Gentleman or Outlaw?

During the 1950s, the United States' conservative post-World War II cold-war society encouraged men to conform to the role of a straight-laced, breadwinning patriarch. By this time, the industrialization of American cities, coupled with the mechanization of farming, forced a population and culture shift from rural to urban. This shift caused the blue-collar employee to supplant the independent farmer as the national standard of middle-class masculinity.

Concurrently, the mainstream country & western music industry attempted to profit by following this cultural shift and demanded that its male artists project the prototype of a clean living, polished gentleman. Headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, the powers of country music possessed a virtual monopoly over country radio waves and refused to give airtime to artists whose music failed to conform to their demands for a highly polished, socially innocuous soundtrack for the domestic suburbanite. In terms of masculinity, Nashville politics became a microcosm of post-World War II America; it emasculated the male artist by taking away his creative independence and pigeonholing him as a benign country gentleman in the same way that American society stripped its middle-class men of their rugged individualism and left them effete wage-slaves.

Young up and coming country artists, such as Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, rebelled against Nashville's overproduced sound and monopolistic practices. By valuing their artistic integrity and masculine individuality over profits, they catalyzed an "Outlaw" movement in country music that defied the status quo of the recording industry and allowed male artists to carve unique niches for their own styles.

The Corporatization of Rural Music

Hillbilly music. Honky-tonk. Gospel, bluegrass, folk. According to Willie Nelson, "they didn't start calling it country western music until the singing cowboy movies of the thirties and forties. This was not real country or cowboy or western music, for the most part...these were movie tunes by pop songwriters who tried to sound country... but it all began to blend with the real country music."(Nelson, 71) Therein lie the seeds of the emasculation of the country musician: the formula for success became pop songs sung by fake cowboys, "attempting to create a product that would appeal to the broadest possible spectrum of listeners, that is to say, music shorn of most of its "rural" characteristics."(Malone, 127) The popularity of the singing cowboy provided the corporate music executive a perfect masculine persona for the fledgling country music industry in Nashville. His smooth voice, innocuous vocabulary, clean-cut looks, and chivalrous nature made him mass-marketable across gender and age boundaries, and across television and radio formats.

"The 'Nashville sound,' which has been much maligned in recent years, did what it was intended to do in terms of increasing Nashville's and country music's - market share, even if it watered down the music's traditionally rusticity and aggressive instrumentation in the process. This growth was evidenced by the number of fulltime country radio stations in the United States, which burgeoned from 81 in 1961, to 606 in 1969." (Allen, 178) Much of this growth, as well as the "watering down" of the music, were due to the efforts of the Country Music Association (CMA), which was founded in 1958. As Bill Malone wrote in "Southern Music American Music", the CMA "worked to elevate the image of the music and to demonstrate its commercial potential to advertisers everywhere. One active campaign to the CMA was the encouragement of radio stations that only played country music. The proliferation of such stations contributed to the national popularization of country music, but it also often promoted a blurring of identity within the music."(Malone, 126)

The "blurring of identity" of which Malone wrote was quite obvious to many artists who were trying to get a foot in the door of the country music recording industry. Said Nashville songwriter, performer and producer Tompall Glaser, "It was such a major concern - are you country enough for Nashville? If you didn't fit in, if you didn't do their idea of country material whether it suited your sound or not, then you weren't worth a dime."(Nelson, 228)

Although the CMA did not possess ownership of the country radio stations, it's leadership called upon the manhood of its members to see its agenda through. Jack Stapp, Director at Large of the CMA and longtime country DJ and program manager, addressed a 1958 speech to hundreds of executives, artists, and DJs at a Nashville convention, telling them "country music has helped to house you and your family, it has medicated you children, it has furnished you with the automobile you driving...This is your livelihood. This business is furnishing you with the funds to raise a family and make you secure...we all know there has been hushed-up and toned-down talk about country music. It's unpleasant, but let's be true to ourselves and admit that one year ago at this convention the question was raised...'How long will there be a country music DJ?"(Stapp, 1-2) Stapp is instructing them to leave their artistic integrity and individuality at the door when entering the recording studio, DJ booth, or office and join a common cause: to mass-market second-rate music. Stapp's listeners certainly could not be faulted for wanting to provide for their families via commercial success, but it is important to give notice that this methodology was congruent to the prevailing social norms of masculinity - mainly that individuality should be sacrificed for conformity.

