The Oxford Handbook of Country Music 9780190248178, 0190248173

Citation preview

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

C O U N T RY  M U SIC

The Oxford Handbook of

Country Music Edited by

TRAVIS D. STIMELING

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Data Names: Stimeling, Travis D., editor. Title: The Oxford handbook of country music / edited by Travis D. Stimeling. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2017. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016050479 | ISBN 9780190248178 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Country music—History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML3524 .O98 2017 | DDC 781.64209—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050479 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents

List of Contributors  Introduction: Situating Country Music Studies  Travis D. Stimeling

ix 1

1.  Country Music Studies and Folklore  Erika Brady

13

2.  The “Southernness” of Country Music  Patrick Huber

31

3. The Country Music Association, The Country Music Foundation, and Country Music’s History  Diane Pecknold 4.  Country Music as Cultural Practice  Clifford R. Murphy 5. Geography and Country Music: Constructing “Geo-​Cultural” Identities  Jada Watson

55 85

95

6.  On the Notion of “Old-​Time” in Country Music  Gregory N. Reish

117

7.  Recording Practice in Country Music  Travis D. Stimeling

141

8.  The Singing Voice in Country Music  Stephanie Vander Wel

157

9. This Machine Plays Country Music: Invention, Innovation, and the Pedal Steel Guitar  Tim Sterner Miller

177

vi   Contents

10.  Country Music and the Recording Industry  Charles L. Hughes

205

11.  Country Radio: The Dialectic of Format and Genre  Eric Weisbard

229

12.  Country Music and Television  Tracey E. W. Laird

249

13.  Country Music and Film  Barry Mazor

263

14.  The Sociology of Country Music  Richard Lloyd

283

15.  Country Music and Class  Leigh H. Edwards

307

16.  Race in Country Music Scholarship  Olivia Carter Mather

327

17.  Gendered Stages: Country Music, Authenticity, and the Performance of Gender  Kristine M. McCusker

355

18.  Sexuality in Country Music  Pamela Fox

375

19.  The Sacred in Country Music  Stephen Shearon

395

20.  Goin’ Hillbilly Nuts: Fashion Culture and Visual Style in Country Music  Caroline Gnagy

415

21.  Whither the Two-​Step: Country Dance Rewrites Its Musical Lineage  Jocelyn R. Neal

439

22.  “These Are My People”: The Politics of Country Music  Jason Mellard

461

Contents   vii

23.  Country Music and Fan Culture  Jonathan R. Wynn

479

24.  What’s International About International Country Music? Country Music and National Identity Around the World  Nathan D. Gibson

495

Index 

519

List of Contributors

Erika Brady  spent more than a decade working with ethnographic cylinder recordings at the Library of Congress and was the principal preservation specialist for the Federal Cylinder Project. Educated in folk studies at Harvard/​Radcliffe, University of California, Los Angeles, and Indiana University, she has a longstanding research interest in vernacular music of North America. In 2006, she organized the first academic conference devoted to bluegrass music, held at Western Kentucky University (WKU). She has been a member of the faculty of the Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology at WKU since 1989. Leigh H. Edwards  is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University. She is the author of Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity (Indiana University Press, 2009), The Triumph of Reality TV: The Revolution in American Television (Praeger, 2013), and Dolly Parton and Gender Performance in Popular Music (forthcoming, Indiana University Press). Pamela Fox  is Professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the author of Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-​Class Novel, 1890-​1945; Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music; and the coeditor of Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music (with Barbara Ching). Nathan D. Gibson  is Ethnic American Music Curator at the University of Wisconsin and a performing musician. His monograph, The Starday Story: The House That Country Music Built (University Press of Mississippi, 2011), received the 2012 Belmont Award for Best Book on Country Music. Caroline Gnagy  is an independent scholar based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of Texas Jailhouse Music: A Prison Band History(The History Press, 2016). Other works appear in Country Boys & Redneck Women (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) and The Handbook of Texas Music, 2nd ed. (Texas State Historical Association Press, 2012). Patrick Huber  is Professor of history at Missouri University of Science and Technology and the author or editor of six books, including the award-​winning Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (2008) and The Hank Williams Reader (2014). His most recent book, The A&Rchitects of American Roots Music: The Record Producers Who Created Hillbilly and Race Music, is forthcoming. Charles L. Hughes is the Director of the Memphis Center at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. His acclaimed first book, Country Soul: Making Music and Making

x   List of Contributors Race in the American South, was released by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. Tracey E. W. Laird  is Professor of music at Agnes Scott College. She is the author or editor of four books, including most recently Austin City Limits:  A  History (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Austin City Limits: A Monument to Music (Insight Editions, 2015), the latter coauthored with her spouse, Brandon. Richard Lloyd  is Associate Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Neo-​Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City. Lloyd has published work on southern cities, urban design, globalization, and conservative politics. He is working on a book about Nashville and the urban geography of musical production. Olivia Carter Mather  is a scholar of American popular music specializing in rock, country, and folk. Her work examines stylistic hybridity and identity. She has published on the Eagles, Gram Parsons, and producer Daniel Lanois. She lives in Long Beach, California. Barry Mazor  is a music journalist, critic, and a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of Meeting Jimmie Rodgers (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago Review Press, 2015). He holds an MFA from the New York University Graduate Film Institute. Kristine M. McCusker  holds a PhD in History, Ethnomusicology and Folklore from Indiana University and has written or coedited three books and multiple articles on history, gender, and country music. With the assistance of a grant from the National Institutes of Health, she is currently writing a book on southern death rituals in the early twentieth century. Jason Mellard  is Assistant Director of the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University in San Marcos. He is the author of Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture and coeditor of The Journal of Texas Music History. Tim Sterner Miller is Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin–​Milwaukee (UWM), where he teaches courses on popular, world, and art musics, and directs the UWM Collegium Musicum. His research focuses on instruments as technologies and the role of individual players and player communities within broader social and musical contexts. Clifford R. Murphy  is an ethnomusicologist, folklorist, and the Director of Folk & Traditional Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts. From 2008 to 2015, Murphy directed the Maryland state folklife program—​Maryland Traditions—​at the Maryland State Arts Council. He received a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Brown University in 2008. Raised in New Hampshire, Murphy was a singer, guitarist, and songwriter for

List of Contributors    xi the alternative country band Say ZuZu and the honky tonk band Hog Mawl. He is the author of Yankee Twang:  Country and Western Music in New England (2014), and—​ with Henry Glassie and Douglas Dowling Peach—​the coauthor of Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-​Dixon Line (2015). Jocelyn R. Neal is Professor of music and adjunct professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Legacy in Country Music (Indiana University Press) and Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History (Oxford University Press). Diane Pecknold is an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Louisville. She has written and edited a number of books on country music, including The Selling Sound (2007); Hidden in the Mix (2013); and, with Kristine M.  McCusker, of A Boy Named Sue (2004) and Country Boys and Redneck Women (2016). Gregory N. Reish  is Director of the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University. A scholar and performer of old-​time and bluegrass styles, Reish has released an album with fiddler Matt Brown, and recently coproduced Spring Fed Records’ Home Made Sugar and a Puncheon Floor, a collection of home recordings by John Hartford and Howdy Forrester. Stephen Shearon  is Professor of musicology at Middle Tennessee State University, where he teaches a wide range of music topics. His current research interest is the worldwide gospel music phenomenon, particularly the growth of gospel song production, music publishing, and shape-​notation music education in the American South. Travis D. Stimeling  is Assistant Professor of music history at West Virginia University. He has published two books with Oxford University Press, Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin’s Progressive Country Music Scene (2011) and The Country Music Reader (2014), and served as a Senior Editor for The Grove Dictionary of American Music, Second Edition. Jada Watson  holds a PhD in musicology from Université Laval. Her research focuses on geography and country music, with specific interest in issues of genre, gender, identity, environment and geo-​cultural traditions. She teaches research methods in music at the University of Ottawa, where she is also the Undergraduate Research Coordinator. Eric Weisbard  is Associate Professor of American Studies at University of Alabama, longtime organizer of the Experience Music Project Pop Conference, and author of Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music. Some of his 1990s writing on mainstream country music can be found at www.rocksbackpages.com Stephanie Vander Wel  is Associate Professor of Historical Musicology at the University at Buffalo (State University of New York). Her research interests focus on vocality and the embodied performances of gender, class, and region in country music. Her book,

xii   List of Contributors The Singing Voices of Hillbilly Maidens and Cowboys’ Sweethearts: Country Music and the Gendering of Class, 1930s-​1950s, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. Jonathan R. Wynn is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of Music/​ City:  American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport, and The Tour Guide:  Walking and Talking New York.

I n t rodu ction Situating Country Music Studies Travis D. Stimeling

For country music studies, 1965 was a banner year.1 Bill Malone, a doctoral student in history at the University of Texas at Austin, submitted the first comprehensive study of the genre as his doctoral dissertation, “A History of Commercial Country Music in the United States.”2 The John Edwards Memorial Foundation, a University of California, Los Angeles-​based research center focusing on American vernacular music, published its first Newsletter, later to become the John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly, one of the earliest periodical venues for country music research.3 And, perhaps most significantly, the august Journal of American Folklore, then in its seventy-​eighth year of publication, devoted an entire issue to “hillbilly music,” presenting landmark articles on the cultural history of the hillbilly, the definition of bluegrass, and the challenges facing the emerging field of country music studies.4 In his “Hillbilly Issue” essay, “Hillbilly Music:  Source and Resource,” folklorist Ed Kahn documented the steep uphill climb that aspiring country music scholars faced in the middle of the twentieth century. Comparing “the state of research in hillbilly music with that of jazz,” Kahn noted that in stark contrast to the robust state of mid-​century jazz scholarship, “no comparable bibliographic work exists, [and] it is obvious that our literature is comparable in neither quantity nor quality.” He went on to argue that in his survey of the country music studies literature, “not only is the quantity of written material sparse, but its quality is uneven. This field, perhaps more than any comparable segment of popular culture, is marked by a lack of standards of scholarship and accuracy.”5 Country music’s early marginalization can likely be traced to the prevailing attitudes of then-​contemporary folklore, including especially Richard Dorson’s notion of “fakelore,” which argued that commercially mediated forms of expressive culture were unworthy of serious academic attention.6 Although folklorists and song collectors had been collecting vernacular songs since the late nineteenth century, scholars who wished to engage with commercially recorded and distributed vernacular songs faced a battle to prove the legitimacy of their academic interests.7

2    Oxford Handbook of Country Music The emergence of the field of country music studies is intimately linked with the commercialization of folk music and a concomitant rise in popular interest in the commercially recorded country music of the 1920s and 1930s. Appearing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the earliest studies of country music were the products of the mid-​ twentieth-​century folk revival movement that spread across college and university campuses in the United States and Canada during the 1950s and 1960s. Despite critics such as Dorson, these students actively sought to document the early history of country music in an effort to understand the music that moved them. Starting with the pioneering publications of 1965, the first two decades of country music research focused primarily on the documentation of the genre’s pre–​World War II history. Engaging in a sort of salvage folklore, many of the first generation of country music scholars—​including Archie Green, Kahn, D. K. Wilgus, and Norm Cohen, among others—​conducted oral histories with early country musicians, amassed large collections of recordings and ephemera documenting the circulation of country music, and compiled discographies that laid the groundwork for future research.8 Much early country music scholarship did not appear in formal peer-​reviewed venues, however. Rather, it was published in short essays accompanying albums reissuing early hillbilly recordings and presenting new recordings of old repertories by such revivalist groups as the New Lost City Ramblers.9 In these extended sleeve notes, musicians and scholars used archival research, oral histories, and ethnography to trace the creation and proliferation of specific musical practices and to document the biographies of the first generation of commercial country musicians. The published products of this research bear the traces of academe, including ample footnotes, bibliographies, and discographies. Although largely neglected in this digital age, these early multimedia publications continue to offer valuable insights into the genre’s early history and, as metatexts, also shed important light onto the early history of the field. As a consequence of this work, scholarship on prewar country music has continued to thrive into the present, as evidenced most recently by Patrick Huber’s landmark study of country music in the Piedmont South, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South, and recent reissues of landmark recordings from the Bristol, Johnson City, and Knoxville sessions.10 Alongside the salvage folklore work conducted during the 1960s and 1970s were several significant sociological studies of country music, many of which were published in the Country Music Foundation’s Journal of Country Music.11 Led by Richard A. “Pete” Peterson and R. Serge Denisoff and informed by the rise of popular culture studies in the late 1960s, sociological researchers primarily used quantitative methods to explore the attitudes, behaviors, and consumption practices of country music fans, offering important snapshots of the country audience in the 1970s that continue to provide important insights for contemporary scholars.12 In particular, these studies document one of the ongoing concerns of country music studies today, principally, the “southern” identity of country music. Emerging at the height of the social and cultural revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, numerous studies attempted to explain country music’s seemingly inexplicable popularity in the American Midwest and New England, places that

Introduction: Situating Country Music Studies    3 appeared to be relatively free from the racial tensions of the American South.13 Although scholars have been working to debunk country music’s southern mythos since the publication of the “Hillbilly Issue” in 1965, these sociological studies reveal a great deal about the significant place that country music played in the broader cultural debates of the 1960s and 1970s, debates that continue to hold sway over public and academic discourse around country music to today.14 During the mid-​1980s and 1990s, country music scholarship began to examine the cultural significance of country music historically and in contemporary settings, following the so-​called cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences and coinciding significantly with the national popularity of the “hot country” music of Garth Brooks and Shania Twain in the early 1990s. Beginning with Jimmie N. Rogers’s work on “the country music message” and extending through the writings of Cecelia Tichi and others, these scholars drew heavily on contemporary critical theory to explore the ways in which country music interfaces with broader attitudes toward class, gender, and race.15 Much of this scholarship extends the sociological work conducted on country music culture during the 1970s and 1980s in its attempts to explain the popularity and widespread cultural significance of country music. But whereas much of the sociological research on country music culture approached country music’s widespread popularity as a sort of cultural anomaly, scholarship in the 1990s also attempted to treat what journalist Nicholas Dawidoff has described as “the country of country” on its own terms, most notably in Curtis Ellison’s Country Music: From Hard Times to Heaven and Barbara Ching’s Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture.16 Also noteworthy were the first efforts to document women’s rich contributions to the genre, as exemplified by the 1993 publication of Mary Bufwack and Robert Oermann’s Finding Her Voice.17 Furthermore, the 1990s witnessed the publication of one of the defining documents of our field’s success: edited by the staff of the Country Music Foundation, The Encyclopedia of Country Music brought together dozens of leading scholars and journalists that gathered important information about country artists, styles, and business leaders for the first time.18 In a sense, one might argue that the publication of The Encyclopedia of Country Music marked a critical moment in the history of country music studies, a culmination of the work of the field’s first generation, and a new beginning in which distinctions between country music studies and other popular music studies become increasingly blurred. In fact, in the years following its publication, the field of country music studies entered a period of significant critical reflection during which the prevailing narratives around country music were challenged, and radical new methodologies were introduced to the field. Richard Peterson’s Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity, for example, redefined the terms around which debates of country music authenticity—​and, in fact, all popular music authenticity—​have centered, whereas historian Karl Hagstrom Miller’s Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow has contextualized the early hillbilly industry within the broader framework of the early twentieth-​century recording industry and its racial politics.19 The introduction of musicological and music-​analytic methods to the field of country music studies has also

4    Oxford Handbook of Country Music necessitated a new kind of engagement with country music. As demonstrated in Jocelyn Neal’s pioneering efforts to use music-​theoretical tools to analyze song form and rhythm and meter in country songs have opened the door for new engagements with country music as music, helping to integrate the genre into an already rich field of popular music analysis.20 The fruits of this work are already evident in the work of Stephanie Vander Wel, Jada Watson and Lori Burns, Joti Rockwell, and Nicholas Stoia.21 Finally, the contributors to Diane Pecknold’s remarkable collection Hidden in the Mix:  The African American Presence in Country Music have suggested the need for sustained and simultaneous engagement with the recorded texts of country music (as it appears in a variety of forms) and country music culture, more generally, to understand the genre’s racial politics.22 Although country music studies has come to embrace a wide array of topics and methodologies, this survey of the country music literature suggests that there are several significant lacunae that must be explored over the coming decades. First, while the earliest generation of country music scholars were surprisingly thorough in their efforts to document the lives and works of many early country recording artists and the business practices of the hillbilly industry, this focus on pre-​World War II country music has left a remarkable literature on prewar country to the detriment of more contemporary musical practices. For instance, very little of substance has been written on country music recorded since the 1970s, especially when compared to the wealth of available literature on early country recording artists. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the absence of generic discographies for postwar country music, a stark contrast to the two remarkably thorough publications of Tony Russell and Guthrie Meade, Dick Spottswood, and Douglas Meade.23 Furthermore, while Aaron Fox’s and David Pruett’s recent books stand as remarkable examples of contemporary ethnomusicology’s potential contributions to the field of country music studies, ethnographic studies of country music and country music culture are still woefully rare.24 The inclusion of ethnographic methods in the country music studies toolboxes will continue to offer new insights into the rich variety of ways in which people make, consume, and engage with country music as a genre.25 Finally, with the notable exception of Australia and Canada, very little research has been conducted on global country music, despite the widespread dissemination of the genre through American military, cultural, and economic colonization and the rarely documented syncretic musical practices that have emerged from global engagement with the genre.26 Ethnographic encounters will undoubtedly be necessary in this work, as recent efforts by anthropologist Alexander Sebastian Dent in Brazil and ethnomusicologist Byron Dueck in Alberta have made clear.27 Country music scholars need to consider how they might remedy these lacunae. For example, the kind of salvage work that early country music scholars conducted in the 1960s and 1970s might ensure that the stories of those working in country music as musicians, promoters, recording industry insiders, journalists, and fans since World War II be documented for posterity. The Oral History Collection at the Country Music Foundation has provided an exceptional start toward that work, but many more stories remain undocumented. Concurrent with a focus on the past, it is also essential that

Introduction: Situating Country Music Studies    5 ethnographic engagement with contemporary country music practices be prioritized. To paraphrase ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl’s famous ethnomusicological “credo,” we must be prepared to study country music “from all peoples and nations, classes, sources, periods of history.”28 At the same time, country music must also be understood as a musical practice; that is, we should no longer treat country music simply as a commodity or a reflection of broader cultural and societal trends but as a variety of aesthetic objects crafted with specific aesthetic goals in mind. Country musicians are, first and foremost, musicians, and their work deserves the same kind of critical attention as their counterparts in other musical traditions already receive in the musicological literature. As this survey of trends in the country music literature suggest, scholars have approached country music from remarkably wide disciplinary perspectives. In fact, much like the broader field of popular music studies, country music studies is country music studies is multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. Country music scholars hear country music through the filters of musical aesthetics, cultural history, economics, gender studies, sociology, anthropology, media studies, and musicology, among many others. As a result, the most convincing studies—​many of which are cited dozens of times in this volume—​demonstrate that state of country music studies is drastically stronger than it was five decades ago.29 Hundreds of important articles and books have been written on the subject, and several university presses have dedicated resources to support the publication of thriving book series devoted to this music and its cultural influence. Reissue labels such as Bear Family Records and Dust-​to-​Digital continue to publish critical editions of formative recordings from the genre’s earliest days to the middle of the 1970s. Research archives such as the Country Music Foundation Library, the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, and the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill continue to collect thousands of linear feet of important primary source material each year; and smaller regional archives such as those at Berea College, East Tennessee State University, and Baylor University gather materials related to local and regional country music culture at an astounding pace. Yet despite a half-​century of conscious and persistent effort to build a place for country music studies, Kahn’s observations remain prescient at the dawn of the field’s sixth decade. Although country music studies may be thriving among its own practitioners, the voices of country music scholars are still seldom heard in the broader academic and public discourses around the issues that are important to our work. Country music studies engage with many of the same issues that concern scholars of other forms of popular music in the United States and abroad, including identity formation, the logics of musical subcultures, the effects of mass mediation, and genre. Yet country music—​with its supposed connections to a socially regressive, conservative, rural, white audience and cultural milieu and its own internal rhetoric of musical and lyrical simplicity—​simply does not sit comfortably in the context of the politically and culturally liberal academy. As such, biases against country music—​with the exception of apparently rebellious or politically liberal artists such as Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie—​have led

6    Oxford Handbook of Country Music to a decidedly limited dialogue between country music studies and the field of popular music studies, more generally.30 When compared to the scholarly literature on rock, pop, and jazz, country music scholarship remains marginal. Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A.—​revised little since its original publication—​remains one of the most frequently cited texts on the genre despite the proliferation of exceptional scholarship written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Major English-​language music encyclopedias such as The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd ed. (for which I served as a Senior Editor) devote substantially less space to country music topics than those in other forms of popular music, despite country music’s roughly coterminous history with commercial blues, jazz, and popular music. Undergraduate popular music textbooks such as Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman’s American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 devote significantly more attention to rock than to country music; and only a handful of universities offer courses devoted to the study of country music, whereas courses covering jazz, rock, and hip hop proliferate.31 Moreover, even within specialized disciplinary journals, country music studies remains marginalized from the broader discourses of most country music scholars’ disciplinary homes, despite the valuable contributions that country music studies could be making in those areas.32 Popular writing could also benefit from the nuanced readings of country music and country music culture that country music studies offers, as journalists frequently treat the genre through the dual lens of romanticism and dismissal. Although such contemporary journalists as Jewly Hight, Ann Powers, and Peter Cooper treat country music as a genre that is deserving of close reading and careful consideration, much popular writing on the genre extends a long-​standing narrative that privileges a supposed musical authenticity or scorns the United States’ rural and working-​class whites. For example, writing of Americana singer Chris Stapleton’s triumphs at the 2015 Country Music Association Awards, New York Times critic Jon Caramanica asserted that the industry’s championing of the singer with “a grand, scraped howl capable of resonant grit and tough brooding” was a sign that “country music wants to cleanse itself, to show that it is more than the sum of its hits, its routines, its tics.”33 Embedded in this internationally syndicated writing—​ and other pieces like it—​is a fundamental belief in country music authenticity and a deep-​ seated anxiety that one of the United States’ greatest “roots musics” has been sterilized by its commodification and widespread consumption. These notions have been widely problematized in the scholarly literature on country music, and the results of these studies have not been hidden away behind paywalls in peer-​reviewed journals but are instead widely available in a variety of university press books held by public and university libraries throughout the English-​speaking world.34 Yet, in their efforts to challenge prevailing narratives, country music scholars also run the risk of pushing away those readers who find comfort in such stories and who wish to use the rare exception of an artist like Stapleton to prove their hypothesis that “real country” music is a thing of the past.35 Appearing at the dawn of the sixth decade of country music studies, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music attempts to move country music studies from the periphery of academic and popular discourse by inviting more than two dozen of the field’s leading thinkers to address important methodological and historiographical questions that

Introduction: Situating Country Music Studies    7 country music studies has grappled with over the past half-​century. A survey of chapter titles reveals the field’s broad disciplinary interests, and it is hoped that scholars—​working both in popular music studies and in the respective disciplines represented therein—​will quickly see that the field of country music studies has a long history of engaging with cogent issues. Yet as each author engages with the intellectual histories of their home disciplines and of country music studies, they also provide useful insights into potential directions for future research in country music studies and in the broader academic and popular discourses. Necessarily, the scholars contributing to this volume often engage with the same body of literature, but astute readers will note that each author presents this literature through the filter of their own disciplinary and methodological perspectives. As such, readers are encouraged to note the nuanced engagement with this key scholarship to trace the many varieties of country music scholarship that are currently practiced. Like the field of country music studies as a whole, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music embraces contradiction and interdisciplinary tension, and it has been structured to highlight both the tensions and the points of consensus within the field. The book itself is presented without artificial section subheadings with the hope that readers will wend their way through the essays in a manner befitting their own interests. Moreover, this approach will allow readers to discover the resonances, consonances, and dissonances between the perspectives presented therein, hopefully spurring readers to join the conversation and contribute further to the scholarship on this music. Some of the essays in this volume trace the intellectual histories of particular methods and disciplinary backgrounds, while still others drill down into specific case studies with the goal of providing a model for further analysis. Textual analysis of specific compositions is presented alongside thick descriptions of country music’s sociocultural contexts. And, as is the case in any mass-​mediated form of popular culture, the country music industry looms large, both in individual essays devoted to country music’s production and distribution and in essays exploring other topics. As country music studies enters its second half-​century, this book stands as a testament to just how far the field has come since Kahn’s critical observations and as a stark reminder of just how far the field has to go before its insights are fully integrated into our understanding of popular music and its effects on the people who engage with it. The scholars included in this volume point to the myriad ways that country music—​and popular music, more generally—​shape our experiences; and they challenge us to consider country music as a significant part of life not only in the United States but all around the world.

Notes 1. For an in-​depth overview of the significance of 1965, consult Thomas A. DuBois and James P. Leary, “From the Editors,” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014): 123–​124. 2. Bill Malone, “A History of Commercial Country Music in the United States, 1920–​1964” (doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1965).

8    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 3. John Edwards Memorial Foundation Newsletter 1, no. 1 (October 1965), accessed May 16, 2014, https://​archive.org/​details/​jemfnewsletterse1965john. 4. Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (July–​September 1965). 5. Ed Kahn, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Resource,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (July–​September 1965): 257–​266. 6. Richard M. Dorson, Folklore and Fakelore:  Essays Toward a Discipline of Folk Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). 7. These attitudes were reflected in the comments of panelists at a 2005 International Country Music Conference celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Journal of American Folklore’s “Hillbilly Issue.” For examples of folksong collections that link to the broad repertories of commercial country music, consult, among many others, John A. Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1910); Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917). Several early studies sought to prove the connections between commercial country music and folk antecedents, including Robert Cogswell, “Commercial Hillbilly Lyrics and the Folk Tradition,” Journal of Country Music 3, nos. 3–​4 (Fall & Winter, 1972): 65–​106; Philip Nusbaum, “Some Connections between Anglo-​American Balladry and Country Music,” Journal of Country Music 5, no. 1 (Spring, 1974):  17–​23; and Patricia Averill, “Folk and Popular Elements in Modern Country Music,” Journal of Country Music 5, no. 2 (Summer, 1974): 43–​54. 8. For more on the concept of “salvage folklore,” consult Bruce Jackson, Fieldwork (Urbana-​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 37–​39. The consequences of this work were published regularly in The John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly, and much of the primary documentation from this work is held by the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 9. Bill C. Malone, Music from the True Vine: Mike Seeger’s Life and Musical Journey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 5–​6; Ray Allen, Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival (Urbana-​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 10. Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp:  The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Ted Olson, producer, The Bristol Sessions, 1927-​1928: The Big Bang of Country Music (Bear Family BCD 16094, 2012); Ted Olson, producer, The Johnson City Sessions, 1928–​1929: “Can You Sing Or Play Old-​Time Music?” (Bear Family BCD 16083, 2013); Ted Olson, producer, The Knoxville Sessions, 1929–​1930: Knox County Stomp (Bear Family BCD 16097, 2016). 11. Journal of Country Music began publication in 1971 and continued in print and online versions until 2010. 12. The Popular Culture Association, which was an important venue for much country music research through the 1990s, was formed in 1971. “History and Overview,” Popular Culture Association/​American Culture Association website, accessed May 16, 2014, http://​pcaaca. org/​about/​history-​and-​overview/​. 13. See, for instance, Richard A. Peterson and Paul DiMaggio, “From Region to Class, the Changing Locus of Country Music: A Test of the Massification Hypothesis,” Social Forces 53, no. 3 (March 1975): 497–​506. 14. One needs look no further than the recent debate over Malone’s so-​called “southern thesis” in the Spring 2014 issue of the Journal of American Folklore (Paul L. Tyler, “Hillbilly Music Re-​imagined:  Folk and Country Music in the Midwest,” Journal of American Folklore

Introduction: Situating Country Music Studies    9 127, no. 504 [Spring 2014]:  159–​190; Bill C. Malone, “‘The Southern Thesis’:  Revisited and Reaffirmed,” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 [Spring 2014]: 226–​229; Erika Brady, “ ‘Are You From Dixie?’: Geography and Iconography in Country Music’s Southern Realms of Memory,” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 [Spring 2014]: 230–​232). 15. Jimmie N. Rogers, The Country Music Message:  Revisited (Fayetteville:  University of Arkansas Press, 1989); Cecelia Tichi, High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 16. Curtis W. Ellison, Country Music Culture: From Hard Times to Heaven, Studies in Popular Culture (Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 1995); Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 17. Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, Finding Her Voice:  The Sage of Women in Country Music (New York: Crown, 1993). 18. Paul Kingsbury, ed., The Encyclopedia of Country Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 19. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 20. Jocelyn R. Neal, “Song Structure Determinants: Poetic Narrative, Phrase Structure, and Hypermeter in the Music of Jimmie Rodgers,” doctoral dissertation, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, 2002; Neal, “Narrative Paradigms, Musical Signifiers, and Form as Function in Country Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 29, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 41–​72; Neal, “The Metric Makings of a Country Hit,” in Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-​Tonk Bars, ed. Cecelia Tichi (Durham:  Duke University Press, 1998), 322–​337. 21. Stephanie Vander Wel, “The Lavender Cowboy and ‘The She Buckaroo’:  Gene Autry, Patsy Montana, and Depression-​Era Gender Roles,” The Musical Quarterly 95, nos. 2–​3 (Summer-​Fall 2012): 207–​251; Jada Watson and Lori Burns, “Resisting Exile and Asserting Musical Voice: The Dixie Chicks Are ‘Not Ready to Make Nice,’” Popular Music 29, no. 4 (2010): 325–​350; Lori Burns and Jada Watson, “Subjective Perspectives Through Word, Image and Sound: Temporality, Narrative Agency and Embodiment in the Dixie Chicks’ Video Top of the World,” Music, Sound and the Moving Image 4, no. 1 (2010): 3–​37; Joti Rockwell, “Time on the Crooked Road: Isochrony, Meter, and Disruption in Old-​Time Country and Bluegrass Music,” Ethnomusicology 55, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 55–​76; Nicholas Stoia, “The Common Stock of Schemes in Early Blues and Country Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 35, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 194–​234. 22. Diane Pecknold, ed., Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 23. Tony Russell, Country Music Records:  A  Discography, 1921-​1942 (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2004); Guthrie T. Meade, Jr., with Dick Spottswood and Douglas S. Meade, Country Music Sources:  A  Biblio-​ Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music (Chapel Hill: Southern Folklife Collection, Academic Affairs Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in association with the John Edwards Memorial Forum, 2002). 24. Aaron A. Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-​Class Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); David Pruett, MuzikMafia: From the Local Nashville Scene to the National Mainstream (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010).

10    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 25. Dan Michael Randel, “The Canons in the Musicological Toolbox,” in Disciplining Music:  Musicology and Its Canons, ed. Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 10–​22. 26. For instance, in the past three years, numerous studies have been written on country music in Australia. See, for example, Sarah Baker and Alison Huber, “Locating the Canon in Tamworth: Historical Narratives, Cultural Memory and Australia’s ‘Country Music Capital,’” Popular Music 32, no. 2 (May 2013): 223–​2 40; Melissa Bellanta and Toby Martin, “The Sins of the Son: Country Music and Masculine Sentimentality in 1930s to 1940s Australia,” Australian Feminist Studies 27, no. 74 (December 2012): 355–​372; Daniel Fisher, “Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia,” Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 2 (2009):  280–​312; Åse Ottosson, “The Intercultural Crafting of Real Aboriginal Country and Manhood in Central Australia,” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2012): 179–​196; Graeme Smith, “Singers and Songwriters in Australian Country Music,” Musicology Australia 33, no. 2 (December 2011): 213–​222. 27. Alexander Sebastian Dent, “Cross-​Cultural ‘Countries’:  Covers, Conjuncture, and the Whiff of Nashville in Música Sertaneja (Brazilian Commercial Country Music),” Popular Music and Society 28, no. 2 (May 2005): 207–​227; Alexander Sebastian Dent, “Country Brothers:  Kinship and Chronotope in Brazilian Rural Public Culture,” Anthropological Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2007): 455–​495; Alexander Sebastian Dent, River of Tears: Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Byron Dueck, Musical Intimacies & Indigenous Imaginaries: Aboriginal Music and Dance in Public Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Dueck, “Civil Twilight: Country Music, Alcohol and the Spaces of Manitoban Aboriginal Sociability.” In Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, ed. Georgina Born (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 239–​256. 28. Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-​Nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 9. 29. For a broad overview of the country music literature, consult Travis D. Stimeling, “American Country Music,” Oxford Bibliographies Online, last modified June 29, 2015, doi:10.1093/​OBO/​9780199757824-​0148. 30. Leigh Edwards’s study of Johnny Cash provides a particularly powerful testament to Cash’s symbolic malleability. See Leigh H. Edwards, Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 31. Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Country (and “hillbilly”) music appears in the titles of ­chapters 5, 10, and 12. 32. In my home discipline of musicology, for instance, only one brief colloquy essay has ever appeared on country music in the field’s leading publication, The Journal of the American Musicological Society (Nadine Hubbs, “Country Music, the Queer, and the Redneck,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 3 [2013]:  852–​856). Similar statistics can be found in many of the leading journals in other disciplines as well, including American Quarterly, Journal of American History, and Journal of American Folklore, among others. 33. Jon Caramanica, “At C.M.A. Awards, Triumph for Chris Stapleton and Country Music’s Fringes,” New York Times, November 5, 2015.

Introduction: Situating Country Music Studies    11 34. One wonders, for instance, how this narrative would be constructed were Caramanica to have read Richard Peterson’s oft-​cited study Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 35. Ethnomusicologist Aaron Fox has shown how this notion of “real country” can serve as a powerful tool in identity formation in white working-​class communities that have been radically transformed as a result of globalization and free trade. Consult Aaron A. Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-​Class Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

Chapter 1

C ou ntry M u si c St u di e s and Folkl ore Erika Brady

The Grand Ole Opry is as simple as sunshine. It has a universal appeal because it is built upon good will and with folk music expresses the heart-​ beat of a large percentage of Americans who labor for a living. There is no trick about it and it requires no fancy key to open its front door. The latchstring is always out. —​George D. Hay, “The Solemn Old Judge”1 Gentlemen! Whenever you see a great big overgrown buck sitting at the mouth of some holler … with a big slouch hat on, a blue, celluloid collar, a celluloid artificial, red rose in his coat lapel, a banjo strung across his breast, and a-​pickin’ ‘Sour Wood Mountain,’ fine that man, gentlemen! Fine him! For if he hasn’t done already done something, he’s a-​going’ to! —​Appalachian mountain judge to jury, quoted with approval by folklorist Josiah Combs2

The path of folklorists examining country music has been a zigzag: on one hand dodging sideline menaces from a resistant academia, on the other struggling with personal ambivalence toward a commercial genre that challenges a cherished disciplinary illusion—​the siren song of a musical wellspring, an uncontaminated stream flowing from the ideological pulse of a mythic essentialist Volk. Can a commercial style of music be identified as “folk,” as impresario George D. Hay blithely claimed in his account of the origin of the Grand Ole Opry? Or was this claim a cynical construction calculated to authenticate what was from the start a bastardized and phony marketing pretext? Initially given serious attention in the 1960s by independent, often self-​trained scholars, country music styles such as bluegrass and old-​time string band flourished in campus concert halls but were shunned in the classroom by professors and professionals, who would rather choose to continue investigation of ballad and lyric song surviving in oral

14    Oxford Handbook of Country Music tradition—​an academic tradition dating back almost two centuries. Ed Kahn, a notable independent scholar, remarked tersely in a 1996 encyclopedia entry that “Scholarship in country music developed slowly.”3 Norm Cohen taught what appears to have been the first university course dedicated specifically to country music at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1976; and by the 1990s, courses devoted to country music in popular culture and folk studies programs had become relatively common in US colleges and universities, but they remained controversial. As late as 1993, the journal Southern Folklore featured a point/​counterpoint discussion of the relevance of country music pedagogy, with the opposing side represented by country music scholar Ronnie Pugh, and the supporting side taken by Appalachian poet Jim Wayne Miller.4 Furthermore, even when once established in university folklore degree programs as prestigious as UCLA and Indiana University, the study of country music and related popular genres with traditional roots such as jazz and blues suffered from fluctuating peaks of passionate student interest (often with ambivalence from the old guard) followed by troughs of student indifference—​not merely to country music, but to traditional music in general.5 In a discipline devoted to vernacular creative patterns in community life, the persistence of folklorists’ ambivalence toward one aspect of what ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin calls “everyday musical expression” deserves attention.6 One answer may lie in the complex origin of the study of folklore in the larger nineteenth-​century Romantic Nationalist movement.

Escape from the Artful: Nineteenth-​ Century Collection of Folk Music The initial impetus for Romanticism and its connection with the study of folklore lay in the charismatic teaching of philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–​1803), who valorized the importance of the peasant class, “das Volk,” as the repository of cultural knowledge specific to each nation. Preserved through careful collection, in his view such forms of expression as folktale, epic, and dance among the illiterate could provide the key to national identity and ultimately justify the drive toward national political autonomy that characterized European history in the 1800s. The very illiteracy of the peasant class provided, in Herder’s view, a guarantee of native cultural authenticity, uncorrupted by effete foreign sophistications imposed from faraway imperial courts.7 From the start, Herder argued that the songs of the people—​die Volkslieder—​provided a treasury of such authenticity: Know, then, that the more savage, that is, the more alive and freedom-​loving a people is, the more savage, that is, alive, free, sensuous, lyrically alive its songs must be. … The more distant a people is from artful cultivated thinking, language, and letters, the less will its songs be written for paper—​dead literary verse.8

Country Music Studies and Folklore    15 Two points are worth noting here in relation to the later study of country music. First, Herder and his many followers among European intellectuals who took to the field in search of folk music were in search of song texts. They pursued a verbal record, with little interest in tunes or instrumental performance of folk music, much less than any contextual information concerning performance. Major nineteenth-​century collections undertaken by university scholars in Germany, Ireland, Finland, and elsewhere were published more or less as anonymous poetry—​attribution of a song to a singer was by no means a necessity because the song was attributed to a generalized collective tradition rather than to a single gifted individual. Paradoxically, the creation of a written text created a version of a song that would thenceforth be regarded as authoritative and fixed. Transcription and publication violated the notion of a strict orality. As one Scottish singer lamented to Sir Walter Scott, “There was never ane o’ ma sangs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel’, and ye hae spoilt them a’ thegither. They were made for singing and no for reading, but you hae broken the charm now and they’ll never be sung mair.”9 But this singer was exceptional in her resistance to the written record: a fixed text, whether in print or much later in audio recording, was more frequently embraced than shunned by performers. Conventional transcribing of a song from oral tradition into written form—​the breaking of the charm—​posed a paradox generally unrecognized by nineteenth-​century folksong collectors. A related paradox pertained to the question of the singers’ sources. Herder and his followers were concerned with what they conceived to be a purely oral tradition. Any taint of a written source compromised that “alive, free, sensuous” spirit that embodied a communal, rather than personal, artistic impulse. Nevertheless, as the nineteenth century wore on, collectors found fewer and fewer singers without at least some access to written, even published song texts. Indeed, mercantile broadside production in which sheets of song texts might be purchased from urban and itinerant rural peddlers was strong as early as the sixteenth century; and far from being spurned, such publications were often embraced by the very public the folksong collectors were wooing for their supposed cultural purity. It was a scholarly given that such broadsides were aesthetically inferior to the “lyrically alive” songs of oral tradition—​an assumption that gave rise to a circularity in categorization of the English and Scottish ballad tradition in particular. If a text pleased a scholar for its directness and vigor, it was clearly a ballad of tradition. If it was “marred” by sentimentality, verbosity, or other violations of Victorian or Edwardian literary aesthetic, then it was likely from the detested world of broadside, or in a later period, music hall, parlor sheet music, or vaudeville. Discerning the differences was not always easy. George Lyman Kittredge described his mentor, the Harvard philologist and folklorist Francis James Child (1825–​1896), who compiled the monumental canon The English and Scottish Ballads, as possessed of a complete understanding of the of the “popular” genius, a sympathetic recognition of the traits that characterize oral literature, wherever and in whatever degree they exist. This faculty, which even the folk has not retained, and which collectors living

16    Oxford Handbook of Country Music inn ballad-​singing and tale-​telling times have often failed to acquire, was vouchsafed by nature herself to this sedentary scholar.10

Whether university-​affiliated or not, most folklorists of the early twentieth century in Great Britain and the United States followed Child’s lead in pursuit of the specific sanctified 305 so-​called Child ballads, deploring the influence of the “Grub Street hacks” churning out broadsides for the delectation of those folk unappreciative of their own noble heritage. The influential scholar G. H. (Gordon Hall) Gerould (1877–​1953) even suggested that what he termed “the ballad of tradition” persisted in Scotland, whereas its performance attenuated in the South because of “an earlier decay in regions near London as a result of the infiltration of songs from Grub Street.”11 Although not quite synonymous with broadside ballads, the broader term “vulgar ballad” became strongly associated with such sources and was defined as a street ballad (implying an urban, public performance setting) “… developed in expository fashion with a commonplace incipit and a series of events and transitions given relatively equal emphasis, often containing sentimental and moral comment”12—​in other words, artistically inferior to the ballad of tradition, representing rather the corrupt influence of an increasingly urbanized and industrialized world. By 1922, the basic academic criteria for American folksong in the purest sense was summarized by the formidable Louise Pound: the songs were orally transmitted, existed in variants and lacking in fixed form, persistent through “a fair period of time,” and lacked identifiable authorship or clear provenance.13 Folksong scholarship in the United States during the early years of the twentieth century was saturated with the contrast between the noble and austere rural world of the folksong ballad of tradition, and the literally “vulgar” and toxic world manufactured by urban Grub Street—​later Tin Pan Alley—​songwriting shills. The symbolic contrast held consequences for a whole realm of cultural intervention and activism notable in the southern Appalachian region. Through the agency of educator Olive Dame Campbell, English composer and folksong scholar Cecil Sharp (1859–​1924) collected songs from southern Appalachian singers in the course of an American sojourn from 1914 to 1918. He was attracted to those singers who performed solidly in what he considered the best British-​derived tradition. Influenced by the aesthetic theories of William Morris, he readily characterized their performances as the product of a cultural isolation that preserved the essential qualities of British folk culture, reinforcing the trope in circulation then, and still heard today, that the southern mountaineers are unwitting archivists of an Elizabethan, even Anglo-​Saxon, verbal and musical heritage.14 Anxious cultural observers of the early twentieth century who deplored African and immigrant cultural “contamination” of American life through ragtime, jazz, and other forms of moral subversion found this fanciful construction of southern Appalachia deeply attractive as an isolated enclave, a backwater inhabited by preservers of ancient lore. This myth also informed highly publicized programs of social intervention designed to educate and improve the lot of southern mountaineers while preserving the

Country Music Studies and Folklore    17 aspects of their culture most agreeable to intellectual outsiders and consistent with their nativist agenda. This emphasis on a selective reinforcement of folk culture was especially evident in the so-​called settlement-​school movement of the early twentieth century and the later establishment of events such as the White Top (Virginia) Folk Festival in the 1930s.15 Reinforcement of a national notion of the southern Appalachian region and the South in general as prime territory for folksong investigation persisted despite extensive documentation of ballad and folksong in other regions of the country. Austin E. and Alta Fife in the Intermountain West, Helen Creighton in anglophone Eastern Canada, Helen Hartness Flanders in Vermont, and Louise Pound of Nebraska, among many others, amply demonstrated the vigor of ballad and folksong throughout North America in the first half of the twentieth century.16 Nevertheless, the image of the South as a “realm of memory,” as well as a location genuinely rich in vernacular music with fascinating and sometimes archaic roots, remained firmly entrenched. This unquestioned perception of a special relationship between folk music and the South was to have consequences for the early recording and marketing of commercial country music and remains evident as a powerful stereotype in the music business today.17

Hymnody and Instrumental Music: Further Selectivities The narrow purview of many folklorists of the early twentieth century may also be observed in their studied lack of attention to vernacular music of the churches in the regions they most eagerly explored. Cecil Sharp himself admitted that he had no expertise in the area of hymnody and acknowledged the gap in his collecting, but there may have been other reasons why early folklorists neglected this important area of vernacular music. Rural southern Protestant churches then and now relied on congregational singing as a central form of worship. If possible, all members were expected to lift up their voices, regardless of the quality of their singing—​indeed, in many churches, use of instruments was, and is, forbidden. In many churches, part-​ singing based on shape-​note, “fasola” hymnody was the norm; even in cases where hymnals were scarce, the words were “lined out” by a song leader and the congregation responded by repeating, line by line. Such a tradition by its nature was linked to print sources; even in areas where literacy was limited, the desire to read the Bible and hymnal was intense because only through such sources could the individual soul achieve personal salvation. The more directly scriptural the source, the greater the assurance of doctrinal inerrancy.18 Although some early collectors remarked on the power of such congregational singing, little effort was made to document it because by its nature, it was the commercial product of publishers and writers of the urban world. The very term “fasola folk,” coined

18    Oxford Handbook of Country Music by musicologist George Pullen Jackson, suggests the fixed-​text nature of sacred music in the areas of the American South most intensely explored by early folklorists. Jackson ascribed the attrition of the antebellum Sacred Harp singing tradition to the incursion of radio into the mid-​South;19 but in fact, congregational singing based on four-​part harmony with a repertoire drawn from publishers such as Stamps-​Baxter and Vaughan continues into the early twenty-​first century and still provides the core knowledge of harmony among many country music singers. Hymnody was not the only area neglected by songcatchers and folklorists of the early twentieth century. Apart from the vocal tradition in southern Appalachia, vernacular instrumental styles were flourishing according to contemporary accounts but were largely ignored by collectors—​even those individuals such as Cecil Sharp who as musicologists were especially interested in melody. To apply the useful distinction suggested by Anne and Norm Cohen, the instrumental music of mountains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was “assembly” music and not “domestic” in nature.20 The domestic tradition was associated with family, with long evenings by the fireside, with a safe and admirable set of social continuities. Assembly music, on the other hand, was appropriate for public gatherings and social events such as dances—​often a dangerous and testosterone-​charged social setting in the rural South. The old-​time string band tradition evolving during this period was raucous, hell-​ for-​leather, rich with borrowings from parlor sheet music, vaudeville, blackface minstrel shows, African American instrumentation and musical stylization often learned directly from admired local black musicians. Banjos were notoriously African in origin, and those guitars ordered from Montgomery Ward mail-​order catalogs encouraged conventional harmony and discouraged performance in the supposed archaic modal scales cherished by collectors. As David E. Whisnant suggests, a moral contrast between the domestic vision of the damsel with the dulcimer and the brazen young mountain buck and his banjo21—​complete with tacky celluloid collar and a fake rose in his lapel—​ came to represent the domestic innocence posed by commercial media, first in the form of the phonograph recordings and later by commercial radio broadcasts. In the minds of purists, just as surely as cheap printing and the “vulgar ballad” had threatened the poetic purity of the ballad of tradition, the revolution in technical sound media undermined the world of localized vernacular music as they had chosen to represent it—​in part by recasting the nature of domestic music and in part by vastly extending the reach of assembly music.

The Game Changers: Phonograph and Radio Patented in 1878, Thomas Alva Edison’s cylinder phonograph was the first technical means to record and play back sound events. In light of the vilification of the device as

Country Music Studies and Folklore    19 an agent of cultural degeneration through commercial recordings, it is ironic that one of its first recognized uses was by ethnologists as a means to preserve traditional cultural information on American Indian reservations and in the same rural communities whose older ways it was later seen to threaten. With a few exceptions, North American folksong collectors did not embrace the device as eagerly as scholars of American Indian music and ceremony; but fieldworkers such as John A. Lomax, Helen Hartness Flanders, and Phillips Barry made excellent use of the device in their folksong fieldwork.22 On the other hand, the invention was in itself a fascinating and desirable acquisition for performers. Balis Ritchie, a singer and local gatherer of folksongs in the vicinity of his home in Viper, Kentucky, was father of two young girls whose traditional songs were transcribed by Cecil Sharp in 1917 and also fathered the renowned folksinger Jean Ritchie. In her memoir, Singing Family of the Cumberlands, she related his later account of local cronies’ reaction to commercial recordings such as Whistling Rufus’s “Little Liza Jane” on the phonograph he purchased from Sears, Roebuck in 1905: They were awful skeptical when I would set it up. “Some trickery som’ers,”they’d say to one another. “Now you know ain’t no little box like that can talk. That man’s a pyore fool.” And they’d watch my mouth to see that it wasn’t me a-​throwin’ my voice.23

Within twenty years, of course, the music industry had recognized the potential of regional markets for recordings that reflected styles of music familiar from home and public gatherings and had launched a search for performers who would appeal to so-​ called race, hillbilly, and ethnic buyers. The success of such musicians as Fiddlin’ John Carson, Henry Whitter, Eck Robertson, and Henry Gilliland in the early 1920s alerted music executives to the potential profit to be found especially in the instrumental and song styles rooted in rural white communities. Initially, the sessions for these recordings were rather haphazard opportunistic affairs: Fiddlin’ John Carson’s first releases recorded in Atlanta in 1923 were a speculative venture by Okeh Records out of which no one expected much; and Robertson and Gilliland almost literally walked off the street into Victor Record’s studios, where the recordings they made in 1922 were not widely released until after Carson’s unanticipated success. The role of music executive Ralph Peer deserves particular attention in the examination of country music and folklore. Music historian Barry Mazor has detailed Peer’s remarkable influence on popular roots music in which two principal contributions stand out. Folksong collectors from the time of Herder understood that to find the authentic “folk voice” they must engage in fieldwork, traveling themselves to locations where such traditions could still be found. Peer understood that to capture a market with musical styles with which he himself was not intimately familiar, he would succeed best by setting up recording sessions in locales where both musicians already popular in a region would have easy access, and where new talent, inexperienced but potentially appealing, might be found. Neither folksong collectors nor A&R (“artist and repertory”) men or scouts necessarily understood the music they were capturing

20    Oxford Handbook of Country Music from the standpoint of the performers; but both folklorists and executives recognized certain qualities that fit their quest were best found in situ, or close to it.24 It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Peer represented a kind of fieldworker as understood in the study of folklore. Nonetheless, his pioneering approach broadened the documentation of vernacular music of his period to comprise many aspects of traditional music that folksong collectors had overlooked or actively avoided, including rollicking, bad boy banjo/​fiddle/​guitar ensembles, as well as family performers such as the Carter Family, whose repertoire contains an abundance of sacred songs and who could claim in flyers for their performances that “this program is morally good.” Though their motives may not have been simon-​pure, A&R men such as Peer, Art Satherley, and Frank Walker cast a wide net and established the thematic and musical foundations for country music. Ralph Peer’s intention to enrich his own pockets as well as American’s musical heritage had another consequence of concern in the history of country music. Folksong collectors tended to exaggerate the anonymous origins of the music they collected to support a kind of literal or communal origin. In the context of a community’s shared tradition, this assumption hardly mattered. But when record companies stepped into the picture, the distinctions between ownership, authorship, and performance became a matter of potential profit. Peer shrewdly recognized that in legal ownership of mechanical song copyright through publishing lay, as he put it, “the heart of moneymaking in the record business.”25 Legal ownership also represented a flat contradiction to the heart of the academic definition of folksong as lacking in authorship or provenance. At roughly the same time commercially marketing hillbilly music was taking off in the 1920s, commercial radio was finding its niche. Pittsburgh’s KDKA in 1920 was the first commercial radio station to broadcast regular programming; by the mid-​1920s, the airwaves were alive with unregulated signals from local stations, many of which relied on local performers to appeal to their regional audiences. The “barn-​dance” format for country music on radio relied on the recreation of a beloved community scenario: friends and neighbors gathered informally in a rural setting to dance and perform for one another. The genial host invited radio listeners to join the fun, imagining themselves actually present. In a curious way, country music radio programming extended the old pattern of domestic music on the porch and in the parlor. The intimacy of radio as a medium encouraged the illusion of genuine face-​to-​face community, and promoters such as George D. Hay and John Lair were expert at encouraging this atmosphere of communal exchange. Listeners wrote to performers as though they were family, and emerging stars took pains to maintain a friendly and accessible demeanor in the course of the personal appearances that were most performers’ economic bread and butter. George D. Hay was careful to balance the faintly disreputable names of what he called “hoedown bands” such as the Fruit Jar Drinkers, the Gully Jumpers, and the Possum Hunters with respectable backstories for the performers: “They are down-​to-​earth men. Most of them have large families. … The key note of [the Opry] is simplicity and good will backed up by a tremendous repertory of folk tunes.”26

Country Music Studies and Folklore    21 As Michael Ann Williams points out in Staging Tradition, John Lair brought considerable theatrical experience to his creation of the WLS radio’s Barn Dance. In concocting stage names for his performers that were consistent with the rural atmosphere he wanted to convey, Jeanne [Genevieve Elizabeth] Meunich became “Linda Parker, the Sunbonnet Girl.”27 (Rechristening a performer with a more folk-​sounding sobriquet was nothing new—​folksong collector and would-​be impresario Jean Thomas chose to present her pet find J. W. Day as the more colorful Jilson Setters, “the Blind Fiddler of Lost Hope Holler.” (He was neither completely blind nor from Lost Hope Hollow.) Staged tradition in country music continues today in ever evolving forms. Radio’s longest running broadcast in US history, the Grand Ole Opry, is a live program that intentionally recreates a live-​audience radio setting that has long passed away, complete with hokey musical advertising spots and back-​breaking seating that invokes in a newer facility the memory of stiff wooden pews in the Ryman Auditorium.

Folklorists, “Folk,” and the New Media Although audiences familiar with country music’s origins readily accepted the characterization of the style as folk, folklorists stubbornly did not. This deliberate inattention has provided its own chapter in the historiography of folklore as a discipline. Archie Green, one of the groundbreaking scholars in the area of country music, observed that, whereas jazz and blues attracted early and extensive bibliographical and discographical attention, hillbilly music did not. The earliest review of a country music recording in the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) did not appear until 1948, more than a quarter of a century after the first releases. In the course of those twenty-​five years, no volume of JAF appeared without its complement of ballad and folksong scholarship, much of it still focusing on the Child canon. Even the nascent scholarship on popular culture in the mid-​twentieth century was slow to pick up on the importance of country music: Mass Culture, a 1958 anthology of writings that posed provocative questions concerning the validity of intellectual attention to the arena of commercial production. It contains only one peripheral reference to country.28 Scholars may have willfully ignored the hillbilly-​music elephant in the parlor, but the men and women who were of most interest to folklorists and folksong collectors were the very hosts who invited the critter to come on in, set down, and stay a while. As a result, those fieldworkers and compilers most concerned with documenting a clean wellspring of traditional music were remarkably poorly informed concerning the larger musical world enjoyed by their sources. If you’ve never tasted corn whiskey, you are not going to know whether the clear liquid you are putting away so assiduously is pure branch water or if it has been “enhanced.” In their important 1977 article, “Folk and Hillbilly Music:  Further Thoughts on Their Relations,” Anne and Norm Cohen identify the extent of the academic myopia and examine two particularly troubling consequences. First, ignoring the commercial

22    Oxford Handbook of Country Music recordings left scholars ill equipped to analyze the rapid changes in musical style that characterized Anglo-​American vernacular music of the period. Music could be learned note for note directly from the recordings, played over and over. In effect, the recordings provided a “fixed text” if learners chose to memorize their tunes from them. The very commercial nature of country music recordings encouraged a new set of virtuosic requirements: soon, musicians aspired to play as fast and as slick as their recording-​star heroes. Vocalists were often drawn to the smooth tones of a Vernon Dalhart or a Bradley Kincaid, appealing to the largest (and perhaps least knowledgeable) listening audience. In addition, the Cohens observe that the repertoire of commercial hillbilly recording even at the earliest stage, from 1922–​1924, represent a diverse set of song and tune choices that surely reflected with uncomfortable accuracy the taste of the folksong collector’s cherished “Folk,” both performers and the record-​buying public. Far from reflecting the cultural isolation of the upland South that was implied in many published collections, the Cohens’ numerical breakdown reflects nearly a third of the items of Tin Pan Alley/​parlor-​song/​music-​hall origin, and only about 2% deriving from British tradition before 1800.29 In his magisterial account of the history of Anglo-​ American folksong scholarship, D. K. Wilgus demonstrates that the degree of resistance of folksong scholars to the bulk of music that made up the vernacular repertoire may be found in a quote from scholars Hubert G. Shearin and Josiah H. Combs, the latter from the mountains of eastern Kentucky, concerning songs from music halls and parlors: “They are hardly worth preserving, even by title, save for the fact that in spite of their pseudo-​literary tang they are fellow travelers by oral tradition with the true folk-​songs and song-​ballads.”30 Not all folklorists maintained quite this degree of sanctimonious selectivity—​among others, academic outliers Robert Winslow Gordon and Phillips Barry advanced theories concerning print origin and authorship that diverged from orthodoxy.31 Nevertheless, most institutional study and publication in the area of folklore maintained a dogmatic attitude toward issues of folksong origin and transmission in relation to country music through the first half of the twentieth century. The second half of the twentieth century in folk studies would see a shift from the sorting of traditional sheep from vulgar goats to an appreciation of the relationship between, and value of, all the critters in the corral.

