‘Don’t Be Disrespectful, Young ‘Un!’: Grandpa Jones and Age Masquerade in Country Music

Abstract

ABSTRACT From the 1930s to 1950s, dozens of country musicians ‘aged-up’ by drawing on wrinkles, wearing gray wigs, and behaving like ‘old-timers’. Taking as its case study the Kentuckian musician and radio entertainer Louis Marshall ‘Grandpa’ Jones, this article unpacks the phenomenon of age masquerade in mid-twentieth-century country music. Although best remembered as a cast member of the early 1970s CBS series Hee Haw, Jones first started his career as ‘Grandpa’ in the 1930s, when he was still in his twenties. This article asks what Grandpa Jones, and the wider age masquerade phenomenon, reveal about the nation’s hopes and fears in the years between the Great Depression and the beginning of the Cold War. In the process, this article argues that Jones and other fake elders operating in early country music draw attention to the diverse theatrical, technological, commercial, and demographic influences on country music’s development; challenge our ideas about the importance of ‘authenticity’ to the genre; and, more broadly, demonstrate how country music history can provide new perspectives on some of the period’s old-age politics and gender, class, and race dynamics.