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(Editor’s Note—This is the first in a series of reflective narratives written by members of the H-Southern-Music Advisory Board. Professor Emeritus Bill Malone (Tulane University) now lives in Madison, Wisconsin with his wife Bobbie. An internationally-renowned historian of country music, he is currently writing a biography of roots musician Mike Seeger. In his spare moments, Malone also finds time to host a popular “Back to the Country” program on community radio station WORT-FM (89.9). Below is Malone’s account of how he became interested in studying roots music. We at H-Southern-Music welcome the feedback of list members to Malone’s commentary.) Like many people who have become scholars on roots music forms, I started out as a fan of such music—in my case, country music. As a very small child, living on a cotton tenant farm in East Texas, I heard my mother singing gospel and sentimental parlor songs (such as “Letter Edged in Black” and “The Little Rosewood Casket”). In 1939, when I was five years old, my father bought a battery-powered Philco radio. The radio was a wonderful resource in those Depression days, and, for me, it was virtually a revolutionary experience. It introduced me to the outside world, and it made me aware of the “radio hillbillies” (such as the Carter Family, Uncle Dave Macon, and Cowboy Slim Rinehart—who broadcast their music from Dallas, Fort Worth, Shreveport, Tulsa, Nashville, the Mexican border, and other places. I looked upon these musicians as romantic figures, singing about remote places and events, but who nevertheless were very much like brothers, sisters, and cousins. We thought that, if we just tried, we could also sing and play like they did. When I went off to the University of Texas in Austin in 1954, during my junior year, I already knew hundreds of songs and was an ardent fan of what we then called “hillbilly music.” By the time I was in graduate school, my interest in this music was well known to people, and I sang often at parties, usually to the guitar accompaniment of someone else. In graduate school my buddies and I began going to Threadgill’s Bar in North Austin once or twice a week. Kenneth Threadgill was a Jimmie Rodgers’ disciple and a good yodeler and singer. I was beginning to learn how to play the guitar. We all sat around the big round tables and sang one song after another. I had no earthly idea that I could write about country music in an academic way. That is, it never dawned on me that the subject could ever gain academic acceptance. But after I finished my graduate course work, and passed my preliminary examinations, my supervising professor, Joe B. Frantz, surprised and delighted me one day when he suggested that I do a dissertation of “Nashville Publishing.” We need to recall that the country was then in the midst of the folk music revival, and that commercial country music had begun to revive from the serious blow that Elvis and rock-and-roll had dealt it. So Joe Frantz would have been aware of country music’s strong presence in American popular culture. Frantz had taken me and some other graduate students to Houston to watch the Texas Longhorns play football in the Bluebonnet Bowl (I don’t remember who they played). We sang all the way to Houston, and out of the blue Frantz surprised me with his suggestion of a country music topic for my dissertation. Frantz was a business historian, but once I got into the research, he permitted me to extend the parameters of my subject. The result was a doctoral dissertation that eventually was published as “Country Music, USA” (1968). Bill C. Malone
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