D. K. Wilgus, Country Music, and the Academy A pivotal figure in this shift was folklorist D. K. Wilgus (1918–​1989). As a student of Francis Lee Utley at Ohio State University, Wilgus secured his place in a lineage of literary folksong scholars extending back through George Lyman Kittredge to Francis James Child. His magisterial Anglo-​American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 earned warm praise from the JAF review in which Samuel P. Bayard found that Wilgus fulfilled his

Country Music Studies and Folklore    23 most stringent requirements for the undertaking of this immense and tricky task: “[He} must be competent in the ramifications of theoretic history; well-​read in the folksong collectanea; versed in the music as well as the texts, and possessed of firsthand acquaintance with living traditional songs, the circumstances of folk life, and the hazards of field collecting. … These qualifications combine in the person of Professor D. K. Wilgus.”32 Wilgus was all those things, as his comprehensive and judicious overview of the history of American folksong scholarship demonstrated. But careful readers might have detected a further characteristic that Wilgus brought to the task—​one that might have alarmed conservative scholars. D. K. Wilgus had a passion for hillbilly music. He was an avid collector of 78 rpm recordings of early country musicians and a modestly competent performer. His enthusiasm did not intrude on the integrity of Anglo-​ American Folksong Scholarship but reveals itself particularly in his concern regarding overselectivity of collectors.33 His regard for the tastes and choices of the country-​music listening audience and their effect on singers and performers anticipated some of the emphasis of performance theorists in folk studies in the 1960s and 1970s. Wilgus, however, would emphatically repudiate their de-​emphasis of text as the primary unit of analysis.34 The book was a brilliant assessment of previous scholarship, but more importantly, it kick the door open for a broader, more inclusive perspective on the complexities of vernacular music in the United States. In 1959, the year of the book’s publication, he was appointed Record Reviews Editor for the JAF, a post he held until 1973. His lengthy review essays established the standard for folksong and country music scholarship for a generation of students. In 1962, UCLA lured Wilgus from the English department faculty of Western Kentucky State College (now Western Kentucky University) where even before his arrival Kentucky folksong collection and scholarship had long been supported. With the support of eminent folklorist Wayland D.  Hand, Wilgus joined a general academic trend toward the institutionalization of folklore studies in academia. UCLA had boasted an interdisciplinary teaching program in folk studies in 1954; in 1964, this loose arrangement was consolidated under Wilgus’s direction as the Folklore and Mythology Group, eventually offering an impressive masters of arts in the discipline with particularly strong offerings in the area of vernacular music. Significantly, the purpose-​built suite designed for Folklore and Mythology included a sound laboratory equipped for work with both field and commercial recordings as well as an office for the John Edwards Memorial Foundation collection of discs, tapes, dubs, files, and photos from 1924 to 1929—​at the time, by far the most significant archival resource relating to country music. The Foundation’s origins were improbable. A  young Australian Department of Transport employee with a passion for American music, John Edwards amassed his extraordinary collection through tireless correspondence with American performers, collectors, and enthusiasts—​including Gene Earle, Archie Green, Ed Kahn, Fred Hoeptner, and of course, D. K. Wilgus. When Edwards died in 1960 in a motorcycle accident, it was discovered that, surprisingly, the twenty-​eight-​year-​old left a will. Even more surprisingly, the document stipulated that his precious collection should not be

24    Oxford Handbook of Country Music “given, sold, or made available in any way to anyone outside the USA”—​a country he had never so much as visited. The disposition of the collection was left to Gene Earle—​a man he had never met. Earle organized Hoeptner, Kahn, Green, and Wilgus as a Board of Advisors, creating the John Edwards Memorial Foundation as an educational nonprofit organization. UCLA was the logical repository; the materials arrived to be housed in the new folklore suite in 1964.35 Students provided most of the staffing for the organization and received valuable experience in the operation of archives, reference work, and later publication, with the advent of the seminal John Edwards Memorial Foundation (JEMF) Newsletter (later Quarterly). Under the editorship of Norm Cohen and Ed Kahn, the publication began in 1965. From the beginning, it was intended to provide a kind of scholarly catch-​all for serious reports, queries, articles, bibliographies, discographies, reprints, and correspondence pertaining to American roots (then “folk”) music.36 Country music folklorists such as Paul Wells and Patty Hall all developed professional skills as graduate students at UCLA working for the JEMF and JEMFQ. As a further declaration that country music scholarship had a claim to attention within folk studies, Wilgus figuratively planted his territorial flag with the publication in 1965 of the so-​called “Hillbilly Issue” of the venerable Journal of American Folklore, the flagship publication of folklore as an academic discipline. Wilgus coedited the issue with John Greenway, a folklorist whose dissertation for University of Pennsylvania had been on American protest songs. Even the title of the issue was provocative. Historian Anthony Harkins has outlined the problematic history of the label, which carried (and carries) a certain social opprobrium among those labeled it, and which has therefore been embraced by some in a reversal of connotation similar to that undergone by the terms “cracker,” “nigger,” and “queer.” Wilgus himself was editor, engine, and caboose of the train, penning the introduction as well as the closing Review Article and Note. The contributors would prove to be among the most influential folklorists of their generation, not least for their work on country music in the years following the JAF breakthrough. L. Mayne Smith broke ground on the tricky question of bluegrass style and origins while also contributing to the story as a musician. Smith received his academic training in folklore at Oberlin College, Indiana University, and UCLA; his childhood friend and picking partner, Neil Rosenberg, pursued a similar course of study at Indiana University and represents “the other” pioneering bluegrass scholar. He is often associated with the “Hillbilly Issue” contributors, although he was not among their number. Norm Cohen, affiliated although not trained in the UCLA Folklore Program, offered a model for subsequent scholarly studies of individual performing ensembles in his examination of Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers. Ed Kahn, whose dissertation on the Carter Family attracted early academic attention to that important group, established his command of the disparate sources and resources that would have to be coordinated for effective country music research. Finally, the indefatigable Archie Green, still progressing toward his PhD in Folklore at University of Pennsylvania, offered important comments on the cultural implications of the term “hillbilly” and its application to country music that still resound today.

Country Music Studies and Folklore    25

Country Music and Folklore Studies Since the 1960s Although D. K. Wilgus in the mid-​1960s was a force to be reckoned with, UCLA was by no means the only university developing a professionalization of folk studies as a discipline in itself—​independent of the Departments of English, History, and Anthropology. Faculty of many of these freestanding, degree-​granting programs encouraged folksong research in relation to country and other vernacular styles of music. Indiana University (IU) awarded the first US doctorate in folklore to Warren Roberts in 1953; the formidable Richard Dorson established IU’s department in 1963.37 Although Dorson was not warmly disposed toward the academic study of country music, many students managed to flout his authority to become notable scholars in the area, including Neil Rosenberg, L. Mayne Smith, Judith McCulloh, Simon Bronner, Thomas Adler, Howard Marshall, and Bill Ivey. The University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and University of California at Berkeley have all offered degree programs variously titled and housed that have produced significant folklore scholars working in the area of country music. Unfortunately, the boom in country music scholarship with roots in folk studies received a severe blow with shifting budget support in higher education since the boom of the 1970s. Results have included an unexpected shifting of affiliations and alliances within colleges and universities, often in the context of odd departmental consolidations. (For many years, until the establishment of a separate department in 2006, the strong folk studies degree program at Western Kentucky University coexisted departmentally with modern languages.) An unexpected and not entirely unfruitful consequence of the reduction of academic lines devoted to folk studies has been the employment of folklorists with a background in country music studies in other education-​related areas. The Archive of Folk Culture and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress has a program and collection strongly base in vernacular music and has long been a platform for the employment of folklorists who grasp the importance of country music—​such as Joseph Hickerson, Alan Jabbour (later the first director of the American Folklife Center), Howard Marshall, and others. Archiving and museum work has attracted a number of folklorists committed to the preservation of valuable and often fragile resources.38 Folklorists Charlie Seemann, Jay Orr,39 and Chris Skinker at the Country Music Foundation and Paul Wells and musicologists Dale Cockrell and Greg Reish have done yeoman work for future generations in this regard at the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University. Other country music/​folklore scholars such as Paul McCoy, Clifford Murphy, Larry Morrisey, and Jennifer Joy Jameson have found a place in state or federally based arts and humanities agencies. Outside state and government agencies, the outlook has been rockier. Nonprofit organizations directed toward education, often combined with trade or regional

26    Oxford Handbook of Country Music development, began to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Nashville organization now known as the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum had as its first and second directors folklorists Howard Marshall and Bill Ivey, respectively. Folklorist and musician Thomas Adler was first director of the International Bluegrass Music Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky. It must be said that coordination of the goals of education and documentation have not always been easy in organizations strongly oriented toward trade or tourisms interests. Nevertheless, talented country music scholars such as Thomas Grant Richardson, Brad Hanson, and others have either found or created positions involving research and outreach in nonprofits that benefit from these individuals’ special training. Despite pressure from within and without institutions of higher learning during this difficult period, many folklorists with university appointments continued to place a high priority on country music scholarship, both in their own work and in mentoring younger scholars. In part, this has been possible because of remarkable support from the university press community. It has never been difficult to market colorful trade publications to the general public, but it is something of a phenomenon that responsible and rigorous scholarly work on country music has continue to find a place in the respected catalogs of the University Press of Mississippi, the University of Tennessee Press, the University of North Carolina Press, and perhaps most notably, the University of Illinois Press (UIP). The importance of the latter press in publication of country music scholarship was largely due to the influence of editor Judith McCulloh who earned her PhD in folklore and ethnomusicology at Indiana University with a dissertation on the song “In the Pines.” She joined the editorial staff of UIP in 1968. Among her many accomplishments, her direction of the series Music in American Life over a period of thirty-​five years provided the gold standard for scholarship in the area of American roots music. Many of her writers were not trained in folklore, but her sensibilities as a folklorist guided the works toward a distinctly folkloric perspective overall, characterized by attention to community, context, and performance and audience concerns in addition to musicological analysis. Country music researchers owe McCulloh, and the generation of editors she influenced, a profound debt. Many of the predominant themes of early twenty-​first century folklore scholarship reflect more general intellectual trends of the period. Works such as Michael Ann Williams’s Staging Tradition address the issue of presentation of vernacular music in commercial performance. Kristine McCusker and Diane Pecknold have explored questions of gender and race in their many publications; and the notion of region continues to morph in unexpected ways in a global, digitalized marketplace: in 2014, Ronald Cohen edited an issue of JAF that challenged monumental country music historian Bill Malone’s ongoing thesis concerning the relationship between country music and southern culture, with contributions that represented the importance of hillbilly twang in regions such as New England and the Midwest.40 Exploration of specific recording labels and commercial institutions have given new insight into the interplay between

Country Music Studies and Folklore    27 market concerns, audiences, and performers. A younger generation of country music scholars coming out of folklore programs is infusing new vigor into a discipline that, for a time, seemed to be catching its breath after a robust start in the 1960s and 1970s. Much of the story of country music itself remains to be written, and the story of the story—​the tales from the field, classroom, festival stage, and archive—​are also compelling and culturally revealing.

Conclusion Readers familiar with country music scholarship will undoubtedly note in this brief overview the absence of many important workers in the field. It has been both the blessing and the curse of this area of research that, throughout its brief history, it has attracted individuals from many backgrounds—​ ethnomusicologists, culture-​ study theorists, sociologists, literary scholars, popular culture scholars, record collectors, musicians, and amateur devotees of the music. Any annual meeting of the International Country Music Conference draws presenters from these categories and more, and each makes a contribution to the whole. I make no claim for those trained specifically in folk studies as an exclusive team of experts who, by acquired skill and knowledge, offer a privileged perspective on this complex area of research. I would suggest, however—​and I hope this short chapter bears it out—​that despite self-​imposed and external limitations, by virtue of a scholarly tradition that has attempted to listen to the voices of the unheard, to attend to context and community, and to interpret the arts of everyday life, folklorists have in spirit honored the instruction of Solemn Old Judge to his Opry musicians: “Boys, keep it close to the ground.”

Notes 1. George D. Hay (The Solemn Old Judge), A Story of the Grand Ole Opry (G. D. Hay, 1945), 3. 2. Josiah Combs, Folk-​Songs of the Southern United States, ed. D. K. Wilgus (1925; repr., Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), 99–​101. 3. American Folklore:  An Encyclopedia, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand (New  York:  Garland Publishing 1996), s. v. “Country Music,” by Ed Kahn, 166. 4. Ronnie Pugh, “Country Music’s Academic Credentials: A Closer Look,” Southern Folklore 50, no. 3 (1993): 247–​256; Jim Wayne Miller, “The Ballad in the Street: A Response to Ronald Pugh,” Southern Folklore 50, no. 3 (1993): 257–​267. 5. For a fascinating discussion and interpretation of these cycles by eminent folklorist John Szwed, the reader is directed to “Whatever Happened to Folk Songs?,” Francis Lee Utley Memorial Lecture at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting, October 16, 2015, accessed January 15, 2016, https://​media.dlib.indiana.edu/​media_​objects/​avalon:210420. 6. Mark Slobin, Folk Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2.

28    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 7. A  thorough review of the early influence of Romantic Nationalism on folk studies in general may be found in Roger Abrahams, “Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism in Folkloristics,” Journal of American Folklore 106, no. 419 (1993): 3–​37. 8. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient People,” in The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680–​1860, ed. and trans. Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson (1765; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), 229–​230. 9. James Hogg, The Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott (1834; repr., London: Forgotten Books Facsimile Publications, 2015), 61. 10. George Lyman Kittredge, introduction to The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Francis James Child (1882; facsimile, New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1965), xxx. 11. G. H. (Gordon Hall) Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1932), 243–​244. 12. D. K. Wilgus, Anglo-​ American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1959), 438. 13. Louise Pound, American Ballads and Songs (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), xiii. 14. Wilgus, Anglo-​American Folksong Scholarship, 169–​173. 15. David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native & Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). 16. A useful collection of essays exploring the work of so-​called songcatchers beyond the South is Scott B. Spencer, ed., The Ballad Collectors of North America: How Gathering Folksongs Transformed Academic Thought and American Identity (Lanham, MD:  Scarecrow Press, 2012). 17. Erika Brady, “‘Are You from Dixie?’:  Geography and Iconography in Country Music’s Southern Realms of Memory,” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (2014): 230–​232. 18. Dickson D. Bruce, And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-​Folk Camp-​Meeting Religion, 1800–​ 1845 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981). 19. George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands: The Story of the Fasola Folk, Their Songs, Singings, and “Buckwheat Notes” (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1933). 20. Anne Cohen and Norm Cohen, “Folk and Hillbilly Music: Further Thoughts on Their Relations,” in Exploring Roots Music:  Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly, ed. Nolan Porterfield (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 162. 21. Whisnant, All That Is Native, 93. 22. Erika Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 52–​88. 23. Jean Ritchie, Singing Family of the Cumberlands (New York: Oak Publications, 1963) 73–​75. 24. Barry Mazor, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015). 25. Ibid. 74–​75. 26. Hay, Grand Old Opry, 7. 27. Michael Ann Williams, Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sara Gertrude Knott (Urbana–​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 1–​15. 28. Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (1965): 223, n. 8. 29. Anne Cohen and Norm Cohen, “Folk and Hillbilly Music,” 163–​165. 30. Wilgus, Anglo-​American Folksong Scholarship, 152.

Country Music Studies and Folklore    29 31. See Ibid. 73; Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (Urbana–​ Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 2000), 198–​202; and Debora Kodish, Good Friends and Bad Enemies: Robert Winslow Gordon and the Study of American Folksong (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 210. 32. Samuel P. Bayard, “Review: Anglo-​American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (Wilgus),” Journal of American Folklore 73, no. 290 (1960): 336. 33. Wilgus, Anglo-​American Folksong Scholarship, 167–​173. 34. Wilgus, Anglo-​American Folksong Scholarship, 232–​236, 258–​259, 283–​284; D. K. Wilgus, “The Text Is the Thing,” Journal of American Folklore 86, no. 341 (1973): 241–​252. 35. Wayland D. Hand, “Folklore, Mythology, Folk Music, and Ethnomusicology,” Western Folklore 23, no. 1 (1964): 35–​37. 36. Nolan Porterfield, “Introduction” in Exploring Roots Music:  Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly, ed. Nolan Porterfield (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), ix–​xxviii. 37. “The Hillbilly Issue,” ed. D. K. Wilgus and John Greenway, Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (1965). 38. Ronald L. Baker, “The Folklorist in the Academy” in One Hundred Years of American Folklore Studies:  A  Conceptual History, ed. William M. Clements (Washington, DC: American Folklore Society, 1988), 67. 39. Jay Orr, “The Folklorist as Archivist,” in Time and Temperature: A Centennial Publication of the American Folklore Society, ed. Charles Camp (Washington, DC: American Folklore Society, 1989), 19–​20. 40. Ronald Cohen, Special Editor, Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (2014); and notably, Bill C. Malone, “Don’t Get Above your Raisin’ ”:  Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

Chapter 2

T he “Sou the rnne s s ” of C ountry Mu si c Patrick Huber *

That hillbilly music is a phenomenon solely of the South in general and of the Southern Appalachians in particular is a myth in the best sense of the word. The myth has had its factual aspects—​that the music was first recorded in the South, that the musical style was originally Southern. But … [e]‌arly hillbilly performers came not only from the lowland and upland South, but from the Great Plains and the Midwest—​and eventually New England, Nova Scotia, and Alberta. That the first important hillbilly radio show originated in Chicago cannot be explained solely by the presence of Southern migrants. Its manifestation was of the South; its essence was of rural America. Southern hillbilly music seems but a specialized and dominant form of a widespread music. … —​D. K. Wilgus, “An Introduction to the Study of Hillbilly Music” (1965)

Guest editor D. K. Wilgus penned these often-​quoted words in his introduction to the 1965 “Hillbilly Issue” of the Journal of American Folklore. Arguably, that landmark issue launched country music studies as a scholarly enterprise, and from its beginning, as Wilgus’s statement makes clear, scholars have grappled with the genre’s regional origins and identity. Of course, since the mid-​1920s, record companies and, to a lesser degree, radio barn dance programs, had portrayed hillbilly music, as it was then called, as an expression of the rural American South, particularly a Mountain South. Years later, in formulating their interpretations of the music, many of the first generation of country music scholars embraced this nostalgic idea. But Wilgus cautioned his colleagues to resist the alluring myth of country music’s southernness, and instead argued for approaching the genre as a widely dispersed rural folk music that flourished throughout the United States and even parts of Canada.1 Despite his pronouncement, however,

32    Oxford Handbook of Country Music scholars have, over the decades, insisted that this genre is essentially a commercialized form of the traditional white folk music of the rural American South, and that romantic convention now pervades the historiography. Today, the premise that country music is, and always has been, distinctly southern stands as one of the cornerstones of country music studies. Since the inception of country music studies, its narratives and historiography have been profoundly shaped by the idea of the American South. Specifically, country music studies relies on the scholarly convention of “southern exceptionalism”: the belief that the American South developed outside the main currents of American history, and therefore its past and its culture are separate and distinct from those of the national experience.2 For more than a half-​century now, southern exceptionalism has animated southern historiography and has provided many scholars with a conceptual framework for explaining what they perceive as the region’s peculiar history and culture. In recent years, however, this concept has drawn mounting criticism. As editors Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino argued in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (2010), “the notion of the exceptional South has served as a myth, one that has persistently distorted our understanding of American history.”3 Nevertheless, while under attack in other academic quarters, southern exceptionalism continues to flourish within country music studies in the form of what Roderick J. Roberts, writing in 1978, first identified as the “southern thesis”—​that is, the idea that this genre of music developed chiefly out of the traditional white folk music of the rural American South and that it is therefore intrinsically southern.4 Unfortunately, this interpretive concept has a limited, even closed off, examination of certain subjects within the scholarship, resulting in a parochial understanding of country music’s commercial origins and development. Despite its widespread currency within both scholarly and popular discourse, the southern thesis remains problematic, and, over the years, it has sparked, and continues to spark, heated debate. In this chapter, I  examine the longstanding concept of the southern thesis and its influential role in shaping country music scholarship. To do so, I  survey some of the major trends that have emerged in the field over the past five decades regarding the perceived southernness of the music. Certainly, the nationalization and, indeed, globalization of country music since World War II have raised important questions about the regional origins and identity of the music. This chapter, however, focuses chiefly on prewar recorded country music, because it was during the formative period between 1922 and 1942 that this genre of commercial music first came to be defined as southern. Moreover, although radio broadcasts and stage shows contributed to country music’s popularization, it was primarily the US recording industry that transformed this music into a discrete genre of American commercial music and, in the process, regionalized it.5 The chapter then goes on to examine some significant topical and interpretative lacunae in the existing scholarship, before concluding with a consideration of some areas that may yield productive research in the future.

“Southernness” of Country Music    33

The “Southern Thesis” Since at least the late 1950s, folklorists and other scholars have associated country music with the American South.6 It was historian Bill C. Malone, however, who, in his now-​ classic study, Country Music, U.S.A.: A Fifty-​Year History (1968), first articulated, and remains most closely identified with, the southern thesis. “Modern American country music,” Malone wrote in the first line of his opening chapter, “emerged out of the varied social and musical currents of the South.”7 Oddly, though, he failed to define this wellspring culture region explicitly, in that first as well as in subsequent editions of Country Music, U.S.A.8 But, not unlike the first generation of country blues scholars who preceded him, Malone constructed a grand theory for the historical origins and development of an entire genre of American popular music based on the concept of a distinctive southern rural folk culture, an idea that borrowed heavily from decades of regionalist sociological and, especially, folklore scholarship.9 “Commercial country music developed out of the folk culture of the rural South,” Malone asserted, and then went on to argue that “[t]‌he music developed lineally out of the rural styles of the past, and the bulk of its performers today, in point of origin, are southerners who came from farms or small towns or who are only a generation away from a farm background.”10 Malone also drew, to a lesser extent, on the scholarship of southern history, and in formulating his southern thesis, he identified the specific historical conditions in the American South that gave rise to prewar recorded country music, including a population composed predominantly of white, Anglo-​Celtic Protestants—​“an agricultural economy” based on African American slavery, a cultural conservatism and commitment to the preservation of tradition, and a “rural way of life.”11 As a result of these combined historical influences, Malone envisioned the American South to be an exceptional place, a land that stood outside of, or at least deviated sharply from, the nation’s mainstream—​though, as he conceded, its folk music was deeply influenced by music from outside the region. Anglo-​Celtic musical traditions that had once been widespread throughout colonial British North America “endured in the South long after they had ceased to be important elsewhere.” Moreover, “only in the South did they contribute to the creation of a lasting regional music.”12 Later, in Southern Music/​American Music (1979), Malone extended his southern thesis to argue that much of American popular music, including jazz and blues, also emerged directly from southern rural folk music.13 From Malone’s southern thesis, several important arguments flowed. Not only did country music represent a commercialized extension of rural southern folk music, but much of the music’s identity and historical development could be explained by its southernness. First, Malone argued that, prior to World War II, the audience for country music consisted almost exclusively of rural and small-​town Southerners and, to a lesser degree, Midwesterners.14 Second, he attributed the eventual diffusion of the music across the United States and much of the globe to a southern diaspora. Country music “became a national phenomenon” during World War II, he argued, chiefly as a

34    Oxford Handbook of Country Music result of the large-​scale migration of Southerners to military bases and defense plants in Midwestern and West Coast cities. In the following decades, during the Cold War, southern servicemen stationed at military bases overseas helped further spread the popularity of the music to Germany, Japan, and other nations around the world.15 Malone’s southern migration theory proved to be an appealing and influential model, and many subsequent studies have adopted its basic premise to account for the national spread of country music, especially during the “Okie migration” of the Great Depression, including James N.  Gregory’s The Southern Diaspora:  How the Great Migrations of White and Black Southerners Transformed America (2005), Gerald W. Haslam’s Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California (1999), and Peter La Chapelle’s Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California (2007).16 With the publication of Country Music, U.S.A., the southern thesis soon gained widespread currency within the field of country music studies and beyond. Its acceptance resulted from the book’s scholarly authority and remarkable comprehensiveness, combined with several other factors, including a dearth of competing conceptual frameworks. But as an “origins myth,” the southern thesis also provided an attractive explanation for the birth and development of country music. Informed by an impressive array of historical and folkloristic methodologies, it confirmed what many scholars, journalists, and music fans already believed to be true—​that country music was, and is, a product principally of the rural American South. Much of the southern thesis, after all, mirrored the fabricated but appealing regionalized history and imagery of the music propagated by the record companies and radio barn dance programs of the 1920s and 1930s. By and large, succeeding scholars have followed Malone’s interpretive lead, producing monographs that focus on country music in particular southern (or quasi-​ southern) regions, states, and, in some cases, cities, while also connecting the music intrinsically to rural southern folk culture. Among the more noteworthy of these works are Charles K. Wolfe’s Tennessee Strings: The Story of Country Music in Tennessee (1977) and his Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky (1982); Ivan M. Tribe’s Mountaineer Jamboree: Country Music in West Virginia (1984); Wayne W. Daniel’s Pickin’ on Peachtree: A History of Country Music in Atlanta, Georgia (1990); and Jean A. Boyd’s The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (1998).17 To be sure, this group of local and regional studies undermined, to a degree, Malone’s premise of a cohesive American South and its pan-​southern folk culture by highlighting the social and cultural variations that existed in specific southern locations. In the end, however, most of these studies adhered to the prevailing scholarly interpretation of country music as an inherently southern music derived primarily from rural folk culture. Other scholars from a variety of academic fields, including sociology and cultural geography, have reaffirmed the southern thesis. Sociologists Richard A. Peterson and Russell Davis Jr., for example, provided quantitative support for the theory in their frequently cited 1975 Journal of Country Music article, “The Fertile Crescent of Country Music.” Based on their study of the birthplaces of 416 “country music notables,” Peterson and Davis concluded that “the South has been, and still is, the cradle of country music,” with nearly 80% of the artists surveyed hailing from what the authors famously described

“Southernness” of Country Music    35 as “the fertile crescent of country music,” a region “beginning with West Virginia in the northeast continuing south and west encompassing most of the Southeast, as well as including Texas and Oklahoma.”18 Moreover, the authors also endorsed Malone’s assertion of the rural roots of the music, citing data that revealed that “country music has been and continues to be most often produced by performers born in rural areas and small towns.”19 While Malone, along with Peterson and Davis, focused on the regional origins of country music performers or musical styles, in the mid-​1970s, other scholars began to examine different aspects that also ostensibly demonstrated the music’s southernness. Some, for example, mapped the regional concentration of country music radio stations and audiences, whereas others identified “southern” themes and references in song lyrics.20 Meanwhile, Malone has continued to refine his southern thesis in three revised editions of Country Music, U.S.A. (1985, 2002, and 2010) and in other studies, articulating it with greater nuance and sophistication but always maintaining the central validity of his premise.21 For example, in his contribution “The South and Country Music” to The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music (1998), Malone admitted that, while “[i]‌t may seem foolhardy to attribute a southern identity to country music when we note the music’s strength everywhere in the United States and throughout the world,” the music nonetheless “has always had a special relationship with the South.”22 But in reaffirming the intellectual soundness of the southern thesis, Malone and other scholars have been forced to perform a delicate balancing act, arguing for the essential southernness of country music while simultaneously acknowledging all the ways in which this music has been, at least since the late 1960s, national and even international in scope and content.23 Malone and other southern thesis adherents now acknowledge that country music embodies a certain ambiguous geographical identity, and the relationship of this music to region and nation remains in constant tension, sometimes more “southern” than American, other times more American than “southern,” depending on the historical period under discussion—​all of which has resulted in a sort of intellectual confusion that undercuts the authority of the southern thesis as a coherent interpretive model. Indeed, as Malone conceded in 1979 in Southern Music/​American Music, “Southern styles have become so enmeshed in American popular culture that it is now impossible to determine where their southernness ends and their Americanism begins.”24

Critiques of the Southern Thesis Today, most standard histories of country music still echo Malone’s southern thesis, but over the decades a handful of academic and popular writers have strongly criticized this interpretive concept. Beginning in the late 1960s, as country music underwent another surge of national popularity, some sociologists and journalists challenged its enduring southernness. Without denying that country music may have once been a southern

36    Oxford Handbook of Country Music music that reflected the perspective and values of white Southerners, these writers tacitly embraced the massification thesis of Theodor Adorno and other “Frankfurt school” theorists, arguing that, by the late 1960s, the homogenizing effects of mass culture had so eroded the diversity of regional cultures in the United States that the music and its audience no longer bore much of an intrinsic relationship to the American South.25 Writing in 1975, for example, Richard A. Peterson and Russell J. Davis contended that, although “its fans come from all walks of life,” country music’s core audience consisted of “middle-​aged, white, working-​class people irrespective of whether they live in small towns, rural areas, or large cities. Moreover, most of these people have never lived in the crescent-​shaped homeland of country music.”26 In explaining contemporary country music’s growing national appeal, Peterson and Davis, along with several other critics of the southern thesis, implicitly advanced what might be described as a competing “Americanization of Dixie” thesis. This argument asserted that, as a result of the gathering momentum of postwar regional transformations and the increasing encroachment of powerful technologies and mass culture, the American South was converging with the rest of the nation socially, culturally, and economically. Significantly, this argument represented the inverse of the “southernization of America” thesis to which Malone and his allies implicitly subscribed.27 Such arguments, it is also worth noting, reflected broader debates in southern historiography at the time when the postwar rise of the Sun Belt and the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation prompted historians to argue whether, as John B. Boles framed the question, the American South was “persisting as a distinct region or vanishing into a great homogenous American culture.”28 Scholars and journalists who championed the concept of homogenization steadily chipped away at the southern thesis during the 1970s and even, as we have seen, forced advocates of the southernness of country music to modify some of their claims as it applied to the postwar history of the music. The most influential and forceful critics of the southern thesis, however, consisted of what I call the “regional revisionists,” a group of primarily folklorists that includes Simon J. Bronner, Roderick J. Roberts, Neil V. Rosenberg, George H. Lewis, Peter Narváez, and, more recently, Paul L. Tyler and Clifford R. Murphy.29 Since the mid-​1970s, they have attempted to challenge Malone’s southern thesis, though sometimes only implicitly, by documenting various regional country music traditions that thrived outside the American South before World War II. None of these critics denied the preeminent role of that region in the origins and development of commercial country music. Rather, they took exception to Malone’s argument of a singular country music tradition developing from an exceptional folk culture that existed only in the American South. Writing in his 1978 Journal of Country Music article titled “An Introduction to the Study of Northern Country Music,” Roderick J. Roberts disputed “the Malone premise that in the romantic, mystical cauldron of the South, the imported Anglo-​Celtic musical tradition boiled and bubbled, catalyzing in some unique fashion, while throughout the rest of the nation the bemused immigrants blithely forgot their music.”30 If a rural folk culture was prevalent throughout the American South, as Malone asserted, it was never confined solely to that region, these scholars countered, and, in fact, similar grassroots musical traditions flourished

“Southernness” of Country Music    37 throughout the United States and much of Canada, including in New York State, New England, the American Midwest, and even in British Columbia and the Canadian Maritimes. For Roberts, commercial country music “represented one regional development of a deeper underlying Anglo-​Celtic tradition that reacted to differing influences in different areas of the continent.”31 Although the scholarly debate about country music’s southernness raged most fiercely between the mid-​1970s and the late 1980s, this issue remains one of the primary ongoing concerns of country music studies and recently has been taken up by a new generation of multidisciplinary scholars. In 2014, in one example of how this issue continues to engage scholars, the Journal of American Folklore published a “Country Music” special issue that featured four articles devoted to a reconsideration of the southernness of country music—​with Bill C. Malone, among other respondents, offering commentary.32 That same year, Clifford R. Murphy, one of that issue’s contributors, published an extended rejoinder to the southern thesis in his book, Yankee Twang: Country and Western Music in New England (2014). Following a long parade of regional revisionists, Murphy argued that “New England—​indeed, much of the North American continent—​ has a long, rich history and tradition of country and western music that dates back as far as that of its famous southern counterpart.” However, that New England musical tradition, he lamented, “has been buried under a mountain of corporate propaganda that wants you to believe that country music is an exclusively southern cultural export.”33 In challenging the southern thesis, then, Murphy and other regional revisionists advanced what might be termed an “American thesis” or, in some cases, a “North American thesis” for the origins and historical development of commercial country music. Of all the regional revisionist studies published since the mid-​1970s, undoubtedly the most influential have been those of Simon J. Bronner, who in his 1987 book, Old-​ Time Music Makers of New York State, and a series of preceding articles, offered the most direct and compelling challenge to Malone’s southern thesis. Without denying “the large shadow cast by the South over country music,” Bronner insisted that the history of country music was “a more complicated story than the outline that has been previously drawn in works such as Malone’s of a national musical foliage growing from a single southern root.”34 Bronner also criticized what he called Malone’s “migration thesis,” which, as we have seen, attributed the growing national popularity of country music during World War II to a southern diaspora, while ignoring similar grassroots musical traditions in other regions that could also help account for the nationalization of country music.35 In the end, Bronner concluded “that the story of old-​time music is not a simple plot of a nationalization of southern music, as Malone has called its development into country music, but rather it is a saga of complex regionalization, and later commercialization, out of the folkways of a nationwide regional experience.”36 Collectively, the regional revisionists attempted to reorient the scholarship of country music beyond the American South, and their examinations of how local musical and cultural practices shaped the development of regional music traditions have served to complicate prevailing understandings of country music in both its vernacular and its commercial forms. But these scholars nevertheless remained trapped within Malone’s

38    Oxford Handbook of Country Music conceptual framework. In making their cases for a more complex, multiregional history of country music, they adopted both Malone’s definition of the music as a rural, folk-​ derived music and his theoretical paradigm for its historical development, and then simply transposed them onto other states or regions. Writing in Old-​Time Music Makers of New York State, for example, Bronner agreed with Malone about the “historical conditions that helped to perpetuate a rurally based music that later developed into country music”; but he disputed Malone’s claims “that these conditions and the old-​time music associated with them are unique to the South.”37 As communications studies scholar Brian Rusted has noted of Malone’s critics, “Rather than saying that the problem is in how he conceives of place, their challenges reframe his southern thesis as a sin of omission. … For all intents and purposes, the spatial accounts of country music by authors following and even critical of Malone’s thesis are the same: only the region and the names of the performers have changed.”38 In the end, then, much of this revisionist scholarship is constrained by the same conceptual frameworks of region and folk culture found in the very argument it sought to overturn. So far, despite this still-​growing body of literature, the fundamental outlines of the southern thesis remain largely undisturbed. Whether it be the American South, the Midwest, New  York State, the Canadian Maritimes, or elsewhere, geography remains central to country music studies, and much of its scholarship, including studies of both historical and contemporary traditions, reflects a local or regional approach (See Jada Watson’s c­ hapter 5 on cultural geography in this volume).39 Even “country music” and especially its former marketing label, “country and western music,” conveys a sense of place. In his provocative chapter in Challenging Frontiers: The Canadian West (2004), however, Brian Rusted questioned the fundamental usefulness of geographical place as an analytical tool for understanding the history of this music because of what he described as “the ambivalent relation between the spatialized performance of traditional country music and its recording and subsequent deterritorialized diffusion.”40 Instead, Rusted advanced the concept (borrowed from cultural anthropologist George Marcus) that “culture is increasingly deterritorialized.” As Rusted, quoting from a 1994 article by Marcus, explained, “many cultural phenomena and processes can no longer be contained by the conventions that fix place as the most distinctive dimension of culture. Merely historicizing local culture … or describing the depth and richness of tradition fails to capture the side of culture that travels, its production in multiple, parallel, and simultaneous worlds of variant connection.”41 In introducing this concept of “deterritorialized” culture to country music studies, Rusted subverted the fundamental premise of Malone’s southern thesis and, significantly, pointed the way toward a more nuanced and satisfying interpretative model for understanding the origins and development of commercial country music. As Rusted indicated, the regional focus of Malone’s southern thesis remains riddled with problematic assumptions. Not only does this concept tend to ignore or downplay the ways in which highly mobile, mass-​mediated cultural elements traverse space and time to become embedded in multiple local cultures, but it also obscures the resulting connections of those cultures across regional and even national borders. To be sure,

“Southernness” of Country Music    39 Malone attempted to present rural southern folk culture historically as neither static nor isolated.42 He recognized, for example, that country music “has absorbed styles, songs, instruments, and influences from a multitude of nonwhite and noncountry sources.”43 In particular, he stressed the myriad northern, urban influences on southern folk music. Chief among these were nineteenth-​century songs derived from the minstrel stage and popular songwriters, and Malone later elaborated on the profound influence that this body of songs exerted on country music in a long chapter in Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (1993).44 Nevertheless, despite countless examples of adaptations and borrowings of such songs and even in the face of the disruptive forces of technology and commercialization, Malone insisted that rural southern folk music somehow remained distinctly “southern.”45 But if, as he conceded in the first revised edition of Country Music, U.S.A., “much of this music came from nonsouthern sources, a very large percentage, in fact, from the North,” then to what degree can we still consider country music, even its prewar traditions, to be intrinsically “southern”?46 Judging from the first decade of commercial recordings, it appears that hillbilly music emerged from the intermingling of local vernacular traditions and an assortment of mass-​mediated national and global musics, as Brian Rusted and Karl Hagstrom Miller, among others, have demonstrated.47 Certainly, by the 1920s, as various kinds of commercial music—​via sheet music, traveling shows, phonograph records, radio broadcasts, and, eventually, talking motion pictures—​circulated throughout the American South and were adapted and reworked within the musical cultures of local communities, they eroded the distinctiveness of Malone’s rural folk culture even as they reshaped it. How else can we account for small-​town Southerners such as Frank Hutchison, Jimmie Tarlton, and Howard Dixon who, on prewar hillbilly records, demonstrated a mastery of the Hawaiian steel guitar, an instrumental style created some five thousand miles away on a set of small Pacific Islands? Although these artists’ exposure to the Hawaiian guitar often came to them second-​hand, as it were, their fascination with and eventual adoption of this instrument and its attendant style reveals, as musicologist Charles Hiroshi Garrett has noted, “the international, ethnically diverse, and multicultural roots of American music”—​in this case, specifically hillbilly music.48 But in presenting the American South as an exceptional region rooted in a persistent and unique, rural folk culture, Malone essentially sealed it off from outside musical influences, although this was not his intention. As a result, his southern thesis obscures much of the cultural interplay and exchange that connected the American South and recorded hillbilly music to a variety of different regions and musical traditions.49 Indeed, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the southern thesis actually ends up depicting southern folk culture as relatively static, isolated, and largely unaffected by the mainstream mass culture that had engulfed much of the nation by the 1920s. It is therefore problematic to situate the origins of an entire commercial genre in an imagined, culturally constructed geographical region and its purportedly distinctive folk culture that, by the advent of the hillbilly recording industry, were profoundly implicated in a broader, mass-​mediated world of diverse commercial musics.

40    Oxford Handbook of Country Music

The “Southern Thesis” and Lacunae in Country Music Scholarship For nearly five decades now, the southern thesis has structured much of country music scholarship, and as a result of its interpretive dominance, it has inadvertently produced several significant lacunae within the scholarly literature that should be explored. First, and perhaps most obviously, the southern thesis has created a seductive but false dichotomy between an authentic, musically superior, rural folk culture unique to the American South and an inherently inferior, modern, mass-​mediated culture common to other regions of the United States.50 Indeed, Malone has argued as much, noting that, during the 1920s, the northern record producers and talent scouts who ventured into the American South found “southern rural music” to be “both different and more interesting than the rural music forms of the North,” and, furthermore, that “southern string bands” in particular possessed a “vitality and rhythmic punch that set them apart from other rural bands in America.”51 In presenting the American South as an exceptional place where a rural folk culture continued to flourish into the 1920s and beyond, Malone established the region as a bastion of folk authenticity and traditionalism in a modernizing nation. It alone, according to him, gave birth to commercial country music and its subregional offshoots of western swing, honky tonk, and bluegrass. The southern thesis, then, is dismissively negative and intrinsically counterproductive because it implies that other regional musical traditions are somehow less significant or culturally resonant than those of the American South. As a result, comparatively few studies of non-​ southern country musicians and musical traditions have been produced, and those handful that do exist have been marginalized as somehow less relevant to the nearly one-​hundred-​year development of commercial country music. At the same time, the southern thesis, with its focus on country music as a commercial variant of rural white folk music, has portrayed hillbilly recording artists as “tradition-​bound rural southerners who came of age in the countryside and mountain hollows, often isolated from or little influenced by the main currents of modern urban life and mass culture,” as I argued in Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (2008).52 Such romanticized portrayals, however, have impeded the advancement of more complex and sophisticated scholarly interpretations of this music as a modern phenomenon produced by residents of an emergent urban-​industrial America who were demonstrably influenced by its mass culture.53 Perhaps even worse, these pastoral depictions have also perpetuated pernicious stereotypes of the music and its performers as being artistically and culturally backward. Thus, in the fifth edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music (2007), Michael Kennedy and Joyce Bourne Kennedy could define “hillbilly songs” using language that smacks of condescension: “The traditional songs (largely of European origin) of the primitive peoples of the mountain regions (e.g., Appalachians) of the S.E. parts of the USA.”54

“Southernness” of Country Music    41 The southern thesis has also hampered efforts to chronicle country music’s evolution in more historically accurate ways. Take, for example, the attempt to identify the commercial origins of this music. Today, most scholars credit A. C. “Eck” Robertson and Henry Gilliland’s “Sallie Gooden,” backed with “Arkansaw Traveler,” waxed in June 1922 for Victor, as the first country music record.55 This historic claim, as Simon J. Bronner noted in a 1979 Journal of Country Music article, rests on the premise that this record represented “the first combination of Southern folk music performed by true practitioners of the tradition on commercial recordings catering to a general market.”56 But such a definition excludes the “traditional and ‘old-​time’ music present on discs prior to June of 1922,” Bronner argued. In his article, he went on to survey nearly twenty older Edison recordings of the same or similar material by popular artists such as Billy Golden, the Edison Male Quartet, and John J. Kimmel. The only salient difference, it seems, is that these earlier recording artists were not native Southerners who could be considered “true practitioners” of the region’s folk music.57 Furthermore, the interpretation of country music as intrinsically southern has also biased understandings of other aspects of the genre’s history, including the constituency of its prewar audience and the causes for its unprecedented national popularity during World War II. Perhaps less directly, it has also obscured much of the extraordinary ethnic and racial diversity found on hillbilly recordings, particularly African Americans’ significant but largely unrecognized involvement in this genre, due to its emphasis on the Anglo-​Celtic folk roots of prewar commercial country music.58 Thus, scholars have tended to ignore or downplay the popular and vernacular musical tributaries from outside of the American South that fed and influenced hillbilly music. All of which is to say that the southern thesis has narrowed the genealogy of the late nineteenth-​century and early twentieth-​century sources of this music and closed off a broader, more inclusive discussion of its precommercial roots and commercial origins. In formulating the southern thesis, Malone helped enshrine the interpretive concepts of “folk” and “traditional” as the touchstones by which to assess the authenticity of country musicians and styles. “One cannot join the ‘folk’; one must be born into the culture,” Malone asserted in the first edition of Country Music U.S.A. Thus, a whole parade of country recording artists and radio entertainers, “[n]‌o matter what their talents might be, and regardless of the skills they might possess in imitating folk styles,” he argued, “can never be considered as authentic folk performers.”59 Although the now outmoded, intrinsically problematic concepts of “folk” and “traditional” have largely been abandoned in folklore studies, they continue to be deployed as evaluative standards within country music studies. For instance, in his 2014 response titled “ ‘The Southern Thesis’: Revisited and Reaffirmed,” in the “Country Music” special issue of the Journal of American Folklore, Malone dismissed professional New York studio singers such as Vernon Dalhart and Carson J. Robison as “imitators of the rural musicians who were beginning to appear in American entertainment at that time.”60 Nevertheless, these so-​ called citybilly artists made thousands of profitable hillbilly recordings, that were advertised and marketed as such. To marginalize Dalhart, Robison, and other citybillies, who collectively accounted for as much as one-​third of the estimated 11,000 hillbilly releases

42    Oxford Handbook of Country Music between 1924 and 1932, seems an ahistorical exercise based solely on arbitrary definitions of who and what are authentically “folk” and “traditional.”61 Perhaps the most significant blind spot of Malone’s southern thesis, however, is that it almost completely disregards the business history and commercial dimensions of country music. Since the inception of the field, scholars have largely studied country music in isolation from both the broader history of the US recording industry and of other contemporaneous genres of American popular music, because of their southern-​ thesis-​inspired interpretation of it as essentially a rural southern folk music outside of, and separate from, the commercial world of capitalist imperatives and profit-​driven motives.62 As Bill Ivey, then director of the Country Music Foundation, complained in a 1986 review of Malone’s first revised edition of Country Music, U.S.A., “Businessmen, songwriters, and other players have walk-​on parts or a quick scene here and there, but the roles of law, institutions, and commercial alliances are virtually ignored.”63 To conceptualize the hillbilly music of the 1920s and 1930s as simply a commercialized variant of southern folk music disregards the numerous ways in which record producers, for example, defined, shaped, and otherwise influenced this music: through, for instance, their decisions regarding the selection of field-​recording locations; artists, songs and tunes; release takes; and series assignments. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, record company officials “influenced the scope and sound of hillbilly music in so many ways that it simply cannot be considered a pure, unmediated expression of southern culture.”64 Even though most corporate records of the prewar companies involved in the hillbilly recording industry are no longer extant, some source material regarding the business practices of these early firms do still exist. Few such business histories have been produced, however, and at least some of this inattention can be blamed on scholars’ persistent focus on country music as a rural folk tradition and their attendant preoccupation with chronicling its precommercial folk genealogy.65

Areas for Future Research The dominance of the southern thesis has inadvertently created gaps in the scholarly literature that now provide significant opportunities for researchers to advance the field of country music studies. For example, since the 1970s, regional revisionists and other scholars have produced biographical studies of various New England and Midwestern fiddlers and string bands who made prewar commercial recordings, including Alanson “Mellie” Dunham, Jasper “Jep” Bisbee, John Baltzell, the Plymouth Vermont Old-​ Time Dance Orchestra, and John Wilfahrt’s Concertina Orchstra.66 But more studies are needed of such non-​southern musicians and of their musical traditions and music scenes, both in historical and contemporary settings, all of which, as Paul L. Tyler has recommended, “should be considered in writing the full history of American country music.”67 Also needed are more detailed and insightful comparative analyses of American regional musical styles, especially “northern” and “southern” fiddling and

“Southernness” of Country Music    43 string band music, so that scholars are equipped with a better sense of what elements constitute these regional styles and what distinguishes them from one another. Scholars should be careful, however, to avoid essentialist arguments in their approach. Terms such as “northern fiddler” or “midwestern string band” are just as intrinsically problematic as “southern musician.” Scholars also need to approach geographical place as more than just what Brian Rusted has called “a mere setting, the nominal locale where certain historical actions occurred.” In particular, scholars must “treat region as a dynamic concept,” as Robert H. Ferguson has advised, in a way that appreciates not only “vibrant cultural exchange” across regional boundaries but also how such interactions link a particular region to other regional, national, and global forms of culture.68 Furthermore, scholars should avoid the inclination to “just add and stir” (to borrow a phrase from women’s studies) non-​southern musicians into otherwise conventional, southern-​ thesis-​driven histories. Rather, the inclusion of these musicians requires scholars to, at long last, abandon the southern thesis and to fundamentally reinterpret country music and the multitude of American regional traditions and musical tributaries that contributed to its creation. In short, as regional revisionists have long argued, the time has arrived to embrace the broader, multiregional traditions of American country music and to fully integrate them into a comprehensive, truly national master narrative of country music. Beyond reconceptualizing country music as an American music, the time has also come, in this age of globalization, for scholars to traverse national boundaries (see Nathan D. Gibson’s c­ hapter 24 on global country music in this volume). Regional styles of country music around the globe have multiplied prolifically since World War II, as a 2015 New York Times article profiling the country music scene in Kenya suggests.69 With the exception of country music in Canada and Australia, however, the international presence of this music has received surprisingly little attention until recently.70 One of the most important and welcome recent trends in country music studies is a focus on the music’s global popularity and the ethnographic documentation of traditions in such countries as Brazil, the Czech Republic, Japan, and Thailand; scholars would profit from redoubling their efforts in this exciting subfield.71 Most such studies chronicle postwar musical traditions and scenes, but the reality of country music’s international diffusion stretches back to the 1920s when, as American cultural imperialism expanded around the globe, US record companies marketed 78-​rpm recordings of this music throughout the British Empire, including in South Africa and India, and even in Japan, Sweden, and Portugal.72 As yet, though, scholars have conducted far too few analyses of American country music’s prewar global dimensions.73 Conversely, the field of country music studies will also profit from additional accounts that explore the significant but understudied influence of global musics on country music in the United States. Provocative studies of the Hawaiian guitar’s impact on American music by Brian Rusted and John W. Troutman serve as excellent models for this kind of scholarship, as do Robert B. Klymasz’s and James P. Leary’s pioneering accounts of the influence of various eastern and central European immigrant traditions on country music in western Canada and the upper American Midwest, respectively.74

44    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Much more remains to be done, though, in this productive field, and this kind of work will undoubtedly help reorient standard narratives by connecting country music, both as a commercial genre and a performative tradition, to broader global music traditions. Scholars must also focus more attention on prewar country music as a product of a modern, urban-​industrial America. Not only did record companies employ progressive business practices and state-​of-​the-​art technology to record, manufacture, advertise, and distribute this music, but the lived experiences and musical influences of the artists who made these records were deeply shaped by a modern world and its mass culture. Even though many hillbilly singers and musicians spent much of their lives in small towns or even rural areas, their contact with the powerful mass media of commercial radio and phonograph records enabled them to participate in a broad national mass culture. As I argued in Linthead Stomp, these artists were “children of the modern age, for they were among the first generation of southerners to be deeply influenced by automobiles, movies, radios, phonograph recordings, and mass-​circulation newspapers and magazines.” Although rooted in local and regional vernacular cultures, much of prewar hillbilly music reflected the modernizing forces of industrial development, urban growth, and farm-​to-​factory migration that engulfed the American South during the half-​century before World War II. Scholars, thus, should view this music as being as “thoroughly modern in its origins and evolution as its quintessentially modern counterpart, jazz.”75 Most of all, scholars need to approach prewar country music principally as a commercial music and devote greater attention to the influential role of the U.S. recording industry in creating it. Although some scholars—​notably Archie Green, Charles K. Wolfe, Tony Russell, Richard A. Peterson, and Barry Mazor—​have published important studies in this area, a significant amount of research remains to be done on the business, advertising, and marketing practices of the hillbilly recording industry.76 As I have argued elsewhere, country music, like all other genres of American popular music, is a commercially constructed category that, since its inception in the 1920s, has been continuously redefined by, among others, record company officials who were charged with producing and promoting recordings that would enjoy brisk sales among the nation’s record buyers.77 Conceptualizing hillbilly music as primarily a commercial product can help us understand how corporate recording practices, advertising strategies, and marketplace concerns, along with the constraints of technology, transformed the hybridized music of ordinary Americans—​albeit chiefly white, rural, and working-​class Southerners—​ into the appealing and profitable regionalized genre that we recognize as the precursor of modern country music. In particular, a business-​focused approach reorients the discussion of country music’s southernness by placing the emphasis more properly on the commercialization of the music. Doing so reveals that the music’s regional identity was not the product of some unique folk culture that supposedly existed only in the American South, as Malone has argued. Rather, its southernness resulted chiefly from the prewar recording activities and advertising campaigns of the New  York-​based record companies that produced and sold these records. During the 1920s, fiddle and string band music flourished

“Southernness” of Country Music    45 throughout much of the United States, but, as folklorist Norm Cohen has suggested, the US recording industry regionalized this music by intentionally concentrating its field-​ recording sessions in the American South and by affixing to this music particular southern descriptions and images in its advertising, both of which formed much of the basis for what Simon J. Bronner has called country music’s “myth of southern origin.”78 In short, approaching country music as a commercial genre helps explain its southernness more accurately and historically as a product of the US recording industry and refocuses our attention squarely, though not solely, on its business dimensions. In doing so, this advantageous approach can remedy significant lacunae that exist within the current scholarship and, in turn, advance the field of country music studies in new and provocative directions.

Conclusion Country music studies now stands at a pivotal moment. A series of important recent books and articles by scholars working in a variety of academic disciplines are beginning to push the field beyond the decades-​old constraints imposed on it by the influential but problematic concept of the southern thesis. Creative approaches to non-​southern musicians and musical traditions; an appreciation of the reciprocal influences of American grassroots music and national and global musics; a recognition of the modern, urban-​ industrial sources of prewar hillbilly music; and an increased focus on the business history of country music have all yielded, and will continue to yield, revelations long precluded by the basic premises of the southern thesis. Country music studies, I believe, has arrived at the beginning of a post-​southern thesis era, and much of the scholarship produced in this field in the next ten years will almost certainly differ dramatically from the more traditional, southern-​focused interpretations of the last five decades. Despite the promise of post-​southern thesis scholarship, a number of obstacles remain in the dismantling and clearing away of this stubborn concept. For example, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, through its exhibitions and some of the books published under its imprimatur, contributes significantly to the perpetuation of country music’s southern identity. Indeed, local civic leaders and tourism officials have transformed Nashville into “Music City, U.S.A.”—​or simply “Music City,” as the Nashville Convention and Visitors Bureau now officially bills the city. In Nashville especially, there are few indications that the entrenched myth of country music’s southernness will be replaced with a more inclusive and historically accurate interpretation. Record executives, radio program directors and deejays, museum and tourist attraction staff, historical reissue producers, fans, and even many scholars are far too deeply invested, both emotionally and financially, in the romantic notion of country music as a rural, folk tradition of the American South and of Southern Appalachia in particular. From a strictly commercial perspective, one cannot deny that selling such a myth makes good business sense. But the progress of country music studies depends on a

46    Oxford Handbook of Country Music penetrating examination of country music, in full historical perspective, within larger national and global contexts. Writing a new master narrative of country music poses a number of challenges to scholars, including finding new answers to “perennial questions” that Bill C. Malone himself, the principal architect of the southern thesis, has, over the years, raised “about country music’s alleged southernness, identity, and authenticity.”79 At a 1989 conference held to celebrate the opening of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Southern Folklife Collection, Malone, reflecting on his thirty years of scholarship, asked rhetorically, “Is the music Southern in either origin or ultimate meaning? … Is country music a direct outgrowth of folk music? Or is the music preeminently a product of commercial developments and decisions? And is country music truly a reflection of the society in which it exists? Too often,” he went on to lament, “the answers to such questions have been presented simply and accepted with little challenge, and only rarely have they inspired the kinds of rigorous debate that any field of serious scholarship deserves.”80 Over the course of his fifty-​plus years as a scholar, which have yielded more than half a dozen books and a multitude of articles, Malone has offered his own responses to these questions. But there are undoubtedly other ways to answer them. With country music studies now entering its sixth decade as an academic discipline, as scholars, we must critically reevaluate what we know, or think we know, about country music and engage in “the kinds of rigorous debate” that Malone called for to advance the field interpretively. Only by asking such probing questions will scholars be able to extend the discussion of country music in exciting new directions, beyond the narrow, restrictive paradigms and concepts that have structured it for the last five decades, especially the binaries of “northern/​southern,” “rural/​urban,” “folk/​commercial,” and “authentic/​inauthentic.” Surely Malone’s questions, posed more than a quarter century ago, provide a useful starting place to begin achieving these goals. At the same time, however, current and succeeding generations of scholars, informed by new sources and insights and armed with new theories and methodological approaches from an ever-​widening array of multidisciplinary fields, will need to formulate new questions about, among other things, the southernness of country music and its rural folk origins. Despite the demonstrated staying power of the southern thesis, serious and thoroughgoing future scholarship, I predict, will reflect as well as foster an increased appreciation for conceptualizing country music principally as the commercial global enterprise that it has always been.

Notes * For critical reading, encouragement, and suggestions in the preparation of this chapter, the author wishes to thank Kathleen Drowne, Travis Stimeling, Tony Russell, Ronald D. Cohen, Bill C. Malone, James E. Akenson, Brian Ward, Kevin Fontenot, Paul Gifford, Lance Ledbetter, and the late Archie Green.

