Singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman made history last year when she became the first Black artist to receive the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year Award, after Luke Combs remade a song she wrote—the 1988 hit “Fast Car”—and it soared to No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart.

If only the late, great Black singer-songwriter Ted Jarrett had been alive to witness Chapman’s achievement. Like Chapman, Jarrett sticks out as a kind of oddity—the rare Black musician who wrote a country No. 1 and became renowned for it. That there are not more examples of hit country songs written by Black songwriters speaks to America’s racial divide, which, for many decades, dictated how music was marketed. The fact is, Chapman’s and Jarrett’s songs, and the country stars who perform them, have a great deal in common. They express in uncomplicated and memorable ways the everyday experiences of everyday Americans. Looking at it that way, Chapman’s CMA honor was not an anomaly; it was inevitable, if long overdue.

Country music and Black folk music are rooted in centuries of symbiotic relationships between southern Black and white singers, songwriters, musicians, and audiences. As early as the 18th century, African American traditional fiddlers were familiar sights on slave plantations in the South. They were “the center of social activities during the evenings for relaxation as well as during holiday festivities, providing music not only for blacks but for the white slave owners on holidays and for their private parties,” wrote musical polymath Terry Jenoure in 1981, in the journal Contributions in Black Studies.

The banjo, an instrument with African origins, became the signature sound of string band and bluegrass music beloved especially by southern white migrants toiling in northern factories and stockyards. Jazz genius Louis Armstrong and his wife Lil Hardin Armstrong accompanied Jimmie Rodgers, one of country music’s first modern superstars, on Rodgers’ 1930 recording of “Blue Yodel #9.” African American harmonica player DeFord Bailey was one of the first artists heard on WSM’s “Grand Ole Opry” radio broadcast. Black country crooner Charley Pride garnered CMAs and Grammys. Ray Charles’s two Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music albums became bestsellers in 1962.

Jarrett’s life and work reflect this give and take.

Theodore Roosevelt “Ted” Jarrett Jr. was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 17, 1925, just more than a month before Nashville station WSM launched the “Grand Ole Opry,” the radio broadcast that turned Nashville into the country music capital. Jarrett’s upbringing was a riches-to-rags story. His father, Theodore Roosevelt Jarrett Sr., earned enough money working for a bootlegging enterprise to enable his family to employ a housekeeper, a cook, and a nurse. But after Ted Sr. was shot and killed, Jarrett’s mother, unable to maintain the family’s standard of living, sent 7-year-old Ted Jr. and his sister, Dorothy, to live with their grandmother and step-grandfather on their Antioch, Tennessee farm. When they were old enough, Ted and Dorothy joined their grandparents in picking cotton and doing other farm work.

Ted always had an imaginative mind, and from knee pants, he spent what little free time he had writing poems. In his pre-teen years, Jarrett was intrigued by newspaper ads that shouted about the “thousands of dollars” to be made by submitting song poems, or lyrics, for publication. Ignoring his step-grandfather’s dismissive retort that “Black boys don’t write songs,” and with surreptitious support from his grandmother, Ted eagerly sent samples of his song-poems to the advertisers. To his dismay, the so-called publishers turned out to be nothing more than “song sharks” who preyed on the hopes of amateur lyricists, only to defraud them in the end.

Disappointed but not daunted, Jarrett made music throughout high school, and enrolled in the music program at Fisk University after graduation. He had to delay his studies when he was drafted during World War II, and again later, when his GI Bill money ran out. To pay the bills, he dove full-time into Nashville’s postwar music scene, fitting in a class or two at Fisk whenever he had extra money.

Jarrett wrote songs and pitched them to Music City publishers. He also worked as a disc jockey on pioneering African American radio station WSOK, as a pianist in the city’s then-booming R&B club circuit, as a talent scout for the R&B and country label Tennessee Records and, briefly, as tour manager for Nashville’s Radio Four gospel quartet. In 1955, his song “It’s Love Baby (24 Hours a Day)” became an R&B hit for local unit Louis Brooks and His Hi-Toppers, and for bigger stars like Ruth Brown, and the vocal group the Midnighters.

Jarrett wrote his first No. 1 Country hit, “Love, Love, Love,” that same year. The song, an exuberant pledge of eternal affection, caught the attention of Webb Pierce, a white singer, guitarist, songwriter, and Opry star known for wearing elaborately decorated “Nudie Suits.” Pierce’s version of “Love, Love, Love,” which gave Jarrett’s song a pedal-steel-drenched reading that sounded like a long-lost Hank Williams piece, spent 32 weeks on the U.S. country chart, eight at number No. 1. In November 1955, Billboard presented the song with a Triple Crown Award for being the most played country record on radio and jukeboxes, and the best-selling country record in stores. The December 10, 1955 issue of the trade magazine the Cash Box featured a smiling Jarrett holding 78 rpm singles of three versions of the song: one by Pierce, one by pop crooner Johnny Ray on Columbia, and his own recording for Nashville imprint Excello.

