Honky-Tonk Weekly

#8: Roba Stanley, "Single Life"

This is the eighth edition of Honky-Tonk Weekly, a weekly column here at the Tropical Depression Substack. You can read previous editions here. Every week, I will listen to and share a country song and write whatever comes to mind. Listen along! This week, we’re dancing in the single life with Roba Stanley.

Roba Stanley was around fifteen years old when she drove with her father and a family friend to a makeshift recording studio in Atlanta on a hot day in August 1924. She was nervous. Roba grew up in the small farm town of Dacula, about forty miles northeast of the city. She had recently joined up with her dad to form the Stanley Trio, a string band, and they had toured around locally. Okeh Records, out of New York, had been scouting around for rural musicians, and invited them to put their songs on record.

The recording industry was on the cusp of a major change. But not quite yet. The technology for electric condenser microphones was getting better and more usable, but adoption was still a couple years away. Instead, record companies were still doing the very same thing Thomas Edison had done. Musicians would play and sing acoustically into a horn, which captured the sound waves. The waves were funneled into a diaphragm that would vibrate with the waves. The diaphragm was attached to a needle that would then create grooves in the wax cylinder.

“There was one big room, high upstairs in this building,” Roba recalled decades later.¹ “We sang into a big horn, and they had this big old piece of wax turning, just like a record, cutting grooves into the wax. I remember that we had to get pretty close to the horn. It was pretty hard work.”

The entire process was mechanical. For the recording industry, you could say this was a kind of liminal time in the advent of modernity. The real revolution had already happened: the phonograph itself. (Phonograph: what a lovely etymology, from the Greek, roughly “sound writing.”) In the first two decades of the century, though, sheet music still substantially outsold records. Most people who knew popular songs knew them because they played them on the piano at home.

But record sales were already exploding. In 1900, around four million records were sold; in 1910, sales were nearly 30 million. By 1920, annual record sales were more than 100 million. Over those two decades, record players became common in the home, even for many lower-income families, who had cheap options available.

And these records, if you’ll indulge me, would profoundly change the experience of being alive. As long as there had been music, you could hear performers who you could get to, or who came to you. You might hear someone who shook your mind and body and then never hear them again for the rest of your life. To have music in the home beyond what someone in your family might play—what a wonder. And new types of music, too, as the country’s local folkways now had the means to spread to mass audiences. Surely even dreams were not the same.

The burgeoning record industry was about to revolutionize culture forever, in other words. But in August 1924, when Roba Stanley went to Atlanta, they were still using techniques from the late nineteenth century. Picture in your mind Hank Williams at Castle Studio in Nashville in 1947, leaning in to the mic, Fred Rose behind the glass fussing at him to do one more take. This is a scene from the past, of course, and the studio equipment was incredibly primitive by today’s standards. But this is still a recognizable image from the modern world.

Now picture Roba. A teenage farm girl with a thick north Georgia accent, she is belting out her regional rendition of a traditional Irish folk ballad, directly into a massive horn. Forget the calendars, this is a scene from another century.

Just one year earlier, in the same studio, Okeh Records had recorded what is often labeled the first country music record, Fiddlin’ John Carson’s “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.” The term “country music,” keep in mind, did not yet exist. Even the term “hillbilly music” was not coined until the following year, at least according to the common story, by piano player Al Hopkins.² Whatever country music might mean, though, this was its dawn: rural folk music’s encounter with mass media.

This was the beginning.

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Roba’s father, Rob Stanley, was well known in their hometown area for his skill in fiddling contests. He took first place in 1920 the region’s biggest contest, at Municipal Auditorium in Atlanta, with Fiddlin’ John Carson presiding.

Roba would live until 1986. The country music industry would become a multi-billion dollar industry. Perhaps she watched some country music videos on CMT, launched in 1983, in her final years. She was born in the twentieth century, but as a girl she would have had access to the stories and songs of nineteenth-century life. Her father, then sixty-six, was born a few years before the Civil War. He must have had memories and tunes that we can now only half-conjure secondhand in dusty archival accounts and scratchy recordings, if at all. Some are irretrievable.

