Coming Hayride Will Be the Ride of a Lifetime

We are on the cusp of a media innovation that will propel the next creative explosion in Texas music. It may be here now, just under the radar of the general public. Technologies that have become popular in the past decade - music downloads, social networking, streaming video, mobile devices - are waiting to be harnessed in an imaginative way to create a new kind of hayride to delight Texas music listeners.

Hayride? Let's explain...

In the early 1920s commercial radio stations started popping up in the larger cities around the country. Some brave early adoptors bought receivers to find out what was going on out there on the airwaves - their great grandchildren became those first people on your block to by a Blue Ray player or iPhone. It took a while though for the radio station operators to figure out what to broadcast and how to make it work as a business. Amon Carter started WBAP ("We Bring a Program") in Fort Worth in 1922and on January 4, 1923, rolled out a "Hayride" format consisting of "a fiddler, a square dance caller, and ... a familiar mélange of wisecracks, music both lugubrious and jolly, and country costumes" as described by the Handbook of Texas Online. The original star of the show was the fiddler Captain M J Bonner (Captain as in Confederate army Captain, so he was no spring chicken). The format was a hit, and spread to Chicago as the "National Barn Dance," and then to Nashville, where it became the "Grand Ole Opry," which of course is still thriving today. These venues helped shape what became known as country music later on. At the time, record companies called it "hillbilly" or "old time" music.




Here is a Biscuit sketch of M J Bonner from our Texas Songbook artist Randy Biscuit. We will use Biscuit sketches here in the blog from time to time to give the blog some class, but don't be alarmed on account of the name - we'll leave out the really randy Biscuit sketches.

One of Bonner's associates, Eck Robertson, also played fiddle on WBAP in the 20s. He's the unnamed fiddler from Amarillo mentioned in the last post for having made the first ever country record, "Sally Gooden" in 1922. He is given credit for being the first musician to plug his own record on the radio too. By the early 30s, radio had gotten how to work the business part - get money from sponsors for marketing stuff to the people who tune in. A string band named the Aladdin Laddies (for their sponsor who sold lights) became a hit on Fort Worth radio, then they changed sponsor and name to Light Crust Doughboys (for the flour they were selling) and birthed Milton Brown's Brownies and Bob Wills' Texas Playboys and the whole Western Swing movement, with radio programming playing the midwife.

Fast forward to the mid 70s. Willie Nelson had bridged the gulf between hippies and redneck by creating a musical genre known as "progressive country" or "cosmic cowboy" or several even sillier names, and had achieved a wildly enthusiastic regional following. Then a TV program called "Austin City Limits" was launched using Gary P Nunn's "London Homesick Blues" as its theme song and presenting a nicely balanced mix of Texas and national artists, and vastly extended the reach and influence of this brand of Texas music, artistically and geographically. Thirty five years later, ACL is going strong, the longest running music program in TV history. ACL continued as the music morphed from "progressive country" into the next trendy forms and helped Austin in its endeavor to proclaim itself the live music capital of the world. By the 70s, TV had already demonstrated its cultural power by producing the first generation of stay at home couch potatos, and had shown an ability to impact where music was going - as in the Ed Sullivan show acting as the armada carrying the Beatles and the first wave of the British invasion to our shores. But ACL has proved the deeper and more sustaining power of TV programming in the musical world and especially Texas music.

Now days, radio and TV seem passé, so what about the new kind of hayride? Well, just like radio in the hayride days and TV before ACL, there are these new technologies out there that constitute a new media platform. Most of them have been around for a decade or so, but no one has yet formulated the programming that will launch the next wave in Texas music. Is there any reason to doubt that history will repeat itself? Is there any reason to doubt that it will germinate in Texas as it always has, with creative Texas musical content? Well, okay then, we think we have a compelling case, so...

Texas Songbook predicts that a cyber hayride will be unveiled and it will be the big happening in this last decade of the Texas music century. It will propel a new creative musical outpouring of Texas music. Given the high tech credentials, media savy, and abundance of musical creative content in the Austin area, the cyber hayride is probably already underway and will emerge from there. We shall see...