From there, Jarrett grabbed the music industry with both hands. Music, regardless of genre or marketing category, was his passion. He championed Black artists who crossed over from R&B to pop, managed acts, and founded record labels such as Calvert, Champion, Ref-O-Ree, and T-Jaye. In total, Jarrett wrote approximately 300 songs, several of them portending the rise of southern soul music. The Rolling Stones covered “You Can Make It If You Try,” arguably Jarrett’s best known composition, on their eponymous 1964 debut album. All the while, Jarrett never gave up on his dream of a college degree, receiving a bachelor’s in music from Fisk University in 1974, when he was in his late 40s.

But all of Jarrett’s success didn’t shield him from the racism embedded in the music industry. Take an incident in 1956, when the Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), an organization that represents songwriters and music composers and publishers, saluted Jarrett and “Love, Love, Love” at Nashville’s Hermitage Hotel. Arriving in black tie at the hotel where his mother once worked, Jarrett was stopped at the door by a white police officer who thought he was trying to crash the party. The mishap was quickly rectified, but Jarrett reflected in his 2005 memoir that initially “all the people inside [the event] stared at me, wondering what a black man was doing at the country awards.”

Jarrett only had one big country hit. But he maintained a relationship with the country music community by helping the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum curate “Night Train to Nashville,” a 2004-2005 exhibit that chronicled Nashville’s significant but often overlooked contributions to R&B. A two-album compilation inspired by the exhibit earned a Grammy in 2005 for Best Historical Recording. (Today, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, you can view the “Night Train to Nashville” exhibit online.)

By his death at age 83 in March 2009, Jarrett had showed his step-grandfather, and the world, that “Black boys” could write songs, even hit country songs for white artists. More importantly, Jarrett—and now Chapman—demonstrated that a good song is a good song, no matter who sings it, when, where, or in what genre.

The post The Black Songwriter Who Took Nashville by Storm appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Scherman’s impassioned farewell created something of a stir—but he was not the first and certainly not the last of the music’s obituarists who erred in assuming that cultures and cultural forms survive by resisting change rather than accommodating it.

While the very name of “country” music emphasizes its cultural roots, it’s been shaped by commerce from the outset. The ballads and fiddle tunes favored by early emigrants from the British Isles might have constituted “folk music,” but by the end of the 19th century, as music writer Francis Davis observed, what a visiting folklorist might have seized on as “a supposedly authorless … song learned by ear for generations” could well have been picked up recently from a touring vaudevillian.

Even though early 20th-century country music pioneers—like A. P. Carter of the famed Carter Family—played and sang songs from an oral tradition stretching several centuries deep into British history and culture, they were not purist collectors but professional performers who often reconfigured awkward chords and arcane lyrics into a mix more palatable to live audiences and record producers.

Jimmie Rodgers, who is widely recognized today as “The Father of Country Music,” was one of the most truly innovative artists in American musical history. Rodgers made his recording breakthrough in July 1927, only five years after the first commercial country music record appeared. Punctuating his bluesy, black-sounding vocals with the melodic yodeling style he had learned from a traveling Swiss troupe, he also incorporated the Hawaiian steel guitar and the jazz trumpet of Louis Armstrong into recordings like his famous “Blue Yodel No. 9.” Though his life was cut tragically short by tuberculosis in 1933, his records sold 12 million copies over a six-year span.

Rodgers also led the way as country performers shucked their overalls in favor of the more romantic garb of the cowboy already popularized on the silver screen, a makeover embraced by recording executives who feared that the old “hillbilly” image was too evocative of the daily drudgery and deprivation of the Great Depression.

The Second World War brought some relief from that poverty, and changed the music in the process. The massive infusion of some $9 billion in wartime federal spending suddenly had the South sprouting not only military bases and defense plants but drinking and dancing establishments eager to relieve the locals of their newfound ready cash. These “honky tonks” (think “Bob’s Country Bunker” in The Blues Brothers) presented some new musical challenges, chiefly that of simply penetrating the din of dancing, rattling beer bottles, and drunken conversation. In such raucous settings, the softer vocals and acoustic guitars of the old hillbilly string bands quickly proved no match for amplified instruments and the transcendent twang of the pedal steel guitar.

“Honky Tonk” music’s distinct sound came with place-appropriate lyrics, sometimes celebrating the fleeting but intense pleasures of a good buzz, but dwelling more often on the pangs of guilt and loss occasioned by habitual drunkenness, adulterous assignations, and dimly lit barroom romances that could not survive the light of day.