“Southernness” of Country Music    47 1. D. K. Wilgus, “An Introduction to the Study of Hillbilly Music,” Journal of American Folklore [JAF] 78, no. 309 (July–​September 1965): 196. 2. Monroe L. Billington, “Introduction,” in The South:  A  Central Theme? ed. Monroe L. Billington (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 1. 3. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, “Introduction: The End of Southern History,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 7. The scholarly literature on southern exceptionalism is extensive; for more on the concept, see, for example, James M. McPherson, “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism:  A  New Look at an Old Question,” Civil War History 29, no. 3 (September 1983): 230–​244; and Laura F. Edwards, “Southern History as U.S. History,” Journal of Southern History 75, no. 3 (August 2009): 533–​564. 4. If Roberts did not coin the term “southern thesis” as it applies to Malone’s regional argument, at the very least he can be credited with one of its first printed usages. See Roderick J. Roberts, “An Introduction to the Study of Northern Country Music,” Journal of Country Music 7, no. 4 (January 1978): 26. 5. It is worth noting that for the sake of convenience in this chapter, I employ the labels prewar country music and hillbilly music interchangeably, if anachronistically. 6. For examples of this regional interpretation in country music scholarship that precedes even the Journal of American Folklore’s 1965 “Hillbilly Issue,” see Fred G. Hoeptner, “Folk and Hillbilly Music: The Background of Their Relation,” Caravan 16 (April–​May 1959): 16; and D. K. Wilgus, Anglo-​American Folksong Scholarship since 1898 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1959), 433. 7. Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A.: A Fifty-​Year History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), viii. 8. Ibid. 5. The context of Malone’s discussion, however, implies that he meant roughly the eleven states that once constituted the Confederate States of America (“[t]‌he socially ingrown rural South, from the tidewater of Virginia to the pine barrens of East Texas”). 9. In formulating his theory, Malone identified the persistence of a unique rural folk culture to explain the distinctiveness of the American South, an idea first advanced by the eminent southern historian David M. Potter in a 1961 article, “The Enigma of the South” (though Malone does not cite this work in his footnotes or bibliography). David M. Potter, “The Enigma of the South,” Yale Review 51 (October 1961):  142–​151. For a fuller analysis of Potter’s concept, see Charles Winston Joyner, “The South as a Folk Culture: David Potter and the Southern Enigma,” in The Southern Enigma: Essays on Race, Class, and Folk Culture, ed. Walter J. FraserJr. and Winfred B. MooreJr. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 157–​167; and Charles Joyner, Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 141–​150. 10. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., viii, ix. 11. Ibid. 3–​4. See also Simon J. Bronner, Old-​Time Music Makers of New York State (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 41. 12. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 3–​5. 13. Bill C. Malone, Southern Music/​American Music (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979), esp. 1–​5, 18, 153; Bronner, Old-​Time Music Makers, 195, n. 37. Malone advanced this same argument in his introductory essay to the “Music” section in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 985–​992; as well as in his expanded introduction to the stand-​alone volume, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan

48    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Wilson, vol. 12, Music, ed. Bill C. Malone (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 1–​17. 14. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., vii. 15. Ibid. 185, 192–​193. 16. James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of White and Black Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Gerald W. Haslam, with Alexandra Haslam Russell and Richard Chon, Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Peter La Chapelle, Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). For other studies that employ a similar explanation to account for the spread of country music traditions, see James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Nicholas Dawidoff, In the Country of Country: People and Places in American Music (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997); and Chad Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles (Urbana–​Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 2000). 17. Charles K. Wolfe, Tennessee Strings:  The Story of Country Music in Tennessee (Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 1977); Wolfe, Kentucky Country:  Folk and Country Music of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982); Ivan M. Tribe, Mountaineer Jamboree: Country Music in West Virginia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984); Wayne W. Daniel, Pickin’ on Peachtree: A History of Country Music in Atlanta, Georgia (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Jean A. Boyd, The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). 18. Richard A. Peterson and Russell J. Davis, “The Fertile Crescent of Country Music,” Journal of Country Music 6, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 19, 21, 26. 19. Ibid. 23. It is worth mentioning, however, that on the point of country performers’ rural origins, Peterson and Davis’s results were skewed toward that conclusion due to the fact that they defined “cities” as urban places with only extraordinarily large populations (“greater than 250,000”; Ibid. 20). Cultural geographers George O. Carney and Paul Fryer reached the same conclusions in their respective studies: George O. Carney, “T for Texas, T for Tennessee: The Origins of American Country Music Notables,” Journal of Geography 78, no. 6 (November 1979): 218–​225; and Paul Fryer, “Local Styles and Country Music: An Introductory Essay,” Popular Music and Society 8, nos. 3–​4 (1982):  63–​76, reprinted in All That Glitters:  Country Music in America, ed. George H. Lewis (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1993), 62–​74. It should be noted, however, that much of Carney’s article was plagiarized from that of Peterson and Davis. 20. See, for example, George O. Carney, “Spatial Diffusion of the All-​Country Music Radio Stations in the United States, 1971-​74,” John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly 13, no. 46 (Summer 1977):  58–​66; Carney, “From Down Home to Uptown:  The Diffusion of Country-​Music Radio Stations in the United States,” Journal of Geography 76, no. 3 (March 1977): 104–​110; Carney, “Country Music and the South: A Cultural Geography Perspective,” Journal of Cultural Geography 1, no. 1 (Fall/​Winter 1980):  16–​33; Billy D. White and Frederick A. Day, “Country Music Radio and American Culture Regions,” Journal of Cultural Geography 16, no. 2 (Spring/​Summer 1997): 21–​35; Stephen A. Smith, “Sounds of the South:  The Rhetorical Saga of Country Music Lyrics,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 45, no. 2 (Winter 1980): 164–​172; and Melton A. McLaurin, “Songs

“Southernness” of Country Music    49 of the South:  The Changing Image of the South in Country Music,” in You Wrote My Life: Lyrical Themes in Country Music, ed. Melton A. McLaurin and Richard A. Peterson (Philadelphia, PA: Gordon and Breach, 1992), 15–​33. 21. Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 2nd rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Bill C. Malone and Jocelyn R. Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., 3rd rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010); Paul L. Tyler, “The Rise of Rural Rhythm,” in The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance, ed. Chad Berry (Urbana–​Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 2008), 31. 22. Bill C. Malone, “The South and Country Music,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1998), 529. 23. See, for example, Bill C. Malone, “Country Music, the South, and Americanism,” Mississippi Folklore Register 10, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 54; and Malone, Don’t Get above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), esp. 13–​15. 24. Malone, Southern Music/​American Music, 153. 25. Richard A. Peterson and Paul DiMaggio, “From Region to Class, The Changing Locus of Country Music: A Test of the Massification Hypothesis,” Social Forces 53, no. 3 (March 1975): 503–​504. 26. Peterson and Davis, “Fertile Crescent,” 19. 27. On these two concepts, see John Egerton, The Americanization of Dixie:  The Southernization of America (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974). 28. John B. Boles, “Introduction: The Dixie Difference,” in Dixie Dateline: A Journalist Portrait of the Contemporary South, ed. John B. Boles (Houston, TX:  Rice University Studies, 1983), 1. 29. For examples of these and other regional revisionists’ studies, see Robert B. Klymasz, “‘Sounds You Never Before Heard’:  Ukrainian Country Music in Western Canada,” Ethnomusicology 16, no. 3 (September 1972):  372–​380; Neil V. Rosenberg, “‘Folk’ and ‘Country’ Music in the Canadian Maritimes: A Regional Model,” Journal of Country Music 5, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 76–​83; Michael Taft, “‘That’s Two More Dollars’: Jimmy Linegar’s Success with Country Music in Newfoundland,” Folklore Forum 7, no. 2 (1974): 99–​120; Simon J. Bronner, “Woodhull’s Old Tyme Masters:  A  Hillbilly Band in the Northern Tradition,” John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly 12, no. 42 (Summer 1976): 54–​63, reprinted in Exploring Roots Music:  Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly, ed. Nolan Porterfield (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 127–​134; Simon J. Bronner, “Country Music Culture in Central New York State,” John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly 13, no. 48 (Winter 1977): 171–​182; Paul F. Wells, booklet notes to New England Traditional Fiddling:  An Anthology of Recordings, 1926-​1975 (John Edwards Memorial Foundation, Inc. JEMF-​105); Roberts, “Northern Country Music,” 23–​28; Simon J. Bronner, “The Country Music Tradition in Western New York State,” Journal of Country Music 7, no. 4 (January 1978): 29–​46, 55–​59; Peter Narváez, “Country Music in Diffusion: Juxtaposition and Syncretism in the Popular Music of Newfoundland,” Journal of Country Music 7, no. 2 (May 1978): 93–​101; James P. Leary, “Ethnic Country Music on Superior’s South Shore,” John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly 19, no. 72 (Winter 1983): 219–​230; Bronner, Old-​Time Music Makers; George H. Lewis, “A Tombstone Every Mile: Country Music in Maine,” in Lewis, All That Glitters, 102–​115; James P. Leary, Polkabilly: How the Goose Island

50    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Paul L. Tyler, “Hillbilly Music Re-​Imagined: Folk and Country Music in the Midwest,” JAF 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014): 159–​190; Clifford R. Murphy, Yankee Twang: Country and Western Music in New England (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014); and James P. Leary, Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-​1946 (Madison and Atlanta: University of Wisconsin Press and Dust-​to-​Digital, 2015). 30. Roberts, “Northern Country Music,” 24. 31. Ibid. 26. 32. Conceived of as a sort of (belated) sequel to the journal’s 1965  “Hillbilly Issue,” the 2014 “Country Music” special issue featured articles by Ronald D. Cohen, Patrick Huber, Paul L. Tyler, and Clifford R. Murphy, with comments by Bill C. Malone, Erika Brady, and Norm Cohen. See Thomas A. DuBois and James P. Leary, “Country Music,”, JAF 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014), special issue. 33. Murphy, Yankee Twang, 1, 13. 34. Bronner, Old-​Time Music Makers, xv, 47. 35. Ibid. 46–​47. For other critiques of Malone’s migration thesis, see Roberts, “Northern Country Music,” 24; and Peterson and DiMaggio, “From Region to Class,” 500–​502. 36. Bronner, Old-​Time Music Makers, xv. 37. Ibid. 41. See also Bronner, “Country Music Culture,” 171; Lewis, “Tombstone Every Mile,” 105. 38. Brian Rusted, “Hank Snow and the Eastern Frontiers of Western Music,” in Challenging Frontiers:  The Canadian West, ed. Lorry W. Felske and Beverly Rasporich (Calgary, Alberta, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 2004), 184. 39. Contrary to Rusted, other scholars have explicitly argued for the importance of geographical place in any serious understanding of country music. See, for example, Wolfe, Tennessee Strings, vii–​viii. 40. Rusted, “Hank Snow,” 184–​186, 187. 41. Ibid. 185–​186. 42. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 18–​19; see also ibid. rev. ed., 5, 27. 43. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., viii. 44. Ibid. 18–​19, 22–​23; Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 43–​68. 45. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., viii–​ix, 3. 46. Ibid. rev. ed., 29. 47. Rusted, “Hank Snow,” 191–​195; Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Popular Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), esp. 215–​217. 48. Charles Hiroshi Garrett, Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 168. 49. Robert H. Ferguson, review of Linthead Stomp:  The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South, by Patrick Huber (2008), H-​Southern Music at H-​Net Online, accessed January 5, 2015, https://​www.h-​net.org/​reviews/​showrev.php?id=23122. 50. See, e.g., Malone, Don’t Get above Your Raisin’, 16. 51. Ibid. 16. 52. Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp:  The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), xiv. 53. Ibid. esp. xiv, 6.

“Southernness” of Country Music    51 54. Michael Kennedy and Joyce Bourne Kennedy, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, 5th ed. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2007), 347, s.v. “hillbilly songs.” 55. Malone and Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., 35. 56. Simon J. Bronner, “Old-​Time Tunes on Edison Records, 1899-​1923,” Journal of Country Music 8, no. 1 (May 1979): 95. See also Roberts, “Northern Country Music,” 26. 57. Bronner, “Old-​Time Tunes on Edison Records, 1899-​1923,” 95. 58. Patrick Huber, “Black Hillbillies:  African American Musicians on Old-​Time Records, 1924-​1932,” in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 19–​81. 59. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., x. 60. Bill C. Malone, “‘The Southern Thesis’: Revisited and Reaffirmed,” JAF 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014): 228, and the article to which he was responding: Patrick Huber, “The New York Sound: Citybilly Recording Artists and the Creation of Hillbilly Music, 1924-​1932,” JAF 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014): 140–​158. See also Norm Cohen, “A Few Thoughts on Provocative Points,” JAF 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014): 233–​234, in which he notes other country music scholars’ similarly dismissive comments about Dalhart’s recordings. 61. Huber, “New York Sound,” 145. 62. Huber, “New  York Sound,” 148. Two important studies that do situate hillbilly music within broader commercial contexts are Norm Cohen’s liner notes to Minstrels and Tunesmiths:  The Commercial Roots of Early Country Music (John Edwards Memorial Foundation, Inc. JEMF-​109) and Miller’s Segregating Sound. 63. Bill Ivey, review of Country Music, U.S.A. (rev. ed.), by Bill C. Malone in The Country Reader: Twenty-​Five Years of the Journal of Country Music, ed. Paul Kingsbury (Nashville, TN:  Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 290. Originally published in Journal of Country Music 11, no. 2 (1986): 91–​93. 64. Patrick Huber, “Before ‘The Big Bang of Country Music’: Recording Hillbilly Music on Location Prior to the 1927 Bristol Sessions,” International Country Music Journal 2016, ed. Don Cusic (2016), 31–​32. 65. Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 58, n. 9. Whereas scholars have failed to undertake many studies of the prewar country music industry, a rich literature exists about the music’s postwar business history. For examples of such studies, see “The Unseen Hand: How Producers Shape the Country Sound:  A JCM Special Report,” Journal of Country Music 12, no. 2 (1987); Bill Ivey, “The Bottom Line: Business Practices That Shaped Country Music,” in Country:  The Music and the Musicians, ed. Paul Kingsbury, Alan Axelrod, and Susan Costello, rev. and updated ed. (New  York:  Country Music Foundation and Abbeville Press, 1994, 280–​311; Joli Jensen, The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music (Nashville, TN:  Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1998); Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2007); and Michael Jarrett, Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014). 66. See, for example, Sally Thompson, “Plymouth Old-​Time Dance Orchestra,” Vermont History 40, no. 3 (Summer 1972):  185–​189; Paul F. Wells, “Mellie Dunham:  Maine’s Champion Fiddler,” John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly 12, no. 43 (Autumn 1976): 112–​118; Simon J. Bronner, “John Baltzell: Champion Old Time Fiddler,” Old Time Music 27 (Winter 1977/​78): 13–​14; Howard L. Sacks, “John Baltzell, A Country Fiddler from the Heartland,” Journal of Country Music 10, no. 1 (1985): 18–​24, 33–​35; David Sanderson,

52    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Mellie Dunham, A  Remembrance (Waterford, ME:  Norway Downtown Revitalization, 2003); Howard L. Sacks, “From the Barn to the Bowery and Back Again: Musical Routes in Rural Ohio, 1800–​1929,” JAF 116, no. 461 (Summer 2003): 314–​338; Paul Gifford, “Jasper E.  ‘Jep’ Bisbee:  Old-​Time Michigan Dance Fiddler,” Old-​Time Herald 9, no. 6 (Winter 2004/​2005):  30–​34; and Tony Russell, “Nicholson’s Players,” Old-​Time Herald 13, no. 5 (March 2013): 28–​35. 67. Tyler, “Hillbilly Music Re-​Imagined,” 160. Indeed, Peter Narváez specifically argues for the importance of studies of “regional and local performers, well outside of the southern ‘fertile crescent’ of country music” as being “essential to an understanding of the diffusional processes whereby the music has spread.” Narváez, “Country Music in Diffusion,” 93. 68. Rusted, “Hank Snow,” 185; Ferguson, review of Linthead Stomp. 69. Isma’il Kushkush, “Country Music Finds a Home Far from Home, in Kenya,” New York Times, July 1, 2015. 70. In addition to the Canadian studies cited in endnote 29, see, for example, Tim B. Rogers, “Country Music Bands during the 1950s:  A  Comparative Survey,” in Ethnomusicology in Canada, ed. Robert Witmer (Toronto, Ontario: Institute for Canadian Music, 1990), 225–​235; Linda Jean Daniel, “If You’re Not in It for Love: Canadian Women in Country Music,” in The Women of Country Music: A Reader, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 161–​185; Andrew Smith, “The Yodeling Cowgirls:  Australian Women and Country Music,” in Wolfe and Akenson, Women of Country Music, 186–​201; Graeme Smith, Singing Australian: A History of Folk and Country Music (North Melbourne, Australia:  Pluto Press, 2005); Daniel Fisher, “Mediating Kinship:  Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia,” Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 2 (May 2009):  280–​312; Byron Dueck, “Civil Twilight:  Country Music, Alcohol and the Spaces of Manitoban Aboriginal Sociability,” in Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, ed. Georgina Born (Cambridge, England:  Cambridge University Press, 2013), 239–​256; Sarah Baker and Alison Huber, “Locating the Canon in Tamworth: Historical Narratives, Cultural Memory and Australia’s ‘Country Music Capital,’” Popular Music 32, no. 2 (May 2013): 223–​240; and Toby Martin, Yodelling Boundary Riders:  Country Music in Australia since the 1920s (University of Melbourne: Lyrebird Press, 2015). 71. Among such works are Tōru Mitsui, “The Reception of the Music of American Southern Whites in Japan,” in Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, ed. Neil V. Rosenberg (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 275–​293; Alexander Sebastian Dent, River of Tears:  Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2009); Jane M. Ferguson, “Another Country Is the Past:  Western Cowboys, Lanna Nostalgia, and Bluegrass Aesthetics as Performed by Professional Musicians in Northern Thailand,” American Ethnologist 37, no. 2 (May 2010): 227–​240; Lee Bidgood, “Performing Americanness, Locating Identity:  Bluegrass and Ethnography in the Czech Republic” (PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 2010); Amporn Jirattikorn, “Lukthung:  Authenticity and Modernity in Thai Country Music,” Asian Music 37, no. 1 (Winter/​Spring 2006): 24–​50. For a brief overview of the history of global country music and a selected bibliography, see Nathan D. Gibson, “Sound Review: International Country Music,” JAF 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014): 236–​242. See also Gibson’s ­chapter 24 in this volume.

“Southernness” of Country Music    53 72. Gibson, “Sound Review,” 236; Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921-​ 1942, with editorial research by Bob Pinson, assisted by the staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 9–​33, 44–​45. 73. See, for example, Bob Coltman, “Habitantbilly: French-​Canadian Old Time Music,” Old Time Music 11 (Winter 1973): 9–​13 and Old Time Music 12 (Spring 1974): 9–​14; Graeme Smith, “Australian Country Music and the Hillbilly Yodel,” Popular Music 13, no. 3 (October 1994): 297–​311; Rusted, “Hank Snow,” 181–​200; Melissa Bellanta and Toby Martin, “The Sins of the Son: Country Music and Masculine Sentimentality in 1930s to 1940s Australia,” Australian Feminist Studies 27, no. 74 (December 2012):  355–​ 372; Martin, Yodelling Boundary Riders, 11–​80; and Andrew Smith, “Tex Morton:  Australia’s Country Music Pioneer,” International Country Music Journal 2016, ed. Don Cusic (Nashville: Brackish Publishing, 2016), 83–​108. 74. Rusted, “Hank Snow,” 181–​200; John W. Troutman, Kika Kila:  How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Klymasz, “ ‘Sounds You Never Before Heard,’ ” 372–​380; Leary, “Ethnic Country Music,” 219–​230; Leary, Folksongs of Another America. 75. Huber, Linthead Stomp, xiv, 37, 39. 76. See, for example, Archie Green’s pioneering series of “Commercial Music Graphics” articles that appeared in the John Edwards Memorial Foundation Newsletter (later the John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly) between 1968 and 1985; Charles K. Wolfe, “The Legend That Peer Built: Reappraising the Bristol Sessions,” Journal of Country Music 12, no. 2 (1989): 24–​35, reprinted in The Bristol Sessions: Writings about the Big Bang of Country Music, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and Ted Olson (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2005), 17–​ 39; Tony Russell, “Country Music on Location: ‘Field Recording’ Before Bristol,” Popular Music 26, no. 1 (January 2007): 23–​31; Tony Russell, “Aftershocks: Location Recording after the Bristol Sessions,” in Cusic, International Country Music Journal 2016, 57–​65; Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Barry Mazor, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014). 77. Huber, “Black Hillbillies,” 52–​53. 78. Cohen, “A Few Thoughts,” 233; Bronner, Old-​Time Music Makers, 41. 79. Malone and Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., xviii. 80. Bill C. Malone, “Country Music and the Academy: A Thirty-​Year Professional Odyssey,” in Sounds of the South, ed. Daniel W. Patterson (Chapel Hill, NC:  Southern Folklife Collection, 1991), 54.

Chapter 3

The C ou ntry Mu si c Asso ciation, Th e C ou nt ry M usic Foundat i on, a nd C ountry Music ’ s H i story Diane Pecknold

In 1972, the recently appointed executive director of the Country Music Foundation (CMF), Bill Ivey, offered a brief portrait of the organization he had been hired to lead. Since its establishment in 1964, the Foundation had “become a wide-​ranging educational organization, involved in the preservation of the history of Country Music … and dedicated to the encouragement of all forms of research into the past, present, and possible future of Country Music.” The development of such an institution had been made possible only by the industry itself, and especially by the “dedicated Country Music executives who formed the Country Music Association.” “[F]‌inanced and operated through the dedication of Country Music people,” the Foundation represented a unique commitment to history. “Few industries have shown such concern for the preservation and study of their own pasts,” the profile concluded.1 This evaluation was sharply at odds with the assessment folklorist Ed Kahn had advanced less than a decade earlier. Lamenting the paucity of scholarly attention to country music history, Kahn had laid the blame squarely at the feet of the country music industry: “There is probably no equally large segment of the American economy that has existed for so long without attempting in some way to understand or explain itself,” he wrote. “Area after area of popular culture has seen to it that popular histories are written, but country music has not even managed to encourage one good article!”2 Although they disagreed about the extent to which the country music industry had supported study of the genre’s history, Ivey and Kahn both acknowledged that it must play a pivotal role in shaping how that history would and could be told. As Kahn and other contributors to the germinal “Hillbilly Issue” of the Journal of American Folklore noted, folklorists had paid little attention to the genre, viewing it mainly as a corruption

56    Oxford Handbook of Country Music of orally transmitted folk culture. Musicologists were even less interested; musicological study of jazz was in its early stages, and most musicologists still conceived of the notated score as the discipline’s fundamental object of analysis, so that most popular music was excluded from its purview.3 “The inherited mystique of folklorists, the prejudices of dominant levels of American culture, and the difficulties of obtaining and dealing with the materials,” D. K. Wilgus concluded, “have all contributed to academic ignorance.”4 The only solution, these scholars suggested, was for the industry itself to value its own history and work with academics to document it. Since the formation of the Country Music Foundation in 1964, the industry has done just this, becoming the dominant force in shaping the popular history of the genre and arguably its academic history as well. The Foundation’s relationship to the industry gives it a unique ability to influence the construction of country’s historical archive and narrative and to distribute the products of both through the museum and popular media. Perhaps most obviously, the Foundation’s Frist Library and Archive (formerly the Library and Media Center) is by far the largest repository of materials related to the genre; and its privileged connection to the artists, business people, and corporations that are the most important sources of archival donations and oral histories ensures its future preeminence.5 Through its board members’ contacts with the broadcasting, recording, and publishing industries, the Foundation has also been in a unique position to disseminate the genre’s history by turning it into commercial entertainment products such as radio and television documentaries and recording reissues. Critics of the CMF, from its earliest days to the present, have tended to view this cultural power with suspicion, fearing that the country industry exercises a Disneyesque level of corporate control over its own history.6 But for much of the Foundation’s history, its internally fractured nature created a shifting set of competing priorities and, as a result, a historiography that was more varied and expansive than the promotional narrative advanced by the CMA (Country Music Association). Particularly through the early 1980s, the latter narrative, elliptically represented in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, supported the CMA’s industrial goals by emphasizing the genre’s transformation from romanticized southern folk origins into a multimillion dollar international entertainment field; focusing disproportionately on the Nashville institutions that had facilitated this transformation; overemphasizing the distinction between country music and other genres; and concentrating on country’s most commercially successful recording stars. But whereas these features remained prominent in the patchwork history presented in the Hall of Fame and Museum, the Foundation’s Library and Media Center and its initiatives to advance and disseminate research on country music pursued a different set of priorities, dominated by the conventions and interests of traditional academic scholarship. Not until the 1980s did the Foundation begin to try to integrate these two approaches by harnessing its scholarly apparatus to a popular education mission, a project that arguably did not reach full expression until the museum’s move to its downtown location in 2001. This stance reflected both the wider trend toward museum corporatization—​which increasingly prioritized privatization and economic self-​sufficiency and blurred the boundaries between the nonprofit and

CMA, CMF, and Country Music’s History    57 commercial entertainment sectors—​and a democratic impulse to interpret country music history for the widest possible public.

Telling Country Music History at  the Hall of Fame and Museum The CMA’s initial interest in preserving and promoting the history of country music was an extension of the genre’s longstanding reliance on historicity and nostalgia as central points of its marketing appeal.7 From its earliest days on record and radio, “hillbilly” or “old-​time,” as it was then known, had been presented as a form of preservation, bringing traditional folk music into the modern age. Radio artists and announcers such as Bradley Kincaid and John Lair emphasized their roles as transmitters of a vanishing rural folk culture, even as they participated in and profited from the folk-​commercial interchange that had produced the traditions on which hillbilly was based.8 Early field recording executives were frequently portrayed in popular and trade media as folkloric “songcatchers.” For instance, despite his own self-​conception as a “record man,” expert in every phase of the business from recording to disc manufacture to promotion, “Uncle” Art Satherley was depicted in the Saturday Evening Post as “a scholarly and dignified man who speaks with a British accent and looks somewhat like an Oxford professor” who sought out “country music in the bayous, canebrakes and hills.”9 Even his Hall of Fame plaque emphasized his folkloric credentials by noting that he was “steeped in the traditions of Anglo-​Celtic folk art.” Early marketing materials for old-​time catalogues similarly emphasized the rustic and primitive, offering old-​time as the musical remnant of an exotic mountain culture. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, documenting and disseminating the history of the genre became particularly important to the industry and its newly formed trade association for a number of reasons. The stylistic changes associated with the Nashville Sound, which many fans and DJs perceived as making country music indistinguishable from pop, raised a host of concerns about what should and should not be included under the generic label of country. A historical definition defused such concerns by ratifying as country music whatever was successful within the industry rather than imposing restrictive stylistic dictates. This essentially aesthetic battle was conjoined with a more practical one: as the country industry increasingly centralized in Nashville, its executives were keen to establish their artistic and operational autonomy from the larger music industry, and they did so in part through a historical discourse that positioned country’s connections to the city and the region as key components of its authenticity. Those who had not been immersed in the culture and history of the country community, this line of reasoning argued, simply could not produce “real” country music. The historical project also had important material consequences for the CMA’s campaign to expand the number of radio stations broadcasting country music.

58    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Broadcasters and advertisers were frequently unfamiliar with the genre or viewed it as culturally and artistically worthless. Connecting contemporaneous commercial country with its folk roots—​particularly in the context of the revival movement then taking place among middle-​class, college-​educated youth—​and demonstrating its economic growth as an industry allowed the CMA to overcome the prejudices that deterred broadcasters and advertisers from programming country. Perhaps most importantly, the CMA’s rags-​to-​riches version of country music history was a direct appeal to its core audience, inviting a generation of migrants—​who had themselves travelled from modest rural beginnings to the urban and suburban blue-​collar middle class—​to identify with the genre in a very personal way.10 The CMA’s interest in country music history was thus motivated by a complex set of goals that were directly related to its economic interests and in practical terms tended to focus on canonization of specific individuals rather than attending to the wider social and cultural contexts within which the genre emerged. With the exception of the canonizing project represented by the Hall of Fame, however, the CMA’s early approach to country music history was to address each of its constituencies separately, and even more commonly simply to assist in those constituencies’ efforts to tell histories that were relevant for their own purposes. Sales pitches to broadcasters and advertisers could highlight current stars, modern sounds, and changing audience demographics; trade publication histories could emphasize the executives who had contributed to the industry’s growth; and fan-​oriented publications and memorial events could offer paeans to beloved stars, even if those stars were not commercially interesting to the industry. This scattershot approach began to change in 1963, however, as the organization undertook planning to build a museum that would house the Hall of Fame.11 In its original incarnation, according to Bill Ivey, the Hall of Fame and Museum, as the museum was called, was imagined simply as “a commercial-​type country music tourist attraction that would promote the field. … [N]‌othing more than an extension of CMA’s purposes, which were to promote and expand the commercial horizons of the music.”12 Nonetheless, the construction of the museum created new pressures to codify the genre’s history through the curation of exhibit contents. This task fell to the board of the new Country Music Foundation, which was established in 1964 to allow tax-​ deductible donations for the building fund and to ensure nonprofit status for museum once it opened. Despite its nominally independent status, the Foundation remained little more than a subsidiary of the CMA for nearly a decade, with significant overlap in board membership and with Jo Walker serving as the executive director for both organizations. As a result of this intertwined structure, the history of country music presented in the earliest contents of the museum was shaped by the priorities of the CMA. Initial plans for the museum emphasized that it would “not only enshrine the memorabilia associated with country music and its personalities, but … also trace country music history from the beginning.” 13 In reality, the history offered by the original installations was somewhat haphazard. Upon entering, visitors could watch a 25-​minute film on the history of the genre in which “The folk background of Country Music [was] explained, and the stories of performers, broadcasters, and recording company

CMA, CMF, and Country Music’s History    59 executives who created the sound of Country Music [were] told in the words of industry leaders”; but this was the only substantial interpretive narrative on offer in the museum.14 The remainder of the south wing was devoted to a reconstruction of contemporary recording and pressing processes and an Artists’ Gallery in which a backlit photograph of each artist was illuminated when that artist’s song played. This exhibit made little effort to contextualize the music in any kind of historical narrative and instead emphasized nostalgia and individual memory. As the museum’s souvenir book explained, “The Gallery brings back memories of another time—​memories of famous performers on stage; memories of a family gathered around a battered radio or windup phonograph, sharing the thrill of hearing the newest Country hit; and memories of a more recent day—​of television programs and awards shows, and the thrill of an autographed picture, signed just for you, at a Bluegrass festival.”15 Like the narrative of commercial success at the heart of the CMA’s promotional campaigns, the Artists’ Gallery invited visitors to identify with country music as a metaphor for their own personal history.16 Whereas the south wing was devoted to what the souvenir book called “the modern flavor of the Country Music product,” the north wing was more historical, “harken[ing] back to an earlier age … of country general stores, Atwater-​Kent radios and fragile records played on windup phonographs.”17 Despite its focus on the past, however, Bill Ivey later observed that, “there was almost no interpretation here. If there were artifacts on display, the only identification was, you know, ‘Tex Ritter’s gun.’ There was no real attempt to put it in any kind of context.”18 It was perhaps this lack of interpretation that led Archie Green to remark that the entire museum gave the impression of having been “designed and executed by a competent display house but not by a curator involved in the music.”19 For fans, the lack of interpretation may not have been an impediment to the museum serving what the public continues to see as the core function of a historical museum: giving them “a sense of immediacy, personal involvement, and a connection to the past that is being presented to them.”20 That the Foundation’s new museum admirably achieved this goal was particularly evident in its most popular display: a case of artifacts—​nestled along a reconstructed country town boardwalk of porches and storefront windows—​that included personal effects of Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves as well as a floorboard of the plane in which Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and Cowboy Copas had been killed. As museum director Dorothy Gable explained, people “associate[d]‌the artifacts with the artists, and thus associate[d] the artists with themselves,” sometimes even weeping as they reflected on the display.21 Like the museum as a whole, the artifacts exhibit was aimed less at explaining the history of country music than at sacralizing its stars and inviting fans to relive their own experiences of the music. As such, Bill Ivey suggested, it “meant most to people who were very knowledgeable country music fans, because then they could fill in all the blanks themselves. It didn’t mean much to somebody who wanted to learn about the music and didn’t already know about it.”22 The lack of an historical narrative in the museum was undoubtedly due largely to the fact that, as Archie Green had deduced, the exhibits had been put together by the Foundation board, the staff of the CMA, and Jenter Exhibits, Inc., a display firm

60    Oxford Handbook of Country Music with long experience in creating trade show and fair exhibits.23 But even as the professional staff of the library and media center expanded through the late 1960s and 1970s, their research and curatorial expertise was rarely brought to bear in the museum. Ivey recalled that during his first decade of leadership, the library staff generally “developed its constituency outside the building” and felt they “had nothing to do with what went on upstairs [in the museum].” Rather, he said, they “walked in with their heads down and kind of avoided everything until they got down in the basement [where the Library and Media Center were housed]. … They weren’t negative toward [the museum], they just didn’t—​it was like they worked for an organization that had its offices in the basement of [the museum] building. They didn’t work for that organization.”24 This outlook was, in part, a reflection of Ivey’s own feelings. Though he would later change his opinion, at the outset of his tenure as director of the Foundation, he did not imagine the museum as “an intellectually respectable method of communicating with the public.” As a result, he “entirely emphasized the library and didn’t even mess with the museum,” viewing it mainly as “this thing that channeled money in that we could use to improve the library.”25 Thus, during its early years, both the CMA and the staff of the CMF treated the museum as an extension of the CMA’s promotional mission; and its content remained under the control of the CMF board, whose membership consisted of the same industry figures that oversaw the CMA.26 The Foundation board’s lack of historical and museological expertise and the disinterest of the growing professional staff in the Library and Media Center may have inhibited the construction of a coherent historical narrative in the museum, but the board members were intensely occupied with the contours of such a narrative, often in very personal ways. The development of the “pioneers” exhibit in the early 1970s offers a particularly compelling example of how the interests of the board could shape the way country music history was presented in the museum. Plans for the exhibit began in 1969 when board member Ben Rosner introduced a suggestion from Dave Kapp that the museum honor “pioneers in the Country Music Field”—​by which he meant the businessmen, producers, and A&R men who had influenced the genre’s development. This was, perhaps, a self-​serving proposal in that Kapp and his brother, Jack, had themselves shaped the development of the field in their roles as executives for Brunswick and Decca. Indeed, both were ultimately included in the exhibit. But it was also a corrective to what the board perceived to be the limitations of the Hall of Fame as a vehicle for enshrining country music history. Frances Preston of BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) urged the museum to pursue Kapp’s suggestion because, in her opinion, “unless this group does something for the pioneers, they will never be recognized because the Panel of Electors will continue to elect artists to the Hall of Fame, under the current rules, and tend to forget the non-​performers who also contributed much to the industry.”27 The exhibit raised a series of debates that were indicative of larger issues facing the Foundation. One of the most immediate, as Preston’s comments suggested, was the fraught relationship between the Hall of Fame and the museum. The Hall of Fame, like the CMA itself, emerged at the end of an era during which the centralization of the country industry in Nashville had prompted a series of struggles over control of the genre’s

CMA, CMF, and Country Music’s History    61 national image.28 It was therefore painstakingly designed to minimize conflict between potentially opposing interests in the industry, whether between different sectors, such as DJs and record labels, or rivals in the same sector, such as music publishers Acuff-​ Rose Music and Hill and Range Songs, Inc. The electoral process was codified and transparent to avoid charges of factionalism or favoritism. To the degree that a position in the museum might be understood as an honor on par with inclusion in the Hall of Fame, the close control of that decision by only a handful of people was a point of concern. Thus, when the idea of permanently limiting the pioneers exhibit to nine executives arose, several board members objected that the Foundation might be usurping the prerogative of the Hall of Fame electors. Board member Bill Denny, a former CMA president, argued that the museum should not devote too much space to figures “whom the industry has not yet chosen to honor” and that the pioneers section “should represent all those people who have contributed to the growth of the industry, and not be limited to a small number chosen by this group.” (Like Kapp’s initial proposal, Denny’s response to the pioneers project may well have been colored by personal interest. His father, Jim Denny, had been elected to the Hall of Fame in 1966 for his contributions as director of WSM’s Artists Service and founder of Cedarwood Publishing, but he was not among those suggested for the pioneers exhibit.) Harold Hitt, who had recently finished his own term as president of the CMA, raised the possibility that if, as proposed, the pioneers exhibit would permanently feature only nine individuals, “in one way we will be placing more importance on the Pioneer section than the Hall of Fame election.” The idea that the museum might wish to include people merely as examples of a larger trend, rather than as a way of conferring honored status on the individual, was lost to the dominant memorializing logic of the Hall of Fame.29 The exhibit was also emblematic of the pressure to present the history of the industry in a way that distinguished country music from other genres and advanced the CMA’s mission to “ensure that Country Music retains its individuality.”30 The initial design of one diorama, for example, was a “log cabin scene in the hills of the South” that “portray[ed] Art Satherley recording a black blues singer.” The scene accurately represented Satherley’s connections to blues as well as country catalogues and had apparently been requested by Satherley himself; but the board refused to approve the design, even though the late date of their intervention imposed significant additional costs and delays. Instead, it determined that the diorama should “incorporate Ernest V. Stoneman, Roy Acuff, or Gene Autry rather than a blues figure … since the Pioneer display is on country music.”31 Similarly, Dave Kapp—​who had worked with artists in jazz, blues, pop, and country including Count Basie, The Ink Spots, The Andrews Sisters, Harry Belafonte, and Judy Garland—​was originally depicted “in a studio with Bing Crosby preparing to record.” This, too, was rejected. “[I]‌t was the general feeling of the Board that only country music figures should be incorporated,” and it was decided that Crosby should be replaced by Ernest Tubb.32 Such choices obscured the degree to which country had been produced by the same mechanisms as other forms of popular music and contributed to the mythology that positioned the recording industry in Nashville as the expression of a distinctive, insulated musical tradition that had followed its own exceptional developmental path.

62    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Finally, discussions of the pioneers exhibit pointed to the ways the museum’s need to cater to a popular audience might limit the kinds of history it could present. Although all on the board agreed that the pioneers should be represented in some way, opinions varied dramatically on the degree to which the subject would appeal to visitors and, therefore, on how prominent the exhibit should be. Bill Denny opined that, “the general public will not be too interested in the pioneers and … we shouldn’t take up first floor display space for anything that has no great appeal to the public.” Given that his father was among the figures to be represented, it was perhaps understandable that Wesley Rose disagreed with Denny’s assessment, and declared that if, as some suggested, the exhibit were reduced to a plaque listing their names, “we may as well forget the idea of doing something for the pioneers.”33 Bill Ivey later summed up the problem succinctly. “It was a boring group of people, because they were to the average public faceless,” he observed. “[H]‌ow do we honor these people? Put them in an exhibit that is intrinsically interesting, even if they’re not. Link them with stars who are known wherever possible. … [Put them] in settings … that contain performers who have something to do with them or in settings that are intrinsically entertaining, [like] an old record store.”34 Although the idea of dioramas to dramatize the historical importance of non-​ performers resolved the immediate issue, the need to make the museum entertaining as well as informative was a harbinger of the trends toward corporatization that would come to dominate museum management over the next several decades.35

“Something They Can Apply An Intellectual Approach To”: The Foundation beyond the Museum The museum was guided by the Foundation’s industry-​ oriented board members throughout its first decade, producing a fragmented historical narrative that primarily advanced the promotional mission of the CMA, but it was joined from the outset by a set of initiatives aimed at an entirely different constituency: the academics and intellectuals who had long dismissed country music as mass culture detritus. The first of these initiatives, the Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center, became the mechanism by which the Foundation built its institutional capacity for preserving, researching, and disseminating country music’s history. Its projects—​particularly The Journal of Country Music, The Country Music Foundation Press, and Country Music Foundation Records—​advanced a claim to cultural respectability that the museum alone could not ensure. But these ventures raised their own set of issues, including the degree to which the Foundation should function as an academic or a public education institution; how it would resolve the tension between the demand for financial self-​sufficiency and the desire to explore subjects and use methodologies that might not be marketable or even

CMA, CMF, and Country Music’s History    63 palatable to public audiences; and the degree to which it should attempt to control historical interpretations based on its collections. Despite the fact that the Foundation had been established primarily as a fundraising vehicle for construction of the museum building, its mission began to expand beyond the museum almost as soon as it was chartered. CMA board member Joe Allison, whose experience writing the association’s sales shows for broadcasters and advertisers had given him a firsthand understanding of the way history could legitimize country music as a cultural form, raised the possibility of including a library and research center among the new organization’s objectives. One of country’s most important selling points, he argued, was its folk origins, which, especially in that era of revivalism, gave “the college kids something they can apply an intellectual approach to and study.”36 A library and research center with all of the scholarly trappings would be the ideal vehicle to indulge this interest. Several board members objected to this new conception of the Foundation’s purpose, but when the CMA convened in San Francisco in the summer of 1965, Allison arranged for the Foundation board to meet with representatives of UCLA’s John Edwards Memorial Foundation (JEMF), then the largest library and archive dedicated to old-​time and hillbilly music.37 There, Ed Kahn delivered the same message he had propounded in the Journal of American Folklore: that the public image of country music as “a part of the [music] industry that makes money, but does not contribute to American culture” would change only when the industry itself recognized its history as culturally significant.38 To a group of executives who had struggled to gain respect in their own industry and in American culture at large, it was a powerful argument. The board began to plan for a library on the mezzanine of the new building. By 1966, as the Foundation entered the last phases of fundraising to complete the Hall of Fame and Museum, the library had become a central part of the building plan, but the conceptual difficulty the board faced in trying to reconcile the public education function of the museum with the academic mission of the library was evident. A fundraising brochure described the proposed library as an “exciting feature to the serious student of country music,” and the accompanying artist’s sketch depicted a conventional reading room dominated by bookshelves and worktables. But the declaration that “Kinescopes and sound films of such stars as Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams will bring the past to life in this unique ‘sight and sound’ library” made the facility sound more like one of the museum’s entertaining exhibits.39 Even as late as 1969, the board seemed uncertain about how the research mission of the library related to the tourism mission of the museum. As they discussed the building plans for an expanded Library and Media Center in the basement, they debated “whether or not the public would be allowed to go downstairs and view the library through glass. … It was the general feeling that tourists should not be encouraged to visit the lower level because of disturbing students studying in the library and also because some would try to go into the library.”40 Although the logistical concern was certainly reasonable, the discussion highlighted in an almost comical way the distinction between the audience for the library and the one for the museum.41

64    Oxford Handbook of Country Music At least through the mid-​1970s, then, the museum was aimed at encouraging fans’ identification with country music and providing the industry with a venue for honoring its participants, whereas the library was imagined as the central vehicle for establishing the cultural value of both country music and the Foundation itself. Nearly every description of the library served as a claim to cultural authority. Writing to the members of the Ralph Stanley fan club in 1969, music librarian Thomas D. Warren explained that the purpose of the library was to “enhance the cultural and educational values of country and western music as a genuine and dynamic full expression,” and offered an image of the facility itself that seemed, in its reverent language, calculated to conjure images of the Library of Congress or the British Museum. The library’s holdings, he wrote, had “been utilized by numerous researchers working on advanced degrees at various colleges and universities.”42 Such scholarly inquiries were “constantly proceeding under the careful eyes of the librarian,” and would soon be dignified with “[s]‌uitable stacks and study area [that would] provide students with the atmosphere and facilities for the work.”43 The Foundation clearly wished to serve as a resource for students of country music, but the board’s attitude also betrayed significant reservations about relinquishing control over interpretations of the genre’s history that might be produced based on their archive. This concern was evident, for example, when the board was approached by a radio production company, led by Johnny Cash Show writer Les Poulliot, for permission to use interview material from the Foundation library in a syndicated history series they hoped to sell to radio stations around the country. Although the group was willing to secure on its own all the necessary releases for use of the material, the request raised new questions about just how the information being collected by the library and archive would be used. Several board members noted that the repositories on which the Foundation library was modeled, including the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts and the JEMF, placed no restrictions on commercial use, provided researchers paid a fee and obtained their own rights clearance. The question of liability was only one part of the concern, however. Far more troublesome was the possibility that the Foundation’s materials would produce a history they did not support. Wesley Rose argued that the series would be merely “the [company’s] conception of the history of Country Music, but that it would not necessarily be something the Country Music Hall of Fame would want to endorse.” “If people see the tape was put together with the approval of the Country Music Hall of Fame,” he worried, they “would think this is a true and factual history.” He felt the Foundation should not “endorse any man’s story when it is merely his opinion.” Harold Hitt suggested that, “in order to use the Library properly, we would have to see that all things endorsed by CMA or CMF would be done with our cooperation … plus CMF officials would have final approval.” Frank Jones simply felt that the archive’s holdings should not “be used for public performance, but rather for historical value only to the student.”44 The idea that the Foundation would need to approve every interpretation based on its collections, or that its media holdings should not be used in commercial productions, placed significant limitations on the Foundation’s mission—​particularly when, as Jo Walker pointed

CMA, CMF, and Country Music’s History    65 out, popular demand for such programming was high. “[M]‌any radio stations inquire at CMA wanting historical tapes and programs on Country Music,” she told the board, “and naturally, the men preparing the history could not do it at no cost to the station.”45 Even allies within the industry were subject to scrutiny. When Bill Williams, the southern editor of Billboard and former president of the CMA, approached the Foundation with the idea of a Billboard special issue on the Hall of Fame, the executive committee called a special meeting to consider the proposal. Though the issue would, because of the cost of its production, necessarily be a commercial venture supported by ad revenue, Billboard offered to provide the Foundation with at-​cost copies to sell in the Hall of Fame and Museum gift shop, or simply to turn the plates over so the museum could print its own copies for sale. Most importantly, the trade paper assured the board that “the Foundation could have control over the contents of the book.” Nonetheless, the board worried that the special issue might affect “future plans of having a Hall of Fame press,” and Williams felt obliged to assure them that the final product “would definitely be a quality, high-​class book with in-​depth coverage of the Hall of Fame and history of Country Music.”46 Even with the assurance that the tribute would be “published by Billboard, and controlled by the Foundation,” the board’s executive committee was evenly split on whether to allow it—​and it was not until the full board approved it that the project was allowed to go forward.47 For some outsiders to the Nashville music community, the Foundation’s insularity and its reticence in its early years about cooperating with historians—​whether commercial or academic—​who were not connected to the Nashville industry was troubling. New York Times journalist Robert Shelton, whose cowritten book The Country Music Story (1966) was one of the earliest attempts to present a narrative history of the genre, expressed frustration at the lack of support he received from the industry, though their attitude generally took the form of benign neglect more than interference. He told Archie Green that in his “attempts to develop strong cooperation on the book or other projects,” he had found the CMA and the Foundation “so very warm and so very friendly, and yet, when it comes to some concrete action, some direct help, suddenly nothing actually happens.”48 Green found the same to be true of his efforts to promote cooperation between the JEMF and the CMF. He reported to Shelton that his own visit to Nashville “had an Alice-​in-​Wonderland air of real unreality. Everyone was friendly and charming; all were eager to hear my story; none gave the JEMF a dime. … I do not feel bitter—​just incredulous.”49 Shelton attributed this reticence to an “old deep-​dish xenophobia.” “Let’s face it,” he observed, “[T]‌hese people have been taken, have been used for so long that … the surface smile can really hide a lot of deeper resentment, fear, suspicion and caution.”50 In the early 1970s, however, the board’s desire to establish the intellectual respectability of the Foundation won out over whatever suspicions they might have harbored about relinquishing control over the substance of the histories to be produced on the basis of the Foundation’s collection or about academics in general.51 This desire was at the heart of the board’s approach to hiring a new full-​time librarian and potential executive director for the Foundation in 1970. While they acknowledged that the board might wish to

66    Oxford Handbook of Country Music hire a qualified functionary who could merely “operate the library with file clerks, etc.,” the search committee charged with hiring the new librarian urged the board instead to “seek a dynamic person who could take hold of the operation of the library … the type of person who can bring a lot of stature to the Foundation.” In a rare moment of fiscal and managerial liberality that highlighted the importance they attached to their aspirations for the library, the board fully delegated hiring responsibilities to a library subcommittee, agreeing that, “as long as [the committee is] in agreement as to the person that they want to hire … they do not have to get further approval on either what they will pay him or who the person is.”52 The board’s desire to engage a bona fide academic was clear in their unsuccessful attempt to hire the JEMF’s Norm Cohen for the position. Although it proved challenging to identify “an academic person in the field of Country Music” for the position, they were ultimately successful in hiring Bill Ivey, a graduate student who had studied with folklorist Richard Dorson at Indiana University.53 The choice of one of Dorson’s students as librarian and subsequently inaugural director of the Foundation was somewhat ironic. Dorson was the leading critic of folklorists such as B. A. Botkin, Charles Seeger, and Alan Lomax who viewed folklore and folk music as living, functional culture that could be expressed through popular contemporary forms as well as through purely grassroots oral tradition.54 Dorson referred to efforts of such popularizers as “fakelore” and denounced them for surrendering folklore to the “cavernous maw of mass media” and seeking to “polish up, overhaul, and distribute folklore to the American people.”55 He was particularly suspicious of folk music and the folk revival; and indeed, Ivey was warned upon applying to the program that he should not broadcast his interest in bluegrass, which, he was told, “was an anathema to Dorson at the time.”56 Dorson did not view country music as folk culture in any case, and Ivey’s graduate work with faculty in history and ethnomusicology gave him a healthy skepticism of Dorson’s attitude toward folk music specifically and cultural value more generally; but he was nonetheless influenced by Dorson’s belief that public education or popularizing efforts and legitimate scholarship were mutually exclusive. In addition to being motivated by his perception of the board’s attitude and by Dorson’s ideas about the proper limits of folklore as a discipline, Ivey’s efforts to turn the Foundation into an academic institution were shaped by his own aspirations. As he told John Rumble, his strategy in his first years was driven by the feeling “that [he] had abandoned [his] academic peers and had gone out on a limb in an organization that had no particular credibility or status in an academic environment.”57 “My gut instinct,” he said, “was to [do] things with [the Foundation] that would make my old friends, who I’d gone to graduate school with, sit up and say, ‘Oh, well, Ivey’s really out there doing something legitimate. He’s not just fooling around.’ ”58 He quickly instituted an ambitious program to secure the library’s research reputation, including “enlargement of our standard holdings, further enlargement of our oral history interview program,” establishment of a photo archive and a press, and a promotional campaign designed to “widen the public and academic knowledge of our facility and to enhance its position of prestige so as to quickly assume its intended purpose of being the most important collection and source of information and knowledge of the Country Music Industry.”59 He encouraged

CMA, CMF, and Country Music’s History    67 library staff to participate in professional academic conferences; worked to build relationships with government institutions such as the Smithsonian; and sought, unsuccessfully, to have the Library and Media Center join the Joint Libraries of Vanderbilt University, Scarritt College, and Peabody College for Teachers.60 He even experimented with the possibility that the Foundation could become an independent teaching institution. In 1972, the board approved a proposal to have the Foundation institute a program consisting of classes in “American Popular Music since 1890,” “The Country Music Tradition,” “The Instrumental Tradition in Anglo-​American Music,” and “Problems in Special Music Library Methods,” upon completion of which students would receive a certificate.61 The most visible effort to appeal to scholars and enhance the Foundation’s academic reputation, however, was the Journal of Country Music (JCM). The library had begun to publish a newsletter in 1970 featuring short updates and catalogue listings, brief biographies drawn mostly from secondary sources, and examples from the library’s interview project. Ivey immediately overhauled it on the model of Folklore and Folk Music Archivist, a publication he had been involved with at Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music. The first issue of the newsletter released under his editorship consisted of a list of new holdings and a single article, “Howdy Folks! Welcome to Renfro Valley: Modern Folklore in the Kentucky Mountains,” by Howard Marshall, a fellow graduate student at Indiana. Applying conventional folkloric fieldwork methods to the modern radio show, the article implicitly argued for the legitimacy of country music as an appropriate object of analysis for traditional academic inquiry.62 The following issue announced the newsletter’s transformation into the JCM. “Although the new publication will continue to contain notes on activities of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and the Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center,” Ivey explained to readers and potential contributors, “the focus of the new publication will be on interpretive articles treating Country Music subjects. The Journal of Country Music will consider articles of any reasonable length on the following topics: Country Music, Old Timey Music, Bluegrass, Western Swing, Gospel Music, Anglo-​American Folksong, Recording Studio Operation, The Business of Music.” Like Marshall’s article, the list gestured to the synthesis of an academic approach and contemporary topics Ivey hoped to encourage, indulging the interests of more conservative folklorists who were primarily interested in folksong, old-​time, and bluegrass—​as well as the concerns of those, like the group gathered around the JEMF, who viewed the contemporary industry as a context to which folkloric analysis could be usefully applied. Though Ivey subsequently referred to the early JCM dismissively as a “funny little journal” and averred that he started it “not because … there was [a]‌perceived need or contribution to the field,” but simply because he “wanted a damned journal,” the Journal actually became an important venue for shaping the field of country music studies and connecting the work of the Foundation to the academic community.63 Its first issue set the tone, featuring an article by Douglas Green that linked traditional broadside balladry with the Nashville Sound; an essay by Richard Peterson and Marcus Gowan that interrogated the “southern thesis” by analyzing the names of country

68    Oxford Handbook of Country Music bands on 1,950 radio shows for their regional associations; and a discography of North Carolina Ramblers guitarist Norman Woodlieff, who, as an old-​time musician who had recorded for Frank Walker in New York in the 1920s, represented the links between folk and commercial music even in the earliest days of the country industry.64 By bringing together folk, old-​time, postwar, and contemporaneous rural music from the south and the nation, this inaugural issue mapped an intellectual terrain and historical narrative that differed from and exceeded the approach to the genre’s history presented in the museum as well as the approach that dominated among folklorists. Over the coming decade, the Journal would feature contributions by nearly every leading academic in the nascent field of country music studies—​including Norm Cohen, Bill Malone, Richard Peterson, Nolan Porterfield, Neil Rosenberg, D.  K. Wilgus, and Charles Wolfe—​in addition to presenting important historical work by Foundation staff members such as Douglas Green, Bob Pinson, Ronnie Pugh, and John Rumble and ultimately by journalists as well. In doing so, it provided a unique point of interchange between all three groups of researchers. The JCM continued to appeal to folklorists throughout this period and engaged in the intellectual debates then characterizing the field, but it also represented new disciplinary approaches and paradigms. An exchange between Saundra Keyes, D. K. Wilgus and Nathan Hurvitz, and Charles Wolfe addressed the debate among folklorists over the analytical role of historical context in assessing folksong and the degree to which mass media environments such as record labels and recording studios might themselves be examined as social contexts that produce folk practices of their own, along the lines of what Howard Becker would subsequently describe as an “art world.”65 The JCM also represented emerging paradigms in fields outside of folklore, particularly in providing a home for Richard Peterson’s early work on the country music industry on which his leading role in developing the production of the culture perspective was based.66 Like Becker’s later examination of the “art world,” this approach focused on “how the symbolic elements of culture are shaped by the systems within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved.”67 Though conceived in relation to the disciplinary concerns of sociology, it was, like the contextualist approach to folklore, fundamentally historical in its focus on change over time. Moreover, the JCM challenged some of the central tenets of both the evolving academic literature on country music and the narrative promoted by the CMA in the museum, promotional materials, and trade publications. Perhaps ironically, given the CMA’s investment in emphasizing country’s southern roots, the JCM became particularly welcoming to research that challenged the southern thesis, publishing work by Neil Rosenberg, Simon Bronner, Timothy Patterson, and Roderick Roberts on folk, old-​time, and country music in the north.68 The degree of controversy such work could provoke was indicated by Norm Cohen’s recollection that Bronner’s article on the subject in the JEMF Quarterly “elicited some strong negative reaction from some readers. … I believe some threatened to terminate their subscriptions if this sort of work continued.”69 The JCM also challenged what Ivey called the “devolutionary theory” that dominated both folkloric and historical scholarship on country. This theory, Ivey felt,

CMA, CMF, and Country Music’s History    69 sketched a narrative in which folk music, imagined as “pure, nice stuff that was in the mountains” was gradually “corrupted by urbanization, commercialization, [and] contact with other styles.” Throughout the 1970s, he argued, the research produced and disseminated by the Foundation led the field in viewing even early old-​time and country artists as professionals and in emphasizing the genre’s connections with pop.70 The Journal of Country Music represented one of the Foundation’s most significant contributions to shaping the scholarly historiography of country music in these years; and while the board rejected an early request from Ivey to provide greater funding for it, they regarded it as an important component in establishing the cultural and intellectual legitimacy of the Foundation and seldom questioned the wisdom of expending the organization’s resources to produce it.71 Other aspects of the research program, however, highlighted more vividly the potential conflict between a traditional academic agenda and the imperative that the Foundation be economically self-​sufficient, a tension that became apparent almost immediately in relation to the Country Music Foundation Press (CMF Press). Initially, the CMF Press, like the JCM, aimed at serving the interests of academic researchers. Its first releases, reprints of the 1921 Gibson and 1940 Martin instrument catalogues, held little appeal for fans or the general public. The board “suggested that more popular and commercial items might be sold,” but Ivey countered that “the Press was set up with the intention of being a historical and educational press, and not a profit-​ making venture,” and reminded the board of the “need to print educational items to establish credibility for the Foundation.”72 The next release, a reprint of the Proceedings of the 1890 Phonograph Convention, fared even worse; a year after its publication, the CMF Press had only sold 26 of its 1,000-​copy run.73 Neil Rosenberg’s Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys: An Illustrated Discography, published the same year, represented an attempt to produce titles that were both academically significant and held the potential for attracting wider interest—​and it did prove more popular, despite initially being available only in the museum gift shop.74 But by the end of 1974, the CMF Press was evidently struggling, and the board appointed a special committee to evaluate the titles the CMF Press proposed to issue.75 Indeed, Ivey himself recognized the need to reorient publications toward a wider public and began pursuing the possibility of reprinting two popular biographies from the 1930s: one of Jimmie Rodgers written by his widow in 1935, which appeared in 1975 with an introduction by Rodgers’s biographer Nolan Porterfield, and one of Bob Wills written by journalist Ruth Sheldon in 1938, which did not appear until the 1990s.76 But Ivey continued to appeal to the board’s interest in academic legitimacy to defend the CMF Press, arguing that its publications “assisted in building the Foundation’s educational image.”77 By 1976, with just over $2,000 in its account, the Press was in dire straits.78 After releasing Alton Delmore’s autobiography Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity in 1977 (with an introduction and discography by Charles Wolfe), it did not publish another book-​length scholarly work for more than a decade.79 Ivey’s difficulties in balancing sales potential with academic appeal pointed to the limitations market concerns imposed on the Foundation’s efforts to operate as an academic institution.

