Original subtitles

PIANO PLAYS

# Let us pause in life's pleasures

# And count its many tears

# While we all sup sorrow with the poor... #

EMMYLOU HARRIS: Well, Hard Times, a song like that has a message.

Poverty is very real,

and hard times are just around the corner for a lot of people.

For me, the sad songs are the best, because they make you feel better,

because somehow they connect you to the world effectively,

that we're maybe on the same boat.

# Whoa, hard times come again no more

# Tis the song, the sigh of the weary

# Hard times, hard times, come again no more

# Many days you have lingered around my cabin door

# Oh, hard times, come again no more... #

FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT: My friends, I've talked with families

who have lost their wheat crops, lost their corn crops,

lost their livestock.

Yet no cracked Earth, no blistering sun,

no burning wind are a permanent match

for the indomitable American farmers and their wives and children...

..who have carried on through desperate days and inspire us

with their self-reliance, their tenacity and their courage.

It was their fathers' task to make homes.

It is their task to keep these homes,

and it is our task to help them win their fight.

# While we seek mirth and beauty

# And music light and gay

# There are frail forms fainting at the door... #

By 1933, the worst economic crisis in United States history,

the Great Depression, had entered its fourth devastating year.

Nearly 13 million workers had lost their jobs,

and one out of every four farm families had lost their land

and their homes.

Between 1933 and 1945,

nearly every aspect of American life would be strained and uprooted.

The Depression would be followed by the United States' entry

into the Second World War.

And together, the twin crises would produce the largest internal

migrations in the nation's history.

But in the midst of those turbulent times,

country music would manage to grow in popularity.

Based on the real-life experiences of America's working people,

the music seemed to express perfectly what everyone was going through.

Coping with loss had always been one of its pervasive themes.

According to a song by the Carter Family,

the only place the Depression hadn't reached was in heaven.

In its infancy, to me it came from two places,

and probably two polar opposite type places.

It came from the church, with the Carter Family...

..and it came from the beer joints with Jimmie Rogers.

The music's first superstar, Jimmie Rogers, had died in 1933.

But from his adopted state of Texas, new stars would emerge,

and push the music's geographic base westward.

From their small valley in Appalachia,

the Carter Family would continue singing songs

firmly rooted in the old traditions of balladry and gospel.

But now, the equally old tradition of string band music

would be radically changed by two more musicians.

One, from the mountains of Tennessee,

would use his voice to give it heightened emotion.

The other, from the hills of Kentucky,

would use his mandolin to infuse it with heightened urgency.

ROOSEVELT: But more importantly,

it will mean a greater contribution to general national prosperity...

Meanwhile, the still young medium of radio

would become increasingly central to American life,

binding people together as they struggled to weather hard times.

I think hard times and country music were born for each other.

There's a strange faith and hope that exist in country music,

even in songs that have nothing to do with faith and hope.

# So many days you have lingered

# Around my cabin door

# Oh, hard times, come again no more... #

FIDDLE PLAYS

Well, you know, the way I'd define country music is,

first of all, I call it country-western music.

It's the music of America, for sure.

And it's an amalgam. It's everything.

Some people wanted to say it was America's only original pure music.

Well, no. It's blues, it's jazz, it's hillbilly.

It's everything about the immigrant experience brought to America

and Americanised.

SWING MUSIC PLAYS

In the 1930s, a new sound was sweeping the nation.

What Variety magazine called

"an indelible notation on the evolution of jazz."

Known as swing, it had incubated in the dance halls of Harlem,

but now an entire generation of Americans,

white as well as black, danced to its beat...

..filling ballrooms and theatres all across the country.

From the Paramount in Manhattan

and the Aragon in Chicago,

to the Palomar in Los Angeles,

where Benny Goodman thrilled audiences

with his version of the music first played by Louis Armstrong,

Duke Ellington and Chick Webb.

People were swinging in Tulsa, Oklahoma, too,

crowding twice a week into a former automobile dealer's garage

called Cain's Dance Academy on North Main Street.

# Where's that girl with the red dress on

# Some folks called her Dinah... #

But the music they moved to was different.

# Take me back to Tulsa, I'm too young to marry

# Take me back to Tulsa, I'm too young to marry... #

Drums, bass, and the syncopated piano provided its pulse,

just as they did in swing bands.

And musicians were expected to improvise

on their instrumental breaks, just as they did in jazz.

