ome scholars
study the atomic age by researching the bomb makers. Others delve
into the physics of the nucleus, or the relations between East and
West in the cold war.ome scholars
study the atomic age by researching the bomb makers. Others delve
into the physics of the nucleus, or the relations between East and
West in the cold war.
Dr. Charles K. Wolfe listens to country music. In fact, he is a leading scholar of the country music of the atom bomb, a genre that flowered almost immediately after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II and faded away by the early 50's.
For Dr. Wolfe, the bomb songs are a "bizarre" expression of a major theme in American folk music, the relationship of people and technology.
Often, these songs tell of a brave man overcoming the dehumanizing force of machinery, as in "The Wreck of the Old 97," the classic song about a runaway train.
"Americans have a kind of love and hate relationship with technology," Dr. Wolfe said in an interview. "We are the most technological country in the world, and yet when it comes to bringing technology into our lives we are a little suspicious."
But the country music of the bomb tells of more than suspicion, Dr. Wolfe writes in a new collection of scholarly papers, "Country Music Goes to War" (University of Kentucky Press), which he edited with James E. Akenson.
When Dr. Wolfe listens to this music, he hears people telling of great cities "scorched from the face of the earth" and wondering if they'll know "the time or hour when a terrible explosion may rain down upon our land."
In his own contribution to the collection, he cites what may be the first nuclear country song, "Atomic Power," released in 1946 by a well-established cowboy-country singer by the name of Fred Kirby.
The song asserts that atomic power "was given by the mighty hand of God" and suggests that those who use it unwisely will face cosmic retribution. When country music faced the bomb, it looked at the power of the atom through the prism of religion.
For the songwriters and the people who listened to their work, Dr. Wolfe said, the atomic bomb was not so much a weapon of war as "absolute proof that the deity exists and his power is infinite."
As a result, many of the country songs of the atomic age carried titles like "Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb," or "There Is a Power Greater Than Atomic."
"Here you have people who have put themselves through all sorts of hardship and struggle during the war," he said, "and all of a sudden it's ended, wham, just like that - what kind of power can do that?"
The bomb was too powerful a technology for people to integrate in their lives the way they did their washing machines or radios or, as Dr. Wolfe put it in an interview, "that friendly piece of machinery, the Model T Ford." So in "Old Man Atom," a song by Vern Partlow in the talking blues style, listeners hear that Einstein is chastened by the power his work helped unleash, "and if he's scared, brother, I'm scared."
This is a narrow specialty: the years immediately after World War II produced only about two dozen country songs about the bomb, Dr. Wolfe said. By the early 50's, atomic country music had withered, he said, as angst about the bomb was transformed into angst about the cold war and communism. One of the last of the genre was the 1951 song "Advice to Joe," by Roy Acuff and Roy Nunn, which threatens Stalin with the atomic might of Uncle Sam and asks Stalin, "Do you have a place to hide?"
Dr. Wolfe, who earned a conventional doctorate in English from the University of Kansas with that most conventional of thesis topics, Charles Dickens, and who teaches English and popular culture at Middle Tennessee State University, in Murfreesboro, began his atomic research with forays to thrift shops or secondhand stores in search of old records.
In those days, before the establishment of the Country Music Hall of Fame and its archives, or other centers for the study of popular culture, "people would swap records on tape," he said. "I would put out the call, If you run across in the Goodwill store a record about the atomic bomb, I am interested."
But there were few serious students of popular culture and far fewer journals that would publish their papers. When researchers got together, he recalled, "people would bring 30 or 40 copies of their papers, and we'd put out stacks on the floor and you just went along and picked up copies. That was the way we shared our knowledge."
Today, Dr. Wolfe likes his job not just for its proximity to the country music resources of Nashville but for the chance it gives him to break new ground. Research is exciting, he said, "when you get into an area and you realize it's really terra incognita." He added, "I would hate to have to go back and do scholarly papers on Victorian England."