For Roba, the old folkways were a living tradition, a way of life. They were what amounted to the popular culture available for her as a teen in Gwinnett County, where her roots ran deep. Her family traced its lineage to the earliest European settlers in the area. “My father lived to be 90,” she told Wolfe. “My grandfather lived to be 100. My great-great grandfather never did die, that anybody heard tell of.” Many of her kin, it seems, played old-time music. Her front porch became a hub for jam sessions featuring many of the best players in the area, including a number who went on to make a name for themselves on record and the radio.³

Okeh at this time was already having success with what it termed “race records.” Then Carson’s recordings for the label in 1923 were an unexpected hit, prompting interest in finding more rural white musicians.

It was around the time that Carson’s first record was released that young Roba began playing alongside her father, traveling to square dances, contests, local political campaign events, and other shows.⁴ By early 1924, they had made something of a name for themselves, and made their radio debut on WSB in Atlanta, which had started broadcasting just two years earlier, one of the first radio stations in the South.

Back home in Dacula, the only radio in the area belonged to the sheriff’s office in Lawrenceville, the county seat down the road. According to a family member’s recollection, everyone from miles around showed up to the jailhouse to listen, packing the place and overflowing to fill up the yard outside, where the broadcast was played with speakers.

By the time Okeh was planning their third recording trip down to Atlanta that summer, they had gotten word of the Stanleys and invited them to give it a crack. At that first recording session, they recorded two sides as the Stanley Trio, with family friend William Patterson on second guitar and harmonica, joining Rob and Roba. Both songs were standards: the ballad “Nellie Gray”⁵ and the cornball humor song “Whoa Mule.”

In addition to the traditional verses on a song like “Whoa Mule,” Roba added new ones, often highly inventive. She did this whenever she recorded a familiar classic. She had the folk singer’s gift for reworking lines to give personal touches or local details from Gwinnett County; other times she came up with new material to give a slightly different spin on the story, at times with seemingly modern or personalized details sprinkled in to the old familiar tales. This gave her performance an extra jolt at that particular moment in music, Wolfe argues:

It was a brilliant strategy for an artist on the very cusp between traditional and the new commercial music; in an age before country commercial songwriting had even been defined, what better way to put your stamp on a song than to make the old new?

Ralph Peer, managing the recording session for Okeh Records, was intrigued by Roba’s performance. Peer had previously recorded Carson. Reportedly, Peer didn’t appreciate the sound of his voice and called it “pluperfect awful.” But when he had five hundred copies of Carson’s record pressed, they sold out right away. Peer, who had been in the fledgling record business since he got a job with the Columbia Phonograph Company at age 18 in 1910, could see the writing on the wall: If you went looking for musicians out in the country, there was a massive untapped market.

Peer’s title at Okeh was recording director, but by 1923, he had hit the road, and would become perhaps the most prominent talent scout in the South. It’s not clear that he had much affection for the music he was hunting, but he had a huge impact on early blues and country as a key figure getting rural musicians on record. He brought portable recording equipment with him on his scouting trips and was an early innovator in using field recordings outside of the studio for commercial records. And he realized that he could make more money off of a new copyright, pushing musicians to write new material or find previously unrecorded songs rather than rely on old standards (he controlled the copyrights and this was a scheme to line his own pocket, but the result was a flourishing of new material).

Peer claimed to have originated the terms “race records” and “hillbilly music,” and at the very least was responsible for them becoming more mainstream with Okeh. After moving to Victor Records, he “discovered” the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, both of whom he recorded and managed. The origins of recorded country music, in short, are centered around the people that impressed Peer when he went down South.

So it’s notable that after hearing the two numbers with the trio, Peer asked Roba to do a couple of sides on her own, with Patterson backing. He recorded her performing “Devilish Mary” and “Mister Chicken,” which Wolfe argues are the very first solo recordings by a female country music singer.

