Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism

Cold War Country

Studies in United States Culture

Grace Elizabeth Hale, editor

SERIES EDITORIAL BOARD

Sara Blair

Janet Davis

Matthew Guterl

Franny Nudelman

A. Naomi Paik

Leigh Raiford

Bryant Simon

Studies in United States Culture publishes provocative books that explore US culture in its many forms and spheres of influence. Bringing together big ideas, brisk prose, bold storytelling, and sophisticated analysis, books published in the series serve as an intellectual meeting ground where scholars from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives can build common lines of inquiry around matters such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, power, and empire in an American context.

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Cold War Country

How Nashville’s Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism

JOSEPH M. THOMPSON

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

© 2024 Joseph M. Thompson

All rights reserved

Set in Charis Regular by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Thompson, Joseph M., author.

Title: Cold War country : how Nashville’s Music Row and the Pentagon created the sound of American patriotism / Joseph M. Thompson.

Other titles: Studies in United States culture.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2024. | Series: Studies in United States culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023044338 | ISBN 9781469678351 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469678368 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469678375 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Country music—History and criticism. | Country music—Political aspects—History—20th century. | Music trade—Tennessee—Nashville—History—20th century. | United States—Armed Forces—Recruiting, enlistment, etc.—History—20th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / 20th Century | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture

Classification: LCC ML3524 .T46 2024 | DDC 782.421642/0904—dc23/ eng/20231004

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023044338

Cover illustration: Cover photo of Western Jamboree USO show in Korea from Staff Section Report, October 1951; A-1 Entry 252, Eighth US Army, Special Services Section, Staff Section Reports, 1950–1958; Records of US Army Operational, Tactical, and Support Organizations (World War II and Thereafter), Record Group 338; National Archives at College Park, MD.

To Jennifer, Evie, Virginia, and Joseph,

for all of their love

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1 Big Government Country

Connie B. Gay and the Roots of Country Music Militarization

2 A GI Bill for Country Music

How Country Music and Military Recruitment Merged in the 1950s

3 Singing in the Ranks

Memphis, Militarization, and the Country Roots of Rock and Roll

4 All-American Boy

Elvis Presley and the Cold War’s Musical and Military Integration

5 Best Liked World-Wide

Selling the Armed Forces and the World on Country Music

6 Tell Them What We’re Fighting For

The CMA, Country Artists, and the Politics of the Vietnam War

7 Proud to Be an American

Country Music Militarization and Patriotism after Vietnam

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

I.1 Roy Acuff, USO poster, 9

1.1 Connie B. Gay with FSA, 20

1.2 Grandpa Jones in Korea program, 32

1.3 Europe Goes Hillbilly in Country Song Roundup, 37

1.4 Private Cecil Gant advertisement in Billboard, 41

2.1 Faron Young on the cover of Country Song Roundup, 62

2.2 The Army Goes Country & Western in Country & Western Jamboree, 64

2.3 A screen still from Country Style, U.S.A., 72

3.1 Students exercising at the Naval Air Technical Training Center, 89

4.1 Cover of Citizens’ Council publication The Southerner, 126

4.2 Fort McClellan article from The Southerner, 126

4.3 Cover of Hank Locklin’s Foreign Love album, 128

4.4 Has Elvis Surrendered to ‘Pop’ Music? article in Country Song Roundup, 143

4.5 Collection of images in Country Song Roundup, 143

5.1 CMA’s Best Liked World-Wide logo, 150

5.2 Joe Allison, 172

6.1 Stars for Goldwater advertisement, 181

6.2 Roy Acuff performs for soldiers in Vietnam, 184

6.3 Program for a CMTS tour featuring the Wagon Wheels, 194

6.4 Soldiers tour the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1968, 196

6.5 An artillery piece with COUNTRY MUSIC along the barrel, 215

7.1 Crew members of the USS Kitty Hawk honor Lee Greenwood, 246

7.2 Lee Greenwood performs for a USO concert, 251

Introduction

My music tastes changed on 9/11. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) gave that answer to a softball question floated to him by Gayle King on CBS This Morning in March 2015. Cruz was a contender for the Republican presidential nomination at the time, and King had asked the White House hopeful about his musical tastes near the end of the interview as a way for voters to get to know the man behind the sound bites. Quick to seize a political moment, Cruz continued, On 9/11, I didn’t like how rock music responded. And country music, collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me, and I have to say … I had an emotional reaction that said, ‘These are my people.’¹

