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But what if you lose your audience? You’ve got fans out there. They’re loyal to you.
They expect more from you. You don’t want to give up your roots. You’d risk alienating
them for the sake of a few bucks. But maybe it’s more than a few bucks. These crazy
rock ‘n’ roll records are selling in the millions. At least that’s what you hear. That’s a lot
of money and a whole new audience. You don’t want to miss out on that. You don’t want
this train to go by without you getting on board. You can always get off again if you
don’t like it.
Or try to imagine this.
You’re a young country musician and you hear some new sounds,
perhaps on the radio, that grab your attention. They’re exciting and they stay in your head
more than the same old country music you’ve been hearing and playing all your life.
Maybe you can find some like-minded musicians out there and work some of these new
sounds into your own style.
On this and the companion Volume of ‘They Tried To Rock’
you will hear music with
these and other stories behind it. We have collected a variety of examples of country
musicians making the transition into rock ‘n’ roll. Some were very successful; others were
less so. The results are all fascinating: the story of a genre struggling to hold its own
against enormous forces of change in the 1950s. Traditional American music battling
against stylistic and economic pressures that threatened to engulf it. Country musicians
wondered,
“Do we fight it or join it?”
They did both as the new music began to spread.
Here’s some of what happened.
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