As with any such claim, it’s hard to really know; some point to other records. It hardly matters. Whoever you want to deem “the first,” Roba was a teen wonder who was all set to be a prime mover in the early history of country music. The following summer, she would record a masterpiece, apparently mostly original to her—a crackerjack anthem with a shockingly modern feminist spirit. So why have you never heard of her?

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Peer liked what he heard and recorded three more sides with Roba and the trio in December, once again featuring familiar favorites with Roba switching up the lyrics with creative twists or personalized local details. Those first four sides they had recorded came out in early 1925 and according to Roba, they were good sellers locally. Unfortunately no documentation has survived regarding just how many copies sold; Roba said they were paid a lump sum.

But Wolfe argues that there is nevertheless evidence that Peer and Okeh believed they had something special with Roba:

By the middle of 1925 it seems apparent that Roba, even at her young age, was on the threshold of becoming the first woman solo-singing star of the new country music genre. Okeh was using her photo in their ads and catalogues, and her records were widely played.

Her singing style was well suited to the acoustic recording process of the time, Wolfe writes, “and she had a pronounced North Georgia accent that no city singer could fake.” In addition to her natural charisma as a singer, she had access to new material, he adds. The pool of lesser-known regional songs from North Georgia was “rich and largely untapped.” And she had already shown potential as a songwriter capable of making standards her own.

One other hint that her star was rising is that she attracted the attention of Henry Whitter, an established singer with good sales at Okeh, including an early recording of “Wreck of the Old 97.” Whitter went down to Dacula and spent some time playing with the Stanley Trio.

Whitter accompanied Roba when she returned to the studio in Atlanta in July 1925. Perhaps Okeh liked the idea of one of their more established stars pairing with an up-and-coming talent. During this final session, she recorded “Single Life,” our Honky-Tonk Weekly song this week:

Hot damn. I can’t get over how perfect the smoking opening lines are: “Do not care for pretty little things / Always felt like dancing.”

And the chorus:

Single life is a happy life,
Single life is lovely,
I am single and no man’s wife,
And no man shall control me.

I wish I could hear her sing this song without the crackle and distance of old recording techniques. There is something arresting about her delivery, in the forceful nasal style of a mountain singer like Ralph Stanley (no relation). She has a snappy charisma, and there is a kind of highly controlled rowdiness in her performance that would have been immediately recognizable at the square dance but was often hard to capture on record. Let’s say that she had what we would now call an it factor.

And the words that she wrote! It’s hard to know precisely what threads came out of existing traditional songs, but the lyrics are thought to be mostly original, and their cadence and fire suggest a budding songwriter of supreme talent.

The song veers racy at times, with weekend encounters with paramours (“if you give them half a chance, they will stay till Monday”). But the song’s vision of Cupid as a menacing brute is what sticks with me:

Cupid came last Saturday night,
Took him in the parlor,
Every time he’d hug my neck,
He’d say now don’t you holler.

The song’s final stanza is a familiar one borrowed from another song, but it’s a powerful choice, with its image of women using a domestic tool to violently bludgeon their husbands:

Boys keep away from the girls I say,
And give ’em plenty of room,
For when you’re wed they’ll bang you til you’re dead,
With the bald-headed end of a broom

The “no man can control me” message is powerful stuff for 1925, though perhaps it’s wise to be cautious about overstating the political import here looking back from our modern lens. Traditional ballads favored outlandish characters, after all, including wild women. Violence pretty much always sold. I’m sure there must have been a bit of shock value in an unmarried teenager singing such a fiery take on men and marriage (particularly with no comeuppance in the song, no hint of a cautionary tale). But that may well have been the sort of mild shock that just put a little pepper into a square dance, more fun than ferocious.

But still! This is 1925! Even if there wasn’t a feminist revolution brewing in rural Georgia, the song’s forthright and funny skepticism about marriage and the patriarchy is pretty remarkable for early country music. Its vision of female freedom—inclusive of sexual desire and wild partying, under the constraints of male control and violence—has a distinctly modern punch. Boys will be boys; here’s a song about sowing wild oats from the perspective of a girl not content to play the role prescribed for her. She doesn’t care about pretty little things. She always felt like dancing.

