Countrypolitan Nationalism: Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow’s Audiopolitics of Empire: Guest Post by Matthew D. Linton

In his 2015 book Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution, Michael Denning explores the musical revolution that took place in port cities ranging from Havana to Jakarta between 1925 and 1931. Facilitated by the inexpensive mass production of shellac records, new genres of music like jazz, samba, and kroncong sprouted up as old musical forms were translated, fused, and transported across a world united by water. This was not merely an artistic revolution, however. They were also “fundamental to the extraordinary social, political, and cultural revolution that was decolonization.”[1] This audiopolitics of revolution, as Denning calls it, gave voice to subaltern peoples languishing under Western colonialism as it transformed colonized and colonizing ears to favor vernacular music. It was an important first step to territorial decolonization. “[T]his noise uprising was prophetic,” Denning argues, “it not only preceded but prepared the way for the decolonization of legislatures and literatures.”[2]

American country music presents a problem for Denning. On the one hand, it was – with jazz – a major part of American vernacular music. Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family recorded hit records in Bristol, Tennessee, bringing the “hillbilly” music of Appalachia a national audience. On the other hand, neither country musicians nor Bristol fit seamlessly into Denning’s narrative. While economically poor, the founding generation of country musicians was not colonized like Denning’s Indonesian kroncong musicians or Hawaiian hula singers. Bristol is also not a port city and therefore not part of the international circulations of goods and peoples that took place in Havana or New Orleans.

In this essay, I find in early country music of the 1940s through the 1960s a similar melding of music and politics, but for a different end. Instead of celebrating musical fusion as a way to upset established hierarchies, the country music of Rodgers’ heirs Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow sang songs that celebrated American empire. Like the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, Tubb and Snow’s music highlighted the burden and sacrifice of American men liberating foreign peoples. They then brought that message to rural audiences through new recording technology. This audiopolitics of empire was crucial in marketing American empire to the homefront as well as defining it as fundamentally white and male.

Ernest Tubb seemed an unlikely heir to Jimmie Rodgers’ pioneering legacy. Born in northeast Texas in 1914, Tubb became a fan of Rodgers in his teens playing with local bands in and around San Antonio.[3] After Rodgers’ death in 1933 from tuberculosis, Tubb contacted his widow, Carrie Rodgers, to get an autographed photograph beginning a lasting friendship that saw her help his career by giving him Jimmie’s guitar and connecting Tubb to local DJs. A tonsillectomy in 1939 changed Tubb’s voice to a deep baritone, however, making it difficult to sing “high and lonesome” yodels in Rodgers’ style. Still, despite his vocal limitations, Tubb had his first major hit one year later with “Walking the Floor Over You” (1940), which established him as an up-and-coming country star. As a result of the single’s success, Tubb was invited to join the Grand Ole Opry in 1943 and would remain in Nashville for the rest of his life.

Tubb was not drafted into World War II, but he recalibrated his music for wartime. His single, “Soldier’s Last Letter” (1944), for example, told the story of a mother receiving and reading a letter from her son who was fighting abroad. Tubb’s song was both timeless and timely. It drew on a long history of war ballads including American Civil War ballads-turned-standards like “Farewell, Mother” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Unlike the folk music of Woody Guthrie or Leadbelly’s blues, which denounced the particularities of fascism, its themes of a grief-stricken mother reading her son’s final words before dying in battle spoke to universal themes of loss and sorrow that stalked home fronts during wartime for centuries. At the same time, “Soldier’s Last Letter” captured the spirit of the age and resonated in a country mobilized for total war.

“Soldier’s Last Letter” was also a shrewd business strategy for Tubb. It reached number one on the country music charts. It aligned Tubb with American nationalism and made him a champion of the American armed forces – the beginnings of what would be a unifying theme of country music up to contemporary artists like Toby Keith. Tubb followed the success of “Soldier’s Last Letter” with two more singles, “Keep My Mem’ry in Your Heart” (1945) and “It’s Been So Long Darling” (1945), that spoke about men forced to go away and the difficulties leaving the ones they love. The latter also reached number one, cementing Tubb as one of the most recognizable and popular voices in country music.

America’s triumphant end to World War II left the nation with a “preponderance of [global] power,” to use diplomatic historian Melvyn Leffler’s phrase.[4] Tubb translated his wartime feelings of loss to an international community yearning for American leadership at war’s end. In 1946, he released “Filipino Baby,” which flipped the perspective of loss from the homefront to the international arena. The song takes place on a military ship departing Manila Bay. Soldiers are swapping stories and photographs of local women they had taken as “lovers” during their time stationed in the Philippines. One man vows to return to Manila to marry his “Filipino baby” and, in what can be interpreted either as a fantasy or flash-forward, Tubb sings of a marriage ceremony on the boat between the American “returned from Caroline” and his Filipino baby.

Tubb’s song came at an anxious time for American empire. On the one hand, Americans were spread the world over shoring up and rebuilding countries from Japan to Germany. Never had the United States played such a large role in the domestic politics of sovereign nations. At the same time, however, imperial ambitions were running against anticolonial nationalism that demanded self-rule for colonized peoples in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The Philippines was one such nation, granted independence from the United States in 1946. It thus becomes possible to hear “Filipino Baby” as a story of imperial return. Like the sailor departing Manila Bay at war’s end, the United States granted the Philippines its independence. Yet, this parting was not absolute but instead was the beginning of a new phase of US-Philippines relations where direct colonial control was replaced with a contracted network of military bases and economic aid.

