Various - Country & Western Hit Parade 1970 - Dim Lights, Thick Smoke And Hillbilly Music

1-CD Deluxe album with 72-page booklet, 28 tracks. Total playing time approx. 86 mns.


Our quarter-century retrospective ends here.

In country music, as in the broader recording industry, change had been profound. In 1945, the only commercial sound-carrier was the 78 RPM disc. By 1970, it had been ten years since the last 78s fell from the presses. They had been supplanted by LPs (1948), 45s (1949), 8-tracks (1962), and cassettes (1965). By 1970, rock, classical music, and jazz were usually bought on LP. Country and R&,B were still singles-driven, and most country albums still comprised one hit single and nine filler tracks. Twelve years had passed since stereo was standardized, and by 1970 most major manufacturers had discontinued monaural LPs. One of the record industry's prize abominations, Rechanneled Stereo, tried to make stereo out of mono (high and low frequencies were split and desynchronized by a fraction of a second to create the illusion of stereo). That’s one audio fad that has never come back.

In 1945, recordings could only be made to acetate, but tape was widely adopted soon after its introduction in 1948. Tape was cheap and easy to store. Single-track tape quickly gave way to two, three, four, and then eight-track. By 1970, Ampex was making 16-track recorders, and Jack Clement installed Nashville's first in his studio that year. Edits and overdubs, almost impossible with acetate, were way too easy with multitrack.

Wartime shellac rationing was phased out in 1945. With limited pressing capacity during the war, major labels cut back their rosters leaving only the most profitable acts. Most rural string bands and hillbilly brother duets, in fact most artists without a national profile in every genre, were jettisoned. Immediately after the war, the major label rebuilt their rosters and independent labels proliferated. Plenty of indies tried to crack the majors' stranglehold on country music. Capitol, launched in 1942, succeeded, as did Mercury, launched in '45, but the sustained success stories ended there. Monument, launched in 1958, did well for twenty years but eventually succumbed. Starday underwent several changes in ownership from 1953 onward, and was still around in 1970, newly merged with King Records. Other indies, like Sun, Fabor-Abbott, and 4-Star, saw their big acts poached by the majors, and found it hard to break the majors' iron grip on country airplay.

Country music, dubbed Hillbilly or Folk in 1945, was recorded nearly everywhere but Nashville. By 1970, Nashville had become country music's epicenter. As Willie Nelson said, Nashville was the store, and if you had something to sell you needed to go there. Even top west coast country artists, including Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, retained a Nashville presence. Almost inevitably, uniformity developed when nearly everyone was recording songs by the same songwriters in the same studios and with the same session guys. In 1945, you could hear a record and make an educated guess at where a singer came from, by 1970 that was pretty much impossible. But in 1970, you could still sit in the lobby of one of the big labels or music publishers on Nashville's fast-growing Music Row and demand to be heard. The bus station for the ride home was conveniently close. Robert Elfstrom's engrossing 1970 documentary, The Nashville Sound, followed one wannabilly, Herbie Howell, as he made the rounds, his self-belief undimmed by rejection. Many of the artists in this compilation made cameos in the movie, almost certainly without the months of tortured negotiation it would take to get one of today's country stars in a documentary.