70    Oxford Handbook of Country Music By contrast, the Foundation’s work with record labels suggested that certain kinds of scholarship were by no means antithetical to commercial viability. In addition to serving academics, the Library and Media Center had always been intended as “a research center for all people concerned with country and western music … in particular, recording artists, their agents, musicians, composers, disc jockeys, radio and television personnel, music publishers, trade publications and the recording industry.”80 As the Foundation’s recorded sound archive grew, particularly with the acquisition of the Bob Pinson Collection in 1971, their materials and the expertise of their staff were increasingly in demand among record labels hoping to parley back catalogue holdings into currently saleable products. After serving as advisors to major labels for several reissue projects, the staff began to consider the possibility of “a modest record label for re-​issue purposes for collector items not available through any outlet.” Although the board had questions about licensing issues and whether the Foundation was sufficiently staffed to manage a record label, the project seemed to offer the perfect synthesis of educational mission and economic viability, especially after Ivey’s liner notes for RCA’s 1973 Jimmie Rodgers retrospective earned a Grammy nomination. A record label run by the Press, Ivey suggested, “would be a profit making venture and would be a prestigious, historical project.”81 Over the next several decades—​particularly after 1983, when Kyle Young began to oversee reissue work in his role as Deputy Director for Special Projects—​the Foundation and the major labels developed a “cooperative and symbiotic relationship” that produced dozens of retrospective titles and box sets, sometimes released by the commercial labels and sometimes by Country Music Foundation Records.82 Often including historically significant material—​such as Hank Williams demos or Louvin Brothers radio performances that had not been previously available and accompanied by extensive liner notes—​these titles brought together intellectual credibility with entertainment profitability. Contrasting the Hall of Fame’s products with those of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which he said had “always seemed like nothing more than merchandise,” New York Times music critic Neil Strauss praised the Foundation’s releases as essential cultural artifacts. “[A]‌CD or book with the yellow circular logo of the Country Music Hall of Fame,” he wrote, “has always been an object of cultural value, a necessity in the collection of anyone who appreciates American music.”83 For Ivey and Young, they were a “way of taking the story of the museum and the material in the foundation’s library and getting it out to people in a form they can enjoy and learn from”; and they set the model for the increasing corporatization of the Foundation as a whole.84

Popular Education and the Corporatized Museum Throughout the 1970s, the Foundation’s approach to telling country music’s history had been bifurcated between the museum, which was dominated by a piecemeal narrative

CMA, CMF, and Country Music’s History    71 determined in large part by members of the country music industry, and the Library and Media Center and its associated projects, guided by researchers who saw their primary constituency as the academic community. By the end of that decade, however, a number of experiences had led Bill Ivey to the conclusion that the Foundation was “not an academic institution [but rather] a popular education institution.”85 In part, this reorientation of the mission was simply realism. The Foundation had no foothold either in academia or in government, the two traditional sources of economic support for preservationist and educational efforts. It had to be financially self-​sustaining and, as Ivey put it, “[I]‌t’s a product of selling [history] that it has to entertain as well as inform. It can’t be academically accurate without being simultaneously entertaining.”86 But the developing public education approach was also motivated by a genuine desire to have the greatest possible impact on the telling of country music’s history. Ivey acknowledged that the emphasis on popular history and entertainment might not result in “the kind of product that will satisfy an academic researcher in terms of its depth or the extent of its contribution to what people know,” but he felt strongly that making “changes in the way country music gets presented to a mass audience,” even if only superficial ones, was just as meaningful a goal. “[I]f you can make the kinds of changes that make [history] authentic and accurate in context, [if] you tell people things about it that are true and that are also entertaining … you can really take a lot of people and make them all know 10 or 15% more than they did before about country music,” he argued. “[T]hat kind of stuff, that’s the role of the non-​university educational or cultural organization.”87 Ironically, it was Archie Green who served as the final catalyst in the Foundation’s transformation from academic to popular education institution. As Ivey recounted to John Rumble Archie came through and was visiting. He came, and he sat right where you are sitting [unclear]. He said, “You know, this is now the leading country music conservator organization, and your journal is the nicest journal. It’s time for you to do this and this and this and this.” He started listing the priorities of maybe thirty-​five people out there who are university scholars interested in country music. That’s what he thought this whole organization should do. It suddenly hit me; we’ve got a half million people a year coming through upstairs, and … it’s much more important to make sure that what they get is credible, meaningful, educational, entertaining. If we can make them, make that half million people [marginally] more knowledgeable about country music, that’s much more important than helping [a music historian] do his next book that’s going to be mainly read by a handful of people. … [F]‌rom that point on, I completely changed my orientation toward seeing this place as a popular education center, not as an academic institution, and saw it as outreach, as something that had to be entertaining, that had to pay its own way, that had to be a business.88

The Foundation’s new philosophy reflected not only Ivey’s own experience but also wider trends in museology. Beginning in the 1970s, museums increasingly focused on a corporate model that viewed “the education and welcoming of the visitor as the museum’s raison d’etre,” and placed less emphasis on its role in producing or codifying

72    Oxford Handbook of Country Music academic knowledge. Spearheaded by J. Carter Brown at the National Gallery of Art, this model relied on large crowds and “blockbuster” exhibits both to fund museums and to validate their mission. The “new museology” had the benefit of acknowledging the value of “areas of inquiry previously thought to be outside the purview of museology proper,” including entertainment and commercial culture such as country music; but it also potentially created pressures to subordinate knowledge production to “consumption, economic development, and inter-​urban competition” for tourism revenue.89 Nonetheless, the shift offered the Foundation greater latitude in its activities than ever before in that the pursuit of academic legitimacy no longer required distancing the organization from the taint of commercialism. On the contrary, embracing entrepreneurialism was now the standard posture at the world’s most prestigious public cultural institutions. The shift in the organization’s mission was visible across all of its divisions. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the research staff became more involved in the presentation of materials in the museum, and the narrative presented there became more cohesive and historically oriented, with new exhibits dedicated to subgenres such as western swing, honky tonk, and bluegrass. Though it was still organized primarily around biographical narratives of stars and did not explicitly stitch the parts into a whole or offer logical connections between the various styles it represented, the organization of the displays implicitly followed what had become the standard historical narrative outlined initially in Bill Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A.90 At the same time that the Foundation’s professional research capacity was brought to bear in the museum, the popularizing mission of the museum was applied to areas that previously had been dominated by academic concerns. In 1979, the Journal of Country Music featured Don Williams, then one of the most popular artists in country music, on its first full-​color photo cover. Inside, however, an interview with Williams was joined by more academically inclined essays on Fiddlin’ John Carson, women in rockabilly, and old-​time Edison Records releases. The next several issues moved further toward popular appeal, featuring journalists and nonacademic writers such as Roy Blount Jr., Chet Flippo, Ellis Nassour, and Nick Tosches alongside academics such as Bill Malone and Wayne Daniel. Over time, the content of the JCM was increasingly produced by journalists and the staff of the Foundation, with fewer contributions from traditional academics. The paucity of voices from within the academic establishment may have represented the publication’s diminishing connections to that constituency, but it also enhanced the Foundation’s role in shaping research agendas and it bolstered its status as a legitimate historical authority in its own right. Indeed, the JCM more than once led the field in exploring new areas of research. Though academic writers on country music would not take up issues of race or sexual orientation in depth until the 2010s, for example, the JCM focused on these subjects in the 1990s.91 Other publications by the Foundation evinced a similar mixture of popular appeal and substantive scholarship. When it returned to publishing books in the 1980s, the CMF Press’s first release was Cooking with Country Music Stars (1986), a title clearly aimed at capturing the “real sales potential” the board had urged on the Press for more

CMA, CMF, and Country Music’s History    73 than a decade.92 But the Foundation also found ways to disseminate in book-​length format the same blend of academic and journalistic research that had come to characterize the JCM that allowed for more in-​depth inquiry. The 1988 collection, Country: The Music and the Musicians:  Pickers, Slickers, Cheatin’ Hearts & Superstars, embodied both the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. Produced and edited by the Foundation staff but published by Abbeville Press, it capitalized on the model set by the Foundation’s work on recording reissues: it provided historical content in a salable, entertaining format with minimal financial risk to the organization. Its glossy format, packed with full-​color photos and sidebars, was obviously calculated to appeal to the general reader rather than to academics. Center for Popular Music director Paul Wells opined somewhat condescendingly that it “reads, and appears, rather like an issue of National Geographic” and lamented the absence of footnotes and musical analysis; but he also grudgingly acknowledged that the collection was “far more substantive than one might at first suppose when confronted with its coffee-​table-​tome heft and glamour.”93 While this reflexive rejection of “glamour” created a specious binary between accessibility and intellectual value, Wells also pointed to more significant consequences of aiming for popular appeal. As he noted, the topics represented by the essays ultimately defined country music exclusively in relation to its commercial identity, beginning its narrative with a comparison of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, and only fleetingly exploring its relationship to other genres.94 Moreover, according to Wells, as was “characteristic of the CMF’s approach to the presentation of country music history,” the book gave “only a nod to roots; the stars are what are really important.”95 It was a restatement of often, and sometimes unfairly, repeated criticism of the Foundation’s approach to country music history; and despite Wells’s generally positive evaluation of the book itself, it summarized the ways the Foundation’s popular education stance diverged from the methodologies and concerns of the growing cadre of popular music academics. Ironically, it was arguably the success of the corporatization strategy that allowed the Foundation to address some of these criticisms as the new millennium dawned. In 2002, after more than a decade of negotiations, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum moved out of its original location at the head of Music Row and into a lavish new building downtown, where it functioned as a cornerstone of the emerging South of Broadway (SoBro) arts, entertainment, and tourism district. In keeping with the museum marketization paradigm, which “reconstruct[s]‌museums as tourist attractions (for entertainment) rather than merely as places of education or knowledge,” the new museum was designed to be “iconic in [its] own right, as opposed to for the objects [it] contain[ed].”96 The building was an imposing edifice larded with careful references to country’s commercial history and dominated by an enormous sweeping arc modeled on a 1950s Cadillac tailfin, “a favorite of many rockabilly and hard country singers.”97 The Nashville Scene enthused that it was “ambitious architecture assertively sited”; and its stately, postmodern quality simultaneously underscored country music’s status as a major entertainment industry and the museum’s stature as a distinguished cultural institution.98 The reflexive emphasis on the museum’s role as both tourism-​oriented entertainment and preeminent research center was evident in the interior design as well. The earliest

74    Oxford Handbook of Country Music proposal to move the museum downtown, offered by then-​Mayor Phil Bredesen, would have separated the research collections from the public space of the museum, with the latter being housed in the new public library and the Hall of Fame and exhibits being incorporated into the envelope of the new downtown sports arena.99 The Foundation board rejected the idea, demonstrating the degree to which the public education orientation had integrated the research and outreach functions of the organization and the recognition that the pursuits of library depended on the ability to monetize the history it produced through the museum. Instead, the new building returned to the old concept of the library behind glass that had been dismissed twenty years earlier, turning the research mission into a visible, public symbol of the museum’s legitimacy. Whereas the studio session and record-​pressing exhibits in the original museum had presented the production processes of the country music industry, the new museum displayed its own industrial process, allowing visitors to view the “archival and curatorial staff … going about the daily process of preservation and study” in a “two-​story glass vault [created] to expose the archive and its research,” making the research and preservation mission “an integral part of the museum experience.”100 Even the museum catalogue for sale in the gift shop positioned the museum itself as part of the industry’s history, including in its historical timeline the opening of the original museum and the opening of the Library and Media Center alongside milestones such as Buck Owens’s signing to Capitol Records, the release of Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, and Patsy Cline’s death.101 The expansion of the museum also allowed for the first concerted effort to present a cohesive historical narrative of country music in the exhibit “Sing Me Back Home,” developed collaboratively by the Foundation’s museum, education, research, and curatorial staffs. Conceived as the core of the visitor experience, the exhibit traced the development of country music from its folk and commercial roots through the turn of the twenty-​first century—​using, as Senior Historian John Rumble put it, “original artifacts that told parts of the story through their very appearance.”102 In some ways—​particularly in its desire to present country music’s history as the story of the genre’s “evolution from a tiny, disrespected part of the music industry to an internationally accepted giant”—​the exhibit continued to echo the central promotional themes the CMA had always envisioned for the Foundation.103 But it also presented a nuanced and complex version of country music history that worked against the mythologizing impulses that had sometimes characterized the previous museum.104 Starting the historical narrative with an examination of country’s roots that emphasized the genre’s connections not only to traditional Anglo-​American folksong but also to African American folk music, gospel hymnal music, and Tin Pan Alley and the commercial sheet music industry, the exhibit no longer conflated the history of the music with the history of the country music recording industry. Displays on the early country recording industry in New York and country radio in the 1920s and 1930s positioned country as a national rather than southern phenomenon from the outset. Later cases on pop/​rock-​to-​country crossovers such as Glenn Campbell and Emmylou Harris and country rock emphasized country’s relationship to other genres, though the curious omission of country soul left Ray Charles

CMA, CMF, and Country Music’s History    75 awkwardly split between displays on the Nashville Sound and one dubbed “Nashville Skyline: Rocking Back to the Country.”105 Nonetheless, the exhibit clearly incorporated the insights of the wealth of scholarship on country music that had appeared in the preceding decades and fulfilled the design team’s ambition to “[s]‌how country music’s origins, stylistic evolution and diversity, ethnic diversity, [and] its relationship to social change and historical events and trends” in a way that the previous museum had never attempted.106 The new building also allowed the museum to move further from the Hall of Fame’s canonizing function by providing rotating exhibit space that could be used to explore less conventional aspects of country music history. The first exhibits in these spaces challenged the traditional emphases of the Foundation’s basic historical narrative. “Treasures Untold: Unique Collections from Devoted Fans” inverted the usual privileging of star biographies and extended the connection between cultural and social history by documenting the everyday practices through which fans interacted with the music they loved; and “Nashville Salutes Texas!: Country from the Lone Star State” served as a reminder that Nashville had never been the exclusive home of country music. But it was the next major temporary exhibit, “Night Train to Nashville,” that demonstrated the museum’s new flexibility and reach in presenting country’s history. Focusing on the city’s rhythm and blues history, the exhibit placed country music in the wider context of popular music history and used music as a lens through which to understand changing racial relations in the South during the postwar and civil rights eras; the accompanying box set earned a Grammy for its producers, Foundation staff members Daniel Cooper and Michael Gray. Though the museum was still mindful of the need to appeal to core country fans by also using it for in-​depth explorations of orthodox topics such as Hank Williams and the Bakersfield Sound, the temporary exhibit space permitted regular examination of country’s links to other styles, as it did with installations examining Ray Charles’s and Bob Dylan’s connections to the country industry in Nashville. These exhibits demonstrated the degree to which the public education and corporatization models actually served to expand and diversify the histories the Foundation produced rather than reify the traditional, industry-​driven narrative. Through the CMF, the country music industry has played a pivotal role in supporting and shaping both popular and academic understandings of the genre’s history. Though its earliest initiatives were closely guided by industry figures, and sometimes seemed calculated primarily to serve the promotional agenda of the CMA, those in the industry quickly ceded the preservation and interpretation of country’s past to a staff of professionals in folklore, history, and museum management. To the degree that the Foundation’s telling of that history still revolves around recognizable stars, defines country music by its connection to the commercial industry, or employs a progressive narrative about the industry’s rise from a disparaged backwater to international mainstream (a set of criticisms that oversimplifies the diversity of the Foundation’s output), it does so because of a different kind of corporate influence: the need to function as a corporation itself, albeit a nonprofit one. As Bill Ivey’s protégé and successor Kyle Young once put it, “No money, no mission.”107 The power of that imperative to shape the mission is

76    Oxford Handbook of Country Music substantial. By 2014, the Foundation’s annual budget was more than $30 million, paid for almost entirely by earned revenue in the form of museum admissions, retail and restaurant sales, and special events fees.108 But the commercial imperative is not antithetical to depth or accuracy. In exhibits and box sets such as From Where I Stand, Night Train to Nashville, and Nashville Cats, the Foundation has tested and expanded the boundaries of country music’s historical orthodoxy. And although its staffing shifted in the twenty-​first century to emphasize journalistic and professional rather than academic backgrounds, the Foundation continued to be a crucial source of support for the growing number of country music scholars who had, since 1964, found a comfortable place in academe. Roy Rosenzweig has argued that the practice of history should be “shaped by popular concerns and … enriched by insights based on systematic and detailed study of the past,” and that it should “link the past and the present in an active and continuing conversation.”109 Embodying both the limitations and the possibilities of public history making, the Country Music Foundation has done just this.

Notes 1. “The Country Music Foundation,” Journal of Country Music 3, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 22. The text is drawn directly from the description of the Foundation featured on the last page of The Official Country Music Hall of Fame Souvenir Book, an undated tour guide that appears to have been prepared in 1970. The Official Country Music Hall of Fame Souvenir Book, Country Music Hall of Fame Proposals, 1966-​77, Series 1, Box 2, Connie B. Gay Collection, Frist Library and Archive, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tenn. 2. Ed Kahn, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Resource,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (July–​September 1965), 264. 3. Leo Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Treitler, “Toward a Desegregated Music Historiography,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (Spring 1996), 3–​10. 4. D. K. Wilgus, “An Introduction to the Study of Hillbilly Music,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (July–​September, 1965): 201. 5. For a compelling example of this advantage, see Bill Ivey’s account of rescuing more than 2,500 early Decca country 78s from the Music Corporation of America (MCA) headquarters in 1973 with the assistance of Jack Loetz, an MCA executive and CMF board member who called Ivey at the eleventh hour when he learned that MCA planned to simply dispose of the records. See Bill Ivey, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 27–​29. As one of the library’s earliest proponents, Joe Allison, observed in the late 1990s, “It’s the only game in town. … [T]‌his is going to be the one. Somebody can’t start one in Dallas and do it. So this is going to be it” (Joe Allison, interviewed by Diane Pecknold, March 26, 1999, Nashville, TN, Tape 2, Side B). This was something of an overstatement because several other repositories contain significant collections on country music. The Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina houses the John Edwards Memorial Foundation Collection as well as other important archives covering roots and folk music. For a history of the JEMF, see Norm Cohen, “The John Edwards Memorial Foundation: Its History and Significance,” in Sounds of the South, ed. Daniel W. Patterson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991),

CMA, CMF, and Country Music’s History    77 113–​126; and Nolan Porterfield, “Introduction,” Exploring Roots Music: Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly, ed. Nolan Porterfield (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), ix–​xxviii. The Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University also has an extensive and growing number of archival holdings related to country music, including the papers of RCA executive and early CMF board member Brad McCuen and Opry member and DJ Charlie Walker. For a preliminary account of how specific brokers and networks of influence might have shaped the recording, archiving, and canonization of southern folk music and, by extension, country music, see David E. Whisnant, “Turning Inward and Outward: Retrospective and Prospective Considerations in the Recording of Vernacular Music in the South,” in Patterson, Sounds of the South, 165–​181. 6. Folklorist Archie Green, for instance, felt that the history of country music told by the CMF was a “spin job” designed primarily to advance the interests and allegiances of the industry. Contrasting its history with that of the John Edwards Memorial Foundation (JEMF), he averred that “JEMF had integrity but no money. CMF had all the money in the world but it lacked integrity” (telephone conversation with Diane Pecknold, 2003). The library’s dominance of the historical archive became apparent in the controversy over the firing of long-​time staff member Ronnie Pugh and Journal of Country Music editor Chris Dickinson in 2001. A number of leading scholars wrote letters of protest to the Foundation; but, as Edward Morris pointed out, they exercised little leverage in determining the priorities of the organization because “No matter how outraged they were, they could hardly boycott their single most important reference source” (Edward Morris, “The Battle of Nashville,” Salon, February 20, 2002, accessed January 30, 2016, http://​www.salon.com/​2002/​02/​20/​ country_​war/​). On Disney’s efforts to dictate the telling of its own history, see Mickey Mouse Monopoly (DVD, Miguel Picker, 2002). According to Neal Gabler, who disagrees with the prevailing characterization, Disney has the “unenviable reputation of being an impregnable corporate fortress” that controls its own archive and routinely refuses to cooperate with scholars “unless [they are] serving the company’s agenda” (Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (New York: Vintage, 2006), 817). If my own experience is any indication, such suspicions of the Country Music Foundation are groundless. Like many scholars of country music, my research, including the research for this chapter, would have been impossible without the materials in the archive and the expertise of the staff, particularly that of Senior Historian John Rumble and Museum Editor Michael Gray. I am enormously grateful for their assistance and their intellectual engagement. With respect to this chapter, I am also indebted to Kathleen Campbell, who patiently endured numerous requests for materials on very short notice. 7. Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” Journal of American Folklore 78 (July–​ September 1965), 204–​228; Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 8. Michael Ann Williams, Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott (Urbana–​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Kristine M. McCusker, “‘Bury Me Beneath the Willow’:  Linda Parker and Definitions of Tradition on the National Barn Dance,” Southern Folklore 56, no. 3 (1999): 223–​243; McCusker, Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-​ Tonk Angels: The Women of Barn Dance Radio (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 22–​24. Kincaid followed on the heels of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who similarly made a commercial radio career largely out of collecting and performing traditional songs in the North Carolina area.

78    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 9. Norm Cohen, “‘I’m a Record Man’:  Uncle Art Satherley Reminisces,” in Porterfield, Exploring Roots Music, 45–​51; Maurice Zolotow, “Hillbilly Boom,” Saturday Evening Post, 216 (February 12, 1944): 22. 10. Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound:  The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 133–​199. 11. “The Hall of Fame: Sight and Sound,” Billboard (April 3, 1971): HF-​27. 12. Bill Ivey interviewed by John Rumble, March 18, 1983, Oral History Collection, Frist Library and Archive. The name of the museum is unfortunate, as it creates confusion between two distinct entities. The Hall of Fame has always remained under the control of the CMA, which appoints nominating committees and a panel of electors to determine inductees. (Under current rules, the Director of the Foundation does submit five names in each category for consideration by the nominating committees, but the committees are not obligated to nominate those individuals, and the Director is not a voting member of the nominating committees. See CMAWORLD.com, accessed February 7, 2016, http://​ www.cmaworld.com/​initiatives/​hall-​of-​fame/​election-​procedure.) The museum, however, is operated by the Country Music Foundation, which became a truly autonomous organization in the early 1970s when its board voted to create an executive director position separate from the CMA organizational structure (1971) and to pay back the loan from the CMA with which the Foundation had been established (1972). 13. “Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum,” fundraising brochure (1966), p. 11, Country Music Hall of Fame Proposals, 1966-​77, Series 1, Box 2, Connie B. Gay Collection. 14. Country Music Hall of Fame Souvenir Book, p. 6. 15. Country Music Hall of Fame Souvenir Book, p. 6. 16. Although the Gallery contained no historical narrative, the Foundation board members were acutely concerned with which artists should be represented there. When the Gallery was expanded in 1970, the board discussed criteria and nominees at some length and voted individually on a list of nominees prepared by Jo Walker. Most of those approved were recent and contemporary artists, though the new group included Riley Puckett, Clyde Moody of Mainer’s Mountaineers, Patsy Montana, and Lulu Belle and Scotty Wiseman of the WLS radio’s National Barn Dance. From the Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board Executive Committee, January 6, 1970, p. 3, Country Music Foundation minutes, 1969-​77, Series 1, Box 4, Connie B. Gay Collection. 17. Country Music Hall of Fame Souvenir Book, p. 12. 18. Ivey interviewed by Rumble, March 18, 1983, Oral History Collection, Frist Library and Archive. 19. Field notes, Folder 1305 (Country Music Association, June 1967), Field Work, circa 1961–​ 1971, General Projects, Projects circa 1965-​1972, Archie Green Papers, Southern Folklife Collection, Chapel Hill, NC, http://​library.unc.edu/​wilson/​sfc/​. 20. Davina M. DesRoches, “The Marketized Museum:  New Museology in a Corporatized World,” Political Economy of Communication 3, no. 1 (2015): 7. This assertion is based on responses to a national survey conducted by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen that explored popular understandings of and connections to history. See Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past:  Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 21. Fred Travis, “A Barn-​Style Museum for Country-​Style Music,” New York Times (January 7, 1968), sec. 10, p. 15; “Guardian of the Hall of Fame Gates,” Billboard (October 28, 1967), sec. 2, 76–​77.

CMA, CMF, and Country Music’s History    79 22. Ivey interviewed by Rumble, March 18, 1983, Oral History Collection, First Library and Archive. 23. “A Solid Beginning for CMA Building,” Billboard (January 1, 1966): 3. 24. Bill Ivey interviewed by John Rumble, July 18, 1983, Oral History Collection, Frist Library and Archive; Bill Ivey interviewed by John Rumble, June 21, 1983, Oral History Collection, First Library and Archive. 25. Bill Ivey interviewed by John Rumble, March 8, 1983, Oral History Collection, First Library and Archive. 26. The lack of professional expertise in these early years was evident in the Foundation’s efforts to obtain accreditation from American Association of Museums. When the Foundation board met to discuss accreditation, they quickly found that they did not meet the basic staffing requirements, which included “at least one salaried employee who commands an appropriate body of special knowledge and the ability to reach museological decisions consonant with the experience of his peers and who also has access to and acquaintance with the literature of the field.” Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board Executive Committee, August 18, 1969, Country Music Foundation minutes, 1969-​ 77, Series 1, Box 4, Connie B. Gay Collection. 27. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, January 6, 1970, p. 3, Country Music Foundation Minutes, 1969-​77, Series 1, Box 4, Connie B. Gay Collection. The rules for election to the Hall of Fame were subsequently changed to address this. Under current rules, a non-​performer must be inducted at least every three years. See CMAWORLD.com, accessed February 7, 2016, http://​www.cmaworld.com/​initiatives/​hall-​of-​fame/​election-​ procedure/​. 28. Pecknold, Selling Sound, 53–​94. 29. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, July 7, 1971, p. 4, Country Music Foundation Minutes, 1969-​77, Series 1, Box 4, Connie B. Gay Collection. 30. Pecknold, Selling Sound, 165–​168. 31. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, June 24, 1974, p. 2, Country Music Foundation Minutes, 1969-​77, Series 1, Box 4, Connie B. Gay Collection. 32. Ibid. 33. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Executive Committee, December 8, 1970, p. 3, Connie B. Gay Collection. 34. Ivey interviewed by Rumble, March 8, 1983, Oral History Collection, First Library and Archive. 35. For discussion of the shift toward the “marketized” or “corporatized” museum, see Saloni Mathur, “Social Thought & Commentary: Museums and Globalization,” Anthropological Quarterly 78, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 697–​708; DesRoches, “Marketized Museum”; and Neil Harris, Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 36. “Allison: Sincerity, Simplicity—​Acceptance,” Billboard (October 18, 1969): 112. 37. Jo Walker-​Meador interviewed by John Rumble, July 30, 1997, Oral History Collection, First Library and Archive. 38. Kahn, “Hillbilly Music,” 264; “CMA May Stage World Country Music Festival,” Billboard (September 11, 1965): 1, 68. 39. “Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum,” fundraising brochure, p. 11. 40. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Executive Committee, July 23, 1969, p. 1, Connie B. Gay Collection.

80    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 41. The souvenir book for the museum produced in the early 1970s mentioned the library only once, and the lower level that housed it did not appear on the map of the building. When the museum moved to its new building in 2001, visitors to the museum finally were, indeed, able to view the library and its curatorial operations through a two-​story glass wall at the center of the museum galleries, a design that symbolically represented the closer integration of the museum and library missions. 42. Thomas D. Warren, “Country Music Foundation in Brief,” Ralph Stanley International Fan Club Journal, 4, no. 1 (1969): 6. 43. Thomas D. Warren, “The Story of the Country Music Association,” Ralph Stanley International Fan Club Journal, 4, no. 1 (1969): 10. 44. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Executive Committee, May 1, 1970, p. 3, Connie B. Gay Collection. 45. Ibid. The demand for audio and video histories of country music was also evident in several other requests to the board, including one from the Johnny Cash show to broadcast portions of the museum’s orientation film (Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Executive Committee, December 8, 1970, p. 1, Connie B. Gay Collection) and one from a Chicago high school that hoped to purchase or rent a copy of the film for use in its music education classes (Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Executive Committee, August 18, 1969, p. 1, Connie B. Gay Collection). 46. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Executive Committee, December 22, 1970, p. 1, Connie B. Gay Collection. 47. Ibid., p. 2, Connie B. Gay Collection. 48. Robert Shelton to Archie Green, August 23, 1967; Archie Green Papers. 49. Archie Green to Robert Shelton, August 9, 1967; Archie Green Papers. Green encountered other difficulties in soliciting support from the music industry for the JEMF. Explaining to Shelton his difficulties in enticing the organizers of the Monterrey Pop Festival to invest in the study of the folk music they were reviving, he recognized that such a sponsorship would probably entail a shift in the JEMF’s research agenda, which he was willing to accommodate. “The JEMF is prepared to study the poplore scene,” he wrote with an air of resignation that echoed Dorson’s “fakelore” coinage, “But we have to be alive to study.” 50. Shelton to Green, August 23, 1967. 51. Bill Ivey told John Rumble in 1983 that “The trustees had—​had, and still have—​a suspicion of people with academic backgrounds,” in part because several academics hired to work at the Foundation had not met the board’s expectations (Ivey interviewed by Rumble, March 18, 1983). 52. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, October 12, 1970, p. 3. 53. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, May 20, 1971, p. 6. 54. It is worth noting that although the functionalist approach did not necessarily exclude written or recorded popular culture as components of folk practice, the folklorists in the initial generation of “popularizers” did not embrace country music as a term or an area of study. Lomax produced records for Decca in the years after World War II, but his work took “a national approach, avoiding any southern focus or even mention of country music”; Ronald Cohen, “Bill Malone, Alan Lomax, and the Origins of Country Music,” Journal of American Folklore 127 (Spring 2014): 129. Pete Seeger, who followed in the popularizing footsteps of his father, also showed little interest in country music and was wary of music created “with an eye toward making money for a burgeoning commercial industry”;

CMA, CMF, and Country Music’s History    81 Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 223. 55. Filene, Romancing the Folk, 168–​169. 56. Ivey interviewed by Rumble, March 8, 1983. 57. Ibid. 58. Ivey interviewed by Rumble, June 21, 1983. 59. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, October 11, 1971, p. 5, Connie B. Gay Collection. 60. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, September 18, 1974, p. 2; Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, February 8, 1972, p. 2; and Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, June 15, 1972, p. 2, Connie B. Gay Collection. 61. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, June 15, 1972, p. 3, Connie B. Gay Collection. 62. Howard Wight Marshall, “Howdy Folks! Welcome to Renfro Valley:  Modern Folklore in the Kentucky Mountains,” Country Music Foundation Newsletter 2, no. 2 (September 1971). Ivey subsequently hired Marshall as director of the museum, but the disjuncture between Marshall’s academic approach and the needs of museum made his tenure there difficult and brief. Ivey cites this incident as one of the events that “moved [him] away from thinking that [the Foundation] needed to be oriented toward the needs and the standards of academic folklorists who were interested in country music” (Ivey interview with Rumble, March 18, 1983). Marshall ultimately went on to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and then to a faculty appointment in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Missouri. 63. Ivey interviewed by Rumble, March 8, 1983; Ivey interviewed by Rumble, June 21, 1983. 64. Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp:  The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 124–​157. 65. John Minton, 78 Blues:  Folksongs and Phonographs in the American South (Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 27–​31. Saundra Keyes, “‘Little Mary Phagan’: A Native American Ballad in Context,” Journal of Country Music 3, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 1–​16; D. K. Wilgus and Nathan Hurvitz, “‘Little Mary Phagan’: Further Notes on a Native American Ballad in Context,” Journal of Country Music 4, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 17–​30; Saundra Keyes, “Ms. Keyes Replies to Wilgus and Hurvitz,” Journal of Country Music 4, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 31; Charles K. Wolfe, “Toward a Contextual Approach to Old-​Time Music,” Journal of Country Music 5, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 65–​75. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 66. Richard A. Peterson and Paul Di Maggio, “The Early Opry: Its Hillbilly Image in Fact and Fancy,” Journal of Country Music 4, no. 2 (Summer 1973): 39–​51; Richard A. Peterson and Russell Davis Jr., “The Fertile Crescent of Country Music,” Journal of Country Music 6, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 19–​27. 67. Richard A. Peterson and N. Anand, “The Production of Culture Perspective,” Annual Review of Sociology 30 (2004): 311–​334. 68. Neil Rosenberg, “‘Folk’ and ‘Country’ Music in the Canadian Maritimes:  A  Regional Model,” Journal of Country Music 5, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 76–​82; Timothy A. Patterson, “Hillbilly among the Flatlanders:  Early Midwestern Radio Barn Dances,” Journal of Country Music 6, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 12–​18; Roderick J. Roberts, “An Introduction to the Study of Northern Country Music,” Journal of Country Music 6, no. 4 (January 1978): 22–​28;

82    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Simon J. Bronner, “The Country Music Tradition in Western New York State,” Journal of Country Music 6, no. 4 (January 1978): 60–​77. 69. Norm Cohen, “A Few Thoughts on Provocative Points,” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014): 233–​235. 70. Ivey interviewed by Rumble, March 8, 1983. 71. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Executive Committee, March 21, 1972, p. 1, Connie B. Gay Collection. 72. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, October 15, 1973, p. 2, Connie B. Gay Collection. 73. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, April 25, 1975, p. 1, Connie B. Gay Collection. 74. Tom Ewing, ed., The Bill Monroe Reader (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 75. 75. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, September 18, 1974, p. 2, Connie B. Gay Collection. 76. Ibid. 77. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, January 7, 1975, p. 2, Connie B. Gay Collection. 78. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, January 13, 1976, p. 5, Connie B. Gay Collection. 79. Alton Delmore, Truth Is Stranger than Publicity (Nashville: Country Music Foundation Press, 1077). 80. Warren, “Country Music Foundation in Brief,” 6; Douglas Green, “Hall of Fame Home: Country Music’s Solid Foundation,” Billboard (March 18, 1978): CMA-​12, CMA-​42. 81. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, June 24, 1974, p. 3, Connie B. Gay Collection. 82. cmt.com staff, “Hall of Fame Names Kyle Young Third Director,” CMT News, accessed February 17, 2016, http://​www.cmt.com/​news/​1473096/​hall-​of-​fame-​names-​kyle-​ young-​third-​director/​; Peter Cronin, “Country Music Foundation Builds Reissue Label,” Billboard (November 26, 1994): 56, 59; Joe Edwards, “Music Foundation Helps Preserve Legends of Country Music,” Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-​World (February 24, 1988): 13. 83. Neil Strauss, “Countrified And Dignified,” New York Times (June 23, 1999): E3. 84. Cronin, “Foundation Builds Reissue Label,” 56. 85. Ivey interviewed by Rumble, March 8, 1983. 86. Ibid. 87. Ivey interviewed by Rumble, March 18, 1983. 88. Ibid., March 8, 1983. 89. DesRoches, “Marketized Museum,” 4; Harris, Capital Culture; Corinna Dean, Claire Donnellan, and Andrew C. Pratt, “Tate Modern:  Pushing the Limits of Regeneration,” City, Culture and Society 1, no. 2 (June 2010): 79–​87. 90. Bill Malone, Country Music, U.S.A (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968); John Rumble to Diane Pecknold, email correspondence, February 2, 2016. The museum’s guidebook, prepared in part by the library’s research historian, John Rumble, further enhanced the historical narrative, but its narrative was not incorporated into the exhibits themselves; The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press, 1990).

CMA, CMF, and Country Music’s History    83 91. On African Americans in country music, see the “Black Artists in Country Music,” special issue, Journal of Country Music 14, no. 2 (1992). The topic did not receive book-​ length academic treatment until Diane Pecknold, ed., Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). See also Erich Nunn, Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 2015), which discusses country music alongside other popular music of the South; Chris Dickinson, “Country Undetectable: Gay Country Artists,” Journal of Country Music 21, no. 1 (1999): 28–​39. Though Dickinson’s essay was preceded by Teresa Ortega’s exploration of lesbian audiences for Johnny Cash, virtually no work had been done on the subject in the interim; and it was not until 2014 that the first book-​length treatment of the connections between country, class, and queerness appeared. See Teresa Ortega, “‘My name is Sue! How do you do?’: Johnny Cash as Lesbian Icon,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94 (Winter 1995):  259–​272; Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 92. Meeting Minutes, Country Music Foundation Board, January 13, 1976, p.  5, Connie B. Gay Collection. 93. Paul Wells, “Review: Paul Kingsbury and Alan Axelrod, eds., Country: The Music and the Musicians,” American Music 12, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 462, 463. 94. Ron Cohen also noted the book’s tendency to define country music as the music produced by the country music industry, which he argued was also evident in other books produced by the Foundation. See Cohen, “Origins of Country Music,” 133–​34. 95. Wells, “Review: Country: The Music and the Musicians,” 463. 96. DesRoches, “Marketized Museum,” 3. 97. Paul Kingsbury, ed., Inside the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum:  A  Visitor’s Companion (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press, 2004), 5. 98. Christine Kreyling, “Country Comes to Town,” Nashville Scene (May 10, 2001): 26. 99. Liz Murray Garrigan, “Preservation Hall: Hall of Fame Cuts a Deal,” Nashville Scene August 15, 1996, accessed February 18, 2016, http://​www.nashvillescene.com/​nashville/​ preservation-​hall/​Content?oid=1180678. 100. Kingsbury, Inside the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, 60. 101. Kingsbury, Inside the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, 32, 34. 102. Rumble to Pecknold, email, February 2, 2016. 103. Ibid. 104. Ivey interviewed by Rumble, March 8, 1983. 105. Kingsbury, Inside the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, 10–​14, 49. 106. Rumble to Pecknold, email, February 2, 2016. 107. Ibid., January 21, 2016. 108. GIVINGmatters.com, accessed February 15, 2016, Http://​givingmatters.guidestar.org/​ profile/​1889/​country-​music-​foundation.aspx. 109. Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, 188.

Chapter 4

C ou ntry Mu si c as Cultural Prac t i c e Clifford R. Murphy

Introduction It’s nobody’s picture of success—​this dark warehouse filled with country music accoutrements in Glen Burnie, Maryland. It’s Friday night, and I’m in the shipping and receiving building of Carol’s Western Wear, the main source of country fashion in a town nicknamed “Chrome City” on account of the endless car dealerships and strip malls that straddle Ritchie Highway. But what’s happening here is not about success—​it’s about something else entirely. Every Friday night, locals park in Carol’s lot and walk to the back warehouse for live, country band, open mic night. A mixture of brave and confident souls take their place behind a microphone, face the people occupying the park benches and church pews assembled on the checkerboard floor, and sing their heart out with the backing of a full country band. There’s no cover charge, no marquee, no bar, and certainly no kitchen. There is, however, a coke machine, a microwave for BYOHD (bring your own hot dogs), and a table for a potluck buffet. Everybody seems to know everybody else. The band is sturdy, intuitive, and always graceful no matter the skill level of the singer. And the skill level of the singers ranges from awful to sublime. The musicians in the band are veterans of the local, live country music “scene” (if that’s the word for it), as evidenced not only by their ability to play along with seemingly any song any singer wants to sing but also for their collective ability to keep up with some singers’ wildly erratic tempo, phrasing, and timing. Several of the players have custom leather guitar straps with their names on them. This is a good band, on a Friday night, halfway between Baltimore and Annapolis, and we are all here by choice: there is no shortage of other things we all could be doing. And here I am—​a newcomer to the open mic. I don’t have my guitar with me, but as is custom here, one is loaned to me. I’ve also come with my buddy, James, who plays bass.

86    Oxford Handbook of Country Music The house bassist steps out and lets James take over, and we try our hand—​with the rest of the band—​at “Good Hearted Woman” and “Truck Driving Man.” Afterward, as James and I take our seats in the audience to friendly applause, an eighty-​something lady in a wheelchair, who lives at the old folks’ home across the highway, takes the mic and yodels her way through a couple of Jimmie Rodgers songs. Despite her frayed intonation, she gets a much bigger hand than we did. Over the next two hours, the audience offers supportive applause while sharing whispered critiques. I’m approached by several live country music enthusiasts who are curious about what brought me to Carol’s open mic. I explain that I’m the new Maryland state folklorist and that I’m eager to learn about local country music in Maryland. My explanation is met with a hearty and enthusiastic education on Maryland’s live country music landscape. Adjacent to the warehouse, Carol’s Western Wear has a steady stream of customers, browsing their extensive collection of designer cowboy boots, belt buckles, hats, chaps, and clothes aimed at trail riders and line dancers. In the warehouse, the music performed is mostly old-​school country. In the store, the recordings playing overhead are pop country hits. The salesman is dressed like Garth Brooks, circa 1995. And while he shares Garth’s body type, he is African American. Despite the version of Maryland’s African American culture as portrayed in shows like “The Wire,” there are many who identify as “country” in a state with a deep and rich heritage of African American horsemanship, whose working class has robust roots in the rural south, and where Bill Pickett’s Black Rodeo has a hearty following. Horsemanship is also important within the growing, working-​class  Latino community of nearby metro DC and Baltimore, and Carol’s has publicly courted Latino, African American, and LGBT clientele.1 I leave the store, get in my car, and drive 20 minutes back to my home in Baltimore. I’ve made some new friends, enjoyed some music, and got to pick and sing a little.2

Country Music as Folk Music Country music is a form of cultural practice. It is social music and people’s music.3 It is rooted in dancing and storytelling. Country music is a musical activity that is both folk (community based) and popular (mass media/​commercial).4 Oftentimes, the folklife of country music—​such as the open mic at Carol’s Western Wear—​draws from the commercial, but is interpreted and utilized for purely community purposes. Country music encompasses a family of musical subgenres, folk and popular, including old-​time, secular mainstream pop, sacred music (“country gospel”), country rock (and alternative country), and neo-​traditionalist styles such as bluegrass, Americana, and trucker music.5 If there is one commonality, it is that the lines between these subgenres is often blurred and that the rules governing each are met with ambivalence or embraced with culture-​defining verve.

Country Music as Cultural Practice    87 Folk or popular, country music is a driver of sociability. This is true historically—​from the honky tonks of Texas oil towns6 to the “kitchen tunks” of early twentieth-​century New England.7 And it is true in contemporary culture—​from bluegrass and old-​time festivals to tailgate parties, church services, and live country music open mic nights.8 The folk variation of country music is inherently local or regional in style, scope, outlook, and function. Country music as social music, or as people’s music, has not received extensive treatment by the scholarly or popular press. Its social orientation is typically referenced as an important part of the music’s roots—​particularly in the origin myth of a now wildly popular commercial music medium—​but rarely as its flower. But country music as social music, as a live medium where musicians share close space with the audience and each is beholden to the other—​however successfully or uncomfortably—​ is difficult to find in country music scholarship. In fact, it is the relative closeness of the audience to the performers that most differentiates the folk form of country music practice from its commercial country cousin. The audience, as with any people’s music, has input.9 The audience makes demands of the musicians. In a close space, the musicians can still reject these demands, but it is not without discomfort. As such, the musicians walk a tightrope of individual self-​expression and populism. This is the space in which Fox’s “real country” exists. And it is in these spaces that country music as a kind of ethnic working-​class music that does not always hew to race or racially oriented music marketing categories is most visible and plainly akin to related vernacular genres such as polka, conjunto, piedmont blues, Cajun, and zydeco.

Country Music as Popular Music Commercial—​or “popular”—​country music constitutes the largest star in the constellation of country music forms. It is an internationally marketed commercial product, stylistically omnivorous, whose marketing is aimed primarily at white men and women who identify with a romanticized rural or working-​class (and often southern) heritage.10 Whereas folk country is regional in orientation, popular country music is oriented toward the nation, both in marketing and in identity building. Commercial country music is also the bread and butter of the industry that reads and writes about country music. Whether it is contemporary pop country acts and the industry that produces and markets them; or the musicians and styles that have passed into history and are meticulously curated by collectors and discographers; or the scholarly community that seeks to document, chronicle, and interpret the meaning, value, politics, and history of this musical form.11 Popular country music aims at a very wide audience that is not geographically bounded. Marketing through the Internet, corporate and format radio, television, major chain stores, and nonmusical commercial tie-​ins (vehicles, beverages, etc.), the production and marketing of commercial country music has grown increasingly oriented toward identity and decreasingly oriented toward identifiable musical dance forms rooted in early string band music. As a matter of comparison, an analysis of the structure

88    Oxford Handbook of Country Music of “bro country” hits from 2015 shows greater similarity to the songs of classic rock bands such as the Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd and less similarity to early string band songs such as “Fly Around My Pretty Little Pink,” minstrel songs such as “Oh, Suzannah!,” and mid-​ twentieth-​century commercial country hits such as “Hey, Good Lookin’.” Popular country music values artistic malleability. This is often the main source of frustration for artists who grow to resent or defy the industry’s stylistic demands and its voracious appetite for new/​original material—​a resentment embodied (and marketed) in the “Outlaw” movement of the 1970s, the Alternative Country movement of the 1990s (and vocalized in songs such as Robbie Fulks’s “Fuck This Town”), in television dramas such as Nashville, and in films such as Country Strong. Malleability sans conflict is most prominently on display in the reality TV market, in the advice doled out by commercial country singers like Keith Urban (American Idol) and Blake Shelton (The Voice), and the willing and eager contestants who accept the malleability standard as a challenge and indicator of their talent. As can also be seen in shows such as The Voice and American Idol, popular country music rests squarely on the shoulders of singers, rather than ensembles or “bands.” Whereas ensembles were a staple of the early commercial industry’s flirtation with social country dance music (The Skillet Lickers, the Virginia Possum Tamers, etc., or named ensembles fronted by a band leader—​e.g., Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys, Willie Nelson & Family), popular country music prefers individuals singing in front of an otherwise anonymous backing band, or a small collective of identified artists fronting a larger anonymous band (The Dixie Chicks, Lady Antebellum, the Band Perry). Symbolically and practically, this enables the singer to shift stylistically while still maintaining their brand. Popular country music is mainly consumed as a recorded audio artifact—​downloaded online, purchased in a store, heard in a commercial or on the radio. When engaged as a live music form, prominent popular country artists are inaccessible to the audience and hew to their own marketed repertoire. Performances are held in large commercial venues, on staged platforms that place the musicians on a separate level from the audience, with large PA systems that project sound at volumes best appreciated from a distance in large theaters, civic centers, stadiums, and festivals. Opportunities to meet and speak with artists is often limited to a very few fans through commercial giveaways and promotions. The likelihood of any audience member making an audible request during the performers’ highly choreographed, multimedia performances is very slim; the likelihood of that request being accepted is even slimmer. Commercial country music is most readily differentiated from its folk cousin by the distance that exists between the listener and the musicians.

Country Music Scholarship Out of Balance As I  have written elsewhere, country music scholarship was born out of the minds and pens of record collectors who were also men of letters roughly a half century after

Country Music as Cultural Practice    89 commercial country music’s birth.12 The collectors, scholars, and country music enthusiasts who were members of the John Edwards Memorial Foundation (JEMF) and contributors to its quarterly journal gave birth to a body of scholarship of remarkable depth and influence that culminated most notably in the so-​called Hillbilly Issue of the Journal of American Folklore (JAF; 1965); the publication of Bill C.  Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A. (1968); Archie Green’s Only A Miner (1972); Nolan Porterfield’s Jimmie Rodgers (1979); Norm Cohen’s Long Steel Rail (1981); Neil V. Rosenberg’s Bluegrass: A History (1985); Simon Bronner’s Old-​Time Music Makers of New  York State (1987); Richard Peterson’s Creating Country Music (1997); Charles K. Wolfe’s A Good Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (1999); and James P. Leary’s stunning Folk Songs of Another America (2015).13 The relationship between JEMF and country music’s foundational scholarship is extraordinary. Collectively, these works and the shorter works that often preceded them comprise the bedrock of country music scholarship. And as a body of scholarship that arose from the work of record collectors, it is not surprising that the framework would be predominantly on commercial country recordings. That a collection of preeminent and trailblazing folklorists would focus so intently on commercial recordings is, at first blush, surprising. Although there is a great deal of textual analysis and interpretation in these works, there is very little in the way of ethnographic field work. “Hillbilly Issue” contributor Ed Kahn even wondered if folklore was the new media studies.14 Looking at these works as reactionary—​that is, that early country music scholarship was a reaction by scholars who saw country music as having cultural value to the vast many who felt otherwise—​is far more telling. And much of the country music scholarship that arose from generations not involved with the JEMF Quarterly is, in a sense, a reaction to the first wave. The scholarship of Pecknold, Jensen, Brady, Miller, Huber, and others has worked to analyze the conceptual framework of production style; critique the Jim Crow origins of music marketing categories that have come to shape common perception of who country music is made by and for; or to explode and expand the standard narratives of gender, sexuality, race, and geography.15 It could be argued that in the midst of the fight to prove the cultural value and impact of commercial country music, the folklorists and social scientists lost their ethnographic compass. Or perhaps the field was so new that there was a misperception that commercial country music recordings served as a documentation of what was out there. Or perhaps early scholars felt they were laying groundwork for ethnographers who were to come afterward. If so, they did not say. Certainly the folk revivalists who served as a second arm in the fight to establish the cultural worth of commercial hillbilly records—​foremost among them being record collector Harry Smith and the New Lost City Ramblers, whose influence on Country Music, U.S.A. Malone has acknowledged—​ utilized hillbilly records as a road map to find the living musicians who infused the revival with a pre-​three-​Hanks style of country music. Nevertheless, lost in the mix were other forms of regional country music that was less connected with the commercial recording industry. Also lost in the mix was the fact that country music—​as a marketing category that came to influence and seemingly shape reality—​was a racial and ethnic construct of the Jim Crow era that left practitioners of a

90    Oxford Handbook of Country Music multitude of racial backgrounds (particularly African American and Latino) out of the picture.16 Certainly, the clientele of Carol’s Western Wear confounds such a distorted picture of who is “country.” There are three notable outliers in the aforementioned list of “bedrock” works—​that is, the works of Bronner, Rosenberg, and Leary. These scholars have consistently incorporated an ethnographic focus to their country music work. And, significantly, each has pushed the geographical and ethnic sphere of country music authenticity into new areas. An important name to add to that group, from the post-​JEMF generation of scholars, is ethnomusicologist/​anthropologist Aaron Fox, whose groundbreaking Real Country (2004) set a new standard for country music ethnography. Fox’s work is a conspicuous anomaly on the landscape of country music scholarship. It is virtually the only book on country music that is devoid of any shred of historical narrative of commercial country music. It is not devoid of commercial country music content; the protagonists of his work swap Merle Haggard songs and pop country hits from the 1970s through the 1990s, and some even dream of commercial success. But the focal point of the work is in the homes of the musicians, on the stage at the bar, and in the language of the patrons, musicians, and song lyrics.

Country Music as Regional Vernacular Music A broad view of American vernacular music shows that cultural geography plays a significant role in the evolution of musical style and form. And as vernacular forms wend their way into national consciousness, a narrative coalesces around them that is fixed to specific geography: conjunto music of the Texas–​Mexican border; rockabilly and soul of greater Memphis; Taiko and the San Francisco Bay region; electric blues in Chicago; jazz in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York; the “polka belt” of the industrial Northeast; Go-​Go and political punk rock in Washington, DC; the plains Indian style that dominates the pow-​wow circuit; bluegrass and the Appalachian diaspora; and hip hop and New York and Los Angeles. Each of these styles evolved in myriad ways concurrently in a multitude of places. And as scholarship around these styles grows, the narrative ossifies. For country music, this geographic center is Nashville, with Austin and Los Angeles playing outsider foils. As the disciplines of ethnomusicology and folklore grow increasingly closer to new media studies—​that is, the growing body of scholarship that employs a kind of digital fieldwork rather than in-​person ethnographic fieldwork—​it is plausible to argue that country music scholarship faces a double challenge: to wrest its focus away from commercial production while resisting the inclination toward digital fieldwork in favor of ethnographic inquiry. In my ethnographic fieldwork for Yankee Twang: Country and Western Music in New England, as well as my contribution toward the “Country Music” issue of the Journal

Country Music as Cultural Practice    91 of American Folklore, I encountered a multitude of artists whose story, style, and local/​ cultural impact never registered within the world explored by JEMF and whose cultural heritage and geographic home differs from the landscape of Country Music, U.S.A. Without ethnographic inquiry, it would not have been possible to tell the story of New England’s living country music culture and traditions. That this regional world barely registered among the JEMF scholars (Paul Wells, Simon Bronner, Jim Leary, and Neil V. Rosenberg being notable exceptions) should not reflect poorly on the JEMF scholars. Rather, it is an indicator that Yankee country musicians mostly eschewed commercial recordings prior to the 1950s. By the time Yankee musicians developed an active interest in entering the commercial recording market in the 1960s, the popular and scholarly narrative had already been firmly established. It is noteworthy that New England’s most iconic country musician—​the eyepatch wearing Dick Curless—​had his biggest hit at the same time that the “Hillbilly Issue” of the JAF went to press. From 1964 onward, Yankee musicians—​like country musicians in other regional country music scenes—​had three choices with regards to the commercial market: be malleable to the Nashville sound, reject Nashville, or be rejected by it. Although there is a sob story embedded within that, there is also the fact that country music persists on a local, community basis despite the narrative’s indifference to it. The same is certainly true for every other region of the United States.

Hometown Country Music At Andy Nelson’s BBQ restaurant in Cockeysville, Maryland, Arty Hill & The Long Gone Daddy’s play a mix of originals and country standards in the parking lot while the sun sets along the commercial strip of York Road. Patrons and fans sit in lawn chairs, make requests, harass the band, and generally have a good time. There is no stage. The set spans generations, the band is both artful and playful, and they could garner the respect of many seasoned country veterans from across the United States. Arty welcomes Andy Nelson’s daughter to the mic to sing a song, and the audience is thrilled. Black clouds form above, and a storm blows up with fierce wind and whipping rain. With urgency, the band and the audience mobilize together to strike the PA and pack the band’s gear into their nearby trucks. It is not glamorous, but it speaks to the relationship between the band and its audience. There is little distance between them, and little concern for mystique. About seventy-​five miles up I-​95, in Port Deposit, Maryland, a similar dynamic plays out at Jumbo Jimmy’s Crab Shack. Danny Paisley and the Southern Grass hammer through a honky tonk, bluegrass set for about a hundred enthusiastic locals. They alternate between Danny’s songs, bluegrass standards, honky tonk standards, and fiddle tunes from the southern mountains. On the latter, the audience flatfoots right up against the band. Again, there is no stage. The banter between the band and the audience flows

92    Oxford Handbook of Country Music freely, with playful insults interspersed between encouraging shouts and requests. There is so little space between the band and the audience that the musicians keep an eye on their mic stands so they don’t get knocked in the teeth. They are on the front line of a long tradition inherited from their Appalachian migrant forebears who forged a relationship between local country music and entrepreneurship in Alex Campbell and Ola Belle Reed’s New River Records and their related country music park, New River Ranch. And this inheritance, although clearly encompassing aspects of popular country music, is wedded to a democratic approach to sound, style, and repertoire firmly rooted in the people and audience along the Mason-​Dixon Line.17 And twenty miles east of Baltimore, in the shipping and receiving warehouse of Carol’s Western Wear, the house band plays through another night of country standards, backing anybody who wants to sing on any song the band can play. The only thing that makes Carol’s different from Andy Nelson’s or Jumbo Jimmy’s is that nobody is selling any merchandise or food. In each of these spaces, there is what Fox would call “Real Country.” And in each space, the living country music tradition—​that is, the dynamic, real-​time dance between live musicians and their audience—​plays out in the midst of other social exchange and the amplification of social capital: offers to help a neighbor move, give someone a lift, make a meal for a sick relative, or to simply break bread and share a dance. Each can only be witnessed and understood through participation, and each can only be shared by scholars through ethnographic fieldwork. Country music is a cultural activity not unlike baseball. It may be best understood by the international major league monopoly, but it is also a cultural event that people of all ages participate in, at all level of abilities, in commercial and social realms, and in every corner of the continent.