The genre that was being born would turn out to be so conservative in its social mores that it’s honestly hard to imagine a song like this coming out twenty years later. The mild rebuke of male misbehavior by Kitty Wells, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels,” was considered revolutionary—that wasn’t until 1952 (Roba seems closer in spirit to Honky-Tonk Weekly favorite Jean Shepard, a hardcore traditionalist who showed a fearless proto-feminist bite in the mid-50s). Even as other rambunctious songs from female stars sold millions of records in the wake of Wells, it didn’t take much for the boys club at the Grand Ole Opry to complain that female performers were taking it too far. Loretta Lynn was still getting pushback in the 60s and 70s for material considered (ludicrously) to be too radical or raunchy or rebellious.

I think we can guess that even, say, fifty years after it was recorded, Roba’s song would have had a fierce edge in the context of the country music industry. And even today, its message doesn’t always fit snugly in mainstream American culture or the stories we tell. If a woman goes to social media and comments that she loves her single life and no man can control her, we can predict the flood of responses that will follow.

More importantly—leave all that to the side, it’s just a dynamite song. I hinted above at the time-travel strangeness of old-time music. There is a way in which these performances are from another world. And yet there is a piercing familiarity to a song like “Single Life,” a recognizable thread of human reckoning.

One last detour into country music history. An unmistakable feature of the early decades was the relative dearth of female stars. Of course we know the exceptions: though there was a daddy figure leading the pack, the women of the Carter Family shined; the release of “I Wanna Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” in 1935 made Patsy Montana a legit star; Minnie Pearl was a different sort of performer but she was a hit at the Opry and on the road dating back to the 1940s; Wells is typically thought of as the first woman to become a full-fledged country music superstar. And there were other pioneers. Still, it is striking how few women broke through as big headliners in country music before Wells; it wasn’t until the 1960s that the floodgates really opened with pantheon legends like Dolly, Loretta, Tammy, and so on.

And here you wonder, if things had gone differently, whether Roba might have broken through.⁶ There’s hints that her mashup approach to traditional musics was developing into songwriting with a fresh voice and perspective. She was a vibrant performer, skilled in old-time folkways and breezily modern, with the authentic flavor that reliably juiced the sales of hillbilly music. She had at least a regional following already at sixteen, and she had backing from Ralph Peer, whose fingerprints are all over the foundations of country music. She was a natural.

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But the recording session that produced “Single Life” was her last. Here’s our twist in the story. The song was released in October 1925. Around that time, she met a young man from Miami named Frank Baldwin and quickly got married.

“It was love at first sight,” she explained later. “I just quit everything and got married.”

She moved to Miami with her husband and ditched her burgeoning music career less than a year after her first recording session. It was too complicated to keep playing with the Stanley trio—she only made it back home to Georgia about once a year. “There was no way to keep recording,” she said.

Or course, Okeh could have sent someone down to Miami to record her. But there were other complications. While you have to assume that she was frequently performing when she and Frank fell for each other, he apparently wasn’t crazy about her continuing to perform once they were hitched.

“My husband didn’t like me to play out in public much,” she said.

She brought her guitar with her to Miami but didn’t play much. After three or four months, she stopped playing at all. She eventually gave it away.

Roba raised three children and was completely forgotten in the music world, save for the hardcore vinyl hunters who found scratchy old 78s but had nothing by way of biographical information.

Early folklorists and historians trying to dig into country music’s beginnings believed that she was dead, based on local rumors. And so that is how it was recorded in the official accounts. She was an obscure curiosity, long since gone.

“Thus she never made it into the history books, the museum exhibits, the record reissues,” Wolfe writes.

Around 1977, Wolfe, along with two other researchers, went looking for information about her. Following a tip from an old fiddler, they found her alive and well in Gainesville, Florida (her husband had passed away decades earlier). When Wolfe spoke to her on the phone, she was shocked that anyone remembered or cared about her old records. She had no copies of them, and likely hadn’t heard them in decades. Wolfe made recordings on cassette and sent them to her.