But instead of saxophones, clarinets and horns,

this music featured the mainstays of a hillbilly band -

fiddles and guitar.

It was Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.

If somebody don't like Wills,

he's immediately under suspicion with me.

I just think, this...

This is going to something else.

With an ancestry that included English, Irish, Cajun

and Cherokee stock, James Robert Wills had been born in 1905

near Kosse, Texas, south-east of Waco,

with fiddle playing in his blood.

If you go south of Waco in Texas,

it was settled mostly by Germans, Czechs, Bohemians,

Mexican-Americans.

That's South Texas.

The tradition of beer drinking and dancing is very German,

eastern European.

As a boy, Wills absorbed all the music around him,

including the blues he heard from the nearby shanties

of African-American cotton pickers, whose children were his playmates.

In 1913, his family moved by wagon to the Texas Panhandle,

where he joined his father playing at all-night ranch dances.

In regional fiddle contests, the championship often

came down to Wills, his father and Eck Robertson,

the man who had made one of the first recordings of hillbilly music

back in 1922.

You have Cajun fiddling, you have old-timey New England fiddling,

and you've got French-Canadian fiddling.

Bob was a total iconoclast.

His style of fiddling is Bob Wills.

It's beautiful. It's original.

It's purely a Texas fiddling, but it owes a little to everybody,

but it's all Bob.

FIDDLE PLAYS

He moved briefly to New Mexico,

where he formed a band with some Hispanic American musicians,

developing a style of playing that incorporated their sound

along with the African-American blues he always loved.

So he got fiddle tunes, the blues,

and then you have the Mexican-American experience.

He has a tune called Spanish Two Step.

It encompasses the feeling of the Hispanic music of the day.

So, Bob took all of those things

and made it into what we call Western swing.

Restless for better opportunities,

he moved to Fort Worth just before the crash of 1929.

There, he and singer Milton Brown formed a band called

The Light Crust Doughboys, on radio station KFJZ,

sponsored by the Burrus Mill and Elevator Company.

When the company's manager, Pappy O'Daniel, realised how popular

they were with listeners, he took them on the road

and insisted on introducing them everywhere they played.

He would later capitalise on the publicity

by becoming governor of Texas,

and then narrowly defeating a young Lyndon Johnson

to win a US Senate seat.

When Milton Brown quit the band,

Wills found his replacement in Tommy Duncan,

who had been singing at root beer stands for tips.

Then he said, "Mr Duncan," he said,

"If you can hit I Ain't Got Nobody, Emmett Miller's old tune," he said,

"If you can hit that, you've got the job.

"If you can't, you're out of here."

And Bob told me, he said...

He said, "You know,

"Tommy hit that song maybe a little bit better than old Emmett!"

After a dispute with O'Daniel, Wills formed a band called The Playboys,

appearing in pullover sweaters like college students,

and, in 1934, moved them all to Oklahoma...

..where they ended up at Tulsa's KVOO,

billed as Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.

There he added saxophones, clarinets and horns to his band,

as he expanded the sound he wanted.

In every song, Wills interjected a falsetto "A-ha"

that became his trademark,

the same way Jimmie Rogers had made the Blue Yodel his.

Some people call it a holler.

And I don't do it very well, but he would always do this little...

IN FALSETTO: ..A-haa.

Or little comments.

"Take it away."

Or, you know, "Domino".

His first recording session, Bob Wills cuts loose

and Tommy Duncan singing, and suddenly, "Ah, Tommy."

"Whoa, stop. Stop this session right now. You can't do that.

"You can't do that on a record!"

And Bob said, "OK, then we're going home."

"Oh, all right, all right. You go ahead."

And it became his signature. People just expected it.

# Yes, yes... #

If you take Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, there is a stride piano.

They have a call-and-response.

The solo is like a jazz solo on top of it.

The organisation is like a jump band,

it was a 1930s kind of jazz swing band.

He had some type of swing rhythm.

Dee, de-de-dee, de-de-dee...

Then you can have somebody soloing on that form.

PIANO SOLOS Yeah.

I mean, it's... It's our way.

Louis Armstrong on records would always say,

"Play that thing, Mr Johnny St Cyr!"

And Louis Armstrong didn't invent it,

but it's part of a kind of Southern tradition of the self.

This is so-and-so playing this instrument.

And Bob Wills was definitely like that.

The showman.