Enter The Outlaw

Under the paternal thumb of the Country Music Association, Nashville quickly developed a monopoly over the style and substance of country performers. However, there were artists who found success while maintaining their artistic integrity and personality. By achieving success despite refusing to yield their artistic integrity to the status quo stereotypes of 1950's manhood, alternative Country artists like Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash redefined masculinity in country music.

Born in Abbot, Texas on April 30, 1033, Willie Nelson was a natural musician. He wrote his first poems at age five, learned the guitar at six, and considered himself a serious songwriter by the age of eight. (Nelson, 63) For Willie, music was not only a serious hobby, but also a talent that he hoped would lead him out of the cotton fields where he worked with his family. Raised by his grandparents after his parents divorced and left to find work in other cities before he was old enough to know them, Willie was devastated when his grandfather died. After Daddy Nelson passed, Willie, age seven, started writing "cheating songs...songs about infidelity and betrayal...long before you could sing such songs in Texas." (Nelson, 53) Willie had already experienced a loss of two father figures, and he was already using musical expression as a coping mechanism. It may be that these primal happenings were seminal in Willie's future lifestyle of masculine rebelliousness and artistic autonomy. By his early teens, Willie was playing guitar in a beer-joint band.

Soon after he turned eighteen, Willie enlisted in the Air Force, where he lasted only nine months due to a back injury that he refused to allow the military doctors to operate on. He returned to Texas and promptly fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl, Martha, whom he married. Willie and Martha had a hard time just trying to earn a living with Willie playing music in clubs and Martha's meager waitress job. They moved to Vancouver, Washington for a spell where Willie worked as a disc jockey, making a decent living. Soon, however, Martha talked Willie into moving to Nashville, knowing "if there was any way for him to make it in music, he had to go."(Nelson, 83) They made it to Springfield, Missouri where they stayed with a friend for a few weeks. Willie decided that with homogenized performers like Pat Boone and Debbie Reynolds topping the national country charts, if he went to Nashville right then he "would have been like a chigger on the butt of the abominable snowman," invisible.(Nelson, 110) Willie rationalized: "I couldn't see any future for me in that direction, and Nashville thought my songs were not straight ahead country enough to be recorded...I decided to give up playing music for a living and get a regular job."(Nelson, 110) He moved back home to Fort Worth, Texas and became a salesman for encyclopedias, then vacuum cleaners, but it wasn't long before he started playing at beer joints again.

Willie kept writing songs, but after Martha gave birth to her third child, Willie decided it was time to make something happen: "We didn't have any money, but I did have some new songs I thought I could sell to somebody."(Nelson, 116) During this time Willie wrote "Family Bible" and "Night Life" and sold them for $50 and $150, respectively. "'Family Bible' was recorded with Claude Gray singing it. It rose to number one on the country charts...'Night Life' is now one of the most-recorded songs in history."(Nelson, 118)

"Night Life"

When the evenin' sun goes down
You will find me hangin' 'round
Oh, the night life, it ain't no good life
But it's my life

Many people just like me
Dreamin' of old used-to-be's
Oh, the night life, it ain't no good life
Ah, but it's my life

Listen to the blues that they're playin'
Listen what the blues are sayin'

Life is just another scene
In this old world of broken dreams
Oh, the night life, it ain't no good life
But it's my life

Oh, the night life ain't no good life
Oh, but it's my life

Yeah, it's my life

- Willie Nelson, 1960

Willie's lyrics exuded the ideal of stubborn, maverick manhood; he embraces his own imperfections that make him a real person, and pays homage to the blues, a genre considered contrary to standard country. "Night Life" became Willie's signature song; it represented his rebellious sincerity in opposition to the concocted masculinity that permeated the industry and kept him on the outside looking in. As he put it, "when you open your heart to an audience, you share your deepest feelings with them. They want to find love in your heart. They don't want to see that it is nothing but a bank vault."(Nelson, 14)