Whether genuine or politically calculated, there was good reason for Cruz’s answer. Shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, several country music artists went to their studios to wrestle with what it meant to live in a newly vulnerable United States. Country music has a long-standing reputation as an exceptionally patriotic genre, from the Vietnam-era backlash of Merle Haggard’s Fightin’ Side of Me to the Cold War nationalism of Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. Many country performers took the opportunity to record songs that voiced support for the troops during the first months of what became the multidecade War on Terror. As US servicemembers deployed to the Middle East, country radio promoted a string of these 9/11-inspired songs, and artists released a stream of patriotic tunes in the weeks before the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. These included Alan Jackson’s Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning), Darryl Worley’s Have You Forgotten?, Aaron Tippin’s Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagle Fly, and Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American).

In 2002, a trio of women then known as the Dixie Chicks (renamed the Chicks in 2020) released their addition to country’s wartime playlist, a song called Travelin’ Soldier. It earned them a number-one hit with its lyrics about the doomed love between a teenaged waitress and a young man who dies fighting in Vietnam. The song’s message was ambivalent. While one listener might hear the story of heartbreak and death as an indictment of US military policies, another could hear it as honoring the men who give their lives in sacrifice to military duty, as well as the loved ones they leave behind on the home front. Or it could be both. Either way, the Chicks enjoyed unparalleled success in the early 2000s, and Travelin’ Soldier spoke to the mixture of pride and fear that gripped the nation.

The band’s success nosedived, however, after lead singer Natalie Maines denounced President George W. Bush from a stage in London, England, on March 10, 2003, shortly before the United States invaded Iraq for the second time in little more than a decade. She told the British crowd how she felt ashamed of sharing her home state of Texas with the Republican president, before playing Travelin’ Soldier to affirming cheers. When word reached the United States, many country radio disc jockeys responded with political outrage and misogynistic insults for the band’s perceived unpatriotic views. Encouraged by right-wing media, stations began boycotting the Chicks’ music and holding rallies to destroy their records. These protests amounted to more than bad publicity. Band members received death threats for their dissent, and with the exception of one album in 2006, the group did not release any new music until 2020.²

The outrage against the Chicks’ alleged apostasy suggested that the group had crossed a line. The Chicks had failed an unspoken loyalty test in which country disc jockeys and fans demanded that artists offer unconditional support for the troops and the government officials who made the hard decisions to send servicemembers off to fight.

Two months after the Chicks’ fallout, Billboard magazine asked members of the country music industry about the particular bond between the music, the fans, and the military. Dennis Hannon, senior vice president of Nashville’s Curb Records, admitted that it’s a fine line that you have to walk between showing real patriotic feeling and appearing to capitalize off the most recent war. He believed that country songwriters penned wartime songs as authentic reflections of the average American in flyover country, not as an opportunistic money grab. In Hannon’s estimation, country writers knew how to speak for the silent majority that typifies the country consumer. Country music has never been driven by the East Coast or West Coast. It’s driven by middle America, the heartland. That’s where the more conservative approach comes in; the more patriotic approach. The singer Daryl Worley trusted that people who listen to country music are hard-working, working-class American people and believed that "country listeners tend to back us guys when we put out something pro-America

[or]

pro-military. As for the specific role of musicians, Aaron Tippin put country artists’ relationship to the military even more bluntly: We’re the cheerleaders."³

The responses given by these record executives and artists echoed the political and racial stories that academics and journalists often cite when writing about country music’s association with the US Armed Forces. A common historical explanation posits that, in the late 1960s, as the peace movement defied the authority of the government to wage the war in Vietnam and as the Black freedom struggle notched landmark legal victories, a white silent majority cleaved to the ostensibly all-American virtues of white supremacist law and order, evangelical Christianity, and patriarchal social values. This constituency heard their feelings expressed in country music songs like Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee and The Fightin’ Side of Me, songs that earned him an invitation to the Nixon White House and the loyalty of fans who believed that Haggard spoke for them. The political views of these songs, along with country music’s historical association with white southerners, appeared to offer cultural validation for Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which began in the late 1960s. Ever since, country music has delivered anthems that have draped the nationalistic support for war in patriotic bunting, from Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. to Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.⁴ In this calculus, country music’s support for the troops reflects some cultural predisposition that ties the genre’s fans to the politics of US militarization.