RAY BENSON: His interjections, whether they were hollers,

harmonies, or just talking, was what brought people to Bob Wills.

He demanded and got the greatest musicians of the era

playing for him.

Sometimes the general public does not hone in on the intricacies

or the little things that make great musicians great.

But they saw this guy having an incredible time on stage,

hollering and carrying on and they went, "Wow, we love this guy."

And you'll never forget him.

By the late 1930s, Wills was a celebrity throughout the Southwest.

He persuaded a subsidiary of General Mills to produce Play Boy Flour,

giving him a royalty for every sack it sold.

CASH REGISTER CHIMES

Meanwhile, he kept the band on the road four nights a week,

with six radio broadcasts each morning

and two nights at Tulsa's Cain's Ballroom,

where 1,500 fans regularly came to dance to his music.

Bob Wills, when he hit that stage, he was serious as a heart attack.

He was there to play some music for you.

HIGH ENERGY COUNTRY SWING

To keep the crowd on their feet, he never called for an intermission,

just let some musicians rest while the others continued playing.

To keep his musicians on their toes,

without warning he would nod to one or dip his fiddle bow at them

to take the next instrumental break while he strutted around the stage.

RAY BENSON: Bob Wills was like Elvis Presley.

He was outrageous.

He was a colourful figure, a la Mick Jagger.

He pranced around on stage like a peacock.

# Everybody dancing, call it a day

# Yeah

# Is everybody... #

I got to know a lot of the old Texas Playboys,

and one thing they said to me, all of them,

was that when they got on stage with Bob Wills,

he motivated them to play above what they could.

I said, "Well, why was that?"

They said, "Well, he had these burning black eyes,

"and this look, when he looked at you, you went,

"'Oh, my God, I better do something'."

You can let them shades up now.

Oh, everybody dance now!

But Wills was a binge drinker,

who sometimes missed engagements if he went on a bender.

His affairs with women brought him five divorces in six years,

and he struggled with occasional depressions.

"The only time we ever played sad songs," one band member said,

"was when Bob was between marriages."

But nothing seemed to dampen his growing popularity.

Wills continued to innovate.

Besides introducing drums to hillbilly music,

he encouraged his steel guitar player, Leon McAuliffe,

to adopt a technique other musicians were experimenting with -

hooking his instrument to an amplifier,

creating a whole new sound.

For many people, the electric steel guitar would become as closely

associated with country music as the fiddle.

Domino!

In 1938, Wills recorded a song he had written,

adapted from his earlier tune, Spanish Two Step.

He called this one San Antonio Rose.

It became the most popular hillbilly record of 1939.

San Antonio Rose is a fiddle tune.

It started out, he recorded it - no words, no music, just fiddles.

His publisher at the time was the Irving Berlin Music Company.

And they said, "Hey, we think this could be a big hit.

"We're going to have our writer write the words."

A-ha!

Wills couldn't stand the new lyrics or the new arrangement

Irving Berlin's people had provided.

When his band played it, he complained,

the audience didn't think it sounded authentic.

He gave one of his horn players a jug of whiskey and five bucks

and he said, "Go and write words."

# Deep within my heart lies a melody... #

And he writes...

# Deep within my heart lies a melody

# A song of old San Antone... #

And they love it.

The song, called New San Antonio Rose, was an instant hit.

A year later, Bing Crosby would record his own version,

which sold 1.5 million records.

"I went," Bob Wills said, "from hamburgers to steaks."

Early in my life, I was a young promoter.

I was putting together shows.

I would hire artists

and hope I got enough money through the door to pay them.

Bob Wills I hired for 750 to play over at Whitney, Texas.

I hauled a piano in the back of a pick-up over

so that his band could have a piano.

I managed to take in enough money and pay him.

But I was only like, 14, 15 years old,

and I got up to sing with Bob Wills.

So it was as good as it gets!

All together now!

In 1969, astronaut Pete Conrad would bring a tape

of New San Antonio Rose on the Apollo 12 moon mission.

With a worldwide audience listening far below,

the song was beamed to everyone on the planet.

Well, all right!

FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT: We are definitely in an era of building today.

The best kind of building.

The building of great public projects

for the benefit of the public,

and with the definite objective of building human happiness

at the same time.

CHEERING

For Edwin Craig and the National Life and Accident Insurance Company

in Nashville, the Depression proved to be a time of opportunity.