Willie did not get much money or credit for his new hit songs, but their success motivated him to finally give Nashville a real shot. Willie wrote of the move, "When I went to Nashville in 1960 as a young songwriter with ambition to be a singer, it was because Nashville was where the store was. If I had anything to sell, it must be taken to the store. Nashville, New York, and L.A were the big stores. There was hardly any demand for me or my music outside of Texas, and I knew if I was going to be recognized widely I would have to make it in Nashville."(Nelson, 140) Willie left his family behind in Texas and headed to Nashville.

Fame and fortune did not come easy for him there. Tompall Glaser, a successful Nashville songwriter and producer said of Willie: "When I first met Willie at the Grand Ole Opry in the early sixties, it was a very frustrating period for our business. Nearly everybody realized how good Willie was, but he people who ran the music industry in Nashville would just keep saying, "Well, I don't know if Willie is country or not. Is Willie country? Because if he ain't country, then this stuff he sings won't get played on the country music stations. If he don't get played on the country music stations, he won't make no money for us. And if he don't make money for us, the hell with Willie Nelson. Who needs him?"(Nelson, 228) Again, Nashville's stereotyping prevented the creative cream from rising.

Willie's attitude offered a firm counter to his lukewarm Nashville welcome, and he eventually received a recording contract "by perseverance, determination, sincerity, devotion, dedication, tenacity, willpower, self-assertion, firmness of spirit, ruthlessness when necessary, obstinacy, even selfishness. In other words, "Fuck 'em if they don't know its good...Being true to the heart of your own self puts you way ahead of the game no matter who thinks they're keeping score." (Nelson, 136) Willie made it big by retaining his sense of self and maintaining all along his flawed, Texas hillbilly exterior.

Willie still ran into problems involving his looks, which steadily evolved from basic redneck to decidedly hippie-cowboy. As show promoter Larry Trader noted, "it wasn't all that easy to book Willie in the late sixties and early seventies, particularly after he grew his hair long and wore and earring. People were scared to death of him. Club owners would say, 'we love Willie, but we can't hire a guy with long hair and tennis shoes.'"(Nelson, 186) Eventually, the club owners, along with the rest of the country & western industry, relented; Willie didn't.

"One thing I've learned about Johnny is that you don't tell him what song to sing."

-President Richard Nixon (Cash, 286)

Johnny Cash was born into a poor cotton farming family in Kingsland, Arkansas on February 26, 1932. As soon as he was physically able, he began picking cotton and working other chores around the farm. From a very early age, Johnny was enthralled by the music he heard over his family's radio, his only way of hearing new music. In fact, the pop, blues, and gospel he was listening to on the radio "became the best thing" in his life. (Cash, 68) His father discouraged Johnny's obsession with radio music, telling him "you'll never do any good as long as you've got that music on your mind."(Cash, 69) Johnny's mother, however, was musically inclined and had faith in his talent. She took on extra work to pay for singing lessons, each of which cost her a whole days work.

During Johnny's third lesson, his teacher made him sing to her without accompaniment, in his own style. He sang her a Hank Williams song and when he was through, she said, "Don't ever take voice lessons again. Don't let me or anybody change the way you sing." Then she sent him home. (Cash, 72)

This series of events apparently influenced Cash's masculinity, as he would spend much of his career disregard the advice of the patrician Nashville producers and making his music his own way.

