Jim Reeves – The Jim Reeves Radio Show – Monday, February 24, 1958 / Merle Travis – In Boston 1959

About halfway through a 1959 set at Jordan Hall in Boston, Merle Travis introduces his best-known composition, “Sixteen Tons”: “I would love to impose on you to do a little tune that I made up way back yonder when the world was new — before Elvis developed his pelvis.” Only a dozen years had passed since Travis had written and recorded the song, but in the wake of Presley’s phenomenal success, “Sixteen Tons” might as well have been one of the 19th-century folksongs it mimicked.

In 1956, his first year at RCA, Elvis had sent five singles to #1 on the pop charts, all but one of which had crossed over to the top of the country charts (“Love Me Tender” reached only #3). They didn’t sound like pop records that had come before, and they sure didn’t sound like country radio. From then on, recorded music (hell, the whole cultural history of the United States) would be divided, as Travis’ comment suggested, into two periods: Before Elvis (BE) and After Elvis (AE). Between these eras loomed a vast cultural chasm, with the BE world way back yonder and quickly fading into the distance.

Suddenly, there was little room on the airwaves for the quaint trumpet and accordion arrangements of Travis’ hits from just a decade earlier. In an effort to preserve and expand their audience, country labels had begun embracing AE pop influences in their recordings. The resulting Nashville Sound largely replaced the rural twang of steel guitars and fiddles with the urbane sounds of vibes and string sections, the nasal whine of Hank Williams with the baritone croon of Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold, the Nudie suit with the dinner jacket.

Two recently released live recordings — The Jim Reeves Radio Show Monday, February 24, 1958 and Merle Travis’ In Boston 1959 — illustrate how country music responded to a brave new AE world.

The Jim Reeves Radio Show reveals how widely pop-influenced country music had been embraced, even as early as 1958. Far from just another regional, Nashville-based, gingham-and-overalls program, Reeves’ nationally broadcast lunchtime show on the New York-based American Broadcast Network is consummately, determinedly cosmopolitan. At the show’s center is Reeves himself, who only five years earlier had gone from spinning records on the air to making hillbilly-styled singles such as “Mexican Joe” and “Bimbo”. As the Nashville Sound had developed, Reeves had discovered a lower, mellifluous baritone range, and his 1957 recordings (“Four Walls”, “Am I Losing You”) betrayed not a hint of their hillbilly roots.

On the air, Reeves’ disc jockey experience serves him well as host and featured performer of a virtual showcase for the Nashville Sound. Supported by an orchestra (under the direction of Owen Bradley) and the Anita Kerr Singers (a co-ed version of Elvis’ Jordanaires), the show is as gentle and urbane as Reeves and his “touch of velvet” voice. Guest vocalists deliver pop standards, the orchestra intersperses old chestnuts such as “Moonlight Bay”, and Reeves croons “My Happiness” with the same suave professionalism with which he announces time and temperature or shills for Dove soap. Brisk and upbeat, never jarring or distracting, the show unwittingly points up the inherent shortcomings of the Nashville Sound: without soul or passion at its center, it could easily drift away on a frothy wisp of Lawrence Welk bubbles.

The only wisp offered up by Merle Travis is the dry, bone-white exhalation from what I’d be willing to bet is a filterless cigarette he’s smoking on the cover of Boston 1959. Only 42 years old at the time of this performance, Travis looks easily a decade older. Time-worn wrinkles, haggard eyes and graying sideburns complement the checkerboard-plaid shirt he has topped off with a bolo tie. More than a decade past his mid-’40s heyday of hits such as “No Vacancy” and “Divorce Me C.O.D.”, Travis appears a man out of time, a victim equally of changing styles and his own vices. He steps before this Boston audience aged and alone, without a band or his trademark Gibson Super 400, accompanied only by an acoustic guitar. The soul and spirit of his performance, however, reveal a musical voice that is timeless.

Travis dazzles on “Cannonball Rag”, showing off the classic syncopated “Travis-picking” that influenced a generation or more of Nashville pickers, including Nashville Sound architect/producer Chet Atkins. He digs out every ounce of weary energy from his voice on the self-penned “Dark As A Dungeon”. Renditions of “Sixteen Tons” and “I Am A Pilgrim” remind listeners, then and now, of the breadth of Travis’ contribution to the country and folk catalogues and to decades full of country, folk, pop and rock performers.

Most of all, though, one hears in this performance the charm, the self-effacing humor, the vulnerability — the humanity — that has always been the core of great country music. And while Travis may have stood alone that night in Boston, picking dated folk songs in the midst of a strange new AE world, he was not bemoaning the change. Maybe he’d seen it coming.

Concluding his introduction to “Sixteen Tons”, Travis admits, “I recorded the thing and nothing happened to it and I didn’t much at the time like the song….But a couple of years ago when Tennessee Ernie Ford made a record of it and sold about three million records, I got to where I just loved the song!”

Ford’s single, of course, had taken the ‘folk’ out of Travis’ folk song, adding finger-snaps, serpentine clarinet riffs and Ford’s smooth baritone. In 1955, a year before Elvis would climb the charts, it sounded, for all the world, like a Nashville Sound record.

Maybe Elvis didn’t trigger the Nashville Sound; he just made it clear there was no turning back.