Gene Austin – The father of southern pop
So “crooning,” as Austin suggests, implied singing soft and low, murmuring sweetly, right to the listener — “like a mammy.” With its vulnerability and tenderness, the crooning style dared to risk transgressing the long-prevailing American idea of masculinity.
The female audience responded in massive numbers. They responded even to Austin contemporaries Rudy Valee and Nick Lucas, who do tend to sound effete and fey to the modern ear — the stuff toyed with in camp ’60s parodies such as the New Vaudeville Band’s “Winchester Cathedral” and Tiny Tim’s entire act.
Austin himself, while undeniably masculine by standards of that and any other day, often breaks into a high and wistful, hurtful but hoping falsetto, an effective pop analog to Jimmie Rodgers’ bluesy yodel. (One of Austin’s first great hits, nailing the mood in its title, was “Yearning, Just For You”.)
If he could sing blues well (“Got The Railroad Blues”), and had regular success with fast Charleston numbers (“Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone”), the key source for Austin’s new pop sound was secularized — and clearly southern — black spiritual sounds. His self-penned classic “Lonesome Road” remains a prime example of the genre — at once similar in style to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and in content to “Old Man River”, with which it was introduced in productions of Showboat. The combination of the southern ballad with that high and wistful style would last. A long time.
In the celebrated “Elvis Presliad” essay in Mystery Train, Greil Marcus describes Presley’s Sun sessions take on Rodgers & Hart’s “Blue Moon” — the one odd side out, neither country nor R&B-derived — as an attempt to give his audience “something it could accept — a Valentino love scene with heavy breathing…[and] clippetty-clop hoofbeats worthy of Gene Autry, [sung] like a swamp spirit…He turns this old standard into a combination of a supper club ballad and an Appalachian moan.”
All of which is an excellent delineation of the southern pop style Gene Austin created.
Overstreet recalls Austin himself putting it bluntly, “I may sing high — but my voice has balls.” The impact of this sound was unmistakable. Gene Austin was easily the #1 pop star of the late 1920s and early ’30s, in a whole other, broader league, different from anyone labeled “hillbilly.”
He introduced and had hit records with such lasting, simple and direct songs as “Bye Bye Blackbird”, “Sleepy Time Gal”, “Ramona”, “Melancholy Baby”, “Who’s Sorry Now?” and “Love Letters In The Sand”. He wrote or co-wrote, in addition to “Lonesome Road”, such hot rhythm numbers as “Why Do You Do Me Like You Do Do Do?”, and “When My Sugar Walks Down The Street”.
Austin’s music business savvy was, as Carrie Rodgers recalled, what Jimmie sought that July 4; Austin would help him get lucrative live gigs that even rising record sales weren’t bringing. Add to his show business sense a gift for spotting potential hits among piles of incoming sheet music or pitches by song pluggers, and you had the ingredients for America’s first pop heavyweight.
Researchers have shown that sales of most of Austin’s dozens of singles in his hitmaking years were typically in the 150,000 to 450,000 range — extraordinarily high for the time. RCA chieftain Steve Sholes (an inductee in the Country Music Hall of Fame himself) presented Austin, during a comeback and return to the label in the 1950s, with a singular golden Nipper dog statue, citing his total sales of “86 million records” a figure inflated by nostalgia and a bit of hype, but indicative of a spectacular run.
Nevertheless, in 2004, it’s inevitable that many reading these words will not have heard of the man — let alone realize the impact he has had on pop and country. But following even the trail of one early Austin hit alone, “Carolina Moon”, would suggest that something was up.
Austin recorded the song in 1928, when it could compete in the marketplace with Rodgers’ “Mississippi Moon” and a lot of other state moons. It was a catchy, updated turn on the “missing the south and my girl there” theme that could be traced well back into the minstrel era. The Austin hit would go on to be covered by down-home pop artists Patti Page and Kate Smith on the one hand, and Jim Reeves and Jimmy Dean on the other, marketed as country, with only small changes in orchestration to differentiate them.
Austin’s material made it very clear from what region he hailed, and where his greatest audience was to be found. One 1930 release had “Alabama Lullaby” on one side and “A Vision Of Virginia” on the other. He recorded “Dear Old Southland” and “There’s A Cradle In Carolina” and many more tunes with references and tones from the south.
His records and songs matched perfectly the fast-emerging “new south” sensibility, as outlined, for instance, in W.J. Cash’s The Mind Of The South. Lyric after lyric emphasizes modernity, strong attachments to the current community, to middle-class (not backwoods) life, and to the small, nuclear family new to much of the region.
The songs implied rising prosperity, and a bit of new southern bustle. Austin’s hits came amidst the mania of the Florida land boom (he even had a record, “Tamiami Trail”, about the route there), as massive building of suburban middle class bungalows began and investors clamored for the dot-com-like bubble stocks of the day — hot ones like radio start-up RCA.
The overwhelming nostalgia for a lost, idealized past that’s so omnipresent in southern-oriented songs from the Stephen Foster era to World War I is replaced — in Austin’s pop, but not in the era’s traditional country music — with a sort of sentimentalizing longing for the present, notable in every wistful vocal sigh. That’s the stuff of the Walter Donaldson/George Whiting lyric which was lying around unsung until Austin saw the hit potential in its talk of hurrying home to where it’s just Molly, me, and the baby, to the shelter of a cozy little nest with a fireplace and rosebushes, whippoorwills calling and a little white light marking the spot — a safe, new, self-owned (or at least, comfortably mortgaged) “blue heaven.”
For us, Austin pop song titles through the early ’30s are often strikingly similar to those of country songs. A 1931 Victor 78 paired a tune called “Blue Kentucky Moon” with a B-side called “Guilty”!
If Jimmie Rodgers aimed his music at feisty working-class rural residents and rural refugees who were missing the country, Gene Austin’s music targeted the more satisfied and optimistic, up-and-coming — if fragile — middle-class folks in the towns and suburbs, especially in the south. It’s golf sweater music.
But Austin’s relationship to country could be closer than chance passing encounters — much closer. To begin with, it happens that the first records he ever made, back in 1924, before Rodgers and the Carters had recorded anything — were outright country.