When Cash reached legal age, he had a hard time finding work outside of the cotton field. He briefly worked at an auto factory in Michigan, before enlisting in the Air Force as a radio intercept operator. He was stationed in Germany for three years, where he bought his first guitar and began fooling around with a tape recorder he bought at the Post Exchange. When he returned to Arkansas in1954 after his four-year enlistment was up, he moved to Memphis and took a job as a door-to-door appliance salesman. He was a terrible salesman, but his boss saw his music potential and sponsored fifteen-minute radio segments during which Johnny would sing and plug "Home Equipment Company."(Cash, 94)

While stardom was a tall mountain to climb for Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash gained his much easier and earlier in life. Cash was seemingly at the right place at the right time to get his voice and songs recognized:

"In the mid-1950s, in Memphis, 200 miles west of Nashville another very exciting and very different musical hybrid was alchemizing out of the seemingly disparate forces of country music, bluegrass, hillbilly boogie, and old-time blues. This was music that had little or nothing to do with mainstream Nashville, yet which would indelibly change the face of country and pop music alike and soon give rise to the birth of rock 'n' roll. This strange, wild new music was called rockabilly, and its most fervent acolytes were young Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins." (Allen, 178)

The main catalyst for this Memphis uprising was Sam Phillips, owner of independent record label Sun records who, Cash wrote, "always encouraged me to do it my way, to use whatever other influences I wanted, but never to copy. That was a great, rare gift he gave me: belief in myself, right from the start of my recording career." (Cash, 107) Thus, at the start of his career Johnny Cash was allowed to express himself and his rough masculinity in his own way, and he was highly successful. Johnny had some of his biggest hits with Sun Records with his rockabilly sound, however when Sam Phillips refused to allow Cash to record a gospel album, he decided to leave the label and signed with Columbia Records in Nashville. Cash insisted that his move was not motivated by money, saying, "I'm thankful that money is not my god, that for me it's a means to an end."

In Nashville, Johnny sensed that he was viewed was an outsider: "Some people were suspicious of me, since I was one of those rockabillies from Memphis."(Cash, 379) This didn't stop him from experiencing huge commercial success through most of the sixties. His career took a downward swing when he became addicted to amphetamines. During the height of his addiction, Cash became dangerously hyper-masculine, acting with a near total disregard for his career. He crashed every car he had in those days, high on a concoction of pills and booze (Cash, 223). Publicly, his addiction came to a head when during a guest appearance at the Grand Ole Opry he broke all the footlights with his microphone stand, creating a huge controversy amongst the conservative Nashville audience and earning him banishment from the biggest stage in country music (Cash, 224).

When Cash sobered up, he had a hard time regaining Nashville's approval, feeling the "cold wind of exclusion blowing" his way. "The 'country' music establishment, including 'country' radio and the 'Country' Music Association, does after all seem to have decided that whatever 'country' is, some of us aren't."(Cash, 17) Cash was convinced by Columbia to make an album, John R. Cash, that he did not believe in. The music for the album had been pre-recorded by studio musicians in New York City, and Johnny just sang over the tracks. "I wasn't pleased with either the process or the results, so I decided I wouldn't do any kind of thing again-that is, I would never make any more music I didn't want to make. I'd never just cave the way I did on John R. Cash."(Cash, 337) Cash's rebellious masculinity was coming back strong.

In the late 1960s, Johnny decided to play prison concerts, a move that was viewed as very low class by the Nashville executives of the time. Cash followed his creative heart, knowing "My own version of my music's success or failure is a little different from that prevalent in 'the industry.'"(Cash, 263) From this era came his signature song, "The Man in Black," in which he expressed his own, self-suited idea of manhood:

"The Man In Black"

Well, you wonder why I always dress in black,
Why you never see bright colors on my back,
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.
Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times.

I wear the black for those who never read,
Or listened to the words that Jesus said,
About the road to happiness through love and charity,
Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me.

Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose,
In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes,
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back,
Up front there ought 'a be a Man In Black.

I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been,
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.

And, I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believen' that the Lord was on their side,
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believen' that we all were on their side.

Well, there's things that never will be right I know,
And things need changin' everywhere you go,
But 'til we start to make a move to make a few things right,
You'll never see me wear a suit of white.

Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything's OK,
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
'Till things are brighter, I'm the Man In Black.

-John R. Cash, © 1971 House of Cash, Inc.

The important idea of this song is not what the color black represents, but rather Cash's perception of his own duties as a man in society. Cash said of his black attire, "it means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion - against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of god, against people whose minds are closed to others ideas."(Cash, 86) This is Cash's ultimate protest song, calling for the righting of wrongs and recognizing the plight of the of the Vietnam War soldiers. Even if he was not wearing black, he would still the "The Man."

