This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Ralph Peer was not an employee of anybody. He was an independent contractor working exclusively for RCA Victor, and he had set up a publishing company - which meant he had a reason to look for performers who wrote their own material, and a reason to pass some of that money back to them. So in the summer of 1927 he printed leaflets, took out advertisements in the Bristol newspaper asking for old-time musicians, and set up a portable recording lathe in an old hat factory on State Street, a road with a state line running down the middle of it, Tennessee on one side and Virginia on the other. What brought the rush on was a local reporter sitting in on a Stoneman family session and noting that Pop Stoneman had made about $2,500 in royalties that year - an unimaginable sum then, and especially for hillbillies. Inside a fortnight Peer had recorded both the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. Host Nate Wilcox is joined by Ed Ward, his original co-host and the author of “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 1: 1920-1963,” for a conversation first recorded in 2018 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. Ed’s argument is a legal and commercial one rather than a musical one, and it is the spine of the episode: there had been country records before Bristol - Eck Robertson’s fiddle sides in 1922, Fiddlin’ John Carson out of Atlanta, Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, Vernon Dalhart’s pop hits - but that music was largely traditional, and you could not copyright what everybody already played. What Peer found in Bristol was two songwriting and performing machines whose material could be arranged, credited and owned. “Not the birth of country music so much as the birth of the country music industry,” as Ed puts it, “which I think is a real distinction that has to be made.” Both acts got there on other people’s songs. A.P. Carter roamed the hills collecting material with Lesley Riddle, a Black musician who had a legitimate claim on co-writing credits that nobody in 1928 was sophisticated enough to give him - Riddle knew the Black churches where the sacred material was, and the sheet music aimed at middle-class Black and Black vaudeville audiences. Jimmie Rodgers had his sister-in-law Elsie McWilliams writing for him. And Maybelle Carter’s famously distinctive guitar style, Ed says flatly, is probably the only traditional thing about the way the Carter Family performed: it is church style, the way you lead a congregation that cannot read music or even shape notes - line the melody out on the bass strings, play it through once, and the congregation sings the words. The two acts diverge from there. The Carters were a self-contained group - Peer asked A.P. if he had some new songs, the lineup was set, and as Nate puts it, it was much more like the Beatles. Rodgers was the opposite: Peer, in Nate’s phrase, was constantly messing with the formula, lining up new bands and bringing in session musicians. One of them, almost at random, was a Hawaiian steel guitarist, which is how the steel guitar entered country music. Another was Louis Armstrong. Rodgers, as Ed and Nate put it, did not see a musical color line - he was grabbing bits of Black show business wholesale, and his yodel very likely came through Emmett Miller, the blackface vaudeville performer who cut the “Lovesick Blues” Hank Williams built his career on. Both men were around Asheville at the same time, and who got whose yodel is lost. Rodgers had good ears and bad lungs. Tuberculosis was diagnosed in 1924, took him off the railroad, and killed him in 1933 - after years of relentless touring and recording with a stretcher set up in the studio so he could lie down between takes. He is, Nate argues, American music’s consumptive romantic, the 19th century Chopin trope landing in the 20th, and the direct ancestor of Hank Williams, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse. Somebody - possibly Peer - told him the average life of a popular performer was three years. The Carter Family’s cross was domestic. A.P. and Sara’s marriage broke apart, and the act did not. They went to Del Rio, Texas, and broadcast from across the Mexican border on XERA, a transmitter so powerful it reached the Canadian north and carried the Carter Family to a teenage Bob Dylan in Hibbing, Minnesota. And it was on that border radio, in February 1939, that Sara dedicated a song to Coy Bayes, A.P.’s cousin, the man she had loved and given up. He was in California. He heard it, drove to the border, and she left - her family, the act, and the business - and married him. The rest is the argument the folk revival had with itself. Harry Smith put several Carter Family sides on the Anthology of American Folk Music and no Jimmie Rodgers at all, and Ed’s explanation is deflating and probably correct: Smith wanted Moe Asch to buy his record collection, Asch’s label was called Folkways, and old tunes were therefore folk music. Almost nothing on that anthology was folk music in any strict sense - it was country and blues show business. Mike Seeger took the accident seriously, went looking, found Lesley Riddle alive and brought him onto the folk circuit. John Cohen, his bandmate in the New Lost City Ramblers, did the documenting - Ed rates him an astonishing photographer of an Appalachia the country had decided to ignore. And by the 1960s the original Carter Family were filed as folk while Mother Maybelle and her daughters, on the Grand Ole Opry every week, were filed as country - the same family, sorted by category. Also: why both acts abandoned the fiddle that country music had run on; how the Depression turned record sales from a stream to a trickle while radio got cheaper; the case that the Carters and Rodgers kept Victor afloat; June Carter designated the comedian because she was the poorest singer, until she learned; and Mother Maybelle earning her name by saving Johnny Cash. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * Eck Robertson, “Sallie Gooden” (Victor, 1922) * The Carter Family, “Wildwood Flower” (Victor, 1928) * The Carter Family, “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” * Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)” (Victor, 1927) This episode originally dropped in 2018. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. 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