If Tubb’s “Filipino Baby” showcased country music’s place connecting World War II military success to its postwar empire-building in Asia, one of his first recruits to the Grand Ole Opry, Hank Snow, showed country music’s transnational reach. Born in Nova Scotia, Canada and raised in an abusive household, Hank Snow sought escape in the music he heard on his mother’s radio.[5] The Canadian maritimes, like port cities around the world, was connected to music from across the world in the 1920s and young Hank Snow became entranced by the sounds of Hawaiian steel guitar music. Scraping together their meager earnings, Snow’s mother bought a steel guitar from a catalog. From the outset, Hank showed musical talent and he eventually moved to Montreal in the 1930s to pursue a music career. In Montreal, Snow fell in love with the music of Jimmie Rodgers and reinvented himself as a singing cowboy. Finding modest success in Canada, Snow traveled to Wheeling, West Virginia in 1944 before permanently settling in the United States. On a 1948 tour of Texas, he met Ernest Tubb who invited him to perform at his Cowtown Jamboree in Dallas.[6]

In Snow, Tubb found a performer with considerable talent and similar interests. Snow was a guitar whiz and his high-pitched, nasal voice made him a natural fit for Texas country ballads. The two men were also united by their economic woes during the Great Depression and by their love of Jimmie Rodgers. Furthermore, both men had found success during World War II as patriotic symbols: Tubb as a country crooner and Snow as a radio DJ. It is no accident that one of Snow’s first American recordings was a cover of Tubb’s “Soldier’s Last Letter.” Snow’s first number one hit, “I’m Movin’ On” (1950), followed soon after and he became a regular on Tubb’s Grand Ole Opry.

During the 1950s, Tubb and Snow married the transnational roots of American country music to a nationalist message. These songs often resulted in a fascinating combination of pre-electric sounds from across the globe. Snow’s “The Rhumba Boogie” (1951), for example, used South American and Cuban motifs and layered them over a Hawaiian steel guitar. They were also almost always from an American (or in Snow’s case North American) perspective. Songs like “Caribbean” and “Calypso Sweetheart” were the musical accompaniment to the tiki bars, Polynesian cuisine, and Hawaiian vacations that characterized middle class leisure in the late 1950s through the mid-1970s.

Snow also sometimes imitated local vernaculars. On “Calypso Sweetheart,” for example, his lyrics are in broken English to both make the song’s Trinidadian locale more exotic for his American audience and sound like he imagined people in other, “less-developed” countries spoke his native tongue. Most importantly, the foreign subjects of these songs always welcomed their North American guests recognizing their superiority as consumers, lovers, and allies.

The apex of country music’s midcentury fascination with foreign subjects was Snow’s landmark “I’ve Been Everywhere” (1963). The album was a tour across America’s cultural empire. The famous opening single of the same title was originally an Australian song with Australian place names. Snow’s writers substituted in American and Canadian locales. The song was a number one hit for Snow and has been covered by singers ranging from Johnny Cash to Kacey Musgraves. If the lead single garnered most of the attention, the other songs on the album seamlessly tie American territories turned vacation-states (Alaska and Hawaii) to other nations connected to the United States via cultural influence or military occupation. All the songs about foreign nations fit into the American conqueror, non-white submissive, male-female sexual relationship model made famous by Tubb. “Jamaica Farewell” and “Geisha Girl” are lovelorn ballads in the mold of Tubb’s “Filipino Baby.” Country music like Snow’s “I’ve Been Everywhere,” was the soundtrack for what historian Naoko Shibusawa has called “the mutually reinforcing frameworks of gender and maturity” which subsumed “racial hostility” beneath familiar domestic hierarchies.[7] Snow’s American empire was both an erotic escape for American men living mundane, comfortable middle class lives and a place that enthusiastically welcomed the United States as a bearer of wealth and civilization.[8]

An odd coda to Snow’s career as a promoter of American empire came in 1968. With sales sagging, he decided to help famed segregationist George Wallace campaign for President. For a musician whose career had largely been built upon songs celebrating interracial unions, Snow’s support for Wallace appears as a dramatic break with his prior persona. A more thorough examination of Snow’s discography, however, reveals lyrical themes consistent with white supremacy (though Snow was not known to harbor any personal prejudice against non-whites).[9] Country music’s audiopolitics of empire was a white supremacist vision of international relations. If Snow’s protagonists often had relationships with non-white women, those women were never equal partners. Non-white men were wholly absent. Snow’s songs were a sonic update of traditional colonial fantasies of white men “going native” – sleeping with native women and enjoying foreign cultures as an escape from the “white man’s burden” at home and abroad.

Country music’s audiopolitics of empire was borne in the glow of America’s World War II victory and continued throughout the mid-20^th century. It portrayed peoples in Asia and the Caribbean as enthusiastic supplicants to the American imperial project, welcoming American men with a rum swizzle and the promise of sexual release. The audiopolitics of empire made foreign domination more than a dreary responsibility, it made empire fun. Ultimately, this vision of American empire could not survive the Vietnam War. Country artists like Merle Haggard recast empire as a heavy burden that required self-mastery and restraint, not fun and adventure. Though the need for empire remained, its theme music had changed.