Notes 1. Lauren Himiak, “A Touch of Dodge City in Glen Burnie,” Baltimore Business Journal, July 25, 2005. 2. Clifford R. Murphy, “Fieldnotes on Carol’s Western Wear Open Mic Night,” Maryland State Arts Council, 2008. 3. Aaron A. Fox, Real Country:  Music and Language in Working-​Class  Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Charles Keil, “People’s Music Comparatively: Style and Stereotype, Class and Hegemony,” Dialectical Anthropology 10, no. 1 (1985): 119–​130. 4. Neil V. Rosenberg, “Country Music—​Popular or Folk?,” in All That Glitters: Country Music in America, ed. George H. Lewis (Bowling Green, OH:  Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993), 151–​160. 5. Clifford R. Murphy, “The Diesel Cowboy in New England:  Source and Symbol of Dick Curless’s ‘A Tombstone Every Mile,’” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (2014): 191–​225. 6. Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 2nd rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). 7. Jennifer C. Post, Music in Rural New England Family and Community Life, 1870-​1940. (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2004).

Country Music as Cultural Practice    93 8. James Ruchala, “The Old Folks Danced the Do Si Do: Dancing in the Old-​Time Music Community of North Carolina,” Journal of American Culture 38, no. 1 (March, 2015): 39–​50. 9. Examples of the musician–​audience dynamic of people’s music can be found in Keil, “People’s Music Comparatively”; Fox, Real Country; Manuel H. Peña, The Texas-​Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-​Class Music (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); and Clifford R. Murphy, Yankee Twang: Country and Western Music in New England (Urbana–​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014). 10. Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002); and Richard A Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1997). 11. For different approaches to this, see Tony Russell and Bob Pinson’s exhaustive Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921-​1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Nathan W Gibson’s, The Starday Story: The House That Country Music Built (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011); or any of the works of collector Joe Bussard. For excellent examples of this focus on country music making, see Joli Jensen, The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music (Nashville, TN: The Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1998); and Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 12. Murphy, Yankee Twang; and Murphy, “Diesel Cowboy in New England.” 13. Nolan Porterfield, ed., Exploring Roots Music:  Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004). 14. Porterfield, Exploring Roots Music, 1. 15. David Sanjek, “Blue Moon of Kentucky Rising over the Mystery Train:  The Complex Construction of Country Music,” in Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-​Tonk Bars, ed. Cecelia Tichi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 22–​44; and Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 16. Miller, Segregating Sound. 17. Henry Glassie, Clifford R. Murphy, and Douglas Dowling Peach, Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-​Dixon Line (Atlanta, GA: Dust-​to-​Digital, 2015).

Chapter 5

Geo graph y a nd C ou ntry  Mu si c Constructing “Geo-​Cultural” Identities Jada Watson

In the popular track from his 2005 album Hair in My Eyes like a Highland Steer, Canadian alternative country artist Corb Lund proudly declared himself to be a “Hurtin’ Albertan,” a hard-​working individual who is just doing his best to make an honest living. Lund portrays the protagonist in this narrative, assuming the role of a grader operator who chases the rodeo circuit on weekends. Through this narrative, he also expresses an undeniable “sense of place,” articulating strong attachment to rural southern Alberta and the intangible and unconscious associations of comfort and security that individuals feel about a particular geographic region and the place of their origins in particular.1 For many, like this Hurtin’ Albertan, these associative feelings can emerge by simply crossing a national or provincial border and feeling the change in road pavement, air quality, and even time zones as elaborated in the song verses. The conditions at home may not be perfect, but they are an integral part of the sociocultural, political, topographical, and environmental characteristics that define a region and, by extension, shape an individual or community’s experiences and identity. Through this song, and many others in his discography, Lund defines his artistic identity as a working-​class individual strongly connected to Alberta, its geography, its history, and its cultural traditions. A sixth-​generation rancher and rodeo rider himself, Lund’s family migrated to southern Alberta in the late 1800s—​before the territory was even named an official Canadian province.2 Both sides of Lund’s family have been involved in every stage in Alberta’s history, from its 1905 establishment as a Canadian province, through the heyday in open-​range ranching (early 1900s), the first Calgary Stampede (1912), the 1947 oil boom that shifted the province’s economic structure, and the development of oil sands and coal bed methane extraction practices. Through it all, the foothills family homestead (Bar X Ranch) has remained largely intact and a central location for family members to find comfort and security from the harsh realities

96    Oxford Handbook of Country Music of the world.3 Lund grew up on his family ranch in Taber, Alberta, where he spent his childhood riding steer in the rodeo and helping with his father’s veterinary practice. At 18 years of age, he left Taber for college and eventually a life as a touring and recording musician.4 Based first in Edmonton and now in Calgary, Lund has not lived the life of a rural rancher/​rodeo rider that resides within his narratives in two and a half decades.5 Yet he turns, time and again, to rural southern Albertan history, culture, and traditions of his childhood, reimagining his own experiences, as well as those of his family and friends, on the landscape of his youth. Many of these songs, “Hurtin’ Albertan” in particular, express the duality of Albertan identity, addressing the challenges of being caught between the province’s rural/​agricultural traditions while forging new paths through a life of hard labor. What lies under the surface of this narrative is a comment on the sacrifices many Albertans make to secure gainful employment to live decent lifestyles. Through these narratives, Lund explores the complexities and contradictions of Albertan identity while also constructing his own geo-​culturally based artistic identity. What Lund is doing in his songwriting is certainly not new: within the country music genre, there exists a long tradition of artists using place-​based narratives to tell stories about working-​class issues as well as to construct aspects of their artistic identity. Country singer-​songwriters such as Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and Merle Haggard (to name a few) continually turned to their music to express the hardships of growing up in particular regions while also reflecting nostalgically on a simpler way of life. While these narratives often describe life, work, and sociocultural and political issues particular to a region, they also reveal vital elements of an individual’s artistic identity that would otherwise remain hidden, obscured, or overshadowed.6 Cultural geographic discourse offers a rich understanding of the ways in which individuals invoke place as a marker of identity. According to Thomas Solomon, the connection between an individual’s “sense of self ” and “sense of place” is so intimately connected that it should be described as a “sense of place-​self ’.”7 Individuals are inherently influenced by place and environment in a similar manner to gender, sexuality, race, and class. This perspective, emerging in Cheryll Glotfelty’s scholarship, elevates the role of place in shaping an individual or community’s identity, acknowledging its significant contribution to shaping the ways in which humans see, understand, define, and engage with the physical environment—​ connections that are magnified (as James Cantrill argues) by the duration of tenure and reliance on the natural world.8 What emerges in this literature is the idea that an individual’s identity is expressed through both cultural membership and geographic affiliation, or what the political sciences has termed “geo-​cultural” identity.9 Within a musical genre, this “geo-​cultural” affiliation manifests as an important marker of both individuality within a musical genre and a sense of belonging to a region and community. Literature addressing the relationship between country music and geography offers a critical foundation for exploring complex relationships between an artist and his or her geographic origins. The concept of place is integral to country music, a genre conventionally (and perhaps stereotypically) associated with specific geographic regions, rural landscapes, cultural traditions, and values. Since the birth of the genre, as Norm Cohen

Geography and Country Music    97 has recently observed, academics, fans, and even the industry have defined country music in geographic terms, linking the artists and music to life and culture in the US South—​including its agrarian economy, social conservatism, and a rural lifestyle.10 As a result, the prevailing image associated with the genre is that of musicians springing from the countryside and mountain hollows.11 Although the music, regional styles, and prominent artists from rural southern America have significantly shaped country music’s sound and culture, more recent studies have contested the geographic origins of the genre and emphasized the important role that urban centers have played in producing commercial country music. There has also been growing scholarly interest in the place-​themed songs that have proliferated the genre since its beginnings. The tradition of place songs can be heard in many early country music styles where songwriters express nostalgia for the seemingly simpler places and times of their youth.12 These narratives do not just describe the landscape and culture of geographic regions; rather, they also define the relationship between individuals and their surrounding environment and community, unveiling elements of the artist’s character, values, and beliefs. Following an exploration of literature contributing to this discussion, this chapter returns to country music’s “Hurtin’ Albertan” to offer a framework for interrogating the ways in which country artists use their music to construct an identity intimately connected to place.

Country Music and Geography The seminal history of the genre remains Bill C. Malone’s Country Music U.S.A., which outlines the origins of the genre from its folk roots in the rural US South to the emergence of the genre now known as “country” music. First published in 1968, Country Music U.S.A. highlights the genre’s geo-​cultural roots in the folk ballads of Anglo-​Celtic immigrants and Afro-​American cultures, developing into a hybrid musical style. The chapters discuss the birth and growth of the genre from early field recordings in Bristol, Virginia; the emergence of urban scenes in Nashville, Tennessee, Austin, Texas, and Bakersfield, California; and regional styles and prominent stars, providing a solid historiography of country music—​a veritable “bible” for country music scholars.13 What is perhaps most evident in this book, and certainly in the scholarship since its publication, is an urban–​rural tension in the genre’s geographic narrative. Although Malone has acknowledged the significance that mass migration of the rural white, southern, working-​class population to urban centers has had on the genre’s development,14 his work is often identified with (and criticized for) the “southern thesis” that commercial country music developed primarily out of rural white folk music of the south.15 Although several of his publications focus on southern rural culture and traditions in relation to sociological surroundings of the genre,16 Malone has always acknowledged the important role that several urban industrial centers have played in country music’s history.

98    Oxford Handbook of Country Music The geographic origins of the genre and its earliest stars have been actively re-​ evaluated. Most notably, Patrick Huber’s work has challenged the somewhat romanticized vision of rustic hillbilly musicians, revealing that both urban factory communities in the South and New York City studio singers and musicians contributed significantly to the creation of a commercial country (or “hillbilly”) music.17 In Linthead Stomp, Huber’s research on the lives and careers of hillbilly radio and recording artists Fiddlin’ John Carson, Charlie Poole, Dave McCarn, and the Dixon Brothers provide a new perspective on the geographic origins of commercial country music. Through biographical case studies of each musician, he elaborates the sociocultural context of the genre not through a rural lens but rather through one of urban growth, technological, and industrial innovation in the Piedmont South’s bustling cities and textile mills. Huber’s most recent study chronicles the contribution of New  York City studio singers and musicians in early hillbilly recordings.18 His detailed research on the recordings produced by these artists between 1924 and 1932 reveals a sophisticated system that relied on professionally (often classically) trained “citybilly” singers and musicians who could imitate any musical style, newly composed songs by professional songwriters, and an assembly-​line manner of production. He argues that these artists “played a significant role in defining a distinctive new sound and style of hillbilly music that appealed to a broad audience of American record buyers”—​that style may not have had a lasting impact, but the recording style that developed was certainly a precursor to the system that emerged, and continues to flourish, in Nashville, Tennessee, in the 1960s.19 Although Huber’s research expands the genre’s geographic narrative—​a narrative that could be broadened still by including female artists and global country musics—​the influence that rural cultures have maintained on the sound and character of country music cannot be denied.20 Perhaps, echoing Cohen, issues surrounding the “southern thesis” can be addressed by instead comparing the genre’s diverse regional styles. Regional styles and scenes have been the most popular research topic for country music scholars over the last fifty years. Nicholas Dawidoff ’s In the Country of Country journeys through some of the genre’s most important geographic locations, profiling the places in which country’s leading artists emerged.21 Musician biographies have made important contributions to the discussion of the emergence of particular regional styles. Charles R. Townsend’s book on Bob Wills and Cary Ginnell’s book on Milton Brown have described the contributions that both artists made to the sound and style of western swing,22 while Ronnie Pugh’s biography of Ernest Tubb describes the creation of the 1940s honky tonk style to which the singer-​songwriter contributed.23 Each study provides important geographic context to the origins of these regional styles, describing in detail the inner workings of the world in which these artists worked and performed. Musicologist Jean Boyd’s work on western swing describes the style as one designed for southwestern dancehalls in states such as Texas and Oklahoma, where it was “played in rural settings or for transplanted rural people in urban venues.”24 Perhaps not surprisingly, the relationship between bluegrass and its geographic origins has been avidly explored through both cultural and historic examinations, as well as through Bill Monroe’s biography.25 Each of these studies

Geography and Country Music    99 has contributed to the discussion on the relationship between country music and geography, pointing to their regional origins and the role that this music played in shaping local culture and identity.26 Richard Peterson and Russell Davis Jr. offered another angle for which scholars consider the geography of country music: through an examination of the origins of the genre’s notable artists. They compiled and analyzed a list of 416 singers, instrumentalists, and songwriters, determining that, as of 1975, “country musicians have been, and continue to be, primarily country born.”27 Their data revealed that the South remained the “cradle of country music,” with 75% of country musicians hailing from southern states—​ the majority born in Texas. Their study encourages us to consider the role that an artist’s origins play in questions concerning the “geography” of the genre.28 Peterson returned to this idea in Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity, offering important observations on how artists use their geographic origins to shape their artistic identity (discussed following). Although it is clear that geography assumes a significant role in defining the genre and regional style, country music scholars are only beginning to delve into issues related to regional and artistic identity. Cultural geographers have turned increasingly toward issues of regional and national identity, many turning to popular and indeed to country music, to interrogate the ways in which song lyrics describe or construct images of place and shifting national and cultural identities.29 Several cultural geographers have, however, acknowledged the importance of the sound of place.30 Most notably Blake Gumprecht’s 1998 article on West Texas has offered thoughtful analyses of how singer-​ songwriters from the region capture the county’s soundscape in their music through galloping rhythms, lonesome steel guitar wails, and gravely vocal warbles.31 His work demonstrates the powerful role that the music (both vocal performance and accompaniment) plays in communicating cultural messages. Influenced by this line of inquiry in cultural geographic discourse, country music scholarship in the field of musicology has begun to interrogate the relationships between music and place. My study of Butch Hancock’s 1978 album West Texas Waltzes and Dust-​blown Tractor Tunes focuses on the ways in which the artist’s harmonica playing and vocal gestures evoked Lubbock’s landscape in songs about dry land farming, while also negotiating his complex relationship to West Texas.32 One of the most important contributions to this growing field of interest is Travis Stimeling’s work on musical responses to Central Appalachian, mountaintop removal mining, which offers a critical framework for interrogating the complex relationship between local country artists and place. His analyses articulate the ways in which both mainstream and local artists from the region draw on regional musical heritage to evoke highly personal understandings of local environment, culture, history, and regional identity.33 Moreover, his analyses illustrate the myriad ways in which a community responds to changes in their natural world, especially in a places like Central Appalachia, where residents have competing understandings of local history and where occupation and lifestyle results in varied relationships to landscape. Stimeling’s work has influenced studies interrogating local musical responses to the fossil fuel energy industry in Alberta, Canada, including Gillian

100    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Turnbull’s work on coal mining songs and my own examination of Corb Lund’s response to coal bed methane extraction.34 Other recent studies have considered how country artists employ geography in their songwriting as a way to articulate artistic identity. Popular music discourse, in general, has demonstrated the ways in which musicians construct their artistic identity (or persona) by assuming a distinctive personality. This artistic identity is carefully constructed through a variety of techniques including visual imagery and wardrobe on stage; lyrical and video narratives; and by positioning themselves in relation to other musicians, musical styles, and genre conventions or traditions.35 In a genre that is strongly reliant on representations of authenticity and sincerity as in country music, narratives about an artist’s origins provide another layer in this discussion of an artist’s identity. Songs about the old “homeplace” have traditionally expressed longing for the simpler times and places of one’s youth.36 This tradition finds its roots in early hillbilly recordings, songs of the singing cowboy, Kentucky bluegrass, and western swing. Indeed, many of the genre’s most prominent artists have reflected on place (specifically that of their geographic origins) in their music; popular examples include the Carter Family’s “My Clinch Mountain Home” (1937), Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and Dolly Parton’s “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad).” These latter two songs, both released in 1969, spoke nostalgically about the hardships of their working-​class origins. These songs drew heavily on the singers’ autobiography, evoking real places in a conscious effort to tie their artistic identity to specific geographic regions and cultural traditions. Peterson has offered critical insights into the ways in which artists mobilize their geographic origins to shape their artistic identity. He adopts the terms “hard core” and “soft shell” to define broader cultural spaces within country music in which the former represents the genre’s authentic traditions and the latter melds country with pop music to appeal to a wider audience. Peterson argues that soft-​shell artists tend not to stress their origins, or speak of how far they have come from their youth of rural poverty, whereas hard-​core country artists strongly stress their origins not just as rural, but through associations with specific geographic regions and traditions.37 Pamela Fox echoes Peterson’s observation in Natural Acts, arguing that country musicians refer to their origins in an act of “authentic sincerity.”38 She demonstrates how the published celebrity autobiography affords artists the opportunity to abandon performative guises to honor their “working-​class roots in (some variant of) the mythic rural past.”39 Indeed, geography has played an integral role in shaping the narrative of some of the genre’s most prominent artists: Jimmie Rodgers will forever be known as the “Singing Brakeman” from Meridian Mississippi; Johnny Cash grew up singing with his family in the cotton fields of Dyess, Arkansas; Loretta Lynn was the daughter of a coal miner in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky; Dolly Parton was born to a poor sharecropper and his wife in Sevierville, Tennessee; and the list goes on. Artists rely on these narratives to express their identification with working-​class culture, insisting on the notion that these origins, however far removed from their current reality, remain an integral component of their identity. In revealing these characteristics about themselves through song narrative, these artists also seek to inform their audiences that they remain just like them.

Geography and Country Music    101 Drawing on the ideas put forth by Stimeling, Peterson, and Fox, my own work has focused on the role that a country musician’s origins can play in shaping artistic identity. This interrogation began in my article on the Dixie Chicks’ response to lead singer Natalie Maines’ hometown of Lubbock, Texas, following the ongoing boycott of their music. This article explored the ways in which the trio invoked musical codes and style conventions associated with West Texas to negotiate their relationship to place. Although the lyrical message seemingly rejected the city and its religious and political structures, the country-​rock musical setting actually pulled from regional influences, thus revealing that even though Maines’s values and beliefs may clash with those of her origins, the town and its musical heritage has left an indelible mark on her artistic identity.40 Although initially explored in my work on Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home,41 this complex relationship between artist and place was expanded on considerably in my dissertation.42 Focusing on the music of Canadian alt-​country artist Corb Lund, my research argued that the singer-​songwriter invoked place-​based narratives not just to address specific geo-​cultural issues but also to consciously construct an artistic identity intimately linked to his rural southern Alberta origins. The following case study will further demonstrate the complex ways in which place themes can be used in country songs to elaborate artistic identity.

Case Study: Alberta’s Corb Lund “Place” and “space” are critical themes in Lund’s music, as his songs explore life, work, and environment on the Canadian prairies. Over the span of his twenty-​year career as an alternative country artist, Lund has continually turned to aspects of Alberta’s heritage, culture, politics, landscape, and environment to inform his songwriting. In “No Roads Here” (2005), he reimagined his ancestors’ northward migration into Alberta, describing the province’s desolate landscape and traces of aboriginal heritage with which they were greeted at the turn of the twentieth century—​documenting the province’s and, at the same time, his family’s position within that story. His songs define the province’s diverse landscape and unpredictable weather patterns while also critically commenting on the aspects of rural Albertan culture, politics, and traditions that have shaped Alberta’s history and identity. Whereas some of his songs have drawn on stories from his personal experiences (“Steer Rider’s Blues,” “The Truck Got Stuck,” “Alberta Says Hello,” and “September”), others have been inspired by events in the lives of his relatives and friends (“Talkin’ Veterinarian Blues,” “Buckin’ Horse Rider,” “We Used to Ride ‘Em,” “Roughest Neck Around,” and “This is My Prairie,” to name a few). His songs capture what Murray Forman calls the “extreme local”: Lund maps specific geographic and cultural terrains in his music and his lyrics (and indeed videos) to connect himself to his native southern Alberta.43 These songs reveal not just a pride in his family heritage but also an incredible attachment to and sense of place for the community in which he was raised.

102    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Corby “Corb” Clark Marinus Lund (b. 1969) grew up on his family’s ranch in Taber, Alberta, where he was fully immersed in local, rural cowboy culture. Both sides of his family ranched in Utah and Nevada before migrating north to southern Alberta in the towns of Raymond (paternal Lunds) and Cardston (maternal Ivinses) in the late 1800s, where his great-​grandfathers each built homesteads and raised their families. His great-​grandparents were among the Mormon population migrating north at this time. Although their immigration to southern Alberta was initially met with resistance due to their beliefs and polygamist practices, the Canadian government—​eager to establish an agrarian society in the west—​welcomed the Mormon community with their expertise in irrigation agriculture. This knowledge served Mormons well in the dry climate of southern Alberta—​especially in Lund’s hometown of Taber, which sits on a significant water aquifer.44 Although Lund never became a member of the church, Mormon activities were part of his daily life, and he inherited a deep respect and appreciation for the land from his grandparents.45 Lund’s youth was typical of a young boy growing up on a ranch: he swam in creeks, rode horses, worked on the family ranch (and his father’s veterinary practice), and chased cows. He also rode steer in the rodeo, and may very well have followed in the footsteps of his numerous buckle-​ winning family members if it were not for an injury and the lure of heavy metal band Black Sabbath, both of which ultimately influenced his decision to leave the sport in his mid-​teens.46 Although Lund has not lived in rural southern Alberta since the late-​ 1980s, his discography reveals that these experiences from his youth had a significant impact on his understanding of place and local culture, as well as his songwriting and his identity. Even though Lund did not turn immediately to country music professionally (he spent a decade playing bass in a speed metal band called The Smalls), he did grow up learning to sing traditional cowboy songs such as “Strawberry Roan” (what he calls his “bedrock song”) from his grandfather.47 In fact, Lund’s eight studio albums demonstrate a diverse range of influences and styles drawn from the musical sounds of his youth, especially Marty Robbins, Wilf Carter, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash.48 His music reveals a stylistic eclecticism rooted in traditional country, but one that is also influenced by a variety of styles and genres. Although Lund writes all of his own songs, his band—​the Hurtin’ Albertans—​play a significant role in arranging his tunes, writing their solos, and shaping his overall alt-​country sound: blending drummer Brady Valgardson’s rock style, bassist Kurt Ciesla’s jazz and funk roots, and guitarist Grant Siemens’s and Lund’s interest in roots music, creating a style described as a “hybrid of wild rock and woolly western.”49 Perhaps one of the most prominent features of Lund’s music is the use of the upright bass instead of the more modern electric bass. Although not frequently used in contemporary country music, the upright bass is an integral component of the styles that Lund draws from (western swing, rockabilly, honky tonk) and hearkens back to the rockabilly bands of the 1950s and 1960s such as Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and Marty Robbins (whose albums featured Bob Moore on upright bass).50 By blending these musical influences, Lund and his band have forged their own path in the genre, one that is both progressive for its

Geography and Country Music    103 stylistic diversity and traditional in its nod to styles, bands, and themes ingrained in the genre’s history. This trend toward neo-​traditionalism is further underscored by Lund’s focus on local regional themes. In the current landscape of country music, Lund stands out as an artist strongly connected to place and the culture and traditions of his rural Alberta origins. He is often referred to as the “new [Ian] Tyson,” and highly regarded as an artist keeping the western cowboy tradition alive and bringing Alberta’s vibrant history to life in his music.51 And indeed Tyson has been an important influence on the singer-​songwriter: although their styles are quite different, Lund states that Tyson “made it acceptable to refer to Canadian places in song. It’s easy to put Houston, Nashville or New York City into a song, but it’s tricky to put in Moose Jaw. Ian was the first guy I listened to that used our regional references in a tasteful way.”52 But his music also falls in line with the hard core country tradition and expresses similar attachments to specific geographic places as Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, and Butch Hancock—​all of whom have turned (and returned) to geographic themes to express certain sociocultural and political issues throughout their career. Although known for his sarcastic, witty lyrics, Lund has also addressed a number of serious and controversial topics including local conservation issues as a result of urban sprawl (“The Truth Comes Out,” 2005), the negative destructive impact of the fossil fuel energy industry (“This is My Prairie,” 2009), the effect of the weather phenomenon called a “Chinook” on ranching (“Chinook Wind,” 2009), and even the devastating floods of 2013 that destroyed the Calgary Stampede grounds and surrounding rural communities (“Blood, Sweat and Water,” 2013). His music reveals sensitivity to each of these topics: taking an observational role of the storyteller, Lund offers an even-​handed assessment of each situation and even finds subtle ways to highlight particular societal challenges in a way that lets his audience determine their own conclusions about the issues. Music is not the only avenue through which Lund expresses his ties to Albertan land and heritage. In addition to frequent blogging, Lund proudly proclaims his love of his prairie homeland in interviews, music videos, and, most recently, in a museum exhibition. Following Cabin Fever, Lund was invited to curate an exhibition at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum during his 2013 tenure as their Artist-​in-​Residence.53 The No Roads Here exhibition used songs from four of his albums to tell stories about Alberta’s history and tracing his family’s story into that narrative. As the introductory plaque to the exhibition stated, “I feel very strongly rooted in Alberta and in Western life. I guess it goes back a long way. Song by song, I’ve tried with this exhibition to capture the spirit of my ancestors and my pride in being from this part of the world.”54 The exhibition drew on his personal experiences and family history in the province, augmenting the museum’s archive with images and artifacts from his family archive to cover a range of topics from veterinary medicine, prohibition and bootlegging, gambling, rodeo, ranch life, the energy industry, and natural conservation issues. Through each of these themes, Lund demonstrates his knowledge of and love for his home province, further solidifying his geographic roots and cultural identity as a staunchly Albertan singer-​songwriter.

104    Oxford Handbook of Country Music

“Hurtin’ Albertan” “Hurtin’ Albertan” has become a “theme song” for Lund and his band of the same name. Originally named The Corb Lund Band (1995–​2005), Lund renamed his band The Hurtin’ Albertans with the release of Hair in My Eyes Likes a Highland Steer in 2005 (the album containing this song). Although never released as a single, this song is certainly one of the most popular in his discography and a concert staple: they routinely perform this song in concert sets to introduce the band members and allow time for each to give an instrumental solo. When introducing each member during an extended instrumental interlude (between the second and third verse), Lund acknowledges where each Hurtin’ Albertan is from: Kurt Ceisla from Lethbridge, Alberta; Grant Siemens from Winnipeg, Manitoba (although born in Alberta); and Brady Valgardson from Lund’s hometown of Taber.55 While many bands introduce their members in this manner (especially in front of hometown audiences), for Lund, this is another way in which he solidifies their western Canadian roots. “Hurtin’ Albertan” offers a lighthearted sarcastic humor in its description of the relationship between Alberta and its surrounding provinces, and the elements chosen to describe these regions in relation to one another highlight the complexities of Albertan identity. Cowritten with fellow Albertan singer-​songwriter Tim Hus, “Hurtin’ Albertan” is sung from the perspective of a grader operator and rodeo rider as he hauls his horses behind his dual-​wheeled diesel pickup truck and recounts his reflections on what it feels like to return home after trips on the rodeo circuit. Hus is featured on the recorded track from Hair in My Eyes like a Highland Steer, performing the role of the Hurtin’ Albertan’s voice heard over the CB radio and providing narrative information about the protagonist’s route home from rodeos in neighboring provinces. These spoken-​word interludes reveal the Hurtin’ Albertan’s profession (a grader operator) and his reason for being on the road (hauling his horses home after a weekend at the rodeo) and offer sarcastic commentary on the regions through which he is driving.56 As in many of his songs, Lund describes the geographic regions through topographic features, nature, and wildlife. As the Hurtin’ Albertan drives through Montana (verse 1), British Columbia (verse 2), and Saskatchewan (verse 3) toward Alberta following weekends at the rodeo, the song’s descriptions suggest an intimate familiarity with the rural traditions of each region. In the first verse, he tips his hat to Taber not just through rodeo references (bareback riders, team ropers), but also to its most famous crop: sweet corn, which he calls “Taber corn” in the lyrics. The self-​proclaimed “Corn Capital of Canada,” sweet corn remains an integral part of the Taber’s agricultural identity—​as evidenced in its annual “Cornfest.”57 The place-​descriptions in verses 2 and 3 focus predominantly on neighboring provinces in a way that distinguishes them from Alberta both topographically and culturally. In the second verse, he describes British Columbia’s mountainous Rocky Mountain landscape and then tips his hat to regional cowboy culture, praising the “wild Chilcotin buckaroos” for knowing how to ride. Whereas southern Alberta’s cattle

Geography and Country Music    105 drivers learned their trade from Texan cowboys (whose technique melded Spanish and British herding styles), British Columbia’s herdsmen developed their techniques from southern Spain’s vaquero, or “buckaroo,” tradition. Chilcotin County was also home to countless wild horses, and local riders had to develop expert riding skills to corral these wild horses and drive them south to market.58 Thus, through this verse, Lund acknowledges his rodeo competitors and acknowledges regional differences in riding style. In the final verse, Lund takes a humorous jab at his prairie province to the east (one Alberta is most often compared to), describing “Saskabush” (Saskatchewan) as “pretty flat” (a common joke leveraged at the middle prairie province’s landscape) and ridiculing its gopher-​infested ranches. The overriding sentiment throughout the verse narratives, however, is one of regional discomfort. For example, the second verse finds him traveling east from British Columbia, recounting the windy passes and treacherous turns, revealing that the Pacific Standard Time Zone creates an unsettling feeling inside of him (that leaves his heart in his throat). At the end of each verse, Lund expresses relief to be crossing back into Alberta, referencing specific geographic boundary lines: the Canada–​US border referred to as the “Medicine Line,” the “Kicking Horse” mountain pass at the southern British Columbia–​Alberta meeting point, and the change back to “Mountain Standard Time” when crossing back into Alberta from Saskatchewan.59 As he crosses each of these boundary lines, the Hurtin’ Albertan comments on how the roads improve as soon as he enters his native province. While the song’s lyrical narrative functions as a “travelogue” of the important geographic and cultural landmarks within the Hurtin’ Albertan’s occupational journey, it also maps the terrain of the protagonists (and indeed Lund’s) rural southern Albertan upbringing.60 In fact, whether or not Alberta’s roads improve is not important; rather, the crucial idea expressed in these lyrics is feelings of security and comfort that individuals find in regional landmarks and boundaries—​capturing that unconscious feeling of being “home.” In the song’s chorus, Alberta emerges as a province of riches and hardships, and its residents as honest, hard-​working individuals who are just doing their best to secure gainful employment. The Hurtin’ Albertan sings about having too much oil money, a statement that suggests that Alberta’s financial success has come at a high cost on both personal and provincial levels. A local (and even national) audience might hear this lyric as commentary on the destruction of Alberta’s landscape and environment for the fossil fuels beneath its soil. Furthermore, individuals working in the oil sands have made significant sacrifices for their province on a daily basis, including risking their personal health and safety, living apart from their families, and traveling great distances to work to secure gainful employment.61 These challenges are not specific to the oil sands but to many individuals working in the physically demanding industries. A hard laborer grading roads (possibly to the oil sands of northern Alberta), the Hurtin’ Albertan likely lives a challenging lifestyle of long, mentally and physically exhausting hours on the job and spends his weekend chasing the rodeo circuit—​sometimes only winning enough money to cover his entry fees.

106    Oxford Handbook of Country Music A neo-​traditionalist song, the musical setting draws on the style conventions of the trucker subgenre in a manner resembling the music of Dave Dudley. The trucker subgenre emerged in the 1960s as an expression of working-​class culture and a musical variation of honky tonk and rock-​inflected country music, and it focused on the lives and work environments of long-​haul truckers.62 This style, as exemplified in the “Hurtin’ Albertan,” features twangy electric guitar; spoken word narratives (mimicking CB trucker speak); an accented sixteenth-​note “train beat”; and an uptempo rhythmic gait well-​suited to moving at about 100 km/​h on the highway.63 Although the song’s lyrics express the title character’s solitary existence as a modern-​day “diesel cowboy,” the musical setting captures not a sense of place but the sense of movement through place as he drives along these windy roads and narrates his travels. The combination of Lund’s nostalgic narrative and the uptempo trucker style expresses the complex nature of Lund’s artistic identity and his notion of Albertan identity: the “Hurtin’ Albertan’s” continual reference to regional ranching and rodeo traditions (coupled with the activity of hauling horses to and from the rodeo) suggests a rural upbringing for the truck driver, who is now forging a path for himself outside of the rural ranching traditions of his childhood. Through the Hurtin’ Albertan’s travels, Lund seeks to define the uniqueness of Alberta’s landscape and identity over that of the prairie and mountainous regions at its borders to the south, west, and east. Alberta often stereotypically gets lumped in with its prairie and mountainous neighbors, all of whom have active farming, ranching, and rodeo communities as well. Yet grouping the province with its neighbors ignores the features that make Alberta a unique and distinct region for the individuals residing there. Lund defines Alberta’s geographic positioning in the chorus as “east of the Rockies and west of the rest,” seeking to mark out the region as distinct from the provinces (and states) surrounding its borders. This distinction is also captured through the song character’s incredibly strong sense of place and self-​identification with the landscape and culture of the western Canadian province. The song narrative underscores the sense of security one associates with their homeplace, such as feeling the change in road pavement, air quality, and even time zones as well as the comfort felt with the return to daily routine. Although, with the exception of changes in road pavement, these aspects remain intangible, each can be felt within an individual’s core and bod, and can affect the ways in which individuals relate to a specific region’s environment. These unconscious associations are likewise felt through one’s relationship to a place’s cultural space and the traditions that have historically defined a region. Lund’s “Hurtin’ Albertan” displays a strong connection to southern Alberta’s rural cultures and traditions, as articulated in the seamlessly inserted references to ranching and rodeo throughout the narrative. Thus, not only does the narrative articulate his deep commitment to the rodeo circuit (an activity integral to the province’s heritage), but it also suggests personal connection to the province’s ranching/​farming culture—​all while forging his path outside of the rural ranching traditions with which the cowboy sporting event is usually (stereotypically) attached. Thus, what lies under the surface of this narrative is a comment on the sacrifices many Albertans make to secure gainful employment to live decent lifestyles and support families. As Geo Takach has observed, the rural way of

Geography and Country Music    107 life is slowly losing ground in Alberta. While the agricultural industry remains a strong force in the western Canadian province, the number of young individuals entering the profession is dwindling.64 As the high cost of land drives ranchers east, the younger population is flocking to the more profitable energy industry in droves—​an issue Lund addressed in “Long Gone to Saskatchewan” (2009). The Hurtin’ Albertan could be seen as a representation of this shift in Alberta’s economic and industry structures (from agriculture to heavy machinery/​energy). He is, like many others, a modern cowboy with one foot firmly rooted in rural culture and the other negotiating his position within the province’s changing culture. Within Lund’s discography, the “Hurtin’ Albertan” represents the modern generation of young Albertans, individuals trapped between the province’s rural and urban cultural traditions who ultimately abandon rural communities for gainful employment as heavy equipment operators elsewhere. In fact, Lund’s discography seems to be a reiteration of the “Hurtin’ Albertan.” Whether through the humorous song about his truck getting stuck in the mud and the comedic attempts to pull it out (“The Truck Got Stuck,” 2002); his ode to the “roughneck” (“Roughest Neck Around,” 2002), relaying the struggle of trying to plant crops when the “Chinook Wind” (2009) blows all of the “good dirt east”; and his personal story about coal bed methane extraction encroaching on family land (“This is My Prairie,” 2009), Lund places himself in stories about the hurting rural communities. As journalist A. J. Mangum writes [Lund] writes from the unmistakable perspective of a young westerner, one for whom changes in his landscape are unsurprising, but nonetheless heartbreaking. For Lund’s generation and those that have followed, making a living strictly from the land is less common, and staying connected to one’s cowboy roots requires effort. It’s a perspective the musician ably documents.65

The singer-​songwriter remains connected to his cowboy roots through his music. By drawing on stories of family and friends surrounding him, Lund brings much-​needed attention to the issues that ranchers face in the struggle to protect their families, livelihood, and ranch land that has passed through multiple generations. In these songs, especially “Hurtin’ Albertan,” the attachment to the rural homeplace remains, as does the passion for the cultural activities that define their childhood experiences. Thus, the “Hurtin’ Albertan’s” chase for the elusive rodeo buckle remains a symbol of the homeplace and of the rural life that they can no longer return to.

Country Music’s “Hurtin’ Albertan” There is a popular saying that “where you’re from says a lot about who you are.” This saying is frequently invoked to capture the important role that the old “homeplace” plays in shaping an individual’s character, values, and beliefs. While this relationship

108    Oxford Handbook of Country Music is not always easy to define, it gets to the heart of an individual’s relationship to place and acknowledges the impact that social, political, environmental, and even religious structures have on one’s identity. Furthermore, these geographic and cultural environments are not just the place in which individuals learn how to function in the world, but they provide a sense of rootedness and belonging as well. This popular phrase has been evoked recently in discussions regarding a country artist’s identity. Nancy Cardwell, for example, opened her monograph on Dolly Parton with this phrase, introducing the singer-​songwriter through her poor rural upbringing, arguing that the Smoky Mountains influenced her music and career.66 The relationship was also highlighted in April 2011 at an Academy of Country Music (ACM) special entitled “Girls’ Night Out: Superstar Women of Country,” an event that celebrated career accomplishments of female artists.67 Each artist was saluted by an industry colleague and presented with a video that shared their story, mapping out the artist’s life experiences from their small-​ town or rural origins to present-​day star status. In fact, Kristian Bush (2011) drew on this saying to introduce his Sugarland bandmate Jennifer Nettles, suggesting that the singer’s hometown of Douglas, Georgia, shaped her values and character. The special concluded with the honorees together on stage singing Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” a classic example of autobiographical county narrative and homage to the homeplace. Through these videos and Lynn’s song narrative, this ACM special underscored not just the important relationship between a country artist and his or her origins but also the genre’s tradition of invoking narratives of place in both publicity and song lyrics as a way to reveal elements of an artist’s character. Place-​based songs have remained an important vehicle for country artists seeking to maintain connections to the geographic roots and communities in which they were raised, articulating the ways in which their origins have impacted their life and identity. Thus, it is not just a matter of a geographic region unveiling elements of an artist’s character but rather of a country artist consciously drawing on place to articulate elements of his or her identity. To say that rural southern Alberta has had an impact on Corb Lund’s identity and career would be an understatement. The alt-​country singer-​songwriter has continually turned to aspects of his Albertan heritage to inform his songwriting and to weave together a complex artistic identity. Indeed, Lund’s “sense of self ” (his identity) and “sense of place” (his attachment to Alberta) are so intimately connected that they have become intertwined throughout his life and career. He invests the landscape of rural Alberta with meaning, inscribing his stories on her as if to bring her to life and impart identity to this vast territory. More importantly, he explores working-​class issues that many Albertans face, consciously constructing an artistic identity that grapples with the eternal struggle to find and define his position in relation to provincial traditions and the hardships of modern life in the province. His rural roots run deep, and his music has been a vehicle through which he has been able to honor his family’s heritage as well as the oft-​overlooked ranch and rodeo community in which he grew up. As with many country artists, and indeed individuals, the experiences of his youth have helped to shape his identity and attachment to place.

Geography and Country Music    109 Regionalism continues to be a key ingredient in Lund’s songwriting. On his eighth studio album, Things That Can’t Be Undone (released in October 2015), Lund included a heart-​wrenching story about the dismantling of a family ranch. In “S Lazy H,” he sings from the perspective of a young sixth-​generation rancher who took over the family ranch after his father’s passing. When financial crisis hit the homestead, the protagonist’s younger sister (who had moved east to pursue postsecondary education) and her lawyer husband saw “a whole lot of value in the S Lazy H” ranch. They fought for their stake in the family land, which they ultimately sold to a developer who planned to build rows of houses on the land. The brother tried, but failed, to ranch his remaining portion of the land, but the bank foreclosed on the property. Although not his own story (but rather, an amalgam of experiences of southern Albertan ranchers), this song has hit close to home for many local ranchers.68 As one fan commented, “so many ranches are going through this these days,” pointing out that these “struggles that make Alberta what it is, [are] all but forgotten.”69 Thus, once again, Lund proves his ability to address relevant and serious issues affecting rural Albertans, highlighting the financial challenges that young ranchers face and the emotional attachment to land—​only magnified by the duration of tenure (often generational) on that land. The song narrative reveals how deeply in tune Lund is with the evolving cultures and traditions of his rural origins, using his position as a platform to share and bring awareness to these types of stories. Like all of the protagonists he has portrayed in song, this story’s rancher is another iteration of the “Hurtin’ Albertan,” of the young man trapped between the shifting cultures of modern society, clinging to the rural traditions of his family heritage. His songs reveal a longing for simpler, more certain times, what Stephen Frosh has referred to as nostalgia for a time when an individual’s social role was clearly defined.70 In the case of Alberta’s working class, and exemplified in the juxtaposition of traditional ranching and rodeo culture with the province’s increasingly industrial reality, the need for the “Hurtin’ Albertan” exists. Through Lund, he represents the rural communities struggling to retain their cultures and traditions, and to protect the ranches that have sustained multiple generations of a family. Beyond bringing attention to these issues, “S Lazy H” demonstrates Lund’s commitment to maintaining the artistic identity that he has spent the last twenty years writing through his music. A self-​stylized “Hurtin’ Albertan,” this song, and its many iterations, reinforces Lund’s intimate connection to and rootedness in the geography, culture, and traditions of his origins, all while strengthening the role that such narratives play in defining the “Albertan-​ness” of his “geo-​cultural” identity.

Notes 1. Yi-​Fu Tuan, Topophilia:  A  Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973). 2. From 1679 to 1869, the southern part of present-​day Alberta was part of Rupert’s Land, then under control of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). HBC sold Rupert’s Land to the

110    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Dominion of Canada in 1869, the District of Alberta was formed as part of the North-​West Territories in 1882, and Alberta became an official Canadian province in 1905. 3. Grant Lawrence, “The Beetle Roadtrip Sessions: Corb Lund,” CBCMusic Presents Series (blog), August 13, 2014, accessed June 27, 2016, http://​www.cbc.ca/​beetleroadtrip/​blog/​ entry/​corb-​lund-​performs-​on-​his-​family-​ranch-​in-​the-​rocky-​mountain-​foothills-​of-​a. 4. Lund studied anthropology and history for two years at the University of Lethbridge in the late 1980s. He then moved north to Edmonton in 1989, where he transferred into the jazz music performance program at Grant MacEwan Community College (now MacEwan University). While studying at Grant MacEwan, he and three classmates formed the speed metal band called The Smalls, who enjoyed a regional cult-​like following throughout the 1990s but ultimately parted ways in 2001. See Jacqueline Louie, “Teachers Who Marched to their Own Drum Beat Inspired Music Star Corb Lund,” The Alberta Teacher’s Association, August 1, 2013, accessed June 27, 2016, http://​www.teachers.ab.ca/​News%20 Room/​Summer%20Series/​SummerSeries2013/​Pages/​Teachers-​who-​marched.aspx. 5. Lund lived in Edmonton, Alberta, until 2013, when he put his house up for sale so that he could move closer to his family. See “Corb Lund’s Edmonton House for Sale,” HuffPost Alberta, October 16, 2013 http://​www.huffingtonpost.ca/​2013/​10/​17/​corb-​lund-​house-​for-​ sale_​n_​4116997.html. 6. Jada Watson, “The Dixie Chicks’ ‘Lubbock or Leave it’: Negotiation Place and Identity through Country Song,” Journal of the Society for American Music 8, no. 1 (2014): 52. 7. Thomas Solomon, “Dueling Landscapes:  Singing Places and Identities in Highland Bolivia,” Ethnomusicology 44, no. 2 (2000): 271. 8. Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction:  Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader:  Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens:  The University of Georgia Press, 1996), xv–​ xxxvii. James Cantrill, “The Environmental Self and a Sense of Place: Communication Foundations for Regional Ecosystem Management.” Journal of Applied Communication Research 26, no. 3 (1998): 301–​318. 9. Md. Munir Hossain Talukder, “In Defence of Geo-​Cultural Identity:  An Argument Against Kymlicka’s View of Multiculturalism and Minority Rights,” CEU Political Science Journal 8, no. 4 (2013): 426. 10. Norm Cohen, “A Few Thoughts on Provocative Points,” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (2014): 234. 11. D. K. Wilgus, Anglo-​ American Folksong Scholarship since 1898 (New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 1959), 433; Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music:  Source and Symbol,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (1965): 205; Bill C. Malone, Country Music U.S.A.: A Fifty-​Year History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), viii. 12. Watson, “Dixie Chicks’ ‘Lubbock or Leave it,’ ” 51. 13. Barry Mazor called it as such in a November 2010 article entitled “Scanning the Countryside:  Country History, Then and Now,” on The 9513 (website). Unfortunately, this website is no longer active, but Patrick Huber references this review in Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 2008), fn 4. 14. In his article on Patsy Cline, Malone contends that the singer’s music and especially her live concerts (in urban-​based establishments) provided cultural grounding for audiences of displaced working-​class southerners who were often nostalgic for their rural homes and the communities of their upbringing. See Bill C. Malone, “Patsy Cline and the

Geography and Country Music    111 Transformation of the Working-​Class South,” in Sweet Dreams: The World of Patsy Cline, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (Urbana-​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 17–​21. 15. Malone, Country Music U.S.A., viii. See Paul L. Tyler, “Hillbilly Music Re-​Imagined: Folk and Country Music in the Midwest,” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (2014): 159–​190. 16. Bill C. Malone, Southern Music, American Music (Lexington:  University of Kentucky Press, 1979); Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers:  Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1993); Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001). Aaron Fox has also focused on country music and southern rural culture in his ethnography of the music as an expression of the working-​class in Lockhart, Texas in Real Country: Music and Language in Working-​ Class Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 17. Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp:  The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 2008). 18. Patrick Huber, “The New York Sound: Citybilly Recording Artists and the Creation of Hillbilly Music, 1924-​1932,” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (2014): 139–​158. 19. Huber, “New York Sound,” 145–​147. 20. Kristine McCusker, in particular, has noted the absence of gender analysis in Huber’s study and suggested that the role of female artists, notably Moonshine Kate, in this musical world would enhance the discussion. See Kristine M. McCusker, “Reviewed Work:  Linthead Stomp:  The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South by Patrick Huber,” West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies 3, no. 2 (2009), 111. Of course, the United States is not the sole geographic location in which country music is created and actively pursued by fans. Many regions in Canada have vibrant country music scenes, including Calgary, Alberta (Gillian Turnbull, “Roots Music in Calgary, Alberta: An Ethnography” [PhD dissertation, York University, 2009]); and Québec (Catherine Lefrançois, “La chanson country-​western, 1942-​1957: Un faisceau de la modernité culturelle au Québec” [PhD dissertation, Université Laval, 2011]). Nate Gibson offers an excellent discussion of the global country musics in ­chapter 24 of this volume. 21. Nicholas Dawidoff, In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music (New York: Vintage Books, 1998). 22. Charles R. Townsend, San Antonio Rose:  The Life and Music of Bob Wills (Urbana-​ Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 1976); Cary Ginnell, Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing (Urbana-​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 23. Ronnie Pugh, Ernest Tubb:  The Texas Troubadour (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1996). 24. Jean Boyd, Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 7. See also Jean A. Boyd, Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012). 25. Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown:  The Making of the Old Southern Sound (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992); and Neil V. Rosenberg, Bluegrass: A History (Urbana-​ Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 1985). Several other important works consider the life and work of bluegrass artists:  Thomas Goldsmith, The Bluegrass Reader (Urbana-​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Carl Fleischhauer and Neil V. Rosenberg, Bluegrass Odyssey: A Documentary in Pictures and Words, 1966-​86 (Urbana-​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Neil V. Rosenberg and Charles K. Wolfe,

112    Oxford Handbook of Country Music The Music of Bill Monroe (Urbana-​ Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 2007); Richard D. Smith, Can’t You Hear Me Callin’: The Life of Bill Monroe, Father of Bluegrass (Boston:  Little, Brown, 2000); Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr, Wayfaring Strangers:  The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 26. Geography also emerges as an important element in literature addressing the genre’s various country music “scenes,” including Nashville: Joli Jensen, Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press and Country Music Foundation Press, 1998); Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Austin: Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities:  The Rock‘n’Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover, NH:  Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Travis D. Stimeling, Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks:  The Countercultural Sounds of Austin’s Progressive Country Music Scene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Bakersfield: Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 27. Richard Peterson and Russell Davis Jr., “The Fertile Crescent of Country Music,” The Journal of Country Music 6, no. 1 (1975), 20. 28. Clearly influenced by Peterson and Davis’s article, cultural geographer George O. Carney has been prolific in his exploration of the genre’s geographic origins. In addition to echoing Peterson and Davis’s observations regarding the geographic origins of country’s prominent stars, he has also mapped the diffusion of vocal and instrumental elements. Although perhaps lacking in documentary/​archival support, Carney’s work presents basic groundwork for those interested in interrogating the geographic origins of important elements of the genre and its styles. See George O. Carney, “From Down Home to Uptown: The Diffusion Of Country-​Music Radio Stations in the United States,” Journal of Geography 76, no. 3 (March 1977): 104–​110; Carney, “T for Texas, T for Tennessee: The Origins of American Country Music Notables,” Journal of Geography 78, no. 6 (November 1979): 218–​ 225; and Carney, “Country Music and the South:  A  Cultural Geography Perspective,” Journal of Cultural Geography 1, no. 1 (1980): 16–​33. 29. Warren Gill, “Region, Agency, and Popular Music: The Northwest Sound, 1958-​1966,” The Canadian Geographer 37, no. 2 (1993): 120–​131; Ray Hudson, “Regions and Place: Music, Identity and Place,” Progress in Human Geography 30, no. 5 (2006):  626–​634; Colin McLeay, “Popular Music and Expressions of National Identity,” New Zealand Journal of Geography 103 (1997): 12–​17. 30. Lily Kong, “Popular Music in Geographical Analyses,” Progress in Human Geography 19, no. 2 (1995): 183–​198. 31. Blake Gumprecht, “Lubbock on Everything: The Evocation of Place in Popular Music (A West Texas Example),” Journal of Cultural Geography 18, no. 1 (1998): 68–​77. For more discussions of Lubbock’s musical scene, see Richard Gehr, “Lubbock on Everything,” Rubrics and Tendrils of Richard Gehr, n.d., accessed October 2, 2015, http://​www.levity.com/​rubric/​ lubbock.html; and Nicholas Dawidoff, “Lubbock or Leave it: Jimmie Dale Gilmore and The Flatlanders,” in In the Country of Country (New York: First Vintage Books, 1998): 291–​308. 32. Jada Watson, “Dust-​blown Tractor Tunes:  Representations of Environment in Butch Hancock’s Songs About Farming in West Texas,” Canadian Folk Music 45, no. 2 (2011): 10–​18. This study, and much of my research, has been influenced by the work of the late Adam Krims. In Music and Urban Geography (New York: Routledge, 2007) he demonstrates how

Geography and Country Music    113 musical codes and stylistic conventions mark out place in a way that represents or characterizes geographic space. 33. Travis Stimeling, “Music, Place, and Identity in the Central Appalachian Mountaintop Removal Mining Debate,” American Music 30, no. 1 (2012): 4. 34. Gillian Turnbull, “CoalDust Grins: The Conscious Creation of Western Canadian Mining Songs” (conference paper, Society for American Music, Lancaster Marriott, Lancaster, PA, March 6, 2014). Unlike the artists in Stimeling’s study, Corb Lund does not use regional musical styles; instead, he uses a harmonic language and instruments that are not traditionally used in country music, but that are loaded with extramusical cultural meanings. See Jada Watson, “‘This is My Prairie’: Corb Lund and the Albertan Fossil Fuel Energy Debate,” American Music, 34, no. 1 (2016): 43–​86. 35. See Simon Frith, Performing Rites:  On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1996); Philip Auslander, “Performance Analysis and Popular Music: A Manifesto,” Contemporary Theatre Review 14, no. 1 (2004): 1–​13; and Theodore Gracyk, I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001), 35. 36. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, 54. 37. Richard Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 152. 38. Pamela Fox, Natural Acts:  Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 114. 39. Ibid. 115. 40. Watson, “Dixie Chicks’ ‘Lubbock or Leave it,’ ” 49–​75. 41. Jada Watson, “Region and Identity in Dolly Parton’s Songwriting,” in Cambridge Companion to the Singer-​ Songwriter, ed. Justin Williams and Katherine Williams (Cambridge, England:  University of Cambridge Press, 2016), 120–​130. See also Pamela Wilson, “Mountains of Contradictions: Gender, Class, and Region in the Star Image of Dolly Parton,” in Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-​Tonk Bars, ed. Cecelia Tichi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 98–​120. 42. Jada Watson, “Country Music’s ‘Hurtin’ Albertan’: Corb Lund and the Construction of ‘Geo-​Cultural’ Identity” (PhD dissertation, Quebec City, Québec: Université Laval, 2015). 43. Murray Forman, The ‘Hood Comes First:  Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-​Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), xvii–​xxi, 1–​2. 44. Lawrence B. Lee, “The Mormons Come to Canada, 1887-​1902,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 59, no. 1 (1968): 11–​22; and L. A. Rosenvall, “The Transfer of Mormon Culture to Alberta,” American Review of Canadian Studies 12, no. 2 (1982): 51–​63. 45. Corb Lund, “#UTH: Gettin’ Down on the Mountain,” Corblund.com (blog), September 4, 2012, accessed October 2, 2015, http://​corblund.com/​2012/​09/​gettin-​down-​on-​the-​ mountain/​. He has also written several songs with references to Mormon religion and culture including “No Roads Here” (2002), “Truck Got Stuck” (2005), “Family Reunion,” and “Brother Brigham, Brother Young” (2007). Even though “Brother Brigham, Brother Young” alludes to the second president of the Mormon Church (Brigham Young, from 1847–​1877), the song narrative is fictional. Lund used Mormon reference material to research the setting and language to “accurately reflect the milieu of the early church.” See Corb Lund, No Roads Here: Corb Lund’s Alberta, Museum exhibit presented at the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, January 26–​April 28, 2013.

114    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 46. Both the Lunds and Ivins families have played an integral role in local rodeo history (notably the Calgary Stampede history): his grandfather Clark Lund, father D. C. Lund, and several other relatives have been inducted into the Canadian Professional Rodeo Hall of Fame. His mother Patty Lund (born Ivins) was also named a Pioneer of the Calgary Stampede for having won the Ladies Barrel Racing competition in its first year as an event (1959), and his uncle Lynn Jensen was a prominent local rodeo coach for several years. See Watson, “Country Music’s ‘Hurtin’ Albertan,’ ” 3–​10, 137–​199. 47. See Lund’s live performance of “Strawberry Roan,” House Concert, YouTube video, 3:20, Austin, Texas, uploaded August 18, 2009, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=Lult7TG_​ aPo. 48. Brad Wheeler, “Meet Corb Lund: Canada’s Singer-​Songwriter Cowboy,” The Globe and Mail, September 2, 2012, accessed October 2, 2015, http://​www.theglobeandmail.com/​arts/​ music/​meet-​corblund-​canadas-​singer-​songwritercowboy/​article4513289/​. 49. Wendy Dudley, “Corb Lund Gives Cowboy Music a Modern Edge,” Ranch & Reata Magazine (December 1, 2011): 67–​69. See also Corb Lund, Counterfeit Blues (New West Records NW6312, 2014, CD and DVD). 50. Lund has repeatedly noted Robbins’s 1959 album Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs as a favorite record and as a seminal influence on his music and style. He has even recorded in Robbins’s old studio. See Davis Inman, “Sessions: Corb Lund,” American Songwriter, October 7, 2009, accessed October 2, 2015, http://​www.americansongwriter.com/​2009/​10/​ sessions-​corb-​lund/​. 51. Shannon Phillips, “The Long View: From Criticizing Sour Gas to Prophesying Serpents, Corb Lund Ain’t Your Ordinary Country Star,” Alberta Views (October 2011): 43. 52. Dudley, “Corb Lund Gives Cowboy Music,” 69. 53. Glenbow Museum, “No Roads Here:  Corb Lund’s Alberta,” Glenbow Museum (2015), accessed October 2, 2015, http://​www.glenbow.org/​exhibitions/​past/​2012-​2013/​corblund/​ index.cfm. 54. Lund, No Roads Here. 55. When he is not drumming with the Hurtin’ Albertans, Valgardson manages his family’s large cattle ranch in Taber—​a point Lund is always quick to highlight when introducing his bandmate. See Corb Lund’s website, accessed October 2, 2015, http://​corblund.com/​ band/​. 56. Hus recorded two versions of the song for his 2006 album Huskies and Husqvarnas. The first version included Lund performing the spoken-​word CB radio interludes of the horse-​ hauling “Hurtin’ Albertan,” this time as an oil rigger. The second version, a bonus track on Hus’s album, contains additional verses written by the two songwriters. This alternate version further cements the “Hurtin’ Albertan” within the province’s culture and tradition, pulling on Lund’s personal and family history in southern Alberta (describing his roots in the ranching and rodeo cultures of the foothills landscape), creating a “backstory” for the horse-​hauling Albertan trucker. 57. Taber’s Cornfest celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2015. The Town of Taber website offers a description of the annual event: http://​www.taber.ca/​index.aspx?NID=381. 58. With the popularization of the mythic “wild west” described in dime novels, this “buckaroo” tradition gave way to the modern cowboy at the turn of the twentieth century. See Ken Mathers, Buckaroos and Mud Pups: The Early Days of Ranching in British Columbia (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: Heritage House, 2007).

