I went to Campbell’s house in Elkton to pay my respects, but I soon realized that the album, much less himself, was the last thing he wanted to talk about. (Full disclosure: I ended up writing the liner notes for Zane’s 2017 album “Ola Wave.” My compensation was a few beers and copies of the CD.) I knew this was something special, and I confirmed it with friends who’d had a similar epiphany. I wanted to learn more about the force behind the best country album I’d heard in years - a low-budget CD released on an unknown label, homemade and visionary and raw with just enough varnish to brighten its inner darkness, like a modern-day William Blake singing bare-bones, hardcore country. But if that was even possible, Kitchens, as he was about to learn, would first have to save Campbell from himself.Ĭountry singer-songwriter Zane Campbell and his guitar at his home in Elkton, Md. To Kitchens, Campbell was the kind of artist who could save country music from what he felt it had become: heartland consumerism run amok. “I was thinking, ‘Here’s the best country singer in Maryland or anywhere else at a godd- nursing home in Cecil County.’ ” This wasn’t oldies nostalgia but a form of catharsis. But the music clearly meant just as much to Campbell himself. The familiar songs meant a lot to these folks. He included weepers like Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces,” a favorite with the audience that often spurred lonely hearts to do just that. He sounded like a mountain opera singer.”Ĭampbell played several sets that kept Kitchens and the residents - among them Campbell’s 90-year-old mother, Eva, and his Aunt Darthula - riveted. “I’d never heard anybody sing with that kind of command,” Kitchens says, “and with all the inflections and nuance in his voice tones and the crazy notes he was hitting, from a growl to a tremble. What he was hearing in Elkton weren’t just tasteful cover versions but masterful interpretations of the country-and-western canon that rivaled the originals. Kitchens had grown up with a Vietnam vet father playing classic country records around the house in Owensboro, Ky. Many of them returned to playing before small audiences who they thought better understood their increasingly difficult and intellectual music.Beyond the sheer force of Campbell’s presence, there was also his remarkable vocal range. Soon, however, the hippest jazz players boycotted the festival. The Newport Jazz Festival (after 1986, called the JVC Jazz Festival), held in Newport, Rhode Island, became the granddaddy of American jazz festivals and attracted twenty-six thousand fans in its second year. In the 1950s, jazz was brought out of the cities and into new respectability in popular jazz festivals. The jazz of the 1940s was heard in nightclubs, most often in black neighborhoods. In the 1940s, jazz had been the music of urban hipsters. Jazz was also undergoing a process of transformation. The most popular of the disc jockeys-like Alan Freed (1922–1965) or, later, Wolfman Jack (1938–1995)- became celebrities themselves. Disc jockeys chose the music that they played and helped introduce new rock bands to thousands of devoted listeners. Rock and roll was made popular by a new kind of radio programmer called a disc jockey. Blacks and whites played in bands together, recorded each other's songs, and were played on the same radio stations. In an era when much of American culture was segregated (blacks and whites were distinctly separated), rock and roll was integrated. Rock and roll was a social as well as a musical force. Presley's hip-shaking stage performances made teenage girls swoon. The undisputed king of rock and roll in the 1950s was Elvis Presley (1935–1977). Musician Ray Charles (1930–) described the music this way: "When they get a couple of guitars together with a backbeat, that's rock and roll." Rock and roll was raw, powerful, and compelling it drew young people on to dance floors and into record stores in a way that no music had done before. Rock and roll was a powerful new form of music that combined elements of rhythm and blues (R&B), pop, blues, and hillbilly music to create a sound that truly shook America.
Music in the 1950s was dominated by the birth of rock and roll.
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