Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2024/spring/Section14/Bill Carlisle

Bill Carlisle

William Toliver “Bill” Carlisle was a prolific country singer and contributor to the hillbilly genre.

Personal Life

Childhood in Briar Ridge

Carlisle was born on December 19, 1908 in Briar Ridge, Kentucky, to Van Luther Carlisle, a tobacco farmer and music teacher, and Mary Ellen Boes. Carlisle and his six siblings attended the Ashes Creek School for their primary education. Carlisle began playing the guitar at the age of seven and showed exceptional talent from this young age.

Adolescence in Louisville

Louisville, Kentucky: the industrial center of Kentucky.

In 1923, Carlisle finished the seventh grade and left school. Soon after, his family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, as his father pursued employment at the mills there. Carlisle and his brother Cliff Carlisle, also a musician, worked on Vaudeville shows during their time in Louisville, and at the age of seventeen, Carlisle composed his first song. Initially, Carlisle took to Blues music, but eventually fell in love with the hillbilly genre. From about 1926 to 1929, Carlisle worked at the Louisville Ford Manufacturing plant as an enameller, writing and recording music on the side.

Beginning of Radio Career

After an incident at the factory caused Carlisle to lose the tip of his left index finger, he decided to quit his job and pursue music wholeheartedly before the factory had the chance to permanently disable him from playing the guitar. In 1931, he met his future wife, Leona King. In the mid-1930s, the hillbilly genre of music began to gain popularity on local radios, and Carlisle and his brother Cliff formed a group, The Carlisle Brothers, and began to sing on local radios. They gained popularity, touring to sing on local radios across the south, and soon traveled to New York to record records with the recording companies Brunswick, Victor, and Decca. Their most popular songs were jail songs, love songs, and ballads, and they performed classic hillbilly songs and spirituals as well as their own compositions. Carlisle also performed as his alter ego, the comical "Hot Shot Elmer."

Fame

Carlisle was able to copyright The Carlisle Brothers’ recordings of hillbilly classics, and made good money off of royalties, album sales, and radio gigs. His songs charted frequently throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and Carlisle was honored for his contributions to the hillbilly genre in 2002 with his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He died on March 17, 2003.

Social Contexts

Poverty in Rural Kentucky

The Great Depression hit the rural South especially hard. Partly due to the area’s lack of infrastructure, farmers in this area “faced a devastating economic situation during this period.” However, Kentucky had already been facing an economic downturn before the rest of the country succumbed to the Great Depression. "Overproduction, glutted markets, and systemic misuse of lands by timber and mining companies" had caused farmers' income to decline since the end of World War I. As farmers of other crops struggled, tobacco farmers initially retained their income, as "people were still smoking," but as purchasing power fell in Kentucky and across the South, even tobacco farmers faced "extreme decline" in agricultural prices. During the 1920s, "Kentucky ranked forty-sixth out of forty-eight states in average farm income," and "tobacco-growing families were perpetually cash-starved."

Industry in Louisville during the Great Depression

Louisville was the center of industry in Kentucky during the Great Depression with a population of 300,000 people. Many people from rural Kentucky moved to Louisville, the only urban area in Kentucky, to pursue work in factories. As many families could no longer support themselves through farming, and "asphalt and concrete highways began to replace dirt and gravel road," former farmers turned to heavy industry for work. Industries in Louisville included the cigarette and tobacco industry as well as automobile manufacturing. Labor disputes abounded in Kentucky, and New Deal bodies like the National Labor Relations Board began to regulate wages during this period in order to ensure the families of Kentucky could support themselves.

Hillbilly Music

Hillbilly music emerged in 1923 with the advent of the radio. It was originally devised as a way to commercialize Southern folk music, and was made up of a combination of “Anglo-Irish-Negro folksong and American popular song.” Hillbilly music eventually gained nationwide popularity and commercial success because the radio allowed once-local musicians to broadcast these folk songs to communities outside of their own, and even outside of the South. Hillbilly music became a part of popular culture as "radio unified the country... as no other medium ever had,” and eventually expanded into the still-popular genre of country music.