Geography and Country Music    115 59. The Blackfoot Confederacy nicknamed the 49th parallel the “Medicine Line” because, to them, it seemed to contain supernatural powers in its ability to stop the US Army time and again from entering Canada. See Sharon O’Brien, “The Medicine Line:  A  Border Dividing Tribal Sovereignty, Economies and Families,” Fordham Law Review 53, no. 2 (1984): 315–​350. 60. This notion of using physical and cultural landmarks as a “travelogue” is drawn from the work of Murray Forman’s analysis of Will Smith’s “Freakin’ It” (2000). See Forman, ‘Hood Comes First, xvii. 61. Watson, “ ‘This is My Prairie,’ ” 53–​57. 62. Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Artist Biography, “Dave Dudley,” AllMusic, accessed October 2, 2015, http://​www.allmusic.com/​artist/​dave-​dudley-​mn0000959490/​biography. 63. Clifford R. Murphy, “The Diesel Cowboy in New England: Source and Symbol of Dick Curless’s ‘A Tombstone Every Mile’,” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (2014), 207–​208. 64. Geo Takach, Will the Real Alberta Please Stand Up? (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2010), 35. 65. A. J. Mangum, “Journalism in Song,” Ranch & Reata Magazine 5, no. 1 (2012), accessed October 2, 2015, http://​docs.epaperflip.com/​Old-​Cowdogs/​RanchandReata/​2ca6c4c3-​ c258-​47d6-​9ac1-​9fb20165e9a5/​DecJan12Flip.pdf. 66. Nancy Cardwell, The Words and Music of Dolly Parton: Getting to Know Country’s ‘Iron Butterfly’ (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011). 67. The artists honored at this event include The Judds, Loretta Lynn, Reba McEntire, Martina McBride, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, and Jennifer Nettles. For more information on the event, see “ACM Girl’s Night Out,” T4C, Top 40-​Charts.com, April 21, 2011, accessed June 27, 2016, http://​top40-​charts.com/​news.php?nid=66040. 68. Lynn Saxberg, “CityFolk Preview:  Corb Lund Back in the Saddle with New Album,” Ottawa Citizen, September 11, 2015, accessed October 2, 2015, http://​ottawacitizen.com/​ entertainment/​music/​corb-​lund-​back-​in-​the-​saddle-​with-​new-​album. 69. Corb Lund, “Corb Lund Performs S Lazy H @ Interstellar Rodeo 2014 Edmonton,” YouTube video, posted July 29, 2014, accessed October 2, 2015, https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=c3dhoqS_​gK4. 70. Stephen Frosh, “Melancholic Subjectivity,” in Subjectivity in the Twenty-​First Century, ed. Romin W. Tafarodi (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 87–​110.

Chapter 6

On the Not i on of “Old-​T i me ” in C ou ntry Mu si c Gregory N. Reish

Whereas old-​time music used to be played by rural and small-​town people, mostly involved in agriculture, and sometimes in the mines and mills, it is now played by people who have a common urban-​based experience. Now occupations can include carpentry, computer programming, law practice, car-​washing, education and so forth. Probably five and no more than ten musicians make their full-​time living playing old-​time music, depending on your definitions of “old-​time” and “a living.”1

Mike Seeger’s oft-​quoted essay attempting to define old-​time music first appeared in the May 1997 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited as an old-​time music primer for bluegrass enthusiasts. A founding member of The New Lost City Ramblers, a celebrated multi-​ instrumentalist, and a prolific documenter of rural Southern music, Seeger opined from a unique and privileged vantage point. Starting in the late 1950s, he and fellow Ramblers John Cohen, Tom Paley, and Tracy Schwarz (who replaced Paley in 1962) had revealed another side to the urban folk revival, presenting theirs as a more authentic and informed approach to southern folk music. The Ramblers were the first, the most influential, and by many measures the most successful musicians of their generation to attempt a faithful recreation of the pre–​World War II styles they encountered on old 78s, Library of Congress field recordings, and influential reissues such as the Anthology of American Folk Music, as well as directly from “true vine” musicians of an older generation.2 Seeger defined the true vine as “the home music made by American Southerners before the media age,” by which he certainly meant the dawn of commercial radio and old-​time recordings in the 1920s.3 His parents, Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger, had helped to pioneer the serious academic study and documentation of traditional southern music in the 1930s, elevating its status during the wave of populism fueled by Roosevelt’s New Deal (though largely eschewing the music’s commercial manifestations).4 Moreover, Mike Seeger was among the first—​along with Ralph Rinzler,

118    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Alan Lomax, Mayne Smith, and Neil Rosenberg—​to argue for a significant degree of folk authenticity in commercial bluegrass, reinforcing his authority to Bluegrass Unlimited’s readers.5 In his 1997 essay, Seeger took pains to emphasize old-​time music’s diversity and complicated past (“used to be played by African Americans as well as Anglo, French & Scotch-​Irish, etc. Americans”), and made a case for old-​time music’s importance as the “main foundation for bluegrass music.”6 Accompanying his protracted definition, Seeger presented an annotated list of twenty compact discs recommended for those interested in exploring the music, evenly divided (tellingly) between ten “Recordings of Contemporary Musicians” and ten “Reissues by Older Roots Musicians.”7 His selections in each category are eclectic and broadly representative, obviously intended to convey something of old-​time music’s stylistic, geographic, and racial diversity. The list of reissues contains several field recordings, including examples of African American string band music recorded in Tennessee in the 1940s and a Smithsonian Folkways compilation of music from the mountains of eastern Kentucky (“the rugged, sinewy kind of music Carter and Ralph Stanley probably heard around their home community when they were kids,” Seeger tells his bluegrass readership, not bothering to point out that the Stanleys grew up in neighboring Virginia). Even better represented on this list are commercial recordings of pre–​World War II country music: selections from the 1927 Bristol sessions, a Carter Family compilation, two volumes of 78-​rpm recordings by Ozark string bands, an Uncle Dave Macon CD, and a collection of 1930s country brother duets (a wise means of incorporating a few pre-​bluegrass records by Bill Monroe with his brother Charlie). Among the contemporary albums appear endorsements of several of the genre’s most powerful and influential voices, including some of Seeger’s regular collaborators (Hazel Dickens, Tracy Schwarz), an example of non-​southern fiddling from midwesterner Lynn “Chirps” Smith (who helped Seeger with the lists), and an album by the African American blues fingerpicker Etta Baker. At least as interesting is Seeger’s handful of recordings by younger musicians whom he generously praises for bringing fresh approaches to this old-​fashioned repertory. Bruce Molsky’s Lost Boy (Rounder, 1996) earns recognition for its “inspired fiddling … with new techniques of harmony and strong bowing”; Jody Stecher and Kate Brislin’s “silky, strong vocal and instrumental duets” on A Song That Will Linger (Rounder, 1989) are lauded for bringing a “strong, progressive approach to well chosen, mostly traditional material.” Seeger includes Volume 2 of The Young Fogies (Rounder, 1995), Ray Alden’s survey of the contemporary string band scene with music by thirty of what Seeger calls “old-​time style groups,” and finishes the list with Where’d You Come From, Where’d You Go? (Rounder, 1996) by The Freight Hoppers, another innovative young string band with “a fresh sound.”8 In these few pages, Seeger exposes most of old-​time music’s inherent contradictions and dichotomies at the end of the twentieth century: its agrarian roots and urban flourishing, its professionalization of homegrown folk styles, its strong but not exclusive relationship to the diverse cultures of the South, its Anglo-​Celtic whiteness and intrinsic multiracialism, its reception as both an antiquated style and a manifestly contemporary one, its aesthetic valuation of authenticity and tradition as well as novelty

“Old-Time” in Country Music    119 and innovation, and its conceptual divisions between the pre-​and postrevival eras. The notion of old-​time music has always been a deliberate and somewhat ironic evocation of nostalgia, an idealized and romanticized space in which musicians, listeners, and dancers can delight in the confrontation of old-​fashioned styles and (post)modern sensibilities. These paradoxes were not entirely new for Seeger’s generation, nor, of course, are they for ours. From its inception in the early 1920s, commercially recorded country music, which came to be regarded as old-​time’s canon, capitalized on feelings of nostalgia, on the music’s ability to evoke a mythologized agrarian past through eras of rapid technological development, urbanization, and mass domestic migration. In this, the early country music industry adapted practices inherent in the popular music of the nineteenth century, even borrowing directly from that precedent in shaping its marketing strategies. The postwar, old-​time revival—​spearheaded by Mike Seeger and the New Lost City Ramblers, supported by the work of scholars and field researchers, and sustained by a thriving festival culture—​brought the music to urbanized audiences and new generations of musicians whose enthusiasm for antiquated and rural styles was fed by both exotic fascination and left-​wing political ideals. These motivations persist among old-​time enthusiasts today; but as direct connections to the people and lifestyles considered to be the music’s sources of authenticity continue to fade, playing old-​time music has increasingly become a performance of reenactment. Many of its leading practitioners came to the music through the commercial and political filters of the folk revival yet have become the primary conduits for transmitting the “tradition” to younger generations. Prizing connections to the true vine above all else, today’s old-​time musicians have come to accept increasingly broad definitions of authenticity and routinely celebrate innovation within a shifting set of intensely debated stylistic and conceptual boundaries. For most aficionados of old-​time music, from the beginning of the revival in the 1950s to today, its most important sources are the thousands of commercial recordings made by early country “hillbilly” musicians from 1921 (the year of the Vaughan Quartet’s first recordings) to the so-​called Petrillo Strike that effectively shut down most of the American recording industry beginning in the summer of 1942. When the industry resumed operation two years later, the sounds, styles, audiences, technologies, and business practices of country music began to change rapidly, fueled by the country’s postwar economic boom and highlighted by the rise of such “modern” idioms as honky tonk and bluegrass.9 For members of today’s old-​time scene, from professional musicians and scholars to festival jam participants and passive listeners, this represents a crucial line of historical, conceptual, and musical demarcation. Contemporary old-​time enthusiasts hold this prewar repertory in particularly high regard as a recorded canon of old-​time music (although, as we shall see, many contemporary practitioners choose not to emulate the style slavishly).10 With the occasional exception of bluegrass, accepted as a modern extension of the string band tradition and admired for its sometimes-​antiquated repertory and grassroots cultural milieu, postwar commercial country music is largely dismissed by twenty-​first-​century old-​time musicians (however much they may confess

120    Oxford Handbook of Country Music to enjoying it) as something outside the realm of old-​time. There are certainly musicians active in the postwar years deemed worthy of inclusion in the old-​time canon, but they are generally seen as remnants of an earlier time and their recordings, often made in the field rather than the studio, are received as folkloristic documents rather than commercial products. The music and career of Tommy Jarrell (1901–​1985) provide a well-​known example. A native of Surry County, North Carolina, Jarrell was a singer, fiddler, and banjoist widely considered a paragon of the Round Peak regional style that gained dominance among old-​time revivalists in the 1970s and 1980s. His father Ben and uncle Charlie were also fiddlers in the area, and Ben recorded commercially for Gennett Records in the late 1920s as a member of Da Costa Wolz’s Southern Broadcasters11 Tommy was not a commercial recording artist, however, having worked most of his adult life for the North Carolina Highway Department. Recordings of his music were made informally and released by documentary labels such as County and Folkways. His accepted authenticity as a “true vine” musician came both from his own lack of a commercial recording career and, ironically, from his father’s presence in the canon of prewar commercial country music. To revivalists of the 1970s and 1980s, Jarrell was a living link to that time Mike Seeger referred to as “before the media age,” even though his father participated in it. Tommy’s style and repertory were considered an extension of his father’s and uncle’s and thus presumed to have been unaffected by the rise of postwar country idioms. The establishment of prewar commercial country as a canon of old-​time music began with the release in 1952 of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, a much discussed and widely praised collection of commercially recorded music from the prewar era that served as an essential starting point and touchstone for many revivalists. Although secular, white, southern music comprises the bulk of the Anthology, Smith’s eclectic collection encompasses more than what is generally thought of as old-​time music today—​including among its three volumes (“Ballads,” “Social Music,” and “Songs”) recordings by Sacred Harp singers, Cajun musicians, African American bluesmen, and gospel preachers. Of particular importance to revivalists of the 1950s and 1960s was that Smith’s collection presented commercial recordings explicitly as folk music. He deliberately avoided field recordings and anything else that had been validated by academics or other highbrow cultural curators and gravitated instead toward the recordings that the commercial recording industry had aimed directly at the folk themselves (working, of course, from his own collection of prewar commercial 78s). As Daniel Blim has pointed out, Smith understood the cultural and historical implications of putting together his collection, not just as a compilation of good performances but as an illustrative and instructive sampling of value to both scholars and musicians.12 The records, Smith later explained in an interview, “were selected to be ones that would be popular among musicologists, or possibly with people who would want to sing them and maybe would improve the version.”13 He endeavored to present recordings of high musical quality but was even more interested in those of historical value and popularity. What Smith sought to accomplish by framing early commercial country as folk music, the New Lost City Ramblers reinforced in practice. From the time of their formation

“Old-Time” in Country Music    121 and first release in 1958—​like Smith’s Anthology, on Moses Asch’s Folkways label—​the Ramblers set out to illuminate and revive music from the 1920s and 1930s, the years when the folk process first collided with the commercial recording industry, when songs and styles from the true vine began their transformation into popular music. Mike Seeger emphasized this in the sleeve notes to the Ramblers’ first LP, asserting that the foundations of their repertory and style “show the first attempts of the hill musicians to ‘make a hit’ with old traditional songs that had been in the mountains since pioneer days.”14 Seeger continues by underscoring the result of this interaction between folk cultures and mass media: “This was a period of great experimentation, when country people were learning new instrumental and vocal techniques, affected sometimes by urban or Negro music. … They were gradually hearing by way of radio and records more of what other musicians in the country were playing, which inevitably affected their style.”15 Revivalists valued this repertory because it connected in various ways to uncorrupted, precommercial traditions and because it was creatively stimulated by modern, popular culture and the hybridization it fosters. While Seeger, in his essay, upholds Harry Smith’s approach by legitimizing early commercial country as “traditional American folk music,” fellow Ramblers John Cohen and Tom Paley invoke the terms “old-​time” and “old-​timey” in their contributions to the album’s notes, drawing directly from the phraseology of the prewar hillbilly industry.16 The desired effect, of course, was to draw a distinction between the Ramblers’ brand of revivalism and the folk-​pop sound of contemporaneous groups such as The Weavers and The Kingston Trio, and to distinguish old-​time music from postwar country idioms such as honky tonk, bluegrass, and the emerging Nashville Sound. The New Lost City Ramblers reiterated these notions in the breadth of their subsequent recordings and performances and in The New Lost City Ramblers Song Book. Published in 1964 and reissued in 1976, significantly under the alternate title, Old-​Time String Band Song Book (adding the genre-​defining phrase, “old-​time”), the Song Book presents the prewar southern repertory in yet another format, intended to facilitate the learning and dissemination of old-​time music by the growing number of active revivalist musicians turning away from contemporary folk-​pop in favor of an aesthetic more explicitly rooted in the past. In his introduction to the Song Book, Seeger’s bandmate and coeditor John Cohen bolsters the notion that prewar commercial country constitutes an unusually important body of work in which rural and urban, agrarian and industrial, ancient and modern, orally communicated and mass-​mediated cultural sensibilities collided, significantly, for a short time. Promulgating the misconception that the music enjoys a privileged relationship to Appalachia, Cohen explains The music we play is from the Southern Mountain repertoire, a tradition which has come to be called “old-​time music.” By strict definition, “old-​time” today would logically refer to music of the 1920s and ‘30s, but it actually refers to a much broader [i.e., older] period. Sociologically, the setting is determined by the rural traditions of isolated mountain communities coming into contact with industrialized urban America [note the implication that mountain culture lies outside of American

122    Oxford Handbook of Country Music culture]. Musically, it was a period of experiment with no single style dominating. Individual styles which had developed independently were first being heard on radio and recordings during the ‘20s and it was because of this increased intercommunication that single large styles emerged, such as Bluegrass in the 1940s.17

Thus the recorded music of the 1920s and 1930s earns exceptional status because its diversity is deemed unique, the result of a singular historical moment. Like Seeger had done in his album notes six years earlier, Cohen argues that the music’s initial encounter with modern, commercial culture allowed the purer folk styles of previously “isolated” communities to intermingle, not just with each other but with popular culture at large, producing an unprecedented era of experimentation. The situation, however, was only temporary—​thus enhancing its worth—​for the very intercommunication that sparked innovation would eventually produce a less desirable stylistic homogenization in the postwar years. By the early 1960s, the term “old-​time music” indicated the particular brand of folk revivalism set in motion by Harry Smith’s Anthology and the New Lost City Ramblers—​ and sustained by a burgeoning musical subculture (note Cohen’s reference in 1964 to “a tradition which has come to be called ‘old-​time music.’ ”).18 The revivalists’ adoption of the phrase, however, stems from the prewar recording industry itself, which tentatively employed “old-​time music” and similar constructions as the first descriptors to categorize what we now call “country music.” As Richard Peterson has argued, the earliest efforts to market country music seized on images of the old-​timer as “representations of the unchanged past” in diametric contrast to the marketers’ own modernization and upward social mobility.19 Such evocations even predate slightly the imagery and terminology of “hillbilly music,” which did not cohere until 1925.20 Rather than focusing on particular symbols of rural ways of life, the country rube, or a southern noble savage, the initial marketing of country music in 1924 presented it wrapped in the comforting blanket of familiarity and nostalgia, summarized in the phrase “old-​time” and its close variants. Jeff Todd Titon reminds us that “old-​time music” had a particular currency among southern whites during the 1920s to distinguish styles and repertories of the previous century (parlor songs, minstrelsy, fiddle contests, and dances) from modern ones (ragtime, jazz, and Tin Pan Alley).21 Similar nomenclatural adoptions occurred contemporaneously in other parts of the country, including the upper Midwest, to describe heterogeneous regional repertories.22 Even though the recording and marketing of country music were new at the time, much of the music was not; a significant portion of its initial appeal lay in the fact that it was already proven as strong cultural capital. Mass media were indeed fostering greater levels of musical experimentation and admixture, as Seeger and Cohen emphasized, but many of the styles and repertories were firmly rooted in folk traditions that extended back decades, even centuries, and that had already been professionalized through live performance, sheet music publication, and other means of commercial dissemination for years. The phrase “old-​time music” reinforced to consumers in the 1920s that the music they already knew and loved had found a new outlet, a new medium for delivery. On the other hand, the initial attempts to market old-​time music in this way made little attempt to capitalize on its impressive stylistic

“Old-Time” in Country Music    123 diversity, deliberately emphasizing instead the music’s many connections to longstanding tradition and simpler ways of life. Columbia and Okeh Records were first out of the old-​time marketing gate, driven by the entrepreneurial work of their respective A&R men, Frank Walker and Ralph Peer. Columbia’s published advertisements for the new titles debuted in the May 1924 issue of The Talking Machine World to promote the label’s nascent old-​time stars, Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett (whom Walker installed two years later as the front men of his Atlanta-​ based supergroup, The Skillet Lickers). The next month, June 1924, Columbia and Okeh went head-​to-​head with advertisements for their newest recordings of traditional southern music in The Talking Machine World.23 Columbia’s copy proclaimed that it “leads with records of old-​fashioned southern songs and dances,” citing Tanner and Puckett once again but now adding Ernest Thompson, Samantha Bumgarner, and Eva Davis to the label’s roster of “quaint musicians.” Okeh countered in its advertisement that the “quaint style and ‘Old Time Pieces’ ” of Fiddlin’ John Carson and Henry Whitter constituted “a brand new field for record sales.”24 By the end of 1924, old-​time records were showing up among the releases from several additional labels, some of the titles continuing to appear under broad pop headings like “Vocal” or “Novelties” but others given their own distinct sections. In the December 1924 issue of The Talking Machine World, Okeh added a category in its listings called “Old-​Time Records,” which included sides by Whitter’s Virginia Breakdowners, Land Norris, Roba Stanley, and William Patterson. Aeolian (Vocalion) Records, in the same issue, assigned their new titles to categories that separated vocal and instrumental offerings:  “Southern Records” (George Renau—​the Blind Musician of the Smoky Mountains—​and Uncle Dave Macon) and “Fiddling” (Uncle “Am” Stuart, described as “Old-​Time Fiddler”). Columbia was the first to issue a dedicated catalog of old-​time recordings using a fresh numerical series in November 1924 with the publication of its Familiar Tunes on Fiddle, Guitar, Banjo, Harmonica and Accordion, that cumbersome title replaced in 1925 with Old Familiar Tunes. Okeh followed suit, issuing a brief catalog in January 1925 under the title Old Time Tune Records.25 The range of repertoire and variety of instruments and performers even among these relatively few early releases—​just as the recording industry’s newest genre was beginning to emerge—​offer a glimpse of the diversity that characterized it at the time of its recording debut (a diversity celebrated by Smith, Seeger, and Cohen). One finds entries for vocal and instrumental music, comedic and serious songs, sacred and secular material, solos and ensembles, and male and female performers. Listed instruments include guitar, banjo, fiddle, harmonica, accordion, and piano. The core of the emerging old-​time category was then, as it is now, dance music and songs; the former focused on fiddles and string bands and the latter drew from a wide range of subgenres such as balladry, blues, novelty songs, and sentimental parlor songs. The industry collectively struggled to devise an appropriate categorical heading for these records, to produce a single appellation that would clearly distinguish the category and entice its targeted demographic (chiefly southern and midwestern whites in rural areas or of rural derivation) while managing to encompass this impressive heterogeneity. Unlike “Race Records,” for its time an elegant and direct call to a well-​defined consumer demographic, early country

124    Oxford Handbook of Country Music music’s entrepreneurs could not fall back on simple racial markers. Aeolian-​Vocalion’s “Southern Records” came closest, perhaps, but failed to hone in on whites of the lower socioeconomic classes and excluded the Midwest. Geography was an important determinant, of course, and formed the conceptual basis for the binary name that, some two decades later, eventually stuck: “Country and Western.” But in the industry’s earliest years, the conception was more temporal than geographical—​and the common theme informing these early taxonomies was, above all others, nostalgia. Nostalgia was well-​proven as an effective aesthetic premise and marketing motif, having been a predominant theme of professionally composed American parlor songs beginning with the chivalric songs of composers in the early nineteenth century. Richard Crawford associates this phenomenon with an American vogue for British romances, particularly those of Sir Walter Scott; but he also notes that with the rise of the middle class in the Jacksonian era, “songwriters had begun adapting courtship songs for democratic customers, taking separation, not medieval romance, as their main subject.”26 Stephen Foster’s parlor repertory exemplified this trend, combining sentimental texts of loss and longing with a sensitive melodic flair and a deep sense of effective musical structure. Wallowing in the past resonated powerfully with American musical consumers as they moved up the social ladder, and as industrialization and urban growth transformed the milieu. During an era of steady economic, geographic, and cultural transformation, the preponderance of popular songs of the mid-​nineteenth century offered the nostalgic past as an emotional antidote to the stresses of a rapidly changing social present. The tendency to capitalize on feelings of nostalgia spilled over into other areas of the music industry, including instrumental and sacred music publications, where such notions were meant to have a more obviously positive and reassuring effect. A strongly nostalgic tone conveyed by evocative terms such as “old-​time,” “old-​ fashioned,” and “familiar” was, therefore, hardly new to the music industry in the 1920s, having been employed by music publishers and entertainment promoters since the nineteenth century. The Quadruple Musician’s Omnibus, published in Boston by Elias Howe in 1869, includes among its 400 pages and 3,300 individual selections “The Good Old Time Waltzes (Numbers 1–​5)” and “Old Time Jig (or, Hank Marone).” George L. Lansing’s Monarch Banjo Method, published in 1885, also includes an “Old Time Jig” among a variety of marches, reels, polkas, schottisches, and parlor numbers such as “Last Rose of Summer” and “Barney McCoy” (the latter recorded by Uncle Eck Dunford and Ernest V. Stoneman during Victor Records’ Bristol sessions in 1927). Post-​ Civil War minstrel troupes, which peddled a distorted and exoticized nostalgia as an essential part of their modus operandi, employed the term “old-​time” to bolster their contrived authenticity. Parsons and Pool’s Original Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Tennessee Jubilee Singers described themselves in an 1890s playbill as “The only company on the road to-​day presenting the old-​time manuscript version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” In that same decade, S. C. Wells and Company of Le Roy, New York, published a sixteen-​page booklet of popular vocal pieces under the title Old Time Songs to advertise its Shiloh brand of cough syrup and other remedies, using nostalgia to enhance the campaign’s medicinal reassurances (see Figure 6.1). The songbook’s contents are enlightening, an

Figure 6.1  Old Time Songs, S. C. Wells and Company, 1890s. From the collections of the Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University.

126    Oxford Handbook of Country Music assortment of minstrel, parlor, patriotic, and religious songs, many of them explicitly nostalgic and ataractic in mood and several of which later appeared among the commercial country recordings of the 1920s and 1930s: “Old Black Joe,” “Old Folks at Home,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “The Old Oaken Bucket,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” Often intertwined with “old-​time” in nineteenth-​century musical publications is the related term “familiar,” which also came to be employed by record companies—​ Columbia, most notably—​in the early years of country music. Carrying with it a reassuring tone that was often deemed appropriate to instructional tutors and preceptors, use of “familiar” to describe musical selections extends back even further than that of “old-​time” and can be traced to publishing practices in the British Isles. In 1815, one Captain S.  Fraser published in Edinburgh a collection of Airs and Melodies Peculiar to the Highlands of Scotland and the Isles, Communicated in an Original Pleasing and Familiar Style. The term gained currency in the New World during the Jacksonian decades before the Civil War, when “familiar” became linked to an emerging populist nationalism and was used to distinguish new from well-​known (and therefore, trusted) material. One example, The American National Song Book, published in Boston in 1842, is described as “A collection of patriotic, military, naval, moral, sentimental and popular songs, for the people. With national, familiar and original music.” In the post-​Civil War period and the early years of the twentieth century, use of the term blossomed: Our Familiar Songs and Those Who Made Them (New York: Henry Holt, 1881), Brewer’s Collection of Old Familiar Songs (Chicago: O. Brewer, 1902), Songs of the Sunny South, Containing all Familiar Plantation and Minstrel Songs (New  York:  Academic Music Company, 1907), and many more. During its rise as part of the late nineteenth-​ century’s Great Revival, the gospel publishing industry also seized on the term to convey a sense of accessibility and durability, and as a counterbalance to the deluge of newly written songs and hymns being disseminated in support of the movement’s evangelical agenda: Joyful Songs: A Collection of Familiar Hymns for Gospel Work (Towanda, PA: Clark Willson, 1889), Evangel of Song: A Collection of New and Familiar Gospel Songs (Philadelphia: Hall-​Mack, 1902), Familiar Songs of the Gospel: Songs That We Know and Love to Sing (Fort Wayne, IN: E. A. K. Hackett, 1903). Nashville’s Methodist Publishing House issued a large collection entitled Revival Praises in 1907, organized into sections titled, “Revival Praises,” “Children’s Songs” (which include “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life”), “Special Selections,” and “Familiar Hymns.” Thus, when the businessmen of the early country music recording industry wielded terms such as “old-​time” and “familiar,” they were invoking a time-​tested set of signs and associations to convey the rural authenticity, recognizability, and relatability of their fledgling genre while leaving ample room for its conceptual and stylistic diversity, even though that diversity was not explicitly underscored. Early country music, even before the popularizing and concretizing effects of the Bristol sessions, embraced an array of styles, song types, and performance media that resist simple and elegant amalgamation. These early years saw the release of recordings by solo singers and vocal groups—​including men, women, and children—​performing old world ballads, native

“Old-Time” in Country Music    127 ballads, event songs, parlor songs, comic songs, minstrel songs, cowboy songs, work songs, blues, Hawaiian songs, Tin Pan Alley hits, and gospel hymns. Instrumental solos and ensembles covered a comparably wide range of categories, including hoedowns, breakdowns, reels, hornpipes, jigs, waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, foxtrots, marches, blues, stomps, wobbles, and various descriptively programmatic works. The instruments that early country recording artists used, in seemingly endless combinations, included fiddle, banjo, guitar, cello, piano, mandolin, ukulele, accordion, organ, autoharp, kazoo, jug, harmonica, Jew’s harp, and others. Performance styles varied, too, according to the region, skill level, training, and taste of the artists. “Old-​time” and “familiar” had the capacity to incorporate all of this while reassuring consumers that the music conformed to their tastes, experiences, and expectations. By contrast, to postwar generations of revivalists from the late 1950s to today the phrase “old-​time music” evokes not only a specific time period, romanticized culture, and its associated styles but a politically charged alternative to the societal, cultural, and musical mainstreams of the late twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. As Stephen Wishnevsky expressed it in the Foreword to his irreverently titled compendium of memoirs and interviews, How the Hippies Ruin’t Hillbilly Music, “A few of the most privileged, best-​educated American children became enthralled with the music of the forgotten and the neglected,” what he calls, “an obscure musical form that once was the heart and soul of the American people [and which] refuses to die.”27 Left-​wing activism was embedded in the early work of the New Lost City Ramblers,28 and hippie counterculturalism became even more explicit in the music of the Holy Modal Rounders and others who combined prewar hillbilly styles with the psychedelic drug culture and rock music of the 1960s and 1970s. The roots of this paradoxical conflation of prewar music and postwar counterculture lie in the constructed notion of what Greil Marcus famously dubbed “the old, weird America.”29 Tracing Bob Dylan’s 1967 Basement Tapes back to the influence of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Marcus documents the Anthology’s reception as “a seductive detour away from what, in the 1950s, was known not as America but as Americanism … the consumer society.”30 Beyond Smith’s careful and inspired selection of musical material for inclusion, his graphic design and notes for the Anthology were intended to shock, unnerve, and entice and to evoke a mysterious and eccentric American culture that purportedly existed before the sanitizing effects of postwar consumerism. “The whole bizarre package,” Marcus wrote of the Anthology, “made the familiar strange, the never known into the forgotten, and the forgotten into a collective memory that teased any single listener’s conscious mind.”31 The old-​time music scene’s collective fetishization of pre–​World War II commercial country music continued to intensify from the late 1950s to today, particularly as that prewar era retreated farther and farther from memory and as the growth of scholarship about old-​time music blossomed. The first generation of scholars to take an interest in the academic study of early commercial country music extended from a line of mostly left-​wing folklorists who drew attention to various styles of folk music in the early decades of the twentieth century. Some of those scholars had already begun to recognize the folkloric value of early commercial country before World War II, including Herbert

128    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Halpert, Guy Johnson, Louis Chappell, Charles Seeger, and Alan Lomax. In the 1950s and early 1960s, folklorists John Greenway, D. K. Wilgus, and Archie Green all relied on prewar country recordings as fodder for published performer or song studies.32 The famous “Hillbilly Issue” of the Journal of American Folklore (JAF), published in the summer of 1965, was a significant milestone. The issue’s guest coeditor, D.  K. Wilgus, had recently left his position as a tenured Associate Professor of English at Western Kentucky State College (now University) and taken a post at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). With Wayland Hand, Wilgus cofounded the Folklore and Mythology program at UCLA the same year that the JAF published its seminal collection of hillbilly essays. In his Introduction to the issue, Wilgus argues against the establishment of a sharp dichotomy between commercial and folk as “antithetical concepts,” and for the inclusion of commercialized expressions of folk traditions as objects of folkloristic study. His brilliant and effective rhetorical strategy is to draw an analogy between commercial country (hillbilly) music and an older medium of folk song commercial dissemination already accepted by folklorists as a legitimate source:  the broadside. Cheaply printed and inexpensively sold single sheets containing vernacular song texts, broadsides were an effective means of marketing popular song to common Americans, and a practice that flourished in North America from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. “The hillbilly vein,” Wilgus explains, “has indeed functioned as a broadside tradition since 1923 in accepting material from the folk and transmitting material to the folk.”33 Wilgus’s astute and liberal observations regarding the folkloric validity of commercial hillbilly recordings legitimized Harry Smith’s goals and rather eccentric methodology but seem not to need much reinforcement in the twenty-​first century. Old-​time musicians, students, scholars, and fans have long since accepted that early country recordings qualify as authentic products of various interrelated folk traditions (this is, after all, one of the fundamental tenets of the old-​time canon). Wilgus’s other assertions, challenging the myth of hillbilly music’s exclusive association with the South, and Appalachia in particular, and disputing the idea that the genre derived from isolated rural traditions without significant effects of urban culture, have not been so widely endorsed. These notions endured, having been promulgated by many of the music’s most visible advocates, including the New Lost City Ramblers, and continue to incite debate among scholars and musicians today. Consider that almost fifty years after the publication of the JAF Hillbilly Issue, the same journal revisited the contentious topic of country music’s southernness, with a critical eye focused on the genre’s first two decades. Articles by Ronald Cohen on Alan Lomax’s northern field recordings, Patrick Huber on New  York’s “citybillies” of the 1920s, Paul Tyler on midwestern country music, and Clifford Murphy on country music in New England are succeeded by polemical responses from Bill Malone, Erika Brady, and Norm Cohen.34 Malone, in particular, has become the chief defender of what he calls the “Southern thesis,” his conviction that country music’s “defining and appealing elements are linked to its origins in that region.”35 Acknowledging the important work that other scholars have done to demonstrate and document country music making in other parts of the United States from the 1920s onward, Malone maintains that

“Old-Time” in Country Music    129 “southerners are the ones who in the 1920s made the seminal and crucial recordings and radio broadcasts that lent the music its public, and lasting, identity.”36 Although traditional music was played all over America, and occasionally recorded by non-​ Southerners, Malone contends that the music of the South was simply better, the “more exciting” and diverse product of racial interactions that did not obtain in other regions. Moreover, he argues that the early documenters of country music recognized this intrinsic quality, including both field-​researching scholars and commercial A&R men, seizing on a romanticized image of the South handed down through minstrelsy, Tin Pan Alley, and numerous literary channels.37 Norm Cohen, who had contributed to the original JAF Hillbilly Issue, uses this new opportunity half a century later to reflect on why the old-​time string band revival was “so enamored of southeastern music to the exclusion of southwestern,” singling out the influential New Lost City Ramblers for ignoring practically all prewar southwestern music other than Eck Robertson. Cohen posits the comparative wealth of “older traditional songs and ballads” in the southeast as the chief reason for this neglect of the southwest, but he suggests also a political agenda: it was “easier to associate hillbilly/​southeastern with Appalachian/​Ozark poverty than it was for southwestern music.”38 Despite these long and still unsettled debates about the southernness of old-​time music, Wilgus’s strong disciplinary justification for the inclusion of early country music and related genres in folklore studies was embraced, inspiring the field’s pioneers to take up a positivistic agenda to sort out the material facts of old-​time music and thus nourishing the old-​time revival and its collective obsession with authenticity. This work began with Archie Green’s groundbreaking essay, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” which follows Wilgus’s Introduction directly in the JAF issue.39 After considering the etymology and cultural implications of the term “hillbilly,” Green investigates the “baptismal narrative” of commercial country music’s beginnings, focusing on Ralph Peer’s recording session with Atlanta’s Fiddlin’ John Carson in June 1923. Though he does promulgate a few myths and misunderstandings about that seminal event, some of which have finally been set straight by Barry Mazor in his carefully researched Peer biography, Green pieces together a remarkably detailed and precise account of the events, even taking into consideration some of the broader cultural and economic motivations of the men involved.40 Green’s essay became a model of old-​time music positivistic scholarship, and similar investigative work soon began to flow through newly emerging outlets. In the same year as the publication of the JAF Hillbilly Issue, the John Edwards Memorial Foundation began publication of its Newsletter, which in 1969 became the JEMF Quarterly. Until its gradual demise sixteen years later, the JEMF Quarterly served as one of the primary conduits for sharing research and information pertaining to old-​ time country music, musicians, and records. In its pages appeared groundbreaking work by Archie Green, Norm Cohen, Ed Kahn, Nolan Porterfield, Loyal Jones, Charles Wolfe, and many others. Articles investigated prominent and obscure performers, convoluted song histories, hillbilly “barn dance” radio shows, and the activities of record companies. Around the same time, in August 1967, the Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddlers’ Association, based in Madison, Alabama, issued its first mimeographed Newsletter.

130    Oxford Handbook of Country Music In March 1969, its editor Mike Wallis opted for a more colorful name, The Devil’s Box, which provided another important forum for sharing information about the history of traditional American fiddling as well as record reviews and announcements of upcoming contests and festivals (see Figure 6.2). The founding of the fanzine Old Time Music in London by British scholar and discographer Tony Russell in the summer of 1971 represented another important step in the positivistic documentation of early commercial country music and the sharing of that information with the community of revivalist musicians. Old Time Music provided an essential, if limited, means to distribute the investigative work of various scholars and collectors to one another and to the growing number of revivalist musicians eager for knowledge of musics whose obscurity was an essential part of their appeal. Though often scholarly in the depth and detail of its information, Old Time Music was aimed squarely at contemporary fans and practitioners of the music. Its writing is generally direct and accessible, supported by ample illustrations; and each issue includes dozens of advertisements for recordings, instruments, and events of direct interest to the old-​ time lay community (see Figure 6.3). The breadth and scope of Russell’s editorial statement from the contents page of the inaugural issue are impressive in their inclusivity: OLD TIME MUSIC has come into being to inform and entertain its readers and, we hope, to be of some service to the musicians who make old time music what it is. We say “make” because old time music is a living music. Though many of our articles will be about artists of the past, just as many will describe performers of today. As for our interpretation of “old time music”: well, this should become clear as the magazine progresses. What we can say now is that we intend to cover a lot of ground: stringbands and Western Swing bands, cowboy and Cajun, blues and bluegrass—​and a great deal more.41

Russell makes clear not only that Old Time Music will appeal to scholars, fans, and musicians alike—​the boundaries between those categories being unusually blurry in the culture of the old-​time revival—​but that the publication will strike some sort of healthy balance between music of “the past,” probably understood by most readers to refer to the prewar era, and “performers of today,” which, in 1971, would have included revivalist performers as well as those whose careers began in the prewar era. Moreover, Russell is explicit about his desire to embrace music outside of the southeastern string band tradition. His inclusion of blues broadens the magazine’s racial parameters, while mention of bluegrass makes room for at least one style that coalesced after World War II. Over the course of its eighteen-​year run, Old Time Music disseminated a remarkable amount of information in its historical and regional studies, artist biographies, interviews, reviews, and discographies, with the list of contributors including most of the scholars then active in the field: Tony Russell, Charles Wolfe, Kinney Rorrer, Stephen Davis, Ivan Tribe, Ray Alden, Joe Specht, Mike Yates, Wayne Daniel, Kip Lornell, and others. Although its content did embrace most of the stylistic and chronological diversity Russell had proclaimed in his first editorial mission statement—​with Cajun, blues,

Figure  6.2  The Devil’s Box, first issue with this title, “Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddler’s Association Newsletter, Number VIII, 15 March 1969.” From the collections of the Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University.

Figure 6.3  Old Time Music, Number 1, Summer 1971, cover and contents page. From the collections of the Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University.

Figure 6.3  Continued

134    Oxford Handbook of Country Music bluegrass, and southwestern music receiving sporadic attention—​the vast majority of its pages deal with southeastern string band and vocal music rooted firmly in the prewar era. The potential void left by the demise of Old Time Music in 1989, JEMF Quarterly in 1985, and The Devil’s Box in 2000, was filled chiefly by the founding of The Old-​Time Herald in 1987 by Alice Gerrard.42 A prominent old-​time musician famous for her collaborations with West Virginian true vine singer Hazel Dickens and with Mike Seeger (to whom Gerrard was married from 1970 to 1980), Gerrard and her editorial team devoted the magazine to the “support, promotion, and encouragement of old-​time music.”43 She readily acknowledged her focus on “the traditional old-​time fiddle, banjo, and vocal music of the southeastern United States”; but, like Tony Russell in the previous decade, she allowed room for other regional traditions and contemporary movements. Today The Old-​Time Herald exists as a cross between underground fanzine and scholarly journal, a richly informative means of sharing information of all kinds related to the old-​time music scene—​including historical articles, interviews and memoirs, editorials, artist profiles, and reviews of recordings, videos, books, and instructional materials. The positivistic documentation of old-​time music’s accepted canon flourished in the late twentieth century also through the publication of book-​length regional studies and biographies. Much of this was made possible by the gradual acceptance of early country scholarship by academic presses, stimulated by the creation of the Music in American Life series at the University of Illinois Press in 1972, and cultivated tirelessly by folklorist turned editor Judith McCulloh. The early wave of old-​time music monographs consisted largely of regional studies, reinforcing the folkloristic notion that styles, traditions, and repertories are shaped primarily by local communities and environs. Chief among these were Charles Wolfe’s Tennessee Strings:  The Story of Country Music in Tennessee (1977) and Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky (1982); Ivan Tribe’s Mountaineer Jamboree: Country Music in West Virginia (1984); Joyce Cauthen’s With Fiddle and Well-​Rosined Bow: A History of Old-​Time Fiddling in Alabama (1989); and Wayne Daniel’s Pickin’ on Peachtree: A History of Country Music in Atlanta, Georgia (1990).44 Important book-​length biographies to appear in these decades included Nolan Porterfield’s Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler (1979) and Gene Wiggins’s Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy: Fiddlin’ John Carson, His Real World, and the World of His Songs (1987).45 Undoubtedly one of the most important and impressive reference sources for old-​ time music to appear in the last fifty years focuses precisely on its established canon of prewar commercial country: Tony Russell’s Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–​1942. Although Russell rejects the term “old-​time” as an appropriate moniker for the subject matter of his book, partly for its suggestion of “musical and social backwardness” and partly for its inadequacy in describing some of the period’s more “progressive” country music (e.g., Western swing), his discography forms an indispensable reference for students of old-​time music in the twenty-​first century.46 A meticulous and magisterial work of documentary scholarship covering every known commercial recording of country music from the period, the book provides detailed information about

“Old-Time” in Country Music    135 some 30,000 records, giving each one’s title, date of recording, city of recording, musical personnel, instrumentation, record label, and matrix and issue numbers.47 Organized alphabetically by artist, the book also offers useful indices to performers and titles for ease of research. Russell’s work, it must be acknowledged, was not the first ambitious and purportedly comprehensive discographic study of this material. Gus Meade’s massive Country Music Sources: A Biblio-​Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music, completed and published after Meade’s death in 1991 by his son Douglas and noted record collector Dick Spottswood, covers essentially the same ground but in a distinctly different manner.48 Meade set out not only to provide basic discographic information about commercial country music up to 1942 but to illuminate its folkloric and cultural importance by classifying it into an interpretive taxonomy. He organized material by song, rather than by artist as Russell does, assigning each vocal or instrumental recording to one of fifty-​two categories broadly grouped into four parts: Ballads, Songs, Religious Songs, and Instrumental Music. Many of the categories feature further subject divisions (e.g., within the category of “20th Century Topical Ballads and Songs” one finds subheadings for “Sea Disasters,” “Rail Disasters,” “Storms,” “Floods,” “Strikes,” “Murders,” etc.); and within each subheading, songs are grouped by subject matter, regardless of title and specific musical content. Thus, within “Sea Disasters” Meade lists nine recordings on the subject of the sinking of the Titanic with discographic information and references to relevant historical information, broadsides, individual scholarly studies, and academic folk song anthologies. It is an ingenious approach, not as immediately useful as Russell’s more straightforward discography, perhaps, but one that reveals many interrelationships within the broad repertory of early country music that might otherwise go unnoticed. The contemporary old-​time music scene distinguishes itself from most other fan communities in that the majority of its members are active participants in the performance of its music and dance. It is no surprise, then, that another important facet of the community’s documentation of its canon takes the form of published tune anthologies. Naturally this can be understood as an extension of efforts by late nineteenth-​ century and early twentieth-​century folklorists such as Cecil Sharp, Maud Karpeles, John Lomax, Dorothy Scarborough, Vance Randolph, and Samuel Bayard, to name but a few, who sought to collect and document traditional musics of the American South. The work of postwar tune anthologists Marion Thede, Jeff Todd Titon, Stacy Phillips, Gary Harrison, Drew Beisswenger, Gordon McCann, Harry Bolick, Stephen Austin, Clare Milliner, and Walt Koken has sought not only to document various traditions but to encourage their proliferation among both professional and amateur musicians. The learning and exchange of old-​time repertoire takes place today not just through the publication of anthologies but through vigorous local jam and dance scenes and a thriving festival culture. Early urban centers of old-​time revivalist activity included New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco/​Berkeley, but over time, equally vibrant old-​time scenes have sprouted up in smaller, typically liberal cities such as Bloomington, Indiana; Portland, Oregon; and Asheville, North Carolina. America’s

136    Oxford Handbook of Country Music long history of fiddle contests and other gatherings centered around traditional music and dance dates back to the colonial era;49 and in the early twentieth century, folk festivals such as the White Top Festival, the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, the American Folk Song Festival, and the National Folk Festival were closely intertwined with the institutionalization of American folklore studies under the banner of left-​wing political populism. Fiddle and string band festivals at Mt. Airy, North Carolina, Union Grove and Galax, Virginia, Battle Ground, Indiana, and Clifftop, West Virginia, some of whose history extends back to the prewar era, became annual epicenters of old-​time activity. The proliferation of old-​time festivals as gatherings for large numbers of contemporary old-​time musicians, many of whom travel long distances for such events, has given rise to an unmistakable homogenization and modernization of the music that has come to be known, often derisively, as the “festival style.” North Carolinian Tommy Jarrell and his true vine musical associates Fred Cockerham and Kyle Creed made themselves unusually available to revivalists in the 1970s and 1980s; as a result, their Round Peak regional style and repertory (from Surry County, NC) came to dominate the festival scene along the East Coast and mid-​Appalachian regions. But the twenty-​first-​century festival style also owes much to influences from outside of old-​time music. Its rhythmic drive propelled by a strong backbeat reveals not only the influence of bluegrass but of other postwar vernacular idioms such as rhythm and blues and rock and roll. The harmonic language of the modern festival style generally avoids the delightful clashes of prewar string band music—​which in the case of hoedowns and the like normally confined itself to tonic, dominant, and subdominant harmonies (despite whatever chromatic content of the melodies), and which rarely incorporated minor chords, even in mediant (third) relationships. By contrast, the harmony of the modern festival style makes fairly routine use of subtonic (lowered seventh) chords (another vestige of many musicians’ background in rock) to match the Mixolydian content of various fiddle tunes and embraces minor chords and other echoes of modern pop songwriting. Developing in parallel with the festival jam style, and often reinforcing it, was a range of virtuosic modern approaches that has kept old-​time music fresh for contemporary listeners since the 1980s. Despite their dedication to authentic prewar sounds and true vine sources, the New Lost City Ramblers and other influential revival groups active in the 1970s such as the Highwoods String Band, the Hollow Rock String Band, and the Fuzzy Mountain String Band paved the way for younger, innovative musicians to incorporate contemporary aesthetic ideals and establish new standards of musicianship. To his credit, Mike Seeger drew attention to the work of such artists as Bruce Molsky, Jody Stecher and Kate Brislin, The Freight Hoppers, and The Horse Flies, whose refusal to adhere to a slavish imitation of prewar styles moved well beyond the original goals of the revivalists. The broadening of the stylistic scope of “old-​time music” in the late twentieth century in some ways reflects the spirit of experimentation and innovation that Seeger and John Cohen had valued so highly in the music of the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, the digital music explosion and Internet growth of the last twenty years has produced a situation comparable to the one that The New Lost City Ramblers cited as the source

“Old-Time” in Country Music    137 of early commercial country’s unusual vitality. Young musicians, eager to connect to older traditions but increasingly willing to ignore genre boundaries in their exploration, deconstruction, and recombination of styles, are reinvigorating old-​time music in decidedly contemporary ways. Artists such as Sarah Jarosz, Abigail Washburn, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, Dirk Powell, The Duhks, Foghorn Stringband, Jason and Pharis Romero, and Old Crow Medicine Show draw inspiration from the styles and repertories of old-​time music without feeling beholden to them.50 In so doing, they reinvent the music for a new generation, even as its sources gradually fade into the shadows of the past.

Notes 1. Mike Seeger, “What is Old-​Time Music?: A Brief Description and Personal Selection of 20 Currently Available Compact Discs,” Bluegrass Unlimited 31, no. 11 (May 1997): 62. Seeger later posted the essay on his website, http://​mikeseeger.info, where it has remained even years after his death in 2009. 2. See Ray Allen, Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press), 2010. 3. Quoted in Bill C. Malone, Music from the True Vine: Mike Seeger’s Life and Musical Journey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 136–​137. 4. A full account of the institutionalization of American folk music studies, including its acceptance in the academy, its governmental support in the 1930s, and the Seegers’ central role, appears in ­chapter 4 of Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 5. Mike Seeger, Mountain Music Bluegrass Style, Folkways FA 2318, sleeve notes (1959); Ralph Rinzler, American Banjo–​Scruggs Style, Folkways FA 2314, sleeve notes (1957); Alan Lomax, “Bluegrass Background:  Folk Music with Overdrive,” Esquire 52 (October 1959):  108; Mayne Smith, “An Introduction to Bluegrass,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (July–​September 1965): 245–​256; Neil Rosenberg, “From Sound to Style: The Emergence of Bluegrass,” Journal of American Folklore 80, no. 316 (April–​June 1967): 143–​150. 6. Seeger, “What is Old-​Time Music?,” 62. 7. Ibid. 63–​64. 8. Ibid. 63. The preponderance of releases by Rounder Records on this list speaks to the label’s support of innovative, contemporary old-​time music in the 1980s and 1990s and to Seeger’s desire to suggest albums easily obtainable by readers of Bluegrass Unlimited. 9. Bluegrass itself has exhibited a comparable dichotomy, particularly since the rise of “newgrass” in the 1960s and 1970s. Older styles of bluegrass that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s are often distinguished from more recent styles with appellations such as “traditional” or “classic.” In an interesting and somewhat ironic twist, the phrase “old-​time bluegrass” is occasionally employed, as well. See, for example, John Cohen’s article on Ralph Stanley from 1975 (a pivotal year in the break between older and newer bluegrass styles with the release of J. D. Crowe and the New South, known widely as “Rounder 0044”). John Cohen, “Ralph Stanley’s Old-​Time Bluegrass,” Sing Out! 23, no. 6 (January–​February 1975): 2–​8. 10. In one example, musician and author John Schwab, a fixture of the East Coast old-​time scene, cites prewar commercial country as the foundation of his own playing style and

138    Oxford Handbook of Country Music teaching method. In the introduction to his excellent instructional book on old-​time backup guitar styles, Schwab refers to the “music that had been issued originally in the 1920s and ’30s on 78 rpm discs” (thus the commercial country music of the time) as “classic performances of old-​time music.” John Schwab, Old-​Time Backup Guitar: Learn from the Masters (Bethesda, MD: L-​Century, 2012), 1. 11. Tommy’s own account of his family’s history in the area appears in Nancy Dols Neithammer, “Tommy Jarrell’s Family Stories, 1830–​1925,” The Old Time Herald 3, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 22–​29; and The Old Time Herald 3, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 36–​42. 12. Richard Daniel Blim, “Patchwork Nation: Collage, Music, and American Identity” (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2013), 215–​216. 13. John Cohen, “A Rare Interview with Harry Smith,” Sing Out! 19, no. 1 (April–​May 1969); reprinted in American Magus, Harry Smith:  A  Modern Alchemist, ed. Paola Igliori (New York: Inanout Press, 1996), 126. 14. Mike Seeger, “About the Music and Its Times,” The New Lost City Ramblers, Folkways FA 2396, sleeve notes (1958). 15. Ibid. 16. John Cohen, “About Us” and Tom Paley, “About Our Singing Style,” The New Lost City Ramblers, Folkways FA 2396, sleeve notes (1958). 17. John Cohen, “Introduction to Styles in Old-​Time Music,” in The New Lost City Ramblers Song Book, ed. John Cohen and Mike Seeger (New  York:  Oak Publications, 1964), 10; reprinted in Old-​Time String Band Songbook (New York: Oak Publications, 1976), 6. 18. Ibid. (emphasis added). 19. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 57. 20. See Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (July–​September 1965): 211; Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 71–​101. 21. Jeff Todd Titon, Old-​Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (Lexington:  The University Press of Kentucky, 2001), xiv. 22. James P. Leary, Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006), 26–​27. Leary documents that upper midwestern musicians employed the term “old-​time music” starting in the 1920s to describe a “creolized, regional repertoire” encompassing waltzes, schottisches, polka, two-​ steps, and more. 23. The two labels were direct competitors at this point, still some two years before Columbia’s purchase of Okeh in 1926. 24. The Talking Machine World 20, no. 6 (June 1924). 25. See the discussions in Green, “Hillbilly Music,” 211; Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 129–​130; Barry Mazor, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015), 56. Unsurprisingly, Mazor’s account focuses on Peer’s work at Okeh, though Mazor may have exaggerated in asserting that Okeh’s June 1924 advertisement amounted to “the genre’s birth announcement.” 26. Richard Crawford, America’s Musical Life:  A  History (New  York:  W. W.  Norton, 2001), 242–​244. 27. Stephen T. Wishnevsky, How the Hippies Ruin’t Hillbilly Music: A Historical Memoir 1960–​ 2000 (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2007), xv.

“Old-Time” in Country Music    139 28. In 1959, The New Lost City Ramblers released Songs of the Depression (Folkways FH 5264), an album inspired not only by a historical time period but by a political cause. In the sleeve notes, John Cohen articulates this directly: “There is a quiet economic depression in many places all through this country right now which is receiving little publicity from the politicians and Life, Time, Fortune [sic]. I suppose they would rather not threaten the security of peoples’ present attitudes or prosperity by confronting them with the actuality of the situation.” 29. See ­ chapter  4 of Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic:  Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). 30. Ibid. 96. 31. Ibid. 95. 32. See Ed Kahn’s survey of this scholarship in “Hillbilly Music: Source and Resource,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (July–​September 1965): 257–​266. 33. D. K. Wilgus, “An Introduction to the Study of Hillbilly Music,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (July–​September 1965): 195–​196. 34. Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014). Other important studies of early country music outside of the South predate this JAF issue dedicated to the subject. See, for example, Simon J. Bronner, “Woodhull’s Old Tyme Masters: A Hillbilly Band in the Northern Tradition,” John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly 12, no. 42 (Summer 1976): 54–​62; Paul L. Tyler, “The Rise of Rural Rhythm,” in The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance, ed. Chad Berry (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 19–​7 1; Lisa Krissoff Boehm, “Chicago as Forgotten Country Music Mecca,” in The Hayloft Gang:  The Story of the National Barn Dance, ed. Chad Berry (Urbana–​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 101–​118. 35. Bill C. Malone, “‘The Southern Thesis’: Revisited and Reaffirmed,” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014): 227. 36. Ibid. 37. See ­chapters 1, 2, and 3 of Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 38. Norm Cohen, “A Few Thoughts on Provocative Points,” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014): 234. 39. Green, “Hillbilly Music.” 40. Mazor, Ralph Peer. Among the myths that Green sustains is the report that Peer judged Carson’s singing to be “plu perfect awful.” Green picked up the phrase directly from Polk Brockman, whom Green and Ed Kahn interviewed in 1961 and 1963. Mazor addresses, and dispenses with, this attribution with refreshing clarity and surprising ease (p. 54), but despite some early doubts expressed by Richard Peterson and others, it took the scholarly community sixty years to do so. 41. Tony Russell, Old Time Music 1 (Summer 1971): 3. 42. The final three issues of the JEMF Quarterly, dated Fall–​Winter 1984, Spring–​Summer 1985, and Fall–​Winter 1985, were not actually published until 1987, 1989, and 1990, respectively. See Nolan Porterfield, “Introduction,” in Exploring Roots Music: Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly, ed. Nolan Porterfield (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), xxiii. 43. “Editorial,” The Old Time Herald 1, no. 1 (Fall 1987): 2. 44. Charles K. Wolfe, Tennessee Strings:  The Story of Country Music in Tennessee (Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 1977); Wolfe, Kentucky Country:  Folk and Country Music of Kentucky (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1982); Ivan M.

