The moral aura around country music becomes clearest in its reaction to rock-n-roll. Until Elvis, white musicians came to the Grand Ol Opry (a converted church still using the original pews) in Nashville to learn country music's own particular styles and techniques. But with Hound Dawg, using borrowed blues lyrics and Elvis's own brand of hard twang country steel guitar, all the walls between black and white music collapsed.

In the Opry, a kind of Plato's Republic for country musicians, the feeling was that their music had been defiled, and to make it doubly painful, the early white stars in rock were turncoat country singers-Conway Twitty, Roy Orbison, Sunny James, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis and of course Elvis.

But aside from the fear of racial integration and the obvious economic competition, there was an authentic Puritan's outrage against rock's overt/covert sex.

When Jerry Lee Lewis sang Great Balls of Fire, beat his piano and took off his shirt, he struck at the jugular of country music's conservatism. The kid musicians weren't singing about hard-luck or the hell of prison life any more. They just wanted to make people feel good and that usually had something to do with sex.

With this in mind, the Opry prohibited drums and electric amplifiers. Singers were requested to stand in one spot when they sang and wear ties or neckerchiefs.

The sequence of events that led to the emergence of a distinct country style is complicated by a lack of documentation. Pie Plant Pete of the Georgia Skillet Lickers was not overly concerned with his place in the history of country music. Most objective studies have been forced to rely on advertisements, widely scattered interviews that more often than not said nothing substantive about the music, and stories passed on by witnesses.

RADIO in the twenties went a long way towards consolidating what had been up to then several different strains of rural music. In 1922, WSB broadcast from Atlanta the first country music show, with an unprecedented response of 9,000 letters requesting more songs and artists. Record companies brought portable recording studios and the musicians flowed out of the hills.

But all this was just setting the table for Jimmie Rodgers. Taking the week off from his railroad job in North Carolina, Rodgers made his first recording in 1927 in Bristol, North Carolina, and created the country music sound.

His style was a complex amalgam of hillbilly, blues, English ballad, and Hawaiian twang, all coupled with Rodger's own "blue yodel." A mixture of Swiss yodeling and the Negro falsetto, Rodgers took his voice past its highest note and let it break into "T for Texas, T for Tennessee," yodelling on the "T's" and then back into a normal range for the next line.

He recorded with such disparate stylists as Louis Armstrong, Earl "Fatha" Hynes, Howlin Wolf (Rodgers is credited with giving Chester Burnett the name Howlin Wolf), and the usual repertoire of hillbilly musicians whose musical styles defy categorization.

His major contribution was giving a musical outlet to the down-home lyrics of the Southern backwoods singers. Rodgers' twelve bar structures seemed to fit perfectly the region's idiom. Early in Rodgers' very short career (he recorded from 1927 until he died of tuberculosis in 1933) he was able to blend the artifacts of everyday life with religious themes that made the most mundane chore an act of God. He was one of the first to understand the gulf between the grand style of Southern tradition and the dull realities of Southern living. You can still see the conflict in the South, tiresome old cars with a license plate on the front bumper that pictures a Confederate general shouting "Hellno, we ain't quit," or in the elementary schools that teach the kids to sing Dixie with solemnity and pride.

It is a Southerner's stubborn belief in himself and his white heritage of independence and toughness that accounts for his resistance to the personal misery of the blues. His country music looks to social explanations for unhappiness. In tedious love affairs, prisons, or truck-cabs Southern whites feel most intensely the emptiness of their lives. Rodgers sang:

Will there be any freight trains in heaven,

Any boxcars in which we might hide;

Will there be any tough cops for brakeman,

Will they tell us we cannot ride...?

A distinction can be made between the blues metaphorical use of a social world and country music's more literal retelling. When Merle Haggard sings, "I turned twenty-one in prison, doing life without parole," we have to assume he is not happy. Delta bluesman Robert Johnson's delicate poetics leave little doubt:

I got stones in my passway, and my

road seems dark as night. (repeat)

I have pains in my heart, they have taken my appetite.

As a white man's blues, country music deals with the stunted aspirations of a social class caught between a determined pride and an even more determined poverty. Out of their bitterness, they perceive the world as cruel and unforgiving, hence the recurring motif of a country boy helplessly tangled in tragic events he neither caused nor wanted. Often the events center on a woman, either the unfaithful wife or the seductress who doesn't mention her husband until he is already coming at the interloper with a broken bottle. A Hank Williams song says it best:

I've got a tiger by the tail it's plain to see,

I'm losing sleep and looking mighty pale,

It's clear she's gonna make a big fool out of me.

The deeply felt pain of the blues is transposed in country music into feelings of lost prestige, embarrassment, and finally defeat. In the mountain towns of north Georgia, though, it's not obvious at first. Not until you have talked to someone like Skeeter for a while, and he tells you how he doesn't mind working at the textile mill, and how good the women are and how much he loves the South. And he keeps telling you over and over again.