When their radio station, WSM, was granted a federal licence

to become one of only three 50,000 watt clear channel stations in the South,

Craig spent 250,000 to erect a new transmitting tower -

the tallest of its kind in the nation.

RADIO JINGLE: WSM. A-ha. WSM.

It could beam WSM programmes and the company's name

and its slogan, "We Shield Millions" from coast-to-coast.

I had a hard life. I chopped corn.

I picked cotton.

But it was every night we'd take an hour off

and turn on an old radio and listen to the Grand Old Opry.

That's how I come about the country music

and loved the sounds that come out of that radio.

And now, friends, we present Uncle Dave Macon...

WSM's Saturday night show, the Grand Old Opry,

was still hosted by the amiable George Hay, The Solemn Old Judge.

Let her go, Uncle Dave...

Uncle Dave Macon and his banjo still anchored the cast of musicians,

most of them dressed like caricatures of hillbillies

and playing in string bands with names he had given them.

The Gully Jumpers, the Possum Hunters, the Fruit Jar Drinkers.

Nashville's upper crust still considered it

an embarrassment to the city's image.

When Edwin Craig's wealthy friends in the fashionable

Belle Meade neighbourhood complained that WSM pre-empted

the broadcasts of Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony

with the Grand Old Opry on Saturday nights,

he mollified them by arranging for the Symphony to be carried

on a smaller, 1,000 watt signal

that became the first commercial FM station in America.

And when his far-flung sales force reported a 30% increase in policies,

Craig knew people were listening to and loving the hillbilly music

he was broadcasting, timed around the schedules of working people.

Our friend from way down in the...

I had my mother get me up in the middle of the night practically.

I was four years old,

and when she'd start fixing my father's breakfast

before he went off to work,

working a brick plant -

which was the major industry in Olive Hill, Kentucky...

..they had morning radio shows

that came out of WSM early in the morning,

before civilised society woke up.

And they'd play on WSM, they'd play country music

until Belle Meade woke up and then they'd go back to,

you know, civilised music.

So many fans of the Grand Old Opry were jamming into WSM studio

on the fifth floor of the insurance building

it was clear the Opry had to move.

They tried four different venues in Nashville.

Each would prove unsatisfactory.

Eventually, they would move to a location downtown on Fifth Avenue.

It was an imposing tabernacle, built in 1892 by Thomas Ryman,

a wayward riverboat magnate who had undergone a religious conversion

and wanted a place he called "purely an outpost to catch sinners."

It seated more than 3,000 people, with long pews on the floor,

and a spacious balcony, the Confederate Gallery,

built to accommodate a reunion of Southern soldiers.

It had hosted symphonies, ballets, theatre,

and the Fisk Jubilee singers, an African-American gospel choir.

Enrico Caruso and Marian Anderson had performed there.

President Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T Washington

had spoken from its stage.

Its acoustics were unmatched, "like being inside an old violin,

"surrounded by good, seasoned wood," one performer said

when the Grand Old Opry moved in.

They were home.

Roy Claxton Acuff was born in 1903 in Maynardville, Tennessee

about 25 miles north of Knoxville.

His father, a part-time lawyer and Baptist minister,

was a good country fiddler.

His mother played piano and guitar.

Though he sang in church choirs and at his school's morning

chapel services, Roy seemed more interested in baseball than music.

A career with the New York Yankees seemed within reach,

but when a near-fatal case of sunstroke ruined his chances,

he turned to music instead and took up the fiddle.

He spent a summer touring East Tennessee with a medicine show.

"I got a pretty good background in show business,"

Acuff said of the experience.

"You sang to several thousand people in the open,

"and you couldn't get to them if you didn't put your lungs to the fullest test."

He begins to play a little bit of music,

and forms the Crazy Tennesseans,

who are just, as the name implies, a wild bunch.

You know, they blacked out their teeth, they sit on hay bales,

they wear suspenders.

They really dress the part and they really become hillbillies.

By 1938, the Crazy Tennesseans were appearing on Knoxville radio shows.

It was there that Pee Wee King heard Acuff

and arranged for an on-air audition at the Grand Old Opry.

# What a beautiful thought I am thinking

# Concerning a great speckled bird... #

Acuff was nervous at the start of the performance.

His knees shook.

But after a lilting dobro introduction,

he launched into The Great Speckled Bird,

a religious song with lyrics based on a passage from the Book

of Jeremiah and a melody taken from the Carter Family song,

I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes.