140    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Tribe, Mountaineer Jamboree: Country Music in West Virginia (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1984); Joyce H. Cauthen, With Fiddle and Well-​Rosined Bow: A History of Old-​Time Fiddling in Alabama (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989); Wayne W. Daniel, Pickin’ on Peachtree: A History of Country Music in Atlanta, Georgia (Urbana–​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990). 45. Nolan Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers:  The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler (Oxford:  University Press of Mississippi, 1979); Gene Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy:  Fiddlin’ John Carson, His Real World, and the World of His Songs (Urbana–​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987). 46. Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–​1942 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3. 47. My random sample of fifty pages from the discography revealed an average of just under thirty-​two records per page. Rounded and multiplied by the 933 pages of the discography itself, this yields a total of 29,856 individual records. 48. Guthrie T. Meade, with Dick Spottswood and Douglas S. Meade, Country Music Sources:  A  Biblio-​ Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music (Chapel Hill:  Southern Folklife Collection, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, 2002). 49. The earliest documented public festival featuring fiddle music and contests in the New World took place in Hanover, Virginia, in 1736, although there is little evidence of any other fiddle gatherings before the 1790s. See John Ogasapian, Music of the Colonial and Revolutionary Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 73; Chris Goertzen, Southern Fiddling and Fiddle Contests (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 5. 50. For a discussion of this trend, see Geoffrey Himes, “A New Wave of Musicians Updates that Old-​Time Sound,” New York Times, November 5, 2006.

Chapter 7

Rec ording Prac t i c e in C ou ntry Mu si c Travis D. Stimeling

Narrating his musical awakening, country music historian Bill C.  Malone has recounted—​in numerous venues—​the powerful effect that radio had in shaping his childhood musical tastes, tastes that led to a lifetime of creative and scholarly engagement with country music. In a 2011 interview, for instance, Malone recalled that, after his mother’s domestic singing The next big influence was the Philco Battery Radio that Daddy bought us in 1939. It opened up a wide, wonderful world of experiences for all of us, including the hillbilly radio shows that came out of Dallas, Fort Worth, Tulsa, and Shreveport. The Grand Ole Opry began broadcasting for thirty minutes on NBC that year, and we also heard it over WSM in Nashville, which came in sporadically on Saturday evenings. I heard people like Uncle Dave Macon, DeFord Bailey, Sam and Kirk McGee, Roy Acuff, the Shelton Brothers, the Callahan Brothers, Ernest Tubb, Bill Monroe, and people like that. I was hooked for life. Perhaps the most seminal radio experience that I had was hearing the Carter Family over the broadcasts of XERF from Villa Acuna [sic], Mexico on the Mexican border.1

In Malone’s youth, live performance dominated radio airplay, as nationally syndicated barn dances and local sustaining programs alike brought country music—​along with a variety of musical styles—​directly into the homes of those listeners who could afford a radio and a battery (or who happened to have a generous neighbor who would allow them to come over for a listening party). Yet, as Eric Weisbard demonstrates in ­chapter 11 in this book, live radio performances were supplanted by postwar disc jockey programs that relied on carefully curated playlists of hit recordings.2 Since then, live performance has been a rarity on radio, often finding homes on public and community radio stations. It was into the era of what Weisbard describes as “format radio” that I was born, with radio stations WBUC (Buckhannon, WV) and WKKW (Clarksburg, WV) blasting out

142    Oxford Handbook of Country Music the latest hit recordings of people such as the Oak Ridge Boys, Alabama, Reba McEntire, and Randy Travis to car radios, transistor radios, and home stereos throughout north-​ central West Virginia. As my little brother and I listened to the radio during our play together, we would get excited when the cross-​picked acoustic guitar introduction of Keith Whitley’s 1989 hit “I’m No Stranger to the Rain” would announce the coming of one of our favorite singers, and we would practice introducing Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road,” trying hard to time our introductions so that we would “hit the post”—​or stop talking right before the lyrics started—​as we had heard our favorite disc jockeys do at the start of each set.3 Although much of my early musical upbringing was shaped by the practices of the radio industry, recordings—​the very material of those broadcasts—​were actually at the forefront of those experiences. The introduction to Whitley’s chart-​topper was executed perfectly every time, with no discrepancies in intonation or timing from one performance to another, because I was not listening to live performance that would admit such minor variations but to a comparatively fixed recording. Similarly, Earle’s “Copperhead Road” provided valuable training for a childhood disc jockey because its forty-​second introduction did not fluctuate to accommodate the dragging tempo of a weary road band. Unlike Malone, then, who was reared on the vicissitudes of live performance, my musical tastes—​like most listeners in the United States since the middle of the twentieth century—​were indelibly shaped by the endless repetition of recorded music. Musicologist Mark Katz has noted that recordings’ “repeatability has also affected musicians in their capacity as listeners. With recordings, performers can study, emulate, or imitate performances in a way never before possible.”4 Taking advantage of recorded sound’s “repeatability,” several scholars have worked to develop a “musicology of record production” that treats recordings as significant texts worthy of scholarly inquiry and examines the processes and technologies that shape the creation of recorded sound across a variety of cultural contexts.5 Writing of the value of such an approach, musicologist Allan Moore has suggested that “a musicology of production … would need to address the musical consequences of production decisions, or the consequences attendant on the shifting relationship between production decisions and the decisions of musicians about their performative practice.”6 Embracing the “great man” theory that continues to dominate much musicological thought, numerous authors have devoted attention to record producers, especially those who have exerted a significant sonic impact on the recordings of the artists they produce.7 Virgil Moorefield, for instance, describes record producers with language that is often reserved for mystic oracles or nineteenth-​century German composers, characterizing them “as the mediator between the two worlds of inspiration and [technical] know-​how.”8 To a lesser extent, recording engineers and session musicians have also received significant attention as scholars have begun to recognize the often unheralded—​and, in fact, often uncredited—​role that such behind-​the-​scenes figures play in shaping the sounds of our favorite recordings. As the field is still in its infancy, detailed case studies remain scarce.9 Scholars working in the field of sound studies have also turned their attention to recorded sound—​including music—​as a way to understand how people have heard their

Recording Practice in Country Music    143 world in various times and places.10 Our twenty-​first-​century experiences of recorded sound may seem rather unremarkable, especially in a world in which we are forced into a state of what musicologist Anahid Kassabian describes as “ubiquitous listening.”11 But, as cultural historian and sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne has suggested, recording and “sound-​reproduction technologies are artifacts of vast transformations in the fundamental nature of sound, the human ear, the faculty of hearing, and practices of listening that occurred over the long nineteenth century.”12 As a consequence, the revolutionary nature of recorded sound demands a careful attention to the ways that we—​as both attentive listeners and passive consumers—​engage with it and construct meanings from it. Commercial country music—​whether described as “hillbilly,” “old and familiar tunes,” “country and western,” or, simply, “country”—​has always been intimately linked with the recording industry, emerging more than three decades after the first commercial recordings were made available to the public.13 Simply put, country music was a form of recorded popular music, even as radio barn dances transmitted live performances from urban centers to the rural hinterlands. The discographies compiled by Tony Russell and Guthrie Meade, for instance, reveal the tens of thousands of attempts to capture the sounds of early country music and market them to sometimes surprisingly heterogeneous audiences.14 And while live radio broadcasts brought country music to audiences well into the 1950s, the proliferation of jukeboxes in the 1940s and disc jockey programs in the 1950s cemented the role of recordings in country music culture, a trend that continues today with all-​country radio stations that broadcast carefully managed playlists; televised music video programs that use recordings as the soundtrack to short films; and compact disc sales at the big box retail stores that serve rural, semirural, and suburban communities.15 Country music’s history as a recorded musical practice is not isolated from the rest of popular music but is instead indelibly shaped by technological and aesthetic developments that can be heard in a wide range of recorded popular musics. The first hillbilly recordings were made at the tail end of the acoustic era, a pre-​microphone era that called on recording artists to sing with full voices and play loudly to make impressions on a rotating wax disc. By the time of the Bristol Sessions in 1927, microphone technologies—​ adapted from their use in radio—​were beginning to find common usage in country music recording, allowing musicians to experiment with dynamics, phrasing, and balance and permitting the inclusion of quieter instruments, such as the acoustic guitar, in instrumental arrangements.16 Just as such “crooners” as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra use the microphone’s sensitivity to create intimate emotional performances that thrilled audiences in the 1930s, so, too, did yodeling National Barn Dance stars the DeZurik Sisters exploit those same technological capabilities to capture their delicate singing on wax.17 After World War II, the advent of magnetic tape allowed engineers and producers to edit performances with a razor blade and adhesive tape, and the subsequent development of multitrack recording permitted musicians to create sounds that were physically impossible to recreate in live performance. For instance, in 1967, Nashville session musicians completed work on Jim Reeves’s recording “Different Drums” some two years

144    Oxford Handbook of Country Music after his own death in a plane crash.18 And since the 1980s, a digital recording revolution has allowed producers, engineers, and recording artists to experiment with a wide range of effects and to break free of the constraints of the recording studio altogether, as Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) can transform virtually any computer into a high-​ tech recording console.19 Just as hip hop producers can create fresh beats using digital samplers to capture their favorite snippets of classic funk and soul recordings, so, too, do country producers compile (or “comp”) complete vocal takes from the individual words and syllables that a recording artist commits to a hard drive.20 Although country music’s recording practices have developed alongside those of other musical genres, it is worth noting that record producers, engineers, session musicians, and recording artists alike have not simply been passive users of these changing technologies. Katz, for instance, warns against “technological determinism,” or “the idea that tools, machines, and other artifacts of human invention have unavoidable, irresistible consequences for users and for society in general.” Instead, he argues, “it is not the technology but the relationship between the technology and its users that determine the impact of recording.” As such, we can see recorded country music as the product of a variety of conscious and unconscious decisions made as “users themselves transform recording to meet their needs, desires, and goals, and in doing so continually influence the technology that influences them.” 21

The Microphone and the Recorded Voice in Country Music Country music, especially in its recorded form, privileges vocal expression.22 Although fiddle and banjo tunes played a significant role in the genre’s early recorded history, vocal music—​and, therefore, human voices—​have been at the forefront of country music expression since the first hillbilly recordings were made in the early 1920s. In his ethnographic study of a white, working-​class community in Lockhart, Texas, for instance, ethnomusicologist Aaron Fox notes that vocal expression (including verbal art, ordinary “talk,” and song, as well as intersections and movements between the modalities) is used by working-​class Texans to construct, interpret, and remake their own theories, models, understandings, and experiences of space and emplacement, of time and memory, of personhood and the self, of emotion and reason, and, especially, of sociability, social obligation, and class, gender, generational, and ethnic identity.23

Most scholarship on the country music voice, as Stephanie Vander Wel’s c­ hapter 8 in this book indicates, fails to account for the central role that recording technologies play in not only documenting but framing this vocal expression for future listeners. Much as a camera lens trains the viewer’s eye to certain elements of a visual scene, so too do

Recording Practice in Country Music    145 microphones and related recording technologies draw a listener’s ear to the most important elements of a recorded performance.24 Musicologists Allan Moore, Ruth Dockwray, and Patricia Schmidt, for instance, have convincingly demonstrated that producers and engineers often situate the different sounds of a popular music recording within a three-​dimensional “sound-​box” and use that audible “space” as a compositional tool.25 Moreover, Serge Lacasse, in his pioneering work on what he describes as “vocal staging” in rock music, has documented the powerful role that technological mediation can play in shaping the expressive capacity of a recorded vocal performance.26 More recently, my own scholarship on vocal staging in country music has attempted to tease out some of the ways that record producers and engineers working primarily in the field of country music have adapted recording technologies for their own expressive purposes.27 Because recording technologies—​and the expressive capabilities that they afford—​have changed rapidly and significantly over the course of the past century, recorded country music’s voice-​centered aesthetic has always been shaped by a constant dialogue between technologies and their users, between engineers and producers, between artists and producers, and between personnel and their audiences. During the US recording industry’s first four decades, these various constituencies struggled with the difficulties of transmitting musically and emotionally convincing performances to wax. The technical limitations of acoustic recording—​which required a singer to perform facing a large horn that funneled sound to a small diaphragm transmitting the vibrating column of air to a needle that dug into a wax cylinder or disc—​ often yielded only passable musical results.28 Vocal phrasing that made use of subtle dynamics was often lost in this process, favoring recording artists who had honed their vocal talents on stage. Moreover, the needle’s friction against the recording medium added an exceptional degree of noise to the recording, and the recording medium was only capable of capturing a limited frequency spectrum.29 Additionally, for recording artists who had enjoyed strong careers on stage, the recording studio itself was a problematic venue, as there was no room for audience feedback during particularly exquisite moments.30 Little had changed when Fiddlin’ John Carson entered the recording studio during the first half of the 1920s. A popular live musician who had built a substantial following in the Atlanta area, Carson’s early recordings betray the limitations of the medium. His June 24, 1925, recording of “There’s a Hard Time A-​Comin’ ” provides a useful example. Recorded in a state-​of-​the-​art facility in New York, Carson sings and plays the fiddle along with his daughter Rosa Lee, who accompanies him on the guitar.31 John’s presence in the recording is strong, as his singing voice and fiddle (played just to the left of his mouth) are clearly positioned nearest to the recording horn. His booming voice, trained to project over the noise of a live audience and to fill rooms of all sizes, is overpowering, leading to a degree of distortion that frequently renders the song’s text unintelligible. Rosa Lee’s guitar, on the other hand, is barely audible—​not because she is playing it softly (as indicated by her occasionally powerful bass string runs) but because she is farther away from the horn and, therefore, making less of a physical impact on the diaphragm and the wax. As any Fiddlin’ John and Rosa Lee Carson fan who had heard them

146    Oxford Handbook of Country Music in person or on the radio would know, then, this recording is a poor representation of their musicianship and does little to provide insight into the nuances of their live performance style. Yet, despite these limitations, Carson’s recordings demonstrated the commercial potential of recorded country music, likely because audiences wanted access to voices that, even with distortion and poor balance, sounded more like their own.32 Unlike Carson’s recordings, which were recorded using the acoustic recording processes that dominated the first few decades of commercial recording in the United States, Vernon Dalhart’s contemporary recordings were among the first recordings to make use of microphones. Using technologies that had already been proven in telephony and broadcasting, these “electrically recorded” takes presented recordings with greater fidelity and allowed performers to perform with a wider range of dynamic expression. Microphones also allowed for quieter instruments to be heard with greater clarity, permitting vocalists such as Dalhart—​whose light tenor voice was widely celebrated—​to develop a subtler vocal style that played to the microphone’s abilities to magnify even the softest sounds.33 Recorded within two months of Carson’s “There’s a Hard Time A-​Comin’,” Dalhart’s August 26, 1925, recording of “Little Rosewood Casket” provides a useful point of comparison.34 Dalhart’s light tenor vocals are accompanied by the clearly audible and easily identified instrumental sound of strummed acoustic guitar (played by songwriter Carson Robison) and an obbligato violin; an oboe, listed in the session log, is harder to hear but may have been moved away from the microphone.35 Because the electrical process made the instrumental accompaniment more audible, the musicians—​perhaps with the assistance of an arranger—​were able to wring more sentimentality from the song, particularly in the closing reprise of the first verse, when the obbligato violin plays a harmony line along with Dalhart’s vocals and closes with an ascending arpeggio on the tonic triad that seems to disappear into the heavens. These high notes would have been almost entirely inaudible on Carson’s recordings of the time, but here they provide an emotional counterpoint to the song’s weeping lyrics. Victor first used microphones in controlled studio environments, but it was not long before they were using them in the field as well. The celebrated Bristol Sessions of July–​August 1927, for instance, made use of Western Electric microphones and provide remarkable clarity to performances captured in the upper floors of the Taylor-​Christian Hat Company.36 Listening to the Bristol Sessions recordings alongside those of Carson and Dalhart, the microphone’s capacity as a sort of auditory magnifying glass becomes especially clear. Recording the untrained, naturalized voices of rural Appalachian singers presenting a variety of country and gospel styles, the microphone highlights the distinctive characteristics of each singer’s voice, what Roland Barthes has described as the “grain of the voice,” and helps to reveal the artist’s humanity to us.37 In Corbin, Kentucky, native Alfred Karnes’s “Where We’ll Never Grow Old,” for example, we can hear him strain as the song’s refrain moves to a register that does not sit comfortably in his resonant baritone voice, and he often struggles to support the vowel in “old.” As Karnes reaches for the promise of a “land where we’ll never grow old,” the microphone portrays him not as a virile thirty-​six-​year-​old Baptist preacher, but as a weary traveler seeking heavenly reward.38

Recording Practice in Country Music    147 Microphone technologies have changed subtly over the course of the decades since their introduction to the recording industry in the mid-​1920s, but the basic idea behind the early electrical recording methods has remained the same. As new microphone types became available on the market, recording engineers began to use the intrinsic strengths and weaknesses of each to shape the sounds of their recordings, selecting microphones to subtly change the hue of a singer’s voice. Because of the widespread adoption of microphony throughout the United States and Europe, commercial country recording artists have needed to interact with microphones to be successful since the middle of the 1920s. As such, many of the most successful country recording artists developed a sensitivity to the microphone and learned to treat it as a key instrument in shaping their musical expression by changing their physical proximity to it or carefully adjusting their diction to prevent potential disastrous plosives. Moreover, by the end of World War II, recording engineers and producers invented new technologies that fundamentally transformed the electrical signals generated by microphones, allowing for the creation of new—​and sometimes unnatural—​acoustic environments, as well as changing the very nature of the voice itself.39 The manipulation of electrically recorded sounds becomes a particularly powerful expressive tool in Jean Shepard and Ferlin Husky’s Korean War-​era honky tonk classic, “A Dear John Letter.” Husky, singing as an overseas GI, receives a letter from his beloved and finds himself quickly crestfallen as the letter reports that his love will be marrying his brother. Husky, a talented singer in his own right, does not sing at all on this recording but instead offers a rather unemotional narration. Shepard delivers the letter’s bad news in a lyrical melody, initially presented without reverberation, echoing the coldness and directness of the “Dear John” letter. Here, Shepard’s suggestion that she “hate[s]‌to write” rings cold. As Husky reads the closing paragraph of the “Dear John” letter, Shepard’s opening paragraph is heard in the background and with a bit of reverberation, the product of an engineer’s decision to mix Shepard’s vocals more quietly and to run it through a reverberation chamber. The result of this manipulation is a complex psychological portrait of a man who finds himself in the midst of a significant emotional crisis; he is unable to think clearly as Shepard’s voice echoes (literally and figuratively) in his head.40 Heartbreak and psychological turmoil might also be heard in the treatment of Jessi Colter’s vocals in her 1975 single “I’m Not Lisa.” Colter, one of the small group of women associated with the so-​called “Outlaw” country movement of the mid-​1970s and wife of Outlaw star Waylon Jennings, frequently played the role of the steadfast lover who stood by her man despite his rambling ways. In “I’m Not Lisa,” the speaker—​Julie—​addresses the man she loves, a man who has been betrayed by a former lover, Lisa, whose “smile told of no night” and who, despite his love for her, “left [him …] drowning in [his] … tears.” Knowing that she is the second choice, Julie promises that she “won’t leave you/​ ‘till the sunlight has touched your face,” playing a caretaking role that sublimated her own emotional needs for her lover’s sake. Although the lyrics indicate that Julie is not trapped in this relationship and does, in fact, make a conscious decision to remain in a relationship in which her love is not reciprocated, Colter’s vocals indicate that she is

148    Oxford Handbook of Country Music affected by a profound sense of loneliness. Accompanied by a one-​note piano ostinato, Colter’s vocal track is treated with a moderate amount of reverberation, situating her in a vast and empty space. Whether that empty space is a physical environment or a psychological one is unclear (and perhaps moot), but the emptiness that surrounds her voice is a powerful reminder of how isolating unrequited love can be.41 This loneliness is further accentuated by the lush orchestral string arrangement that enters as Julie begins to describe the effects that Lisa’s love had on her man, revealing the codependency of this relationship. Yet, as the recording closes, the orchestra disappears, and Colter’s reverberant and piano-​backed vocal remains, suggesting that she has a long road of recovery ahead of her.42 Faith Hill’s 1998 hit single “This Kiss” offers an interesting counterpoint to Colter’s isolation. In this uptempo performance, Hill refuses to be party to a relationship in which her needs are not being met, indicating that she doesn’t “want another heartbreak” or “need another turn to cry.” Although she is not seeking a relationship, she seems to have stumbled on one that—​at least at first blush—​has energized her simply through a single kiss. As she states her demands in the first verse, her vocals are treated with virtually no reverberation and have been mixed to the front and center. Combined with a rapid and clipped declamation of the lyric, Hill’s vocal performance presents her as a square-​ shouldered and confident woman who does not need to be dependent on a man but who is pleasantly surprised by the love she finds. Yet, as the recording unfolds, Hill’s unaffected vocals begin to move around in a dizzying arrangement of vocal harmonies, pedal steel guitar obbligato, and a prominent rock beat on the drums, as “this kiss” puts her in a state of “perpetual bliss.” Disoriented and oriented, Hill even loses control of language, exclaiming that the kiss is “ah, impossible,” “ah, unthinkable,” and “ah, subliminal.” Again, recording techniques play a role here, as the nonlexical “ah” sounds as though it has been recorded separately from the remainder of the vocal track. A breathy, low-​register sound, this syllable—​particularly in its breathiness—​would be difficult to perform with the accuracy that repeated playback would necessitate (live performances simply do not demand the precision that recording does). Heard with slightly more reverberation than the rest of the track and at a slightly louder volume and disrupting the steady flow of the lyrics, this specially treated “ah” contributes to what Jocelyn Neal has described as “the poetic patter of the chorus” and creates a multilayered musical hook.43 As these case studies indicate, the effects of vocal staging practices are contingent on the context of the recording itself and the web of associations that listeners bring to their own listening experiences. Musicologist Albin Zak suggests that listeners often hear “records in dialogue,” developing an “association process [that] is an ever-​present and evolving part of the listening experience.”44 That is, reverberant vocals do not intrinsically indicate isolation or loneliness. Instead, recording artists, producers, and engineers frequently use microphones and signal processing to draw out elements of the lyrics, the arrangement, and the vocal performance itself.45 Moreover, these practices are often heard in dialogue with prior recordings of country music as well as other styles. One cannot hear Colter’s recording, for instance, without hearing the work of 1970s pop

Recording Practice in Country Music    149 superstar Karen Carpenter, whose 1971 popular recording of Leon Russell and Bonnie Bramlett’s “Superstar” uses reverberant vocals to depict a groupie’s heartbreak.46 As Zak observes, intertextual resonances between recordings work to heighten our own engagement with a musical work: “The fact that it is possible to make such connections gives listeners the impression that something meaningful is happening as they traverse the aesthetic space between themselves and the musical works that they encounter47 Zak’s notion of “records in dialogue” also provides a useful pathway for understanding how recording practices might help to shape the boundaries of genre within country music. In bluegrass music, for instance, recording practice and vocal staging play a central role in defining a vibrant and sometimes oppositional country music style. Perhaps more than any other country music style, bluegrass music has defined itself in opposition to mainstream country music, situating itself near the “hardcore” end of Peterson’s “hard-​core—​soft-​shell” spectrum by highlighting its deep connections to the acoustic string band music that dominated prewar country music radio and recordings.48 As such, many bluegrass bands maintain a strict adherence to the instrumentation that Bill Monroe—​the so-​called “Father of Bluegrass”—​used during the mid-​1940s tenure of banjoist Earl Scruggs and guitarist Lester Flatt; frequent covers of songs recorded by early bluegrass groups such as Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, and the Stanley Brothers; and nonmusical signifiers that link contemporary bands with their pioneering predecessors.49 For bluegrass musicians and their fans, the authenticity question is never far from the surface. Recording practice—​ and its replication in live performance—​ provides another opportunity for bluegrass musicians to assert their authenticity in a public display of historical knowledge. Many early bluegrass groups recorded around a single microphone, often using the radio studios they used to broadcast to regional and national audiences. A fairly common technique in the first decades of electrical recording, early bluegrass musicians were required to balance the mix of instruments and vocals by changing their physical location around the microphone. Banjo players, for instance, might need to stand far away from the microphone except during their solo breaks so as to keep from drowning out the rest of the band. It is unlikely that most bluegrass fans of the 1940s and 1950s knew how their favorite groups recorded, as it was uncommon to publish behind-​ the-​scenes photographs of these groups in the studio, but they undoubtedly witnessed such choreographed performances when they saw them in person at a local school, fair, or, for the most successful groups, the Grand Ole Opry. Still more bluegrass fans had the opportunity to witness this technique at work in the 1960s Flatt and Scruggs broadcasts sponsored by Martha White Flour and syndicated to television stations throughout the South; recently reissued on DVD, these performances betray the hours of careful rehearsal that were necessary to create an ideal sound and to prevent potentially disastrous collisions.50 Many contemporary bluegrass groups use the single-​mic technique as a way to communicate their authenticity to the bluegrass tradition, even as their musical style might veer far from the sounds of Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, and the Stanley Brothers. Raleigh, North Carolina’s, Chatham County Line, for instance, even emulates the

150    Oxford Handbook of Country Music famous centerstage microphone at the Grand Ole Opry, surrounding their microphone stand (which actually has three microphones, two of which are barely visible from the stage) with a white plywood sign proclaiming the band’s name in black letters. As the members of the group sing, mandolinist and harmony singer John Teer often stands five feet or more away from the microphone to create the appropriate balance between his high harmonies and guitarist Dave Wilson’s lead vocals.51 Similarly, bands such as David Peterson & 1946 and Hot Rize—​both of which self-​consciously refer to bluegrass history in the names of their bands—​typically perform with a modified version of the single-​mic setup, using only one microphone for the vocals and placing two or three additional microphones at waist-​level to amplify the instruments.52 Furthermore, Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri, hosts the National Single Microphone Championship, an annual contest for bluegrass bands that deploy the single-​mic technique, as part of its nearly three-​week Bluegrass & BBQ Festival.53 Although contemporary bluegrass recordings are often made in professional studios that isolate instruments and vocals on separate tracks and use digital processing to adjust pitch, dynamics, and even timing, such public displays of microphone technique suggest an adherence to tradition and allows groups to situate their work within a lineage of bluegrass performance and recording extending to the string band recordings of the 1920s. As a genre of recorded popular music, country music has always been influenced by contemporary recording practice and has always been experienced—​at least in part—​ through the mediating lens of recording horns, microphones, effects, and playback mechanisms. The musicology of recording has the potential to build on the detailed research of those historians and engineers who have documented the technical possibilities and limitations of recording technologies and the discographers who have documented the musicians, technicians, and producers who were involved in sessions. By training our ears on the ways that musicians, engineers, and producers engage technologies for expressive purposes, we can begin to gain a better understanding of the ways that recorded country music conveys its meanings. Moreover, we can come to understand the expressive power of recorded country music by placing these “records in dialogue” with other recordings, both in country music and from other popular music styles. The musicology of recording also reminds us that although country music studies has been obsessed with debunking myths of country music’s authenticity for several decades, listeners continue to have powerful aesthetic experiences by engaging with highly mediated products of the commercial recording industry. The experiences that my brother and I had listening to Keith Whitley recordings on the radio in rural West Virginia were deeply powerful, leading to my work as a country music scholar and his successful career as a country radio disc jockey. Yet, as a carefully managed, permed-​ hair-​sporting recording artist who appeared in music videos in soft-​focus, Whitley was a product of an always-​suspect media industry. When we reflect on our childhoods, we still remember the powerful effect that Whitley’s slightly reverberant baritone voice had on our prepubescent souls. It was through those recordings that we developed an intimate relationship with Whitley and, more generally, with country music. It is through these experiences that he and I continue to evaluate the authenticity of country music,

Recording Practice in Country Music    151 leading us to question whether a new recording moves us in the same way that Whitley’s did. Although our childhood selves might not have been able to articulate the reasons that this recording proved such a powerful force, it certainly had little to do with the markers of country music authenticity that are frequently trotted out when scholars write about the authenticity problem. Rather, it was always influenced by recording practice. By incorporating recording practice as a variable in our authenticity calculus, we can further nuance our investigations into the powerful role that country music plays in the lives of people around the world.

Notes 1. “A Discussion with Author and Music Historian Bill C. Malone on ‘Music from the True Vine: Mike Seeger’s Life and Musical Journey,’” Uprooted Music Revue (blog), December 21, 2011, http://​www.uprootedmusicrevue.com/​2011/​12/​discussion-​with-​author-​and-​ music.html. 2. See Eric Weisbard’s ­chapter 11 on country music and radio in this book. 3. It should probably come as no surprise that my brother, using the on-​air moniker “Clay J. D. Walker,” has gone on to have a successful career in country radio. 4. Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 27. 5. Simon Zagorski-​Thomas, The Musicology of Record Production (Cambridge, England:  Cambridge University Press, 2014). See also Albin J. Zak III, The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 6. Allan Moore, “Beyond a Musicology of Production,” in The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field, ed. Simon Frith and Simon Zagorski-​ Thomas (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2012), 99. 7. Michael Jarrett’s Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014) provides the perspectives of several dozen country music record producers. For a broader view of the producer’s role in US popular music, see, for example, Howard Massey, Behind the Glass: Top Record Producers Tell How They Craft the Hits (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2000); Massey, Behind the Glass, Volume II: Top Record Producers Tell How They Craft the Hits (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2009). Similarly, a thriving market for memoirs and producer biographies has grown over the past several years. See, for instance, Phil Ramone, Making Records:  The Scenes Behind the Music (New York: Hyperion, 2007); Glyn Johns, Sound Man: A Life Recording Hits with the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, Eric Clapton, the Faces … (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2014). 8. Virgil Moorefield, The Producer as Composer:  Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), xvi. Richard Middleton has vociferously challenged the “great man” theory, remarking that “it could easily be argued that this approach is less than completely suitable even for ‘classical’ music. … When we come to popular music, it is obvious that such an approach is likely to create great problems. Indeed, a tentative definition of ‘popular music’—​or, to be more precise, of tendencies which typically exert popular pressure within the musical field—​would probably stress precisely such factors as ephemerality (that is, contemporaneity), socially significant form and technique,

152    Oxford Handbook of Country Music performance rather than fixed text, the experiential rather than the abstract”; Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes, England:  Open University Press, 1990), 107. 9. Consider, for example, Albin J. Za III, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody:  Remaking Music in 1950s America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012); Isabel Campelo, “‘That Extra Thing’: The Role of Session Musicians in the Recording Industry,” Journal on the Art of Record Production no. 10 (July 2015), accessed January 6, 2016, http://​arpjournal. com/​that-​extra-​thing-​the-​role-​of-​session-​musicians-​in-​the-​recording-​industry/​; M. Nyssim Lefford, “The Sound of Coordinated Efforts: Music Producers, Boundary Objects and Trading Zones,” Journal on the Art of Record Production no. 10 (July 2015), accessed January 6, 2016, http://​arpjournal.com/​the-​sound-​of-​coordinated-​efforts-​music-​producers-​boundary-​objects-​and-​trading-​zones/​; Mikko Ojanen, “Mastering Kurenniemi’s Rules (2012): The Role of the Audio Engineer in the Mastering Process,” Journal on the Art of Record Production no. 10 (July 2015), accessed January 6, 2016, http://​arpjournal.com/​ mastering-​kurenniemis-​rules-​2012-​the-​role-​of-​the-​audio-​engineer-​in-​the-​mastering-​ process/​. 10. An excellent overview of the field of sound studies may be found in Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, “New Keys to the World of Sound,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–​35. See also David Suisman, “Introduction: Thinking Historically about Sound and Sense,” in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. David Suisman and Susan Strasser (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 1–​12. 11. Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening:  Affect, Attention, and Disturbed Subjectivity (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2013); Elena Boschi, Anahid Kassabian, and Marta Garcia Quiñones, “Introduction: A Day in the Life of a Ubiquitous Musics Listener,” in Ubiquitous Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don’t Always Notice, ed. Marta Garcia Quiñones, Anahid Kassabian, and Elena Boschi (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2013), 1–​12. 12. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past:  Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 2. 13. For a broad overview of country music’s history as a product of the recording industry, consult Charles Hughes’s ­chapter 10 in this book. 14. Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–​1942 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2004); Guthrie Meade with Dick Spottswood and Douglas S. Meade, Country Music Sources: A Biblio-​Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music (Chapel Hill: Southern Folklife Collection, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, 2002). 15. Steve Knopper, “Is the CD Era Finally Over?,” Rolling Stone no. 1151 (March 1, 2012): 13–​14. 16. Charles K. Wolfe, “The Legend That Peer Built: Reappraising the Bristol Sessions,” in The Bristol Sessions: Writings about the Big Bang of Country Music (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 28. 17. Alison McCracken, Real Men Don’t Sing:  Crooning in American Culture (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2015). It is noteworthy that in Richard Peterson’s oft-​cited delineation of “hard-​core” and “soft-​shell” country music styles, the pop singing styles that he describes as indicative of the “soft-​shell” often reveal that the performer was particularly sensitive to the microphone: Richard A. Peterson, “The Dialectic of Hard-​Core and Soft-​Shell Country Music,” in Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-​Tonk Bars, ed. Cecelia Tichi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 244.

Recording Practice in Country Music    153 18. Kurt Rokitta and Richard Weize, “The Overdubs–​ The Charted Hits,” in Jim Reeves:  Welcome to My World, liner notes (Hamburg, Germany:  Bear Family Records, 1994), 108. 19. For useful background on DAWs, consult Steve Savage, The Art of Digital Audio Recording:  A  Practical Guide for Home and Studio (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2011). 20. Joseph G. Schloss, Making Beats:  The Art of Sample-​ Based Hip-​ Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004); Mark Katz, Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip Hop DJ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 21. Katz, Capturing Sound, 3 (emphasis in original). Thomas Porcello, in his ethnographic study of the Austin, Texas, recording community, indicates that recording practices are not only genre specific but might also be profoundly influenced by local musical aesthetics that transcend genre. See, for instance, Thomas Porcello, “Music Mediated as Live in Austin: Sound, Technology, and Recording,” in Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures, ed. Paul D. Greene and Thomas Porcello (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 103–​117. 22. See Stephanie Vander Wel’s ­chapter 8 on country music vocality in this book. 23. Aaron Fox, Real Country:  Music and Language in Working-​Class  Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 22. 24. My use of a visual analogy is inspired by Simon Frith, “Art Versus Technology: The Strange Case of Popular Music,” Media, Culture, and Society 8, no. 3 (1986):  271; and Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 32–​34. 25. Allan F. Moore and Ruth Dockwray, “The Establishment of the Virtual Performance Space in Rock,” Twentieth-​Century Music 5, no. 2 (2008): 219–​241; Allan F. Moore, Patricia Schmidt, and Ruth Dockwray, “A Hermeneutics of Spatialization for Recorded Song,” Twentieth-​Century Music 6, no. 1 (2009):  83–​114; Ruth Dockwray and Allan F. Moore, “Configuring the Sound-​box, 1965–​1972,” Popular Music 29, no. 2 (2010): 180–​197. Peter Doyle, too, argues for the significance of spatialization in recorded popular music in his Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–​1960 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005). 26. Serge Lacasse, “‘Listen to My Voice’: The Evocative Power of Vocal Staging in Recorded Rock Music and Other Forms of Vocal Expression” (PhD dissertation, University of Liverpool, 2000). 27. See, for instance, Travis D. Stimeling, “Narrative, Vocal Staging and Masculinity in the ‘Outlaw’ Country Music of Waylon Jennings,” Popular Music 32, no. 3 (2013): 343–​358. 28. Useful overviews of the technological underpinnings of early recording may be found in Day, Recorded Music, 6–​12; David L. Morton Jr., Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 26; Andre Millard, America on Record:  A  History of Recorded Sound, 2nd ed. (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2005), 115–​135; and Susan Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 11–​31. 29. Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 27 30. Philip, Performing Music, 47–​49; Yvonne de Treville, “Making a Phonograph Record,” Musician (November 1916):  658, reprinted in Music, Sound, and Technology in

154    Oxford Handbook of Country Music America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio, ed. Timothy D. Taylor, Mark Katz, and Tony Grajeda (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 85–​88. 31. Russell, Country Music Records, 176. 32. For more background on the Carsons’ musical career, consult Gene Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy:  Fiddlin’ John Carson, His Real World, and the World of His Songs (Urbana–​ Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 1987); Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 43–​102; and Edward P. Comentale, Sweet Air: Modernism, Regionalism, and American Popular Song (Urbana–​Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 2013), 76–​84. 33. Such was the case in the broader field of popular music in the United States, as witnessed by the rise of such “crooners” as Bing Crosby and, later, Frank Sinatra (McCracken, Real Men Don’t Sing). For useful background on electrical recording, consult Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1995), 54–​ 70; David Morton, Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 25–​32; Millard, America on Record, 139–​147; Horning, Chasing Sound, 32–​55. 34. Victor’s first electrical recordings were made only a few months earlier, but the success of the process led the label to abandon the acoustic process quickly. For more background, consult Allan Sutton, “‘A Miniature Concert’: The Earliest Issued Victor Electrical Recordings,” The Victor Record Pages, accessed January 5, 2016, http://​www.mainspringpress.com/​vic_​minicon.html. 35. Russell, Country Music Records, 252. 36. Wolfe, “Legend that Ralph Peer Built,” 20. 37. Roland Barthes, Image-​Music-​Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New  York:  Hill and Wang, 1977), 179–​189. See also Jacob Smith, Vocal Tracks:  Performance and Sound Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 115–​162. 38. William Bernard McCarthy, “Ernest Phipps and Alfred G.  Karnes,” in Encyclopedia of Appalachia, accessed January 5, 2016, http://​www.encyclopediaofappalachia.com/​entry. php?rec=170. 39. Consult, among others, Horning, Chasing Sound, chs. 4–​7; Morton, Sound Recording, chs. 10–​13. 40. Serge Lacasse documents similar responses to the application of phasing to vocal tracks (“ ‘Listen to My Voice,’ ” 197–​208). 41. For insight into the ways that echo and reverberation have been used to evoke physical and psychological space, consult Doyle, Echo & Reverb, 105–​119. 42. Stimeling, “Narrative, Vocal Staging.” 43. Jocelyn Neal, “The Voice Behind the Song:  Faith Hill, Country Music, and Reflexive Identity,” in The Women of Country Music: A Reader, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 115. 44. Zak, Poetics of Rock, 190–​191. 45. Doyle, Echo & Reverb, ch. 4. 46. For more on Carpenter’s recording of “Superstar,” consult Kevin J. Holm-​Hudson, “Your Guitar, It Sounds So Sweet and Clear:  Semiosis in Two Versions of ‘Superstar,’” Music Theory Online 8, no. 4 (December 2002), http://​www.mtosmt.org/​issues/​mto.02.8.4/​ mto.02.8.4.holm-​hudson.html; Freya Jarman-​Ivens, “You’re Not Really There: Authorship,

Recording Practice in Country Music    155 Nostalgia, and the Absent ‘Superstar,’” Popular Musicology Online no. 5 (2007), http://​ www.popular-​musicology-​online.com/​issues/​05/​jarman-​ivens-​01.html. 47. Zak, Poetics of Rock, 191. 48. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 213–​215. 49. For a broader discussion of current debates around bluegrass authenticity, consult Joti Rockwell, “What Is Bluegrass Anyway? Category Formation, Debate, and the Framing of Musical Genre,” Popular Music 31, no. 3 (October 2012): 363–​381. 50. See, for example, Best of the Flatt & Scruggs TV Show, Volume 1 (New York: Shanachie Entertainment, 2007). 51. An example of this performance practice may be found in footage from a recent concert performance at the Hamilton in Washington, DC. See VOA Music, “Hamilton Live: Chatham County Line,” YouTube video, 29:50, accessed December 28, 2015, https://​ www.youtube.com/​watch?v=4vyFEXT3yUs. 52. For a recent example of this practice, consult Twist and Shout Records, “Hot Rize Live at Twist & Shout September 27th, 2014 (2/​7) Western Skies,” YouTube video, 3:08, accessed December 28, 2015, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=7y0iStUkfc8. Peterson’s band name refers to the date that Monroe’s classic lineup with Flatt and Scruggs first appeared on the Grand Ole Opry, while Hot Rize recalls an ingredient in Martha White’s Self-​Rising Flour, sponsor of Flatt & Scruggs (and, currently, Rhonda Vincent and the Rage). 53. Numerous clips from this contest are available on YouTube.

Chapter 8

The Singin g Voi c e in C ou ntry Mu si c Stephanie Vander Wel

As listeners, we become intimately familiar with our favorite singers largely through their specific use of vocal techniques. The singer’s breathy sighs, quiet inhalations, belting lines, rounded tones, strained nasal timbre, or lilting murmurs reach our ears and draw us into the music. Though the lyrical context helps to disclose the message of particular songs, the vocal stylizations are what carry the weight of meaning and indicate additional layers of signification beyond the lyrics. We, for instance, locate the personal subjectivity and identity of the performer, the sincerity of the performance, and the genre of the song within the particularities of vocal tone. Within a mass-​mediated popular music market, country music has arisen as a distinct genre largely because of the ways in which the singing voice has been inflected by regional accent, vernacular traditions, and individual style and technique. Though instrumental music was an important aspect of the emerging commercialism of hillbilly music in the 1920s, string bands faded into a supportive role by the 1940s—​and song arrangements for the solo voice came to prominence in the production of country music, as it did in popular music, more generally.1 Whether in a honky tonk or pop-​ influenced country song, the vocalist emerged as the defining performer, as either the leader of the ensemble (as with Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys) or the soloist with session musicians playing the accompaniment (as in the recordings of Patsy Cline). This chapter explores how we—​as scholars, critics, and listeners—​have addressed the vocal nuances of the singing voice in country music, given its centrality and importance in defining and shaping the genre. When the music trade magazine Billboard began to acknowledge begrudgingly the market success of early hillbilly music, it frequently did so by mentioning the genre’s salient characteristics, the “nasal twang” of country singing.2 This description has certainly stuck around. One of the first and most significant scholarly studies of country music, Bill Malone’s Country Music U.S.A., often points to the “nasal twang” of particular performers as well as a range of other key styles and voice types, including rounded baritones, soft tenors, the “pinched throat style” typical of

158    Oxford Handbook of Country Music folk singing, and “a style suggestive of rural hymn singing,” all of which deserve further exploration.3 Whether referring to “nasal voices,” “nasal twang,” or simply “twang,” various studies have continued to underline how this particular vocal and instrumental timbre has been a predominant element of country music. John Potter’s Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology briefly mentions that early country acts either preserved or attempted to modify the customary “hillbilly nasal twang” within the commercial market.4 Likewise, Richard Peterson’s influential discussion of “hard-​core and soft-​shell expression” (mapping onto notions of authenticity and commercialism) connects the “untrained voice with nasal tone” to traditional country music. The nasal singing voices of Roy Acuff or Hank Williams fall on the hard-​core side of the spectrum and stand in contrast stylistically to the rounded tones and crooning techniques of “soft shell” country performers like Red Foley, Crystal Gayle, and Kenny Rogers.5 In other words, the singer’s use of nasality signals an authentic sonority located within the vernacular expressions of rural, white, southern culture even for more contemporary artists. Faith Hill, for example, is a performer known for her country-​pop arrangements. But when she sings with a distinct “throaty twang,” as described by Jocelyn Neal, she purposefully invokes her country roots to remind her audiences that despite her crossover success, she is still a down-​ home, country artist.6 Just as the use of nasality can be a vocal device that can legitimize country vocalists within the mass-​mediated popular music market, it can also stigmatize them. Like other genres marked by class, region, or race (such as the blues and later rap especially before mainstream acceptance), country music has often been a low other of the popular music industry.7 The use of nasal twang as a distinct sonic marker has marred country music as a backward cultural form standing in contrast to genres that have adopted the rounded vocal tones and techniques typical of bel canto singing.8 Country’s nasal twang can still elicit the common response from listeners about music tastes—​“I like anything but country.”9 To further understand the meaning and reception of nasality and country music, it is necessary to examine the specifics of country vocal techniques. Identifying nasal twang is a shorthand way of describing a distinct vocal timbre. This description, however, does not necessarily contextualize the details of vocal production within the rich and complex history of southern vernacular singing, nor does it take into account how the performer uses range and register to help project a nasal tone or the physiological aspects of nasal singing. The singing voice involves the mechanisms of the performing body—​ the use of the throat, tongue, lungs, and breath. As Suzanne Cusick argues, “We believe that the voice is the body, its very breath and interior shapes projected outward into the world as others might know us, even know us intimately.” Yet “voices are always performances of a relationship negotiated between the individual vocalizer and the vocalizer’s culture.”10 With all of this in mind, I suggest we consider the historical and musical role of the performing body in relation to vocal production by asking the following: how does the singing body produce nasal twang? In other words, what are the physiological aspects of a singing technique that has been so central to country music? Apart from the use

Singing Voice in Country Music    159 of nasal twang, what other styles of country singing have maintained a sense of traditionalism associated with white, working-​class rusticity? How do singers make use of timbre, range, and register as expressive devices in various country styles? And how has microphone and recording technology influenced vocal production in country music? The answers to these questions encourage close readings of country singing that can overturn, undermine, or complicate not only poetic narratives but also the commercial packaging and reception of individual artists as authentic conduits of folk or working-​ class culture or as commercial examples of soft-​shell expressions. In exploring the physiological aspects and singing techniques that produce nasal twang, I find that country singers typically carry their voices to the upper part of their chest registers, singing in a range that produces acoustic tension, as can be heard in the singing styles of Hank Williams or Kitty Wells.11 By pushing the chest voice to a higher range, the vocalist increases the volume and propels air through the nasal chamber. In such instances, the singer raises the larynx, which helps in reaching notes of an upper range, and lowers the soft palate at the back of the throat, in effect singing with what feels like a slightly closed throat. As Johan Sundberg’s research on country singing has demonstrated, loud singing of higher pitches requires “elevated degrees of glottal adduction, i.e. pressed phonation,” causing the laryngeal muscles to push the vocal cords together.12 Constricting the body by means of tightening the throat muscles and raising the larynx, the singer is compelled to force the voice from the lungs, vocal cords, throat, and nasal cavity. The resulting physical and vocal tensions have engendered an aesthetic of strain linked to southern, white, rural, and working-​class musical culture. Sammie Ann Wicks demonstrates that the particular vocal mode of pushing the chest voice to a higher register and squeezing notes out through the nose has been a long-​held tradition of southern vernacular singing. Indeed, prominent nineteenth-​century southern singing masters reacted negatively to their students’ “untutored,” loud, nasal singing and hoped to instill a sense of vocal decorum within them.13 Educators found that the oral tradition of “lining out” psalms (referred to the “old way of singing”), wherein church deacons read or chanted lines aloud and congregations responded by embellishing the tune, produced improvised performances that bore little resemblance to the printed music and to notions of “proper” singing practices.14 The use of the shape-​note system (initially a four-​syllable solmization system) was meant to teach students how to read music and develop vocal skills in sight singing and harmony singing as they learned to cultivate a vocal style aligned with bel canto techniques. As Wicks demonstrates, music educators such as B. F. White and E. J. King were proponents of reforming and sanitizing the vocal traditions of the old way of singing. The introduction of White and King’s 1859 edition of the popular, southern, shape-​note hymnal, The Sacred Harp, for example, declared, “All affectation should be banished, for it is disgusting in the performance of sacred music.”15 They were against vocal tones that sounded as if they were “torn to pieces between the teeth” and “forced through the nose.” Similar to White and King, Joe S. James, editor of the 1911 version of the Sacred Harp, reacted against loud nasal singing. James instructed singers to “avoid any unnatural contraction or distension of the mouth or throat” and to forgo directing “the sound into the nasal cavities.”16

160    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Examples of this traditional vocal art that James and White so firmly opposed can be heard in Alan Lomax’s 1959 recording of the Alabama Sacred Harp Convention. In the spiritual “David’s Lamentation” and the folk hymn “Melancholy Day,” for instance, the women singers work to stay in their chest ranges, increasing in volume to realize the higher-​pitched melodies without transitioning to their head voices. This tendency is especially noticeable during a stepwise ascent to D5 in “David’s Lamentation,” which at least one of the sopranos manages to sing in the chest register with a strident and piercing vocal timbre clearly inflected by nasal strain.17 With this, the singers project their vowels against their palates and consonants through their teeth. From the early recordings of Roba Stanley and the Carter Family to the honky tonk recordings of Hank Williams and Kitty Wells, singers have incorporated these elements of southern vernacular singing in their performances by largely including an expressive chest register inflected by the use of nasality. Scholars have interpreted the strained nasal singing voice to be one that resists and cries out against the constraints of dominant society and articulates the concerns and anxieties of the southern dispossessed. Richard Leppert and George Lipsitz’s collaborative study of Hank Williams’s music, for example, argues that the “acoustic tension” of the singer’s higher range “represented a significant refusal” to accept the cultural narratives of middle-​class stability by contrasting so dramatically with “the culturally coded paternal assuredness of the deeper male sounds.”18 At a time when the breadwinning father was the emblem of middle-​class manhood in popular culture and social discourses, Williams’s vocal performances offered sonic models of masculinity that challenged this normative definition. In songs like “Cold, Cold Heart” (1951), Williams paints a picture of male heartache and vulnerability rather than self-​assuredness. Although the lyrics tell a tale of unrequited love, it is Williams’s use of register, timbre, and range that effectively portrays the depth of the protagonist’s pain and the politics of masculine failure. At the end of the verse in “Cold, Cold Heart,” he bemoans the emotional distance between he and his beloved (“a memory from your lonesome past keeps us so far apart”) as he strives to hold onto the melodic apex of the song on the word “apart,” producing a nasally strident vocal tone to the point where it sounds as if his voice is about to break to his falsetto register. His tone of vocal strain, according to Leppert and Lipsitz, “spoke directly to the internal psychic wounds generated by the gap between lived experience and an ideology that promised universal bliss through the emergence of romance and family as unchallenged centres of personal life.”19 Williams’s singing voice, thus, conveyed the political, social, and personal conflicts and complexities of those men whose class and regional status made it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to live the so-​called American dream of the 1950s. Yet at the same time, Williams’s singing style in his lower range could present a sense of self-​confidence and masculine swagger. In the first phrase of “Cold, Cold, Heart,” Williams projects a rich vocal tone as he swings the beat to the lyric “that you’re my every dream,” giving the impression of the warm security and carefree buoyancy of romantic love. As David Brackett explains, Williams’s vocals could float above, strain against, and push the beat forward in his honky tonk songs, upbeat tunes, and blues-​derived

Singing Voice in Country Music    161 numbers. In tunes such as “Move It on Over” (1947), “Lovesick Blues” (1949), and “Hey, Good Lookin’ ” (1951), Williams’s loose and flexible phrasing emphasizes his “fondness of syncopation” and “tendency to inflect certain pitches while treating them as ‘melodic dissonances,’ creating ‘blue note’ effects.”20 Brackett makes it clear that the country star’s sense of rhythm and vocal play of range and register were examples of how he could wield a range of vocal and musical devices derived from southern vernacular practices and idioms. In so doing, Brackett pushes against earlier perceptions of the “untrained nasal voice” in “hardcore” country expression.21 Country performers typically associated with authentic expressions simply did not spring forth from their musical cultures singing in a naturalized or intuitive style but rather worked at cultivating particular vocal approaches for expressive effect. In support of these claims, Olivia Mather’s study of Gram Parsons’s voice, demonstrates how his singing style is a deliberate artistic choice derived from his rock aesthetics and perceptions of a model of country singing that predated Nashville’s highly produced commercial recordings. Like Brackett, she takes issue with the common perceptions of Parsons’s innate authenticity and sincerity in his country songs. Commentators have long described the “frail,” “mournful,” and tortured” sound of Parsons’s voice and connected this sound to his biographical life of drug addiction, overdose, and early death. Mather argues that Parson’s vocal techniques are aesthetic choices. Countering Nashville’s 1960s production values of correct intonation, rounded tones, and smooth transitions between vocal registers, Parsons projects a voice of sonic instability, similar in effect to Williams’s singing style in his higher range. He purposely sings out of tune with his voice about to break or crack, thereby giving the impression of making “mistakes.”22 But these so-​called singing mistakes or failures are a conscious decision, learned, and executed. In other words, his vocal expressions are the result of a rock musician’s interpretation of what he believes country singing should sound like rather than representative of his tragic life story. Both Williams and Parsons were talented vocalists who could operate within a range of idioms by continually drawing on and modifying well-​established vocal practices for individual expressive means. As Mather states, “the instrument we take to be the most direct conduit of the self and its identity is often the result of musical education and context.”23 Instead of searching for those authentic sonic qualities in country music, it can be more productive to explore the creative dynamisms arising from convention and individual expression as demonstrated by Susan McClary’s study of the blues. The music making of southern vernacular culture “ensures the continuity of community, at the same time it celebrates the imagination and skill of each particular practitioner.”24 Consider, for example, the ways in which the vocal arrangements of shape-​note hymnody have persisted in commercial country music and extended to popular music. The Carter Family’s “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow Tree” (1927) features Sara’s lead voice appearing between Maybelle’s higher harmony part and A. P.’s bass part. In this song and many others, Sara carries the melody, usually situated in the tenor part, in her alto voice. Perhaps the prevalence of female altos in country music has partly to do with the practice of women adopting the tenor melody in a similar range. Paula Bishop has

162    Oxford Handbook of Country Music also demonstrated that brother duets—​such as the Allen Brothers, Delmore Brothers, Louvin Brothers in the 1930s, and the Everly Brothers in the1950s with their rock and roll hits—​continued the vocal tradition of singing in close parallel harmony with the harmonizing voice above the melodic one.25 This vocal harmony configuration of showcasing a high male voice combined with the dynamic singing of the Everly Brothers contributed to the explosive energies of rockabilly and helped to ensure the continuity of a vernacular vocal convention within popular music, as in the music of the Beatles (i.e., McCartney harmonizing above Lennon’s vocal melody) and the Byrds (i.e., Crosby harmonizing above Clark’s vocal melody). Along these lines of how musical convention informs individual artistry, Wicks underscores the ways in which country vocalists often include the vocal ornaments used in lining out hymns for expressive effect in their commercial recordings. He provides a list of common melodic devices in the hymn singing of Old Southern Baptists and compares them with the vocal embellishments of a number of prominent country singers including George Jones (one of country music’s most phenomenal singers).26 With his historical approach to country singing, Wicks suggests that “Jones’s voice production is a typical old-​way tenor” for the ways in which he embellishes his melodic lines in performances like his 1977 recording of “Tender Years.”27 Though Wicks indicates how Jones made use of a standard set of vocal embellishments in his virtuosic singing, he does not include in his analysis how the singer’s old way of singing would not have been possible as a soloist without the microphone. Typically Jones would alternate between singing from the back of his throat—​giving the impression of pent-​up emotions and frustrations in his songs of lost love like “Bartender Blues” (1978)—​to belting his melodies with a clenched jaw, high larynx, and a tight throat, in effect pushing his broad sound out nasally. The microphone was essential in picking up not only the changes in vocal placement that affected the volume of Jones’s singing voice but also the nuances of his vocal flourishes. With the microphone, Jones could sing with a flexible larynx, alter his vocal tone, and decorate his melodies with vocal ornaments and embellishments, providing a range of expressive devices that lent to his virtuosity. Technology has played an important role in the developments of the singing voice throughout the history of country music. In cultivating his 1930s singing cowboy persona, Gene Autry, relied on microphone technology to adopt the vocal techniques of crooners in his radio broadcasts, recordings, and film performances. With an intimate sounding voice—​one that was typically heard by conservative cultural critics as “effeminate”—​Autry transformed the hypermasculine or individualistic version of the cowboy into an effusive western figure who crooned about the myths of the West. His singing style was instrumental in helping to shape the cowboy into a gallant but emotive masculine icon. At a historical time when the socio-​economic conditions of the Depression made in nearly impossible for men to assert their patriarchal roles as breadwinners, Autry offered an alternate model of masculinity—​one that could freely give voice to his interior sentiments of vulnerability and hope in both nostalgic tunes and cowboy numbers.28