Honky Tonk’s themes were the stock-in-trade of performers like Ernest Tubb, whose 1941 rendition of “Walking the Floor Over You” became an instant classic. But they reached their apotheosis a few years later in the music of Hank Williams.

As befit the most quintessentially “country” performer of all time, Williams’ emotionally powerful songs seemed wholly genuine in the context of his tragic life. Yet his music was a subtle blend of hillbilly, honky tonk, and black instrumental and vocal influences. And some of his physical gestures and gyrations foreshadowed the performing style that would later establish Elvis Aron Presley as the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

With America’s teens buying rock ‘n’ roll hits by the fistful, Nashville recording gurus Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins set out to woo their frazzled parents with the notably de-twanged’ “Nashville Sound,” marked by soothing background vocals and smooth string arrangements where a single fiddle gave way to a chorus of violins. Featuring the silky vocals of artists like Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline, here was an “easy listening” version of country music tailored for crossing over into the mainstream adult pop market.

The music had been reinvented yet again, and, once more, rather than destroy country music tradition, this innovation would simply enter into it. “Crazy” and “I Fall to Pieces,” two of Patsy Cline’s biggest “crossover” hits in the pop market, now occupy the second and fourth spots respectively in About Country’s ranking of the top 500 country songs of all time. Reeves’s “He’ll Have to Go” rests at number nine. Not bad for a sound that hardcore honky-tonker Ernest Tubb declared inauthentic on arrival, allowing they could “do what they want to, but don’t call it country.”

Tubb might seem a bit out of place in anything resembling a Hegelian dialectic. But in echoing what others had said about his own reworked rendition of country music scarcely a generation earlier, he joined an ongoing process of interaction where each successive departure from tradition both provoked and shaped a counter-response. In this case the Nashville Sound brought forth the “neo-honky tonk” style of George Jones and later the “Bakersfield Sound” of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.

Much of the anxiety about changes in country music stems from its remarkably rapid transition from marginal cultural product to the perceived embodiment of fundamental American values. Such changes appeared to reach warp speed by the 1990s as Garth Brooks ditched long necks for piña coladas and blitzed the touring scene with concert extravaganzas that made the Super Bowl halftime show look like a third-grade Christmas pageant. Then Canadian-born Shania Twain took “crossover” to a new level, scoring big on the international as well as domestic pop charts with songs like “C’est La Vie,” which borrowed heavily from one-time Europop sensation ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” In protest, fed-up neo-traditionalists Alan Jackson and George Strait took center stage at the Academy of Country Music Awards Ceremony in 1999 for a duet bemoaning the “murder” of real country music down on Nashville’s “Music Row.” This somber pronouncement, mind you, came a full decade before the glaringly genre-ambivalent Taylor Swift began a 10-year run in which she was nominated for 26 Country Music Association Awards and won 12 of them.

Because of their interactive nature, clashes between the would-be challengers and defenders of tradition have inevitably led to syntheses of the two approaches, meaning the boundaries of what truly constitutes “mainstream” country music have been in constant flux for most of its history and never more so than now.

Today’s “bro country,” for example, is both hailed as the last great hope for keeping the “country” message in country music and condemned for rendering that message meaningless and superficial. Bro country combines hip-hop, country rock, and frequently—heaven help us!—electronic vocal tuning, with formulaic lyrics dedicated to hot women (preferably in cutoffs), drinking, partying, and most critically, fancy pickup trucks. Accordingly, Luke Bryan’s “That’s My Kind of Night” celebrates listening to “a country rock hip-hop mix tape” while sitting with your girl on the “diamond plate tailgate” of a “big black jacked up truck.”

Early country music fans would surely puzzle over Bryan’s desire to flee the cushy confines of suburbia for a few hours out in the boondocks with his new girlfriend in his garishly over-optioned pickup. But then, back in 1920, 75 percent of Southerners still lived in the countryside, while roughly the same portion today reside in metropolitan areas. Nor are today’s country music followers facing the grinding poverty so familiar to their great-grandparents: With Nielsen surveys showing median household incomes approximately 26 percent higher than the national average, country fans have little trouble swinging loans for luxuriously appointed trucks.

With pickups the nation’s best-selling vehicles, and commercials for them rife with country soundtracks and performers, it’s pretty clear that both Nashville and Detroit understand that the same folks are buttering their respective biscuits. Ironically enough, critics who focus on how far country music has moved away from what it was when first recorded nearly a century ago are in a real sense simply affirming how remarkably attuned it has remained to its ever-evolving base.

The post How Nashville ‘Killed’ Traditional Country Music—and Then Reinvented It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.