# Hey, watch every moon... #

At the microphone that night, Acuff sold the song to his audience.

# They long to find fault with her teaching

# But really they find no mistake... #

He was so special.

He...

He had a way of touching people.

Roy Acuff was not the greatest singer that ever came down the pipe,

but he was a marvellous communicator.

He could communicate those feelings.

When he sang The Great Speckled Bird, you believed it.

You absolutely believed it.

# I am proud I have learned... #

This was not a string band with a singer.

It was a singer with a string band.

And WSM officials were unsure about his performance...

..until their mail clerk asked, "What are we going to do about all

"these letters about something to do with a bird?"

With a regular spot on the show

and his band now called The Smoky Mountain Boys,

Acuff quickly became the Opry's biggest star.

Beloved for his willingness to put everything into his songs,

sometimes even crying on stage.

Listening to him one night in Montgomery, Alabama,

a young Hank Williams was struck by Acuff's palpable sincerity.

"For drawing power in the South," Williams remembered,

"it was Roy Acuff, then God."

He's in a hillbilly string band.

And in a hillbilly string band, there's no hierarchy.

The fiddle plays all the time, the harmonica might play all the time,

the jug might blow all the time.

There's not even solos in hillbilly string band music.

Nobody... Nobody steps out.

But the Opry was ready for a new era in which the star not only stood out

but he sold his own song books, he had his face on the record.

Things were changing.

Well, everybody else was donning cowboy hats and cowboy boots,

adopting cowboy monikers, but he stuck to the old style...

# From the great Atlantic Ocean... #

..and sang old-time songs that had been around -

or at least sounded like they'd been around - for generations.

# To the southbelt by the shore... #

In 1939, when the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company offered to sponsor

a half-hour portion of the Grand Ol' Opry -

to be carried nationally over the NBC Radio Network -

there was no question who would be the main attraction.

One time, I was sitting at the Opry with Roy Acuff.

Roy said, "You know, the difference between me and Bob Wills was that

"I played schoolhouses, churches, tent meetings

"and Bob played dances."

It was a cultural difference.

The South was the Bible Belt.

Baptist and religious people did not allow drinking.

And, of course, dancing was a sin.

There's that great joke, you know -

"Why don't Baptists make love standing up?"

"Because people would think they're dancing."

LAUGHS: You know?

MUSIC: What Would You Give In Exchange For Your Soul? by the Monroe Brothers

The 1930s witnessed an explosion of brother acts in hillbilly music.

There was South Carolina's hard-charging Dixon Brothers,

North Carolina's Callahan Brothers, who mixed blues with gospel,

and the Bolick brothers, who performed as the Blue Sky Boys.

But few other duos built a larger audience than the Monroe Brothers

from Rosine, Kentucky.

Charlie played guitar and sang lead, with Bill providing a high harmony

while driving the beat with furious runs on his mandolin.

I was four, and everybody from the neighbourhood

went to Cherry Grove School to see Bill and Charlie Monroe.

And what I recollect about it was, I was a little girl

sitting in Mama's lap and seeing them white hats.

I thought that was powerful, even at four years old.

Of the two, Bill Monroe was the more unlikely

to become a public performer.

He had been born with one crooked eye,

which made him the butt of constant teasing.

People thought that there was something wrong with him.

Country people can be so cruel.

The stagecoach would stop there - in Kentucky, where they lived.

Bill would run out to the barn so they would not see him,

because they would always make fun of him.

"Look at that little boy!"

Which is bad. I mean, can you imagine?

And that's how he was treated.

And that certainly, I think, was a large cause of him

going to make it and be on his own and him being right no matter what.

Because he was so wrong when he was little.

He was so wrong as far as his family was concerned.

He was so wrong as far as his brothers was concerned,

and his sisters.

His life became even lonelier at age 10, when his mother died.

Bill sought solace walking in the woods and - where no-one else

could hear him - singing the songs she had taught him.

His uncle Pen, an accomplished fiddler,

took the boy under his wing, bringing him along to local

square dances and eventually letting him play backup on the guitar.

Monroe got to know Arnold Shultz, a gifted guitarist and fiddler

who inculcated the boy with an appreciation for the blues.

I would say at least half of these artists in the early days

of country music had that same encounter...

..in which they met a black songster and thought,

"I know what I want to do."

And the torch was passed.

Monroe quit school after the fifth grade to help support the family,

something that became even more important when his father also died.