But country music’s relationship to the US military is more complex than artists acting as cheerleaders, and it did not spring fully formed from the silent majority’s simmering indignation. This book traces how the Pentagon and the country music industry created an economic relationship that benefited the growth of the genre’s commercial power while also encouraging country listeners to enlist in and support the Cold War military. In the pages that follow, I refer to this reciprocal relationship between the Defense Department and the genre as country music militarization.⁵ This phrase emphasizes how the US military influenced the business and politics of the country music industry. I use it as shorthand to describe the personal, economic, and symbolic connections between a genre usually associated in the popular imagination with white southerners and the expansion of the Cold War defense state that delivered a financial boon to their region. Relying on music industry archives, oral histories, and military records, I show how this partnership transformed country music into the sound of white allegiance to US militarization over the late twentieth century.

Cold War Country forwards three main arguments that cover the development of the country music industry’s connection to the Pentagon. First, I show how the genre’s entrepreneurs latched onto the expansion of the Cold War military to help grow their businesses during the formative years of the genre’s industry. Beginning in the 1950s, the Defense Department sponsored country music radio and television programs aimed at recruiting the music’s predominantly white fan base. This relationship gave Music Row, the metonym for what became Nashville’s neighborhood of publishing companies and recording studios, a promotional partner to sell its products and a distribution network to expand its audiences around the globe. The Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) networks, now known as the American Forces Network, aired thousands of hours of country music programs for military and foreign civilian listeners during the Cold War.⁶ These radio and television stations provided Nashville’s white artists with a government-sponsored media outlet to promote their records and expand their audiences around the globe. Additionally, the global system of installations maintained by the US Armed Forces acted as a de facto touring route for country music artists looking to increase their audience, create positive publicity, and entertain the troops. These installations also housed Army and Air Force Exchange stores, commonly referred to as the Post Exchange or PX, where record companies could sell their products to servicemembers in need of entertainment. Soldiers steadily increased the number of country music records they bought over the 1950s and 1960s. By 1968, the PXs in Europe sold more country records than any other category, giving Music Row’s artists around 65 percent of the soldier market share.⁷

Second, I argue that country music militarization helped white southerners see the expansion of the military as a part of their regional culture rather than an intrusion of state power into everyday life. Because of its themes of masculine individualism and working-class pride, country music provided the populist cover for white southerners who joined the military to receive federally funded benefits like the GI Bill. When those white southerners enlisted, they began to request more country music on AFRTS stations, and some began using the armed forces as a space to explore their own talents for playing the music. Dozens of country musicians, including future stars Faron Young, Johnny Cash, Mel Tillis, and George Strait, used their time in the ranks to hone their craft. Many of these men participated in the military’s Special Services, the division in charge of troop morale and entertainment, as a springboard into a civilian music career once they left the military. Artists who had served their nation in this way established personal connections between the genre and the military, making armed service seem like a natural part of the country industry and, by extension, white southern culture.