And so, a decade before she died, she had a chance to share her story, which attracted some media attention. She took a trip to Nashville, where she was honored at the Grand Ole Opry. Now at least she gets an entry in the Encyclopedia of Country Music. There’s enough to write some liner notes, should anyone choose to reissue the scattering of sides that were pressed and released in her brief career, ten in total.⁷ There’s enough for me to write this now, as I listen to a crappy YouTube recording of “Single Life.”

Music history, like life, is filled with funny little contingencies. Who’s to say what would have happened if she had stayed single a little longer and kept singing, or if her husband had been more supportive of the idea. Maybe nothing much. Or maybe all sorts of things. It’s at least possible that she might have been a godmother of country music.

She took a different path. Wolfe writes that when she passed away in 1986, she was “still bemused at her pioneer status…occasionally wondering what might have been if she had followed her music.” I would think so, though I wonder whether that’s Wolfe speaking for himself as a fan as much as her.

I used to work for a small newspaper and I would have to periodically write obituaries. It was a satisfying task but strange. To summarize is to collapse time and complexities. In a way, I find that almost reassuring. The complicated mess of choices, circumstances, and happenings that make up a life—all nubbed down to not too much, bare as a poem.

Here is the summary of Roba Stanley’s life from a memorial to her that appears to have been created by her family:

She was a homemaker and a Baptist. She was a member of the Georgia Country Music Hall of Fame and was introduced at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tenn. as the first woman to record solo country music. She made nine country music recordings in Atlanta.

When she died, she had ten grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.

The Country Music Hall of Fame has a 55-minute interview with her in their oral history archives that I’d love to hear. It is natural to wonder whether she had regrets, but that is only speculation. She fell in love. She started a family. I am tempted to read the irony in her story as tragic, but the truth is I do not know. No one is beholden to song lyrics they wrote as a teenager, even if it happens to be a perfect song.

So this might sound like a sad story, but based on the little I have available, there’s no evidence that she felt that way. It is simpler just to speak for myself—simpler just to say that I am sad that we didn’t get more songs from Roba Stanley.

1. All of Roba Stanley’s quotes and much of the background information about her in this post are from an excellent chapter on her by Charles Wolfe in the essay compilation The Women of Country Music, edited by Wolfe. The piece previously appeared in a different form in the British journal Old Time Music, with research credit given to collaborators Peggy Bulger and Gene Wiggins. Wolfe did multiple telephone interviews with Stanley and Bulger did one in person; for simplicity’s sake, here I am just referencing the quotes to Wolfe in the body of the post.

2. The term was then popularized by Ralph Peer, the recording director at Okeh Records.

3. According to Wolfe, among those who played on the Stanleys’ porch: Gid, Gordon, and Athur Tanner; Fiddlin’ John Carson; Riley Puckett; Earl Johnson; L.D. Snipes; and others.

4. Wolfe asked Roba if it was atypical for a young girl to play the local dances. “Yes, I guess so,” she said. “I know I was the only girl playing—at least I don’t remember seeing any more girls.”

5. “Nellie Gray” in its original form was an anti-slavery song written in 1856, from the perspective of a slave whose lover is sold to another plantation. I haven’t heard the Stanleys’ version, and I’m curious whether the abolitionist message remained in their version. I don’t know anything about what the Stanleys thought about race, but Rob Stanley was buddies with Carson, who was reportedly a regular at Klan rallies.

6. I find myself writing the counterfactual history: What if she stuck with Okeh and had a breakout hit that gave her national acclaim? What happens to country music history if a young woman in those early years got even half as famous as Jimmie Rodgers? And what happens if that young woman was Roba Stanley—who had a preternatural charisma as a teenager just getting started in music, and was developing songwriting instincts in putting her own wild stamp on traditional music? This is just fan fiction, of course—she might have simply remained a regional success. But who knows. History is wobbly; our stories are fixed in place only after all manner of happenstance.

7. Or that’s the number that we know of. It seems a few others were recorded but never released. A memorial to her from her family states that there were nine, but my count is ten based on Wolfe’s research.