You got to realise that Bill Monroe came up - he was born in 1911 -

he came up during the Depression. He saw the hard times.

He knew what it was like, you know, to work hard all day long.

He used to tell me about cutting timber himself,

falling these trees himself, rolling them down the hill himself

onto a wagon and taking them into town.

And he said, you know, "When I'd get in close to town, into Rosine,"

he said, "I'd stand up where everybody could see me

"cos I'd really worked hard."

And that was his identity.

By the early 1930s, he had grown into a strapping young man.

His bad eye had been corrected.

And like so many other rural Southerners seeking employment

in the Depression, he had moved north, joining Charlie

and another brother working for the Sinclair Oil Company near Chicago.

They earned some extra money as square dancers

for the National Barn Dance.

But before long, Charlie and Bill set out on a career as a duo,

playing the Midwest and the Carolinas.

They were doing well in 1938, based at Raleigh's WPTF.

But both Monroe brothers were stubborn and competitive -

Bill was especially prickly -

and they argued constantly about the direction of their music.

One day, Charlie abruptly quit and left town.

He formed his own band

and landed a spot on WWVA's popular Wheeling Jamboree.

Bill went to a smaller station in Greenville, South Carolina and,

with three other musicians, formed the Blue Grass Boys -

named in honour of his home state of Kentucky.

With them, he began experimenting - songs played in higher keys

for what he called "a high, lonesome sound,"

tinged with the blues.

In 1939, both brothers set their sights on Nashville

and the Grand Old Opry,

which was now rivalling Chicago's National Barn Dance

as the premier showcase for hillbilly music.

And they each wanted to be part of it.

Bill got to Nashville first

and was given a guest slot on the October 28 broadcast.

# Good mornin', Captain

# Good mornin', Shine... #

When they walked on stage that night, Bill Monroe

and his Blue Grass Boys didn't look like any of the other Opry acts.

Bill detested the way Judge Hay had performers

costumed like country rubes - and instead dressed himself and

his band members in high top boots, riding pants and crisp shirts.

# I can put my initials

# On a mule any old time... #

As they broke into their own propulsive reworking

of Jimmie Rodgers' famous song Mule Skinner Blues,

it became immediately clear

they didn't sound like any of the other acts either.

"Those people couldn't even think as fast as we played,"

Monroe's guitarist Cleo Davis said.

"There wasn't nobody living who had ever played

"with the speed that we had."

# What do you want me to bring you back... #

APPLAUSE

The audience brought them back for three encores.

# And a John B Stetson hat... #

I always believe that the audience has the last vote.

And the audience heard something in the performance,

they heard something in him,

and they saw something in that man up there on stage.

He stepped out of Kentucky wearing high riding boots and jodhpurs,

and looking like a Kentucky gentleman in that Homburg hat.

They saw something that they liked and they went, "We'll take it."

# Yode-lay-hee-hee! #

Charlie Monroe, in his dressing room in Wheeling, West Virginia,

happened to hear his brother's broadcast.

"He won't last on the Opry," Charlie scoffed.

"Wait till people find out how difficult he is to get along with."

Bill, that was really...

HOST: And now, here is the balance of the Carter Family -

or most of the balance - and they got a number for you.

What's it going to be?

In The Highways! In The Highways!

# In the highways, in the heavens... #

By the spring of 1941, the Carter Family was more popular than ever.

The group now included Maybelle's three young girls -

Helen, June and Anita - who performed regularly on the show.

MUSIC: Why Do You Cry, Little Darling

# Why do you cry, little darling?

# Why are those tears in your eyes... #

In October 1941, RCA Victor brought the Carters to New York City

for another studio session.

Among the songs they recorded was one written by Maybelle -

Why Do You Cry, Little Darling...

# To see you feel so blue... #

..a plaintive song about a girl pining for her sweetheart

who's been called away into the army.

With war already engulfing Europe and Asia, the nation's first

peacetime draft had been instituted in the United States.

Maybelle's song captured the worries of millions of Americans

that they, too, would be drawn into the conflict.

In November, Life Magazine was preparing a cover story

about the increasing popularity of hillbilly music -

and planned to focus on the Carter Family as the prime example.

They all gathered in Poor Valley for the shoot.

# That's why I cry, little darling

# Because you're going away

# Leaving me all broken hearted

# To weep for you day after day... #

June Carter - aged 12 - was so excited,

she saved all the burned flashbulbs as souvenirs of the event

that was sure to make them even more famous.