Third, I argue that the country music industry’s relationship with the military turned the genre’s politics toward political conservatism over the last third of the twentieth century. The expansion of the defense state had enjoyed broad support in the early years of the Cold War, when Americans of virtually all political persuasions shared a belief in a strong standing military that could fight communists. As debates over the Vietnam War fractured that consensus, an unflinching commitment to the armed forces became a central tenet of politicians who painted their opponents and anyone who dared to question military foreign policies as something less than patriotic. Politicians on the right, conservative Republicans and southern Democrats, built a movement that warned, ironically, against the increasing size of the federal government even as they supported the hawkish policies that increased the power and scope of the Defense Department. When President Ronald Reagan upped defense spending to unprecedented peacetime levels, the Republican Party conflated support for the military with support for the nation itself as way to win votes for its partisan agenda.⁸

The country industry located along Nashville’s Music Row generally followed this political trajectory toward conservatism, not because of some inherent ideology within its artists and fans but because of the lucrative partnerships it had established with the Pentagon during the Cold War consensus of the 1950s. Cold War defense policies assured a demand for more soldiers. More soldiers meant steady pay, government benefits, and the creation of defense contractor jobs in the civilian sector to supply those troops. Those soldiers bought more country records and demanded that AFRTS stations play them. The Pentagon then used more country music in its recruitment and entertainment strategies. Simply put, the Cold War was good for the country music business.

Connecting Nashville’s cultural economy and the political economy created by the Defense Department enhances our understanding of country music’s class, gender, and racial politics. Since its emergence as a commercial style in the 1920s, country has cultivated a reputation as the music for the expressions and everyday experiences of the nation’s working class, especially the white working class. Country songwriters have detailed the economic hardships, love lives, and social struggles of these people in their lyrics, cementing the music’s connection between culture and class.⁹ To further the genre’s symbolic and social ties to rural America and the US South, country musicians have populated their songs with and dressed themselves as frontiersmen, farmers, miners, railroad engineers, and cowboys. The songs and stage personas of male artists celebrate the work of white men and the normative gender roles of manly labor.¹⁰

Soldiers, too, belong in country music’s pantheon of white masculinity, as we can see by considering how working for the defense state impacted country music’s fans, artists, and industry. Other writers have examined how the image of the soldier in television, popular songs, film, and literature influenced the victory culture of the postwar United States and informed the idealization of the warrior as a breadwinning hero for the nuclear family.¹¹ Yet these studies have largely overlooked the connections between country music and the job opportunities and political economy created by Cold War defense spending.¹² The military and its civilian defense contractors offered well-paying, stable government employment in the postwar South at a time when the region’s economy lacked other comparable options. White southerners, including aspiring country stars, flocked to those government jobs. Those artists then sang songs about that government work and relied on their fellow defense workers to support their musical careers, completing a circle of art and labor shaped by the intersection of regional politics and Cold War military spending.

Cold War Country also adds new perspectives on the racial history of the genre and the popular music industry more broadly. Much of my work highlights how the white-dominated country music industry benefited from its connection with the Cold War military in ways that other genres did not. Although country has always featured racial and regional diversity, the recording industry has marketed the music as a genre almost exclusively associated with white performers and fans, often from the US South and Southwest.¹³ During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, record label executives and academic folklorists imposed their ideas of racial essentialism onto southern musical cultures. They segregated southern working-class music into two categories, with hillbilly, or what we now call country, classified as white music and the blues and other forms of Black music lumped under the category of race records. This musical color line did not reflect the actual repertoires played by musicians, and it did not reflect the way southerners listened to music. Instead, the record industry divided its products in a way that reproduced the white supremacist divisions of people and cultures in the Jim Crow United States.¹⁴

Because of country music’s reputation as a genre for and by white Americans, the Defense Department’s use of the music in its recruitment campaigns reveals the contradictions of the military’s racial integration policies following World War II. President Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces in 1948, and that executive order took practical effect during the Korean War. This newly integrated military emerged as one of the most diverse institutions in the nation thanks to the peacetime draft. Yet Black servicemembers continued to experience racism at the hands of white enlistees and civilians.¹⁵ Likewise, country music recruitment campaigns could give the impression that the US Armed Forces, as an institution, favored white volunteers. I do not mean to suggest that all, or only, white southern soldiers loved country music or responded to these recruitment campaigns. But when the Pentagon used country music to convey its recruitment message, it imagined its audience for volunteer enlistees as white.

