But how did the mountain folk music of Virginia move from residences and store porches to the ears of America? The answer is an amazing confluence of technology and tradition that began in the 1920s.
Nowadays it is common to equate early radio with early television in assessing impact. This is an error. Nothing like radio had happened before. Radio came before sound films and ignited a fever of attention, a craze, and an apt term, as one must go back to the ancient witch manias to find anything with the fever of interest that radio ignited.
It was wonderfully democratic. There was so much radio time that Sousa-like brass bands and light popular entertainment could not fill all the hours. The rigid curatorial standards of the recording industry could not be maintained.
It was radio that forced democracy upon the recording moguls, and it is no accident that a record company in New York became interested in Henry Whitter in 1923, after radio began sweeping the nation in 1922.
While many Virginia groups were important on early radio, The Hill Billies and the Carter Family made notable contributions through very different radio media. The Hill Billies via New York and Washington on urban stations with a mix of popular entertainment, the Carter Family on high powered “border blaster” stations in Mexico that aimed a barrage of direct mail advertising at rural and small town listeners throughout North and South America.
Fries mill hand and banjoist, John Rector, was performing informally with Galax barber and fiddler Elvis Alonzo (Tony) Alderman, and Al and Joe Hopkins when Henry Whitter recorded in 1923. Rector was included in a Whitter recording foray, that of the Virginia Breakdowners. But he thought the barbershop band a better one.
Al Hopkins was a powerful vocalist and a vaudeville performer. He was in Galax assisting his brother, Jacob, a physician, with office work during the vaudeville off season. He’d been living in Washington, DC, but was a native of nearby Ashe County, NC. Brother Joe Hopkins worked for the Norfolk and Western Railroad on its “Virginia Creeper” line and lived in nearby Green Cove, Virginia.
Rector took the group to Okeh Records, but they were soon on Brunswick and Vocalion records, and Al Hopkins took them to radio in Washington and New York, and to vaudeville stages throughout the east.
Their 1928 sound film, The Hill Billies, was released with Al Jolson’s Singing Fool, and they performed for President Coolidge. Their name became a household word, and music like theirs was dubbed, “hillbilly.” Their lead vocalist and guiding genius was Al Hopkins, and they did not survive after his death in a tragic auto accident in Winchester, Virginia, early in 1932.