But the story never ran.

Life Magazine pulled the cover story at the last moment

to make room for bigger news.

GUNFIRE

EXPLOSION

NEWS REPORTS OVERLAP

Presenting the President of the United States.

December 7, 1941...

..a date which will live...

..in infamy.

The United States of America was suddenly

and deliberately attacked...

..by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation...

As the nation mobilised its young men to enter World War II,

Maybelle's song now held even greater meaning.

# Every night, I'll kneel by my bedside

# And ask God to guide you each day

# Back to your sweetheart that's waiting

# And loves you more than I can say. #

MUSIC: Smoke on the Water by Bob Wills

The day after Pearl Harbor, Tommy Duncan walked into

radio station KVOO to tell Bob Wills and the other Texas Playboys,

"I don't know about you guys, but I'm going to join this man's army

"and fight those sons of bitches."

# There will be a sad day coming for the foes of all mankind

# They must answer to the people and it's troubling their mind

# Everybody who must fear them... #

Wills - aged 36 - decided he would enlist, too,

as did his steel guitar player, Leon McAuliffe.

Virtually every star now added songs reflecting the experiences

and emotions of the war.

Smoke On The Water, released by Bob Wills and artists,

promised revenge against America's enemies.

Patsy Montana did I'll Wait For You,

offering a young woman's promise to her boyfriend.

# In this war with its mad schemes of destruction

# Of our country fair and our sweet liberty

# By the mad dictators leaders of corruption

# Can't the US use a mountain boy like me?

# God gave me the right to be a free American

# For that precious right I'd gladly die

# There's a star spangled banner waving somewhere

# That is where I want to live when I die. #

Bob Wills' time in the service had been brief.

The Army discharged him in 1943.

He was older than most soldiers

and his drinking had led to discipline problems.

He headed out to California where his shows outsold

those of Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman.

During the last years of the war he was bigger than ever.

Got on 10-11 years old and I heard on the radio that he was

going to be at a place called Beardsley Ballroom

and I knew where it was.

I waited till Momma got in bed and give her time to go to sleep.

I got on my bicycle and rode over.

It must have been about five miles.

First thing I seen was this sailor cartwheeling out of it.

Somebody knocked this sailor.

This was back before drive-by shootings and all that, you know.

You used to have some really good brawls at country dancing.

I went round the back of the old dance hall

and I stood on my bicycle seat and I could see in there.

And I could see Bob and I seen them all on stage.

Tommy was singing, Bob had his fiddle

and they all had on white shirts, cowboy hat.

Boots were shining.

They had these GI haircuts.

Dressed fit to kill and they were sharp on the stage.

It was...

..an intriguing moment for me.

I didn't last very long.

I got down off my bike and went home

and went to bed before Momma knew I was gone.

During the war, Sara Carter decided she had had enough of performing.

She yearned for a stable domestic life with her husband Coy Bayes,

who had a steady job in California.

Without making any formal announcement,

the original Carter Family quietly disbanded.

# Blue heart of mine. #

But Maybelle and her three girls still wanted a career in music.

And now here's the three little Carter sisters,

Helen, June and Anita, and they've got a number for you.

Keep Moving On.

Billed as the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle,

they landed a job singing on a small Richmond, Virginia station,

and performed during the week at County Court houses,

school gymnasiums,

even on the top of concession stands at drive-in theatres.

Times were changing.

Radio stations were starting to play records over the air rather

than using only live performances

and television was coming on to the scene.

But, like so many other country artists,

the Carter Sisters and their mother began to dream of going to Nashville

and some day performing on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium

with the Grand Ole Opry.

Something the original Carter Family had never done.

I think until the end of the 1930s,

the Grand Ole Opry was just one of several barn dances.

The World War II period was the time

when the Grand Ole Opry began to surge into prominence

and gradually began to leave

the other barn dances behind commercially.

With the war over, new stars were already rising on the Ryman stage.

And in the late 1940s and 1950s, they would cement the Opry's

place as the pre-eminent venue in country music,

where its artists would continue to push the music in every direction.

# Oh, I'm thinking tonight of my blue eyes

# Who is sailing all over the sea

# And I'm thinking tonight of her only

# And I wonder if she ever thinks of me. #

You know she does.

# Would have been better for us both had we never

# In this wide wicked world ever met. #