The government’s investment in Nashville’s white southern music industry echoed the infusion of military spending that had transformed the South’s broader industrial economy. Beginning in the 1940s, the warfare state delivered an unprecedented level of economic growth to the South. White southern legislators in Congress used their positions of seniority within their respective Armed Services Committees to channel federal defense spending to the region. For the military and its contractors, the South offered cheap land, a temperate climate suitable for year-round training, and an underemployed workforce that lacked a sustained history of unionization. For the region’s conservative Democratic leadership, defense spending supplied an infusion of government funds to the South, while skirting the tinge of socialism carried by New Deal programs.¹⁶ This strategy of military Keynesianism boosted the US South’s economy to unprecedented levels, as defense spending delivered both military installations and private contractors to the region. In 1951, southern states received around 8 percent of the military’s prime contracts. By 1970, that amount grew to more than 25 percent.¹⁷ Companies like Lockheed in Marietta, Georgia; Raytheon in Huntsville, Alabama; and Ingalls Shipbuilders in Pascagoula, Mississippi, remade the region’s economy.¹⁸

The expansion of military spending in the postwar South disproportionately benefited white men and families in the region. White southern politicians had designed the distribution of veterans’ benefits like the GI Bill to discriminate against Black veterans. Defense contractors in the region added to this racial inequality by operating under local control for as long as possible, meaning that their hiring and promotion remained rooted in the region’s practices of Jim Crow segregation.¹⁹ Through these discriminatory measures, defense spending helped turn portions of the Deep South into sites of white Sunbelt prosperity.²⁰

Country music experienced a similar benefit from the federal government by building key components of its industry and infrastructure through Cold War defense spending. The country music business began coalescing on Nashville’s Music Row at the same time that federal defense spending delivered concentrated economic growth to white communities around the South. Examining the reciprocal relationships between Music Row and the Pentagon reveals just how reliant these two institutions of US economic and cultural power were on one another.

Country music’s connection to the military, however, predates the Cold War. Jimmie Rodgers, the Father of Country Music, recorded the song The Soldier’s Sweetheart during his first studio session in 1927.²¹ Predictably, the number of war-themed songs exploded during World War II. In 1942, the yodeling hillbilly singer Elton Britt scored a hit with his song There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere. With its lyrics about a disabled man who longs to give himself to military service, Britt’s tune reportedly sold 4 million copies and became the first country song to earn a gold record distinction.²² The country star Roy Acuff, a mainstay of the Nashville-based radio show the Grand Ole Opry, could attribute a portion of his soaring popularity during World War II to his tours for the United Service Organization (USO). According to wartime surveys in the soldier publications Yank magazine and Stars and Stripes, many men preferred Acuff to pop singers like Frank Sinatra.²³ For much of his career, Acuff even used a fiddle that members of the US Army’s 348th Engineer Combat Battalion found in a bombed-out music store in Frankfurt, Germany, and shipped to their favorite country star as a gift.²⁴ While I reference these precedents, Cold War Country does not provide in-depth examinations of country music’s spread before or during World War II. Nor does it offer anything close to a complete catalogue of every song about military service, anticommunism, or atomic warfare.²⁵

I focus on the business, political, and racial histories of the Cold War era to show how the country industry and the government-funded defense state benefited from an underrecognized public-private partnership over the last half of the twentieth century. Part of the reasoning for this chronology is purely practical. It was not until the postwar era that the country music labels, publishers, and studios consolidated into a recognizable industry in Nashville, while the genre’s business actors did not form their primary trade organization, the Country Music Association, until 1958.²⁶ Meanwhile, what President Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex emerged from the combination of private industry, academia, and the military buildup designed to deter nuclear war and the threat of communism in the Cold War.²⁷

FIGURE I.1 Roy Acuff began performing for military audiences during World War II and increased his participation in USO tours during the 1960s. Those performances included tours in the Pacific during the Vietnam War, where he appeared as an ambassador of the Grand Ole Opry. (Roy Acuff Scrapbook, courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum)

I also aim to bring a fresh outlook to the history of state expansion within this time frame. In relying on music industry archives to tell much of my story, I show how country music helped assuage Americans’ historical suspicions of centralized authority. This is not to argue that conspiring powers within the Defense Department consciously plotted to convince country music’s listeners to support a peacetime military of unprecedented size and scope. My hope is to highlight how this happened regardless of intent. As the military grew, its use of country music legitimized that expansion to the genre’s fans. This blending of public and private sectors filtered state growth through the down-home sounds of country music.²⁸ It dressed Leviathan in a cowboy hat and surplus fatigues.

