America 100 years ago
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Sean of the South
Sean Dietrich
One hundred years ago, America is unrecognizable from its modern-day counterpart.
Booze is illegal. Movies are silent. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s new book is a smash hit.
Baseball is everything. Major League baseball is still young, only in its 28th season. Games are held in the daytime, $0.50 per ticket. Babe Ruth sucks this year. Fans wear Sunday clothes to the ballpark.
Laundry is done by hand. Indoor plumbing is a thing, but only for rich folks. Electricity is becoming common, but only in big cities.
In small towns, they still use kerosene lamps and candles. In the rural parts, if you walk into a general store and ask for a lightbulb, they’ll take their teeth out and laugh at you.
Being a teen in 1925 is no cakewalk. Most teens in the US have a hard life. Education is a luxury. About 8 million people are illiterate. Finishing high-school is a rarity. Less than 20 percent of US kids even attend high school.
Most young people start full-time work in their teens, jumping straight into a 60-hour work week. An average middle-class worker labors for 60 to 75 hours per week and earns an annual income of approximately $1,500.
Automobiles are a big deal. They are affordable now, thanks to the Model T Ford, which costs about $260 for a basic no-frills model.
Many Americans, however, are still resistant to the idea of things like cars, electricity, and radios. These tech advancements will bring about massive change, and change scares the you-know-what out of people.
Life isn’t supposed to be electrified or motorized or broadcast or incandescent or combustible or loud.
Speaking of loud. Jazz music is everywhere. It’s all you hear on radios and Victrolas. Old timers ceremoniously hate this music. It’s chaotic, rebellious and nonsensical. Noisy and obnoxious.
Today, however, kids are being raised by the radio because of lazy parents who just don’t give a dadgum.
The radio is ruining American culture with its wild, sexually charged music, screaming trumpets, and lyricists who have mastered the single entendre.
Kids are now dancing the Charleston and the Lindy Hop, which are highly suggestive pelvic exhibitions. Girls are wearing shorter skirts, with hemlines cut clear above the ankle bones. This country is going to hell.
Which is why most old-timers don’t listen to the radio. It’s annoying. Older folks are accustomed to fiddle tunes and buckdancing.
But you won’t hear buckdancing tunes on the radio. For the older crowd, networks like NBC only air programs with symphonies, philharmonics, brass marching bands, and grandiose opera music from Chicago.
These programs might be popular among cultured big-city dwellers. But one third of America still lives on farms. One third of America couldn’t give a fig about opera. There are 115 million farmers in America who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to “Chicag-ee opry music.”
This is all about to change one November evening.
In middle Tennessee, amidst an autumn cold snap, with lows reaching to the teens, WSM-AM in Nashville starts a new show called “WSM Barn Dance.”
The show is broadcast from a tiny backroom. One microphone. No audience. Lots of static. The first guest is Uncle Jimmy Thompson, a 77-year-old fiddler who played tunes like “Karo” and “Flying Cloud.”
He takes requests via telegram, and sips illegal contraband from a jug to “lubricate his bow arm.”
The show is a runaway hit. Namely, because this is one of the first programs featuring the people’s music. The music of farmers, steel workers, deliverymen, mule skinners, ditch diggers, coal diggers, foundrymen, factory laborers, smiths, wrights, and Appalachian miners.
It isn’t jazz music. It certainly ain’t opera. But, oh, it is grand. And even from its birth, it will forever be old.
Happy 100th birthday to the Grand Ole Opry.