The Change of the Guard: Mainstream goes Outlaw

Both Nelson and Cash have had experienced international fame beyond that of their conformist peers. They did not accomplish this by singing the prettiest songs or by cowering to the music industry status quo. In fact, their style of "do what you want to do" rugged masculinity proved to be just as stable a marketing tool that the domesticated cowboy in a fancy suit that Nashville pushed on the country music audience in the 1950s and 1960s.

Johnny Cash found it "ironic that it was a prison concert with me and the convicts getting along just as fellow rebels, outsiders, and miscreants should, that pumped up my marketability to the point that ABC thought I was respectable enough to have a weekly network TV show."(Cash, 271)

The "Outlaw" country movement was the culmination of rebellious efforts by country singers who would not sacrifice their manhood to the altar of profits. According to Cash, "country Music changed a lot in the 1970s, beginning with the Outlaw movement, a kind of revolution by Nashville's most creative people ... I was never publicly identified with the Outlaw movement, though in both spirit and practice I was closely aligned."(Cash, 338) Although Cash was not an official "Outlaw" in the early 1970s, his style had an effect upon many outlaw artists such as Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, JR., and Waylon Jennings. The rockabilly spirit that Cash helped create was a definite force in the movement. Cash eventually participated in the outlaw quartet, The Highwaymen, with Nelson, Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson.

The popular success of the Outlaws enabled them to change Nashville's monopolistic business practices that stifled creativity and withheld monetary reward from the artists. "By 1975, Nelson had signed a new distributions deal with Columbia/Nashville, which enabled him to record his own lone star label with complete artistic autonomy." (Allen, 216) "It really took the Outlaws to break through Nashville's country-pop gridlock. What artist like Jennings, Nelson, and Hank Williams, Jr. were really fighting for, was something that most rock artists had long been taking for granted: artistic autonomy. That is, the right to produce their own records, to write (or at least choose) their own material, to pick their own studio personnel, and to basically chart their own musical courses. Ironically, these were the sort of decisions that in country music had traditionally been reserved for the producer, rather than the artist.). In short, they were fighting for their own imaginations, as opposed to the purblind musical agenda foisted on them by some second-rate record company-appointed producer." (Allen, 214)

Country & western music endured many changes in the 20^th century. As people moved from farms to cities early genres of rural music, such as hillbilly, honky-tonk, gospel, bluegrass, and folk were blended with pop sounds and mass-marketed to the new suburban middle-class. Part of this marketing effort was to restrict artistry to a highly innocuous standard. This practice led to the patently fabricated "country gentleman" image of domestic masculinity that Nashville forced upon male country performers in an effort to maximize profits over artistic integrity.

During the 1950s and 1960s, artists such as Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash succeeded despite their refusal to kowtow to the diminished depiction of manhood demanded by the recording industry. Thanks to the stubborn self-belief and self-reliance of these true "country folk," an authentic model of manhood infused mainstream country & western music. By the 1970's the "Outlaw" country representation of masculinity, which was true to the artists' nature, became highly popular and commercially viable.

Bibliography:

Primary Sources:

Cash, Johnny. Cash: The Autobiography (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1998); 432p.

Johnny Cash. The Sun Years (Rhino, 1990); Audio CD.

Nelson, Willie. Willie (New York, NY: Cooper Square Press, 2000); 368 pages.

Willie Nelson. The Essential Willie Nelson (Sony, 2003); Audio CD.

Stapp, Jack. Typescript speech from 1958 CMA Conference (Country Music Association Sales & Marketing Programs, 1958); 25 p.

Secondary Sources:

McCusker, Kristine M. and Pecknold, Diane. A Boy Named Sue, Gender and Country Music(Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2004); xxiv, 232 p.

Malone, Bill. Southern Music American Music(Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1979); x, 203 p.

Allen, Bob. The Blackwell Guide to Recorded Country Music(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994); viii, 411 p.