I begin by exploring the roots of that business relationship through Connie B. Gay, a New Deal agricultural adviser who discovered the entrepreneurial potentials of country radio in the postwar period. During the 1950s, Gay planted a flag for country music in Washington, DC, by purchasing radio and television stations and managing country musicians. He also established a partnership with the Pentagon to promote his radio stations and the artists he managed to US servicemembers around the globe. By the end of the decade, Gay had pioneered the use of country music in military recruitment radio shows, amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune based in the ownership of radio and television stations, and served as the founding president of the Country Music Association.

Gay’s work laid a foundation for the military’s country music recruitment campaigns in the 1950s that featured stars like Faron Young. An eventual Country Music Hall of Fame member, Young received an early career boost when the US Army drafted him and made him a voice of recruitment. The Pentagon embraced a wide range of country music recruitment programs following Young’s tenure and relied on the folksy charm of other talented country stars to encourage enlistment. When the military began using those musicians to recruit white men into the service, it gave a familiar, down-home face and sound to the US Cold War military, one of the largest bureaucratic institutions in the world.

Some of those young men who joined the military in search of a better life, or who were snagged by the draft, also used their time in the service to woodshed their musical skills and broaden their artistic pursuits. One group of musically inclined white southern veterans coalesced in Memphis in the early 1950s to create a new style of country music called rockabilly. Almost all of the songwriters, producers, and musicians who shook up Nashville with their cutting-edge sound gained their professional start in music by playing with fellow servicemembers through the US Army and Air Force Special Services Division or in more informal settings around the barracks. Their experiences support my argument that country music made its way into the ranks by two directions: from the top-down collaborations between the Defense Department and Music Row and from the servicemembers on the ground who did not check their talents or fandom at the installation gate.²⁹ Service in the racially integrated Cold War military also opened their ears to new sounds and artistic influences. Those influences came together to help make rockabilly and eventually the style of rock and roll popularized by Elvis Presley.

Presley’s trajectory differed from that of his rockabilly peers in that he did not serve in the military until after he was famous, but his musical and military careers profoundly impacted the racial politics of the country industry and the South as a whole in the 1950s. I argue that racial integration on southern military installations and rockabilly’s Black influence within country music represented internal threats to the white South’s racial hierarchy. For southern white supremacists, military and musical integration represented a two-pronged attack on Jim Crow launched by a communist conspiracy to subvert US power by eroding the armed forces and the dominance of white culture. Elvis Presley began his career as a symbol of that threat to the white social hierarchies and the racial order of the country music industry. By the time Presley had completed his military service from 1958 to 1960, he had become a matinee star and pop-music idol stripped of his threatening image. In this sense, military service did for Presley what it promised to do for thousands of other working-class white men across the South and the country music industry itself. It opened a route to middle-class decency for someone who had grown up at the edge of respectable white southern society.

Like Presley, the country music industry learned how to increase its profits through an association with the Pentagon. Throughout the 1960s, the Country Music Association (CMA) used the Defense Department to cultivate a global network for the promotion and sale of country music. The CMA adopted Best Liked World-Wide as an early slogan for its marketing of country music. Although the genre had not earned that title, the CMA used the AFRTS to push country music to military and civilian audiences around the world and make its slogan into a reality. The PXs provided the necessary infrastructure for the US music business to export musical products around the world and built a global community of listeners for American music, particularly country music. The CMA reaped the benefits of country music’s spread through the Cold War military, which provided a government-subsidized outlet for building wealth within a white-dominated industry.

