STARKVILLE — Marty Robbins strums his guitar on television, appearing in black and white as he croons the song “Singing the Blues.”
After the country music star is finished, a U.S. Army recruiter steps in front of the camera and pitches a new path for young men watching in the audience – artillery as a “career that starts with a bang.”

Mississippi State University Associate Professor and Author Joseph Thompson played this clip of the military recruitment show “Country Style USA” Thursday at the Friends of the Starkville Public Library’s monthly Books and Authors event, where he discussed his new book, “Cold War Country: How Nashville’s Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism.”

“There will be a recruiting officer out front, if anybody wants to join,” Thompson joked.

“Cold War Country” was published in April 2024 by the University of North Carolina Press. But Thompson told The Dispatch he first started developing the idea for the book in 2016 while he was working at the University of Virginia, researching the connection between defense spending and the culture of the South.

Thompson’s research led him to O.B. McClinton, a Black singer-songwriter from Senatobia, and a conversation with McClinton’s sister “opened up” the story.

“She gave me a kind of treasure trove of recordings of his, one of which was him appearing on … an Air Force recruitment show, called ‘Country Music Time,’” Thompson said.

Thompson soon found himself digging through archives of that show and other country music military recruitment shows. He also researched the economic, ideological and cultural connections between the two that unfolded beginning in the 1950s.

“Cold War defense policies ensured a demand for more soldiers,” Thompson said. “More soldiers meant steady pay, government benefits, and the creation of defense contractor jobs in the civilian sector to supply those troops. Those soldiers bought more country records and demanded the military disc jockeys play them. The Pentagon then used more country music in its recruitment and entertainment strategies.”

Producers and artists

As Thompson’s argument unfolds throughout the book, he tells stories of artists and producers that formed the country music genre and scene, beginning with Connie B. Gay.

Gay hosted the first country music show in Washington D.C. He also formed country bands that went on tours to “captive audiences” on military bases in Japan and on the front lines of the Korean War, along with those stationed indefinitely in Europe, Asia and the Caribbean through the 1950s, Thompson said.

“Cold War Country” also includes stories of some of the biggest names in music and how their careers intersected with the military. Some country musicians benefitted from the stability military service could offer them, Thompson said, along with the ways the military could open their view of the world.

For example, more than a decade before Johnny Cash served his night in the Oktibbeha County Jail, he served as a morse code interceptor in the Air Force stationed in West Germany. It was there, Thompson said, that Cash bought his first guitar, developed his musical ability and wrote “Folsom Prison Blues.”

“With three other recruits, the young singer formed a band to help kill time around the barracks, calling themselves the Landsberg Barbarians,” Thompson said. “He also claimed to be the first American to intercept the news that Joseph Stalin had died.”

Other artists, like Robbins, appeared on military recruitment shows like “Country Style USA,” which lasted from 1958 to 1960 and cost the Army about $216,000, or about $2.5 million today, Thompson said.

But some artists did not fit the Army’s image or recruitment goals. Though Elvis Presley was considered a new kind of country artist by publications, he was initially rejected from the Special Services division due to his “appeal” to young women rather than young men and his “jellyfish morality,” Thompson said.

It was only after Presley served, rose to the rank of sergeant and cleaned up his image that the military endorsed his album “GI Blues,” Thompson said.

Country on the air

By 1958, publishers, label executives and others formed the Country Music Association in Nashville. The group promoted the genre’s economic growth and its image as a respectable style of music, Thompson said.

The military also played a role in policing that image through the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. In 1965, Billboard magazine reported that the U.S. Armed Forces had begun a campaign in Europe to present country music as a part of the American cultural heritage and way of life, Thompson said.

This included military disc jockeys receiving orders to not refer to the genre as “hick,” “hillbilly,” or “music from the sticks.” Instead, the military suggested calling it more positive terms like “country,” “western” or “the music of America.” They also increased the amount of country music on the air by 35%, Thompson said.

“With more country music on the air, servicemembers began purchasing more country records, and the genre accounted for around 65% of the records sold in European (Post Exchange stores on military bases) by the end of the 1960s,” Thompson said. “So in this sense, the patriotic branding effort brought real financial gains to Music Row at a clip of over $4 million a year by the end of the decade.”