Class, race, and recruitment dramatically shaped the politics of country music during the Vietnam War. Although I analyze reactionary anthems like Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee, I contextualize them within the diversity of political opinions about the war expressed in country songs, including voices of dissent. But country artists’ songs of subtle protest could not break the ties between Music Row and the Pentagon’s recruitment and entertainment machines. The country music industry and the Pentagon continued their cozy relationship by sending artists on tours of military installations in Europe and Asia to help grow the genre’s profits. This lucrative business relationship meant that Music Row could not afford to break with the Pentagon as support for the war became a rallying cry for conservatism in the Nixon era.

I close by showing how country music helped blur the distinctions between patriotism, nationalism, and militarization following the shift to an all-volunteer force (AVF). When Richard Nixon ended the draft in 1973, he mandated a radical restructuring of military policy that altered the demographics of the US Armed Forces. The conversion to the AVF led to an increase in minorities and women in the service, in part because the military offered a modicum of social welfare at a time that politicians cut those benefits in the civilian sector.³⁰ Changes to personnel policy coincided with changes to foreign policy, and the United States entered a period of warmer relations with the Soviet Union and other Cold War foes.³¹ For a brief window in the late 1970s, it appeared that country music militarization had started to wane, as the armed forces no longer needed the genre to recruit enlistees in the way it had in previous decades.

The defense spending spree initiated under Ronald Reagan renewed the connection between Music Row and the Pentagon, and country music militarization took on a new guise in the Reagan-Bush era. Following the conversion to the AVF, the PXs no longer functioned as a cornerstone of country record sales. Neither did the AFRTS play as much country as it once had. Instead of country performers selling their music to soldiers, they doubled down on selling themselves as patriotic artists to civilian audiences by associating themselves with the military. No artist capitalized on patriotic pride like Lee Greenwood. After the release of his song God Bless the U.S.A. in 1984, Greenwood became the darling performer for Reagan and other small-government conservatives while they expanded the size of the federal government through unprecedented levels of peacetime defense spending. By the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the start of George H. W. Bush’s Persian Gulf War, Greenwood proved just how profitable patriotism could be for individual artists willing to cash in on the fifty-year history of country music militarization.

My concentration on country music is not meant to obscure the way other media and other musical genres intersected with the US government’s Cold War missions. The Defense Department kept close watch over images of the armed forces in film and television, developing a media relations office early in the Cold War to police the portrayal of American fighting men in Hollywood and aid in recruitment campaigns.³² The Pentagon also used pop, rock, and soul music to achieve its recruiting goals, while the State Department used pop and jazz to portray the United States as a nation of racial inclusiveness in the face of communist propaganda that pointed to the hypocrisy of Jim Crow rule in a democratic nation.³³ Throughout the book, I offer comparative analysis of the way Black pop, jazz, R&B, and blues artists served and wrote music about their time in the armed forces.³⁴

The book focuses on country music so intensely because no other genre’s industry courted the financial aid of the Pentagon and used the military to build its business the way that Music Row did. And although the armed forces used other styles of music in their recruitment campaigns, no other genre’s industry was primed to deliver what the military needed like country music. Throughout the Cold War, Nashville’s music industry still functioned as a small-town operation with an insular community of producers, artists, and business actors. Music Row’s genre-affiliated, vertically integrated industry model made it well-suited to deliver what the military needed. The Defense Department created an even cozier connection to Nashville after the birth of the CMA, which retained tight control over the image and politics of the music while keeping it in line with the military’s Cold War mission. As a result, no genre bears the mark of the Cold War’s militarization and normative patriotism into the present day like country music.

By bringing together musical and military histories, Cold War Country also reveals how culture can racialize and polarize the supposedly race-neutral, nonpartisan institutions of the US government. Although the US Armed Forces has pushed for progressive racial policies and claims no partisan affiliation, the Defense Department’s close connection to Music Row branded armed service with the white sounds and symbols of country music. This book helps us understand how the Pentagon’s well-funded bureaucracy not only provides for the common defense but also reflects and shapes US culture.

From a vantage point in the early twenty-first century, country music holds what seems like a naturally occurring affinity with hawkish patriotism. We expect country musicians to back the troops or, as Aaron Tippin suggested, be the cheerleaders of the US military. My book offers a deeper explanation. It shows that white southern men supported the military as a key to class mobility in the postwar era. Country music made the military seem like a part of white southern culture, something familiar, something that sounded like home. If country music is the sound of US patriotism, it is because Music Row spent decades cultivating a business alliance with the Pentagon.

1 Big Government Country

Connie B. Gay and the Roots of Country Music Militarization

Connie B. Gay used country music to build a media empire in the 1950s. His ascent began with a job as a radio announcer in 1946 on station WARL in Arlington, Virginia, and a hunch that listeners in the Washington, DC, suburbs might tune in for what the music business then called hillbilly music. He ended the 1950s as the founding president of the Country Music Association, the owner of dozens of radio stations, the producer of television shows on national networks, and a multimillionaire. Performers like Jimmy Dean, George Hamilton IV, Patsy Cline, Roy Clark, Johnny Cash, Andy Griffith, the Stoneman Family, and Grandpa Jones all received early career boosts from Gay’s web of media and concert promotions based in the capital metropolitan area. Even Grand Ole Opry stars like Eddy Arnold and Minnie Pearl traveled to Washington, DC, to appear on Gay’s radio and television programs Radio Ranch, Gay Time, and Town and Country Time. Others, including Elvis Presley, toured through Washington to play his Hillbilly Cruise aboard a yacht that sailed more than 2,000 concertgoers up and down the Potomac River.¹

Gay’s biography reads like a testament to entrepreneurial drive. In 1971, the Washington Post featured a front-page profile on Gay, then fifty-six years old. The headline told how he rose from hardscrabble farm to king of the hill, and the writer described him as country music’s media magician. An accompanying photograph showed Gay, along with his second wife, an ex-model who was twenty years his junior, and their two small children. They posed on a verdant lawn in front of the family’s four-columned Colonial Revival home in the affluent Washington, DC, suburb of MacLean, Virginia. When Gay was pressed about how much wealth he had accrued through this magic, he coyly told the paper, Just say it’s millions.… Enough to make sure it won’t run out as long as I live.²

Country music carried Gay a long way from his humble origins. Born on a dirt farm in North Carolina in 1914, Gay struggled out of poverty to earn a college degree, worked as a New Deal agricultural adviser during the Great Depression and World War II, and learned the radio business just in time to take advantage of the United States’ postwar appetite for pop culture entertainment. He transformed country music’s artists, producers, and record labels into an industry over the course of his career, having organized the Country Music Dis Jockey Association in 1953, cofounded the Country Music Association in 1958, and helped establish the Country Music Foundation in 1964. He even provided the first $10,000 donation to build the Country Music Hall of Fame.³ Although he never made Nashville his full-time residence, Gay earned a reputation as a founding father of the industry that gave the Tennessee capital its nickname, Music City, USA.⁴

The characterization of Gay as an independent and visionary entrepreneur offers a compelling story, but he owed much of his success to his close ties with the US Department of Defense. Their relationship built gradually. Beginning in the late 1940s, Gay cultivated a country music audience made up of servicemembers, Pentagon employees, and other government workers by producing live concerts and radio programs in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. Gay, like thousands of other natives of the rural South, as well as other regions, had moved to the capital during World War II for wartime government employment. The location of the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, meant that this influx of military personnel and defense contractors remained in and around the capital after the war. Gay recognized the potential to market country music in Arlington, sold the genre to this influx of government workers, and discovered some of the biggest stars of the twentieth century when they were still working for the Cold War defense state.

Gay formalized his connection between his country music businesses and the US military in 1951 when he booked Grandpa Jones and His Grandchildren on a tour of bases in Japan and the front lines of the Korean War. This tour generated a publicity boon for Gay’s radio station back home in Arlington, as listeners tuned in to hear his reports from the battlefront and country music’s role in the fight against communism. Gay parlayed this success into a position as an entertainment adviser for the Department of Defense, a role that he used to book country artists in the US military’s global network of Cold War installations. As the Pentagon established the indefinite presence of US soldiers in Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean, Gay made sure that those troops, essentially a captive audience of young men, heard the latest stars of country music live and in person during the 1950s.

Country music was not the only form of entertainment to intersect with the United States’