Singing Voice in Country Music    163 In addition to transmitting intimate singing styles, the microphone has also enabled a range of expressivity. Country musicians—​like vocalists of other popular genres—​have developed vocal styles that combine microphone-​sensitive techniques with singing styles that were used in an era prior to amplification. Like Jones, singers could continue their vocal ties to musical tradition while singing in quieter and more conversational tones—​imparting that sense of familiarity and intimacy to listening audiences. Moreover, the microphone encouraged vocalists to vary their technique, to combine rounder tones with chest belting, to move away from loud piercing nasal voices, or to combine the use of contrasting ranges and registers. Hank Williams, for example, could give the impression of impassioned angst as he sang his melodies in a nasally strained voice in the upper chest range (as if he had no need for the microphone), or he could promote a sense of ease and warmth in his lower range that relied on the microphone for amplification. Travis Stimeling takes into consideration how the mediating power of technology can shape the production of the singing voice in country music. Focusing on the vocal arrangement and mixing of Waylon Jennings’s voice in the production of his recordings, Stimeling complicates the usual interpretations of the artist’s “hard country,” outlaw persona. As Jennings exercised a newfound level of control in the recording studio—​ moving against the long-​held authority of Nashville producers—​he “deployed vocal staging practices” that highlighted vocal nuance in a way that undermined his commercial image as a dangerous outlaw. Rather, the artist’s singing voice signaled vulnerability and inadequacy, reflecting “the complicated state of working-​class American masculinity,” particularly within a historical context of second-​wave feminism. Jennings’s vocal production, therefore, made the outlaw appearance of “danger, unpredictability, and potential violence” to be a “façade that masked profound insecurity.”29 By addressing the particularities of vocal production, these musicological approaches have offered fresh insights into how the singing voice produced by the body and manipulated by recording technology have fashioned notions of gender, region, race, and class. Extending these models, I  want to demonstrate a critical approach that takes into account the vocal techniques of Loretta Lynn in relation to musical convention, the physiological components of the singing voice, and the role of microphone and recording technology. As an artist whose music and career has unequivocally influenced generations of artists male and female—​in country music as well as popular music—​ Lynn has emerged as a formidable performer. In celebration of her fiftieth anniversary as a recording artist, a number of country performers collaborated on Coal Miner’s Daughter:  A  Tribute to Loretta Lynn (2010); and several of these same musicians—​ notably Miranda Lambert and Sheryl Crow—​have continued to pay homage to their idol by performing Lynn’s music on recent country music award shows. Rolling Stone’s review of the tribute album declared the iconic performer as the “toughest Nashville queen ever.”30 Due to her vocal prowess and style, Lynn has been regarded as a feminist as well as a traditionalist linked to country’s “hard-​core” aesthetic.31 Historians Mary Bufwack and Robert Oermann, for example, declared that Lynn’s “sassy point of view transformed

164    Oxford Handbook of Country Music female country music in the 1960s with its earthy humor, warmth, and sensitivity,” as she became one of the most important “blue-​collar heroines of country music.”32 Many scholars have adopted this view, arguing that it was not until the explicitly feminist-​ themed music of Lynn and others—​namely, Dolly Parton—​in the 1960s that women could fully inhabit a musical and cultural space of political resistance to the status quo.33 When Lynn burst onto the Nashville scene in the early 1960s, country music seemed like a man’s world. The majority of record producers, managers, disc jockeys, and session musicians were men, deciding on the genre’s aesthetics and social messages. Even in this male-​dominated environment, women managed to enter the commercial spotlight. As Leppert argues, Patsy Cline was instrumental in carving out a commercial space for female country performers. Cline’s vocal nuances—​legato phrasing, smooth transitions between vocal registers, resonant tone production, and rhythmic play (typically singing behind the beat)—​allowed her to realize songs with a highly crafted, individual voice of female authority. In turn, she provided aural models of womanhood that reclaimed “the very agency that many of the songs she sang, still duty-​bound to ‘traditional’ values, eschew.”34 Though Leppert offers important insights into the cultural work of Cline’s vocality, he reiterates the usual gendered narratives of country music—​that Cline’s musical career (unlike that of the demure Kitty Wells) was the watershed moment for Lynn and other female country artists. Contrasting the singing styles and personas of Wells and Cline, he emphasizes that Wells played the docile sweet country wife (who did not stray too far from musical expectations), whereas Cline argued with her producer Owen Bradley (the same producer as Wells’s), flouted her sexuality in her personal life, and sang with a voice that took control of song arrangements. Cline did have phenomenal voice, and the architects of the emerging Nashville Sound encouraged the chanteuse to sing in a style that moved away from the strident nasal vocality of Wells and others. But to locate agency in one aesthetic over the other is to simplify the history of singing in country music. Moreover, placing such historical weight on 1960s female country artists, like Cline or Lynn, for revolutionizing country music overlooks female artists of early country music, erasing them from music history—​a point that Kristine McCusker argues in her book on women in barn dance radio.35 It is important to keep in mind that although Cline’s and Lynn’s artistic and acoustic voices have left an indelible mark on the history of women in country music, their individual singing voices carry with them the musical and cultural echoes of the past. What’s important about Leppert’s study of Cline, however, is that he demonstrates how the expressive nuances of the singing voice can forge musical and cultural agency. Like those who write about the virtuosity and cultural resonances of female singers of opera and other vocal genres, scholars have also found the female voice in country music to be sonic site of power that can exceed, complicate, or undermine standard narratives of heterosexual love. 36 An example from early country music is Patsy Montana, a singing cowgirl of 1930s barn dance radio whose singing style and musical narratives presented self-​determined models of womanhood removed from the confines of domesticity. The title of her most successful song, “I Want to be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” (1935),

Singing Voice in Country Music    165 initially appears to reinforce traditional gender roles, as the cowgirl appears to declare her identity in relation to the cowboy’s. On closer examination, however, the cowboy appears to be only a conduit for the cowgirl to ride and roam the symbolic freedoms of the mythical West. She further underlines her desires of independence—​“to rope and ride” her horse over the “plains and desert”—​by means of her virtuosic yodeling. Understanding how singers use vocal register and range for expressive means is essential in writing about country singing, especially because the vocal break has been integral to specific vocal devices—​such as the yodel and vocal tear. Timothy Wise, who has written extensively about the yodel, not only describes the physiology of yodeling (how the larynx and glottis are used to accentuate the abrupt change of vocal register), but he also traces the vocalization musically and culturally to vaudeville.37 First introduced by yodeling families, like the Rainer Family, the yodel became a vocalization that parodied European immigrants, invoked a sense of pastoralism and sentimentality, and expressed virility and independence in popular theatre. Riley Puckett and Jimmie Rodgers were the first hillbilly recording artists to feature the vocal device in their vaudevillian yodel songs, making the yodel part of the sonic texture of early country music.38 As a savvy performer influenced by a variety of performers, Patsy Montana draws on the musical legacy of the yodel in her cowgirl songs. She uses the vocal device as a means to demonstrate her vocal virtuosity and agency while still pointing to the yodel’s pastoral image reinforced by yodeling families like the Rainers. She could yodel to the top of her range, outperforming many of the singing cowboys of her era including Elton Britt, who was dubbed the “World’s highest yodeler.” In this musical context, Montana translates the vocalizations that represent the vastness of the Alps into a sonority that evokes the openness of the American western range, where a “singing cowgirl” like Montana could be free to roam.39 Also contributing to the ongoing conversations about the relationship between vocality and female agency, Robynn Stilwell demonstrates how rockabilly artist Brenda Lee wielded a range of vocal devices in her self-​conscious development as a singer. Lee was a white, southern, working-​class teenager who established a reputation for her sexually heightened performances. Though commentators have acknowledged Lee’s vocal talents, they treat her artistry as a novelty, as if she were a “blank slate” and an “empty vessel,” placed in a proverbial “glass cage” and removed from corporeal expressions of rockabilly.40 Arguing against these critics, Stilwell indicates how the singer was an ideal fit for rockabilly, a musical style linked to the liminal sexual space of adolescents and heavily marked by race, class, and regionality. Unlike the popular woman singers of the 1950s, who projected from their head voices—​the proper sound of a “girl” singer at the time—​Lee sings from her chest voice and pushes against all notions of vocal decorum. That is, she doesn’t sing with “proper” intonation and bodily poise. Exploring the particularities of Lee’s vocal techniques, Stilwell connects her vocal devices (typical of rockabilly) to the physiology of the singing body. When Lee first starts out as a singer, her vocal tone is the “product of a tight larynx,” a position that “makes hiccupping much easier and controlled than growling.”41 But as her voice develops and matures (e.g., her vocal tracts lengthening), Lee could sing with a flexible larynx,

166    Oxford Handbook of Country Music enabling vocal swoops and slides while embellishing her melodic lines with extended growling. These vocal excesses contribute to her performative displays of female sexuality. Stilwell thus makes a case for Lee’s cultivated artistry as a rockabilly vocalist while highlighting the role of the body in vocal production. Like Montana, Lee, and other country and popular singers, Lynn’s singing voice has been integral in shaping her persona. With a chest-​dominant vocal technique—​ amplified by the microphone—​Lynn has projected a vocal identity of strength and conviction in narratives that have offered her listening public female characters who demand respect and proper treatment in their adult heterosexual relationships and who claim southern Appalachia as a cultural and musical home. Belting or singing loudly in the chest register has been coded as an aural sign of agency and strength, often meant to challenge the sonic codes of gender. Because we often get our perceptions about voice types from the gendered playing field of opera (particularly nineteenth-​century opera), we have come to associate the high vocal part of the soprano to virginal innocence, whereas the lower mezzo-​soprano, like Bizet’s sultry Carmen or Verdi’s Amneris, is usually linked to sexuality, resistance, and worldliness.42 In popular music, critics, for example, have heard belting chest voices, like Ethel Merman’s, in terms of masculine power, linked to working-​class aesthetics (even though Merman was from the middle class) and far removed from the sonic markers of “proper” femininity.43 This reception has extended to blues queens and rhythm and blues artists, as well as to contemporary popular and country singers.44 In positioning Lynn within a musical and historical context, I  find Laurie Stras’s approach to the vocal technique and development of 1960s girl groups to be a an important model to vocal style. She argues that “a new teen vocality” emerged “that was quite different from the sound produced by girl singers of previous generations.”45 Largely due to their young age, 1960s girl groups had difficulty transitioning between registers, especially “at the point where the lower register begins to give way to the higher.” They often pushed their chest voices to a range where they produced a fragile sound of unstable intonation, providing a distinct vocal identity of vulnerability—​the trademark sound of girl groups.46 Following Stras’s method, I argue that a distinct singing style dominated women’s country music—​specifically the honky tonk style of the 1950s and 1960s, which had a lasting influence on Lynn’s performance mode and songwriting strategies.47 Lynn’s first hit, “I’m a Honky-​Tonk Girl” (1960) comes directly out of the 1950s honky tonk style. She depicts the desolation a female subject who once was content and secure in a heterosexual relationship but now finds herself abandoned and alone.48 Completely heartbroken, the woman of Lynn’s drama turns to the working-​class bar to drown her sorrows in alcohol and country music blasting from the nearby jukebox. The theme of the song strongly resembles the song material of Wells (the reigning Queen of country music in Nashville when Lynn’s honky tonk tune hit the charts) as well as that of 1950s Nashville honky tonk singers Goldie Hill and Jean Shepard. Wells, who first made it big with “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-​Tonk Angels” (1952), established a successful recording and performance career with songs that

Singing Voice in Country Music    167 problematized the figure of the honky tonk angel. In male songs such as Ernest Tubb’s “I Ain’t Going Honky-​Tonk Anymore” (1941) or Hank Thompson’s “Wild Side of Life” (1951), the honky tonk angel was a sexually promiscuous woman, a working-​class femme fatale, luring unsuspecting men to the licentious honky tonk and away from the promises of domestic happiness and security. Women’s honky tonk did not necessarily rescue the fallen woman from the margins of society. Rather, Wells and her peers provided a voice for the honky tonk angel, one that depicted an array of subject positions. Wells sang of sexual longing with a blues-​inflected vocal line in “You’re Not Easy To Forget” (1954) and underscored the heartache of a woman turning to the honky tonk for solace in “Honky-​Tonk Waltz” (1953). Likewise, Hill’s bluesy numbers—​such as “Treat Me Kind,” “Cry, Cry Darling,” and “Say Big Boy”—​reconfigured the honky tonk angel into a subject who voices her own corporeal passions, whereas Shepard could express the vulnerability of the single, working-​class mother in “My Wedding Ring” (1953) or assert a sense of agency in her feminist songs.49 To realize these emotionally and sexually charged vignettes, Wells, in particular, projects a stridently nasal vocal tone. Indeed, Owen Bradley, Wells’s producer at Decca, strove for this particular forced sound in Wells’s vocal delivery by insisting that she record pieces in higher keys than those in which they were composed.50 Singing with a raised larynx and a tight and constricted throat, Wells projects the voice through the nasal cavity to produce a piercing timbre in a style that Wicks refers to as “the old way of singing.” Wells’s vocal strain became part of the honky tonk idiom meant to capture sonically the frustrations and thwarted desires of subjects reaching for but failing to secure the material and social promises of the 1950s. Lynn’s self-​penned song “I’m a Honky-​Tonk Girl” draws thematically on many of Wells’s well-​known numbers. What’s more, Lynn seems to be trying to sound like her role model. The song is pitched and written to highlight Lynn’s singing voice in the upper range, where she produces a vocal tone of strain and tension. Like Wells, Lynn is an alto and pushes her chest voice well above the vocal break in many of her songs. In “I’m a Honky-​Tonk Girl,” the opening of the first phrase requires Lynn to ascend immediately to the melodic apex of the song (B-​flat4). Realizing aurally the anguish of the subject, Lynn sings with a thin but strident sound the lyrics “ever since you left me.” Yet, unlike Wells’s explicit use of nasality, Lynn does not push the sound through her nose. Lynn slides via stepwise to and from the highest note, enabling her to project the open vowel |e| of the word “left” with a less constricted nasal tone than her predecessor. Unlike Wells, who learned to sing in the acoustic space of the church, Lynn cultivated her singing voice in working-​class dives along the border of Washington State and Canada.51 In these settings, Lynn learned how to project over amplified instrumentation, loud conversations, the sounds of dancing feet, and clinking glasses without relying solely on nasality. As a vocal device, nasality can help project the voice and lift it to higher range (such as when the singer is pushing the chest voice above the vocal break). Vaudevillian performers, for example, would sing with loud nasal voices that would carry to the back of large performance halls, the cheap seats.52 Lynn, however, relies on the microphone to carry her tone without continually directing it out through the nose.

168    Oxford Handbook of Country Music In this way, she could sing with a rounder vocal timbre, even though she still projects from her chest register. What’s more, the vocal staging of the recording points to Lynn’s experiences with live audiences. Produced by Los Angeles western swing steel guitarist Speedy West, the recording underscores the role of the microphone as it picks up the reverberations of the voice within the recording studio, thereby providing the effect of a live performance. It is as if Lynn is singing within the architectural space of an actual honky tonk. Despite these differences between Wells’s and Lynn’s singing styles, the young star shared much in common with the established performer. Lynn’s tone is still one of chest strain, produced by a raised larynx especially in the higher range of the song. Moreover, she, at times, inflects her vocality with a nasal timbre, especially when she sings nasal consonants, such as “n” (as in “honky-​tonk girl”). Also like Wells, Lynn embellishes her melody with a pronounced vibrato at the ends of phrases and with vocal ornaments tied to southern vernacular practices to heighten the emotional effect of the song. She, for example, ends her phrases by landing on the second scale degree on the downbeat before sliding down and sustaining the tonic, accentuated with an extensive use of vibrato. This is particularly effective in the ending of the first phrase (“many nights I’ve laid awake and cried”), in which Lynn’s broad vibrato gives the impression of weeping as she stretches out the long |i| of the word “cried.” The vocal staging of Lynn’s voice in relation to her use of timbre, register, and range works to bring the listener into her honky tonk world of dancing and drinking. As the opening high-​pitched melody descends to the lower range, Lynn’s throat relaxes and her larynx drops. She intones a bluesy melodic line depicting her heartache and then declares her identity as a “honky-​tonk girl,” thereby connecting the protagonist’s downtrodden state to the sexually charged atmosphere of the working-​class juke joint. Moreover, the vocals are multitracked to add further weight to the hook. Lynn harmonizes her own melody, giving the impression of another voice (even though it is her own) entering the musical texture. The sonic effect suggests that she is not alone in the honky tonk tradition. Rather, she is participating within a style that has been occupied by many voices, particularly those female artists who had established their musical careers by singing about the sexual pleasures, domestic conflicts, and abjection connected to the juke joint from a women’s perspective. The vocal staging continues to heighten the drama of the narrative as the overdubs extend to the bridge, where Lynn is the most explicit about the current situation of the female protagonist. Lynn’s anti-​heroine drowns her sorrow in beer and weeps over her lost love. Descending further to the lower range of her chest register, her vocal volume dwindles to a quiet murmur at the ends of her phrases, requiring a microphone to pick up and project the dispirited quality of her vocal tone. In contrast to this, Lynn concludes the verse with an accentuated belting tone. She varies the original quarter note rhythm of the A phrase and sustains the main notes of the melody in her upper range, giving additional weight to the phrase, “I’ve lost everything in this world.” Maximizing vowel projection on the words “lost,” “thing,” and world” with a strident tone inflected by the use of vibrato, Lynn vocally paints a picture of the honky tonk angel’s desperation.

Singing Voice in Country Music    169 She is not a sexually loose woman who thumbs her nose at so-​called respectable society. Instead, Lynn’s protagonist suffers from the pain of the working class—​the shame of living a life that refuses to deliver economic stability and domestic happiness. Like her male contemporaries in Nashville, notably George Jones (who also extended the honky tonk tradition of the 1950s to later decades), Lynn blended honky tonk idioms with the recording practices emblematic of the Nashville Sound. Following her first hit, Lynn secured her record contract with Decca and worked with Owen Bradley. Her song arrangements incorporated pop-​oriented musical elements, such as the smooth sounding vocal harmonies of the Jordanaires, guitar-​laden instrumental textures (at times, downplaying the presence of the pedal steel and fiddle), and sudden modulations to higher high pitch centers for dramatic effect (as in “The Pill” [1972] and “Coal Miner’s Daughter” [1969]). Within a diverse array of sonic signifiers, Lynn projected a resounding voice inflected by her Kentucky accent in narratives that continued to address the pleasures and strife of adult love. Yet Lynn stopped playing the part of the honky tonk angel inflicted by the shame and cultural pain associated with class. Songs such as “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind)” (1966), “Fist City” (1968), or “X-​Rated” (1971) engendered determined and courageous models of working-​class women contesting the gender norms of marriage, sexuality, and courtship. Her songs appeared to set her apart from Wells’s laments, turning Lynn into a trailblazer of feminist-​themed music. Yet Lynn was not alone in contesting gender norms with an assertive voice. In the dance halls of 1950s California, Rose Maddox performed “Pay Me Alimony” (1951), a song that encourages a community of women to leave their husbands and sue for alimony during a time when women were supposed to be flocking to the domestic sphere. Jean Shepard, who also started her career in the dance halls of California and then relocated to Nashville, performed tunes that not only depicted the heartache of the honky tonk angel but also addressed the double standards of gender and sexual roles in “Two Whoops and a Holler” (1954) or “Sad Singing and Slow Riding” (1956). In the latter, Shepard plays the role of the angry housewife (an archetype of honky tonk music) who warns her husband that if he continues to stumble home at the wee hours of the night from an evening of drinking and philandering, he should expect some “sad singin’ and slow ridin’ ” at his funeral procession. Lynn’s “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin” shares many similarities in tone and in theme to Shepard’s “Sad Singing and Slow Riding.” Like Shepard, Lynn enacts the part of the forthright woman who takes issue with her husband’s drinking habits and pursuits of extramarital dalliances. She negotiates the terms of her heterosexual relationship by making it clear that she will not be participating in any sort of amorous relations if he continues to search for physical pleasure outside of the home. Though the lyrical narrative is straightforward, it is Lynn’s vocals that get the message across. Over several years following her first hit, Lynn developed a fuller sounding lower range and the ability to belt from her upper range with a clear and vibrant tone. She was not the first, however, to sing honky tonk tunes in this manner. Performing with her raucous sounding family band—​the Maddox Brothers and Rose—​Rose Maddox developed an open-​throat vocality that enabled her to belt her melodies in her chest voice with

170    Oxford Handbook of Country Music little nasal strain. That is not so say that Maddox never sang with a forced nasal sound. Rooted in the theatrics of the stage, Maddox was incredibly skillful at modifying her singing style with a range of vocal inflections, including a nasally strained singing technique in her performances of Woody Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer” and the gospel tune “Gathering Flowers for the Master’s Bouquet.” But she excelled at using the microphone to project her open tone produced by an agile larynx. Maddox’s vocal style influenced a number of artists, including Shepard. Though Shepard inflected her vocal lines with a more pronounced nasal timbre, she often sang in lower keys that highlighted the warm and sonorous timbre of her chest voice. The country music trade press repeatedly commented on Shepard’s dynamic and sonorous voice. Country and Western Jamboree stated “on-​stage the capable young blonde reaches out magnificently over an entire audience with a surprisingly resonant voice,” and Country Song Roundup declared that Shepard had “one of the biggest and best voices ever to sing on stage of the world famous Grand Ole Opry.”53 I can’t help but think that Lynn must have heard Shepard performing on the Opry and consequently was encouraged to sing with an open and broad tone in her stern warnings to cheating husbands and cheap hussies. Unlike the thin sounding vocal timbre that marked the beginning of “I’m a Honky-​ Tonk Girl,” Lynn projects a more resonant chest voice in “Don’t Come Home A-​Drinkin’.” Though both songs are in the same key, the tessitura of her later hit emphasizes Lynn’s lower range in key moments, such as the beginning of phrases. Lynn begins by singing a declamatory vocal line of repeated pitches that fall below the vocal break and comfortably within her chest register. She follows with an ascending triad that extends to her midrange. To reach the melodic apex of the phrase, she pushes the sound out from the diaphragm but with a raised larynx that causes some pharyngeal tension. But Lynn is still able to produce a vibrant and not overly strident vocal timbre in her upper range. The song’s melodic design combined with her delivery gives the distinct impression of clipped speech developing into louder admonishments produced by a belting tone, inflected with nasal consonants (as in “drinkin’ ”). But as soon as she reaches her higher range, her vocal line drops back down to her lower chest register, where her vocal timbre gives the impression of full-​bodied authority. The vocal arrangement and Lynn’s emphatic singing of the hook underline the weight of the song’s meaning. The Jordanaires join the musical texture with their rounded tones, blended in mellifluous harmonies, adding a level of polish to Lynn’s demanding vocal image, especially one that involves a woman negotiating the sexual nature of a romantic relationship. Despite the warm vocal timbres of the backup singers, Lynn’s singing grows in intensity as she projects the upper range of the melody on the upbeats, infusing her stern warnings with rhythmic emphasis. The vocal energy continues to escalate in the bridge. Lynn begins by repeating the lyrics of the hook—​“don’t come home a drinkin’ with lovin’ on your mind”—​just in case the object of the song did not quite hear her the first time. She does not repeat the melody, however. Instead, she sings a stark melodic line consisting of only repeated pitches and ascending leaps of a third. Unlike her vocal approach in “I’m a Honky-​Tonk Girl,” Lynn does not use vocal slides to reach those high notes in the bridge. Instead, she uses her belting technique to add a rhythmic punch by repeatedly landing on those upper

Singing Voice in Country Music    171 tones on the upbeats. Lynn almost shouts the line. Indeed, in live performances, she often pulls the microphone away from her mouth when singing those higher notes of the hook and the bridge, so the volume of her belting voice does not overload the technology. The Jordanaires reenter the vocal texture with quiet “ooos” and then sing once again the hook with Lynn, as if a community is in harmony with her clearly articulated marital and sexual demands. With “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin’,” Lynn’s assertive and brash vocal identity became firmly established in the public consciousness. A similar vocal approach can be heard in “The Pill” and “Fist City” in which Lynn begins each song in the lower range of her chest voice (below the vocal break) and then projects loudly declamatory vocal lines that ascend to her upper range.54 In such songs as “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” which opens in a higher tessitura, Lynn belts the higher melodic lines with an open-​ throat technique that quickly descends to her more resonant chest range, similar to the melodic pattern of a blues song. In the iconic song that established Lynn as the “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” she vocally declares her identity in a range that does not push the chest voice to the upper register but maintains the voice in a comfortable range—​where she can project a stable identity of region, gender, and class for her audience. Throughout her career, Lynn cultivated a strong and vibrant voice in her personalized and political accounts of women’s lives. She has helped to expand the vocal identity of country music—​encouraging the resonant and broad vocals of Reba McEntire and Marina McBride, or the declamatory, chest dominant vocal approaches of Natalie Maines or Miranda Lambert. At the same time, she continues to sing in a style and performs music that invokes the practices of the past—​the voices of honky tonk angels, angry housewives, and demanding women negotiating the terms of their sexual and domestic lives. As listeners, we have admired, perhaps some of us even identified with, Lynn’s portraits that have blended private accounts with public ones, making her an icon of southern, working-​class female agency. We know of her rise from humble origins to mass-​mediated fame, publicized in the award winning film Coal Miner’s Daughter (based on Lynn’s biography). It is, however, through her singing voice that we feel the most connected and familiar with the country star. We understand the meaning of her expressions by listening to her belting voice in the upper chest range, rhythmic punctuations of her vocal lines, and legato phrases that showcase the warmth and depth of her lower range. From all of this, we have come to celebrate, take pleasure in, and find comfort in the strength and power of Lynn’s voice.

Notes 1. Richard Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 164. 2. “They’re not hillbillies anymore; they don’t come cheap or naïve; they know the value of their products and they’re collecting for every nasal twang or corn-​Jug burp”; Billboard (February 16, 1946): 20.

172    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 3. Bill Malone, Country Music, U.S.A. (Austin: University of Texas, 1985 and 2002), 44. 4. John Potter, Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 134. 5. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 150–​151. 6. Jocelyn R. Neal, “The Voice Behind the Song: Faith Hill, Country Music, and Reflexive Identity,” in The Women of Country Music:  A  Reader, ed. James Akenson and Charles Wolfe (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 109–​130. 7. Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 55. 8. Nadine Hubbs, “‘Redneck Woman’ and the Gender Poetics of Class Rebellion,” Southern Cultures 17, no. 4 (2011): 53. 9. Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, 23–​24. 10. Suzanne Cusick, “On Musical Performance of Gender and Sex,” in Audible Traces:  Gender, Identity, and Music, ed. Elaine Barkin and Lydia Hamessley (Zürich, Switzerland: Carciofoli Verlagshaus, 1999), 29. 11. Many of my ideas about the approach to singing in country music come from my book, Stephanie Vander Wel, The Singing Voices of Hillbilly Maidens and Cowboys’ Sweethearts: Country Music and the Gendering of Class, 1930s–​1950s, Music in American Life (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming). 12. Johan Sundberg, “Where Does the Sound Come From?,” in The Cambridge Companion To Singing, ed. John Potter (Cambridge, England:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), 246. For Sundberg’s extensive research on country singing, see the following:  Johan Sundberg, Thomas F. Cleveland, R. E. Stone Jr., and Jenny Iwarsson, “Estimated Subglottal Pressure in Six Professional Country Singers,” Journal of Voice 11, no. 4 (1997): 403–​409; Johan Sundberg, Thomas F. Cleveland, R. E. Stone Jr., and Jenny Iwarsson, “Voice Source Characteristics in Six Premier Country Singing,” Journal of Voice 13, no. 2 (1999): 168–​ 183; and Johan Sundberg, R. E. Stone Jr., and Thomas Cleveland, “Format Frequencies in Country Singers’ Speech and Singing,” Journal of Voice 13, no. 2 (1999): 161–​167. 13. Sammie Anne Wicks, “A Belated Salute to the ‘Old Way’ of ‘Snaking’ the Voice on Its (ca) 345th Birthday,” Popular Music 8, no. 1 (January 1989): 59. 14. For a history of how singing schools inculcated a level of musical literacy to discourage lined-​out psalm singing, see John Bealle, Public Worship, Private Faith:  Sacred Harp and American Folksong (Athens:  The University of Georgia Press, 1997), 10–​11; Kiri Miller, Traveling Home:  Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism (Urbana–​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 7; and David Warren Steel with Richard H. Hulan, The Makers of the Sacred Harp (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 40. 15. A facsimile of the third edition (1859) was published in B. E. Cobb and B. F. White, The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978), 24. 16. B. F. White, Original Sacred Harp, ed. Joe S. James (Atlanta, Georgia:  1911); quoted in Wicks, “A Belated Salute,” 61–​62. 17. Alabama Sacred Harp Convention, and Alan Lomax, White Spirituals From the Sacred Harp:  The Alabama Sacred Harp Convention, Recorded in Fyffe Alabama, 1959 (New York: New World Records, 1992). 18. Richard Leppert and George Lipsitz, “‘Everybody’s Lonesome for Somebody’: Age, the Body and the Experience in the Music of Hank Williams,” Popular Music 9, no. 3 (October 1990): 271.

Singing Voice in Country Music    173 19. Ibid. 260, 266. 20. David Brackett, “When You’re Lookin’ At Hank (You’re Looking at Country),” in Interpreting Popular Music (Cambridge, England:  Cambridge University Press, 1995); reprinted (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 75–​107. 21. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 151; Peterson’s claim that “hard-​core” performers usually sang with untrained nasal voices is a common one that is often repeated in the popular press and in scholarship. 22. Olivia Mather, “Regressive Country:  The Voice of Gram Parsons,” in Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.country Music, ed. Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 154–​173. Mather draws from Robert Walser theories about Mile Davis’s purposeful use of musical “mistakes” for expressive means. See Robert Walser, “Out of Notes: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles Davis,” Musical Quarterly 77, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 343–​365. 23. Mather, “Regressive Country,” 169. 24. Susan McClary, “Thinking Blues,” in Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkley: University of California Press, 2000), 36. 25. Paula Bishop, “The Roots and the Influences of the Everly Brothers” ([PhD] dissertation, Boston University, 2011), 48–​51. 26. For a list of melodic ornaments found in the old way of singing, see Wicks, “A Belated Salute,” 70–​78. One that I  often hear in country singing is an accented, rhythmically strong second scale tone descending to the first scale tone, especially at the ends of phrases. Charles Hamm identified this melodic ornament as “feathering” and part of southern vernacular traditions; see Hamm, Music in the New World (New York: Norton, 1983), 60. 27. Wicks specifically points to the following embellishments in Jones’s singing: “(a) stressed second scale tone descending to tonic; (b)  third approached portamento; (c)  a shake; (d)  quick flourish downward from the fifth scale tone, touching the third, and ending on the first; (e) a turn; and countless other note clusters grouped at the ends of phrases” (Wicks, “A Belated Salute,” 82). 28. Stephanie Vander Wel, “The Lavender Cowboy and ‘The She Buckaroo’: Gene Autry, Patsy Montana, and Depression-​Era Gender Roles,” Musical Quarterly 95, nos. 2–​3 (Summer–​ Fall 2012): 208. 29. Travis D. Stimeling, “Narrative, Vocal Staging, and Masculinity in the ‘Outlaw’ Country Music of Waylon Jennings,” Popular Music 32, no. 3 (October 2013): 343–​358. For an additional approach to how the singing voice pushes against usual interpretations of identity and authenticity, see Travis D. Stimeling, “Taylor Swift’s ‘Pitch Problem’ and the Place of Adolescent Girls in Country Music,” in Country Boys and Redneck Women: New Essays in Gender and Country Music eds. Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2016), 84–​101. 30. Jody Rosen, “Coal Miner’s Daughter: A Tribute to Loretta Lynn,” Rolling Stone (November 11, 2010), 70. 31. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 151–​152; Peterson places Loretta Lynn’s music under the “hard-​core” aesthetic category for her singing style, southern accents, and songwriting strategies. 32. Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, Finding Her Voice: Women in Country Music, 1800–​2000 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press and the Country Music Foundation, 2003), 263.

174    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 33. Jocelyn Neal claims that it wasn’t until the careers of Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton that feminist-​ themed music revolutionized the genre; Neal, The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers:  A  Legacy in Country Music (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2009), xiv. Richard Leppert, “Gender Sonics:  The Voice of Patsy Cline,” in Musicological Identities: Essays in Honor of Susan McClary (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 194, reinforces the view that female country performers prior to Patsy Cline appeared merely as figures of “window dressing” to the male stars. 34. Leppert, “Gender Sonics, 196. 35. Kristine McCusker, Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-​Tonk Angels:  The Women of Barn Dance Radio (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 148. 36. Carolyn Abbate has written about the power of the voice in opera, the way the voice “produces music that might itself be regarded as working against the story,” even the one narrated by the singing subject; Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 6. Bonnie Gordon demonstrates the way in which female singers in Monteverdi’s operas and madrigals “continually asserted the unsettling force of their voices, despite the attempts of discursive and social systems to mold them into passive and closed-​mouthed projections of patriarchal ideas”; Gordon, Monteverdi’s Unruly Women:  The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 49. 37. Timothy Wise, “Yodel Species:  A  Typology of Falsetto Effects in Popular Music Vocal Styles,” Radical Musicology 2 (2007), 57 pars., January 17, 2008, http://​www.radical-​ musicology.org.uk/​2007/​Wise.htm; Timothy Wise, “From the Mountains to the Prairies and Beyond the Pale:  American Yodeling on Early Recordings,” Journal of American Folklore 125, no. 497 (Summer 2012): 358–​374. 38. Timothy Wise, “Jimmie Rodgers and the Semiosis of the Hillbilly Yodel,” The Musical Quarterly 93, no. 1 (2010): 6–​44. 39. Vander Wel, “The Lavender Cowboy,” 235. 40. Robynn J. Stilwell, “Vocal Decorum: Voice, Body, and Knowledge in the Prodigious Singer, Brenda Lee,” in She’s So Fine: Reflections of Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music, ed. Laurie Stras (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 57. 41. Stilwell, “Vocal Decorum,” 83. 42. Patricia Juliana Smith, “Brit Girls: Sandie Shaw and the Women of the British Invasion,” in Stras, She’s So Fine, 159. See also Catherine Clément, “Through Voices, History,” in Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 21–​24, for how voice types in opera represent distinct versions of womanhood. 43. Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musial (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 102. 44. Maureen Mahon refers to Big Mama Thornton’s powerful chest voice in “Listening for Willie Mae ‘Big Mama’ Thornton’s Voice: The Sounds of Race and Gender Transgression in Rock and Roll,” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 15 (2011): 11. Gillian Rodger demonstrates that Lennox’s use of chest voice contributes to her play of gender roles in “Drag, Camp and Gender Subversion in the Music and Videos of Annie Lennox,” Popular Music 23, no. 1 (2004): 20. For examples of popular media referring to Natalie Maine’s strong and powerful voice, see Peter Bacon, “Culture: Nothing Fluffy about these Chicks,” The Birmingham Post, September 11, 2003, 15; and Jim Rayburn, Deseret Morning News, “No Sign of Controversy at Chicks Concert,” Deseret News, July 10, 2003, B.03.

Singing Voice in Country Music    175 45. Laurie Stras, “Voice of the Beehive: Vocal Technique at the Turn of the 1960s,” in Stras, She’s So Fine, 60. 46. Ibid. 42. 47. Ibid. 33–​56. 48. My argument about the ways in which women’s honky tonk was integral to the musical and cultural signification of the architectural space of the honky tonk counters the usual understandings of Wells’s music. Joli Jensen and Pamela Fox have separately argued that because the honky tonk is a “man’s world,” female performers like Wells (marketed as a devoted southern housewife) couldn’t fully participate within the musical environ of the honky tonk style. See Joli Jensen, Nashville Sound: Authenticity: Commercialization, and Country Music (Nashville, TN: The Country Music Foundation Press & Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), 27; and Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 94. 49. Vander Wel, Singing Voices of Hillbilly Maidens. 50. Charles Wolfe, liner notes to Kitty Wells:  The Queen of Country Music (Hamburgen, Germany: Bear Family Records, LC5197 1993), 7. 51. Wells recalled that during her youth, “we would go to church and to prayer meets, and she’d (Wells’s mother) just sing her heart out …”; Walt Trott, Kitty Wells: The Honky Tonk Angels (Nashville, TN: Nova Books, 1993), 2. 52. Timothy D. Taylor, “Music and the Rise of Radio in Twenties America:  Technological Imperialism, Socialization, and the Transformation of Intimacy,” in Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures, ed. Paul D. Greene and Thomas Porcello (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 260. 53. “That Girl From Oklahoma,” Country and Western Jamboree (Chicago:  Maher Publications, Inc., November 1956), 14; and “Jean Shepard: A Banner Year for the C.M.A.,” Country Song Roundup Yearbook, no. 2 (Derby, Conn: American Folk Publications Spring 1967), 78. 54. For more details about Lynn’s vocal approach to “Fist City,” see Kate Heidemann, “Remarkable Women and Ordinary Gals: Performance of Identity in Songs by Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton,” in Country Boys and Redneck Women, 172–​173.

Chapter 9

This M achi ne Pl ays C ou ntry  Mu si c Invention, Innovation, and the Pedal Steel Guitar Tim Sterner Miller

Musical instruments and instrumentation are integral components of a musical genre’s identity. In the case of country music, a particular emphasis is placed on string instruments from the folk tradition. Consider, for example, Thomas Hart Benton’s 1975 painting The Sources of Country Music, a mural commissioned by the Country Music Foundation in 1973.1 Benton presents a select group of instruments and musicians in a series of overlapping vignettes depicting their cultural contexts. A mountain dulcimer is played by a woman wearing a simple dress, barefoot in the grass. A banjo is played claw hammer-​style by an older African American man in denim overalls. Two fiddles are played by older white men, accompanying several dancing couples, and accompanied by an apparent jug of moonshine. Last, a guitar is played by a cowboy, complete with gun belt, boots, and spurs, with one foot on his saddle and the other on the Southwestern desert. The other musical source depicted is a group singing a cappella from a small hymnal, perhaps at a tent revival. This vision of country music effectively reinforces an aura of “old-​time authenticity” and a narrative of tradition that is often employed to counteract the infiltration of pop into the country soundscape. A more inclusive portrait of the genre’s most enduring sonic markers might include the F-​style mandolin, the electric guitar (particularly the Fender Telecaster), the piano, the “tic-​tac” electric bass, and even (if one is to be honest) orchestral strings. Some of the most distinctly “country” sounds of the late twentieth century come, however, from one of its least understood instruments: the pedal steel guitar. The pedal steel guitar (or simply “pedal steel”) is a notoriously complex and opaque instrument that nonetheless found an enduring place in country music, a genre whose values are ostensibly centered on the simple and the direct. It emerged in the context of the honky tonk-​inflected country of the 1950s, and its physical and musical development reflects the evolving aesthetics of country music over the subsequent decades. The pedal

178    Oxford Handbook of Country Music steel reveals the processes of instrumental invention and innovation within instrument traditions as an alternative history to that of genre development, exemplifying the tension between dominant cultural systems and individual creativity and expression. This chapter begins with an overview of critical approaches to musical instruments as technological and cultural objects. It then turns to the history of the steel guitar family, highlighting its movement across genres and styles in the early twentieth century and discussing the musical and technological developments that led to the emergence of the pedal steel as a distinct instrument in the 1950s. Through a series of musical examples drawn from commercial recordings from the 1950s to 1970s, I then show how players and makers refined the pedal steel’s mechanisms and techniques in a process that responded to and shaped the aesthetic and commercial priorities of country music. I conclude by outlining the factors that contributed to the standardization of the instrument’s form in the mid-​1970s and exploring the work of several players whose individual styles and approaches to the pedal steel demonstrate the continuity of innovation—​both within and outside of the country tradition—​in the twenty-​first century.

Instruments, Invention, and Innovation The act of probing the history of an instrument (or a genre, for that matter) is often an inherently deconstructive act; the layers of its story are peeled away to construct a simple narrative beginning with an act of creation, of inspiration, of apotheosis. An instrument’s history, however, is more than the story of its physical development. To “learn the violin” is not just to absorb techniques and physical training but also to be enculturated into a tradition. This includes everything from the aesthetics of tone production, the posture and comportment of a performer, the instrument’s (and its player’s) place in society, and the nature of music and learning. Consider the differences between the violin and the fiddle—​two instruments that inhabit the same physical form. Perhaps the largest divide between the two is one of cultural context. As a folk instrument, the fiddle is easily assumed to be one part of a complex of social activity, perhaps playing in the background of a tavern or as an accompaniment to dance. As a classical instrument, the violin is generally expected to be the object of more “serious” attention. A procession of commuters walking by a fiddler busking in a subway station could easily be read as an ordinary scene; the same group passing by an “incognito” concert violinist becomes the fodder of thought pieces on the value of music in modern society.2 The multidimensionality of instruments as cultural and technological artifacts has long fostered an array of approaches to their study. In the early twentieth century, the study of musical instruments was deeply connected to the emerging field of comparative musicology, and early organologists such as Sachs and Hornböstel were driven by their pursuit of the roots of Western music (read as the pinnacle of the sonic arts). By the later twentieth century, organology had survived as one of the last bastions of positivistic research in music, unearthing and presenting a wealth of data drawn from string

Invention, Innovation, and the Pedal Steel Guitar    179 lengths, tree rings, metallurgical analysis, and biographical investigation. In the past several decades, the discipline has been infused with the more context-​focused approaches of new musicology and cultural studies, and instruments have been approached as part of the web of culture that supports acts of musical creation and appreciation. The latest modes of instrument research include the “new organology” espoused by Emily Dolan and John Tresch, which draws on the shared histories of science and music, the culturally driven explorations of ethnomusicologists such as Kevin Dawe and Eliot Bates, and the phenomenological approaches to cognition and embodiment of Elisabeth Le Guin and John Baily.3 These scholarly approaches have reveled in the possibilities of interdisciplinary investigation afforded by the physicality of musical instruments and the focus they provide as objects that pass through and transcend the liminality of human histories and cultural contexts. Instruments have also provided a gateway into musical studies for researchers crossing disciplinary lines from other directions, particularly those orientated in the fields of science and technology. To say that instruments are technological artifacts is something of a banal statement in many cases; they, in fact, inhabit a middle ground in a very highly contested area of human experience and scholarly thought. Consider, to begin with, the accepted arena of “music technology,” a domain of music and musicology that is primarily centered on technologies of the mid-​to-​late twentieth century, including technologies of production—​tape music, multitrack recording (both analog and digital), computer software, MIDI (musical instrument digital interface), digital samplers—​and technologies of consumption such as the phonograph, the MP3 file, and the Internet. These devices are typically presented as existing in a separate world from violins, pianos, trumpets, and flutes (let alone dulcimers, banjos, and fiddles)—​a separation that can often be seen in the emerging trends of academia in which the inclusion of those newer technologies is seen as either a boon or a threat to the traditional purview of music departments. The roots of this divide can be seen in the reactions to the technologies of the industrial revolution in the writings of key philosophers of modernity such as Martin Heidegger, whose 1949 essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” considers technology as not simply the tools to accomplish various ends but rather a mindset in which tools both reflect our understanding of reality and act as a means to shape that reality to our will.4 Heidegger and his contemporaries were, however, quick to establish a dichotomy between “good” technology, and “bad” technology and pitted the increasingly automated machinery of factory production lines against tools that are used to mechanically amplify or enhance basic human movements.5 The latter is seen not to interfere with “authentic” human experiences, whereas the former is considered responsible for alienating humans from both nature and themselves. Although not explicitly addressed in this formulation, instruments can easily be read as inhabiting the first category, as they provide the means to transform the inspirations of composers and performers alike into a sounding manifestation of human will (at least that reified as such by the musical philosophers of the early twentieth century). At the crux of these arguments is often a tension between individual musical expression and the automation of musical experience, be it performance or listening.6 A more

180    Oxford Handbook of Country Music critical look, however, reveals that all instruments provide some level of automation that mediates the translation of musical thought to musical sound. The quality and degree of automation varies, of course, from instrument to instrument, and contributes to the idiosyncrasies of styles, repertoires, and individual instrumental voices. A more nuanced approach to the mutually influential relationships between humans and technology can be found in the theory of the social construction of technology,7 which describes a process through which technologies are developed, stabilized, and disseminated within cultural contexts.8 Scholars in this area have subsequently drawn on concepts from narrative theory, actor-​network theory, and other approaches to develop new frames to account for the agency of users to resist, reject, or renegotiate established meanings and uses of technology.9 In the case of music, this can be seen in traditional instruments that are employed in untraditional ways, and in the retasking of objects not intended as instruments for musical purposes.10 The resistance of users to the proscribed limits of technology is part of a process of co-​construction, in which the form, function, and meaning of technologies are negotiated through a feedback loop involving the makers of artifacts, users of artifacts, and the artifacts themselves. As an instrument of the twentieth century, the pedal steel presents numerous avenues for the study of the relationships among its makers and users (which include not only its players but also artists, producers, and listeners). Written sources such as patents and catalogs, as well as the instruments themselves, show the stages of its technological development. A wealth of archival documents, including interviews and journalistic accounts from across its historical timeline, supplements the recollections of the key figures whose stories have been documented in recent years by folklorists and documentarians.11 Perhaps the most valuable stream of data comes from recordings, which are not only historical documents of the pedal steel’s musical evolution but also an integral component of that history, as they were the most important vehicle of its dissemination. In the remainder of this chapter, I will draw from these streams of information to show the pedal steel emerged as a technology embedded in the genre of country music, serving on one hand to embody its musical values but on the other hand to offer a vehicle for the insertion of new ideas through the movement of its players across genre lines.

The Histories of the Steel Guitar What is commonly referred to simply as “the steel guitar” or “steel” is, in fact, a multiplicity of overlapping but distinct performance styles and instrument configurations, each with its own historical trajectory. This instrument family includes the Hawaiian steel guitar, the bluegrass resonator guitar (commonly called the dobro), the non-​pedal steel guitar, and several iterations of the pedal steel. These instruments share several features and fundamental techniques. The player lays a standard guitar across their lap (with the plane of the strings parallel to the ground) and uses a metal bar (often called the “steel”) held in the left hand (normatively) to change the sounding length of the strings.12 The

Invention, Innovation, and the Pedal Steel Guitar    181 use of the bar is in many ways a subversion of the guitar’s existing form, obfuscating the fixed pitches of the frets and producing a distinct quasi-​vocal timbre that is often paired with vibrato. The player plucks the strings with the thumb (usually with a plastic pick), and the index and middle fingers (usually with metal picks) of the right hand. As the bar is often placed across a majority of the strings, the careful articulation of the desired notes is paired with a variety of techniques for muting other strings and controlling their sustain. A technique used across the family is the use of “chimes”—​harmonics played both “naturally” on the open strings and “artificially” in conjunction with the steel. In addition to its timbral characteristics, the use of the bar also meant that players were largely restricted to the intervals of the instrument’s open tuning. Most steel guitarists had several preferred tunings that they would use for different songs in their repertory, as each lent itself to different gestures and melodic features. The particular characteristics of each steel guitar tuning not only made them suitable for different styles and repertory but also guided the composition of music by its players. Beyond the commonalities of timbre and technique, each specific steel guitar style is marked by its own conventions and traditions as well as a history that reflects its use in specific genre contexts and its significance within communities of players and listeners. The origins of the Hawaiian style revolve around Joseph Kekuku (1874–​1934), who claimed to have invented the style in 1885 at age eleven. Anecdotes involving Kekuku appear in sources ranging from books and articles directly related to steel guitar to Hawaiian travel guides and history books.13 The most popular of these stories feature Kekuku discovering the technique by accidentally dropping a metal comb or pocket knife on his guitar; other narratives present competing claims by other Hawaiian musicians and the potential influence of existing instruments from Asia.14 Regardless of its origins, recordings of Hawaiian music (featuring the ukulele as well as the steel guitar) were in circulation beyond the islands as early as 1903; and by 1909, Kekuku and other Hawaiian players were on the mainland teaching and performing.15 The spread of Hawaiian music after the turn of the century is closely related to the changing relationship between the mainland United States and its newly annexed island territory.16 Fueled by the escapist yearnings of a society affected by world wars and economic depression, the exotic sounds of the steel guitar (and the ukulele) provided a soundtrack for American listeners’ fictional constructions of an island paradise. The leis and grass skirts available from the same catalogs as ukuleles and Hawaiian guitars masked the darker side of the colonialism of the United States’ annexation of the Hawaiian Islands and provided audiences and performers the opportunity to adopt not only a musical costume but a physical one as well. As the steel guitar was absorbed into US culture, however, its direct association with the exoticism of Hawaii eroded, and a distinctly “American” steel guitar style began to emerge. In the 1910s, music companies and entrepreneurial players across the country established studios and published instruction manuals for the steel guitar. These tutors largely treat the instrument less as a representative of another culture than as a novel vehicle for the performance of music in the Western tradition. Although some books and schools did retain an emphasis on actual Hawaiian repertory, most

182    Oxford Handbook of Country Music focused on other material: patriotic songs such as “Yankee Doodle Dandy”; tunes from the growing American popular songbook, including many by Stephen Foster; and light classical music, such as the Brahms lullaby, Liszt’s Liebestraum, and the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman. Though still making use of pictures of palm trees and hula girls, these manuals actually worked to remove the exotic character of the instrument and to foster an education in the musical language of European art music. The earliest technological advancements that aligned with the steel guitar tradition in the United States came with the advent of the resonator guitar in the 1920s.17 Developed by George Beauchamp and John Dopyera, these instruments were an attempt to acoustically increase the volume of the instrument to allow guitarists (of both Spanish and steel configurations) to better compete with other instruments and the ambient noise of many performance situations. These instruments gained volume and projection by adding one or more aluminum resonators to their bodies.18 Often referred to by the brand name Dobro, these resonator guitars proved popular among players of the steel guitar and were a key element of the emerging genre of country music. A major shift in steel guitar technology came in the early 1930s with the introduction of electrical amplification, which offered an increased volume far beyond that of resonator guitars.19 One of the pioneers of the amplified acoustic steel guitar (and amplified guitar in general) was Texan Bob Dunn. A trombonist by training, Dunn utilized the slightly overdriven sound of the amplified guitar to play frenetic, single-​line melodies more like a horn than an accompanying instrument.20 Dunn’s conception of the steel guitar as solo instrument anticipated the role of the electric guitar and electric steel guitar in country music, jazz, and other popular music of the next several decades. The proliferation of electrical amplification led to a morphological transformation of the steel guitar (and soon after the Spanish guitar). The reduction of the guitar’s physical form to a simple, often one-​piece body allowed makers and players to sidestep the acoustical demands of the traditional guitar (see Figure 9.1, left). The new, wholly electric steel guitars provided the same cutting volume without the harsh tones of the amplified acoustic guitar. The reception of this increasingly technologized instrument paralleled the emphasis in American society on the “new and improved.” The preface to one of virtuoso multi-​ instrumentalist Roy Smeck’s instruction manuals praises the electric steel guitar, proclaiming that “Continual improvements are being made in the materials and design of both the guitar and the amplifier so that what is now produced in tone by a good instrument with good amplification is a far cry from the ‘stringy’ tone of the original unamplified wooden guitar.”21 A later instruction book went as far as to equate the acoustic Hawaiian guitar to the then obsolete Ford Model T.22 This distinctly modernist attitude fueled the technological and musical development of the electric steel guitar and joined with the perpetual pursuit of novel sounds in the context of commercial music to foster the development of the pedal steel.

Figure 9.1  Left, detail from George D. Beauchamp, Electrical Stringed Musical Instrument (US Patent 2,089,171, filed June 2, 1934, and issued August 10, 1937); right, detail from Walter L. Fuller, Design for a Hawaiian Guitar (US Patent Des. 110,178, filed April 28, 1938, and issued June 21, 1938). Images from the website of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, www.uspto.gov.

Figure 9.1 Continued

Invention, Innovation, and the Pedal Steel Guitar    185

The Prehistory of the Pedal Steel The emergence of the pedal steel was driven by two main developments. The first was the expansion of the electric steel guitar from a six-​string instrument to one with eight, ten, or even twelve strings, and the exploration of new tunings suited to jazz harmonies. The second was the advent of mechanisms to switch between tunings rather than manually retuning each string. These innovations and inventions took place within a community of specialists and enthusiasts whose individual tastes and musical interests cut across the porous borders of the genre conventions espoused by the music industry. The use of multiple tunings dates back to the original Hawaiian steel guitar repertory, and a major benefit of the lap steel design was the low cost and relatively easy construction of multiple-​neck instruments (see Figure 9.1, right). A double-​neck instrument could still be played in the lap, but it was also possible to support with legs in either a standing or sitting playing position. With legs, it was now possible to add a third or fourth neck, granting players unprecedented ease of access to multiple tunings and driving the development of new tunings and techniques. Tunings are integral to the identity of any instrument, but particularly for the steel guitar, as the bar ensures that the open tuning is directly carried throughout the instrument’s range. In this way, the different tunings of the steel guitar can even be seen as distinct instruments—​individual species within a common genus. The lap steel became the site for experimentation on tunings, led by players such as Jerry Byrd, who began his career as a specialist in the Hawaiian style but turned to playing country music in the 1930s because it offered more employment opportunities.23 As Byrd continued to explore new styles, he departed from the open G major, A major, and E major tunings of the Hawaiian players to create tunings based on extended triads and seventh chords, multiple triads, and even the diatonic scale. He is particularly noted for popularizing the C6 tuning, which he developed an eight-​string version of in the mid-​1930s and which remains at the heart of jazz and swing steel guitar styles.24 A table of the various tunings used by Byrd and others in the 1930s and 1940s shows the ways in which they remain closely related—​they are often achieved by retuning selected strings a half or whole step—​and harmonically interconnected, while at the same time enabling different melodic and harmonic gestures (see Table 9.1). The particular characteristics of each steel guitar tuning not only made them suitable for different styles and repertory but also guided the composition of music by its players. The connection between the steel guitar’s tuning (and thus the intervals under the bar) and composition demonstrates the height of idiomatic writing—​compositions that not just “fit” an instrument but are about the instrument and its tuning, showcasing its strengths and techniques. The correlation of tuning and composition is epitomized in one of the “greatest hits” of the steel guitar repertoire: Leon McAuliffe’s 1936 composition “Steel Guitar Rag.”25

186    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Table 9.1 Electric Lap Steel Tunings, ca. 1945 String

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

A major (high bass)

E4

C#4

A3

E3

C#3

A2

A major (low bass)

E4

C#4

A3

E3

A2

E2

E major

E4

B3

G#3

E3

B2

E2

E7th

E4

B3

G#3

E3

D3

E2

C# minor 7th

E4

C#4

G#3

E3

B2

E2

C6th

E4

C4

A3

G3

E3

C3

B11th

E4

C#4

A3

F#3

D#3

C#3

B2

C diatonic

E4

C4

B3

A3

G3

F3

E3

E9th

E4

B3

G#3

F#3

E3

D3

B2

E2

C6th/​A7th

E4

C4

A3

G3

E3

C#3

C3

A1

F# minor 9th

E4

C#4

G#3

E3

A2

F#2

C#2

G#1

Written in the unsurprising key of E major, “Steel Guitar Rag” begins with a single-​ string melodic pickup on the upper two strings of the E major tuning, connected by the C# stopped with the bar at the second fret of the B string (see Figure 9.2a). On the downbeat, McAuliffe displays one of the most characteristic gestures of the steel guitar, bending in and out of the “blue” flatted third. This gesture is repeated twice, followed by a third iteration that ends the A section of the tune with an E major arpeggio with the added sixth. Following a B section centered on the subdominant A major chord, McAuliffe leaps to the twelfth fret for a C section that showcases both the action of the bar and the persistence of the open tuning by sliding into a series of arpeggiated E major triads, which are then transposed to B major and A major (see Figure 9.2b). As simple as this composition is, it perfectly showcases the essential characteristics of the steel guitar, as well as the specific sonorities of the E major tuning. As each tuning lent itself to different gestures and melodic features, most steel guitarists had several preferred tunings that they would use for different songs in their repertory. To access the different tunings, players had several options: they could have multiple instruments; they could retune their instrument for a given song or set of songs; or, beginning in the late 1930s, they could use a multi-​neck instrument setup with several alternate tunings. From as early as 1916, however, American inventors sought to design mechanisms to facilitate the use of multiple tunings on a single neck.26 As documented in the narrative sections of patent documents, each of these inventions was imbued with the intentions of its inventor—​a script for the technology’s use that drove its design. Players, however, pushed the limits of these devices and found new uses for them.

Invention, Innovation, and the Pedal Steel Guitar    187

Figure  9.2  Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, “Steel Guitar Rag” (1936), (a) beginning of A section (0:07–​0:17) and (b) C section (0:45–​1:01).

One of the earliest documented attempts to provide mechanical means to alter the pitch of a Hawaiian-​style guitar is seen in a patent applied for in 1916 by Edwin David Wilber of Detroit, Michigan.27 Wilbur’s “New and Improved Stringed Musical Instrument” was intended to “enable the beginner to learn to play the instrument in a comparatively short time.” By placing a steel (called a “movable finger” in the patent) on the appropriate set of strings at the appropriate fret, the player could simply strum with the right hand to produce any chord desired. A series of buttons, one for each string, is installed on the soundboard, near where a modern pickguard would be located. Depressing a button activates a series of mechanisms by which each string can be raised any amount from a half step to one and a half steps. The major practical problem with Wilbur’s design is the need for the player to simultaneously strum and hold down the buttons with the right hand. Following this outlying design, the late 1920s and early 1930s brought several other designs that sought to add pitch-​ changing functionality to acoustic guitars. The Kaufman brothers of Yankton, South Dakota, attached a device to the headstock of a standard acoustic guitar that provided a two-​way lever to switch between not just two tunings (ostensibly an A major and an E major tuning) but also between a Spanish guitar setup and a Hawaiian guitar setup with a raised nut.28 A different tack was taken by Arthur Harmon of Illinois, who presaged later developments by adding two knee-​ activated levers to an acoustic lap steel guitar.29 Designed to work with the A major tuning, one knee lever lowered the upper C# string to C-​natural for a minor triad, and the other raised the A-​string to B-​flat (A#) for a diminished triad. The advent of solid-​body lap steel guitars in the 1930s facilitated a change in inventors’ approaches to the problem of pitch-​changing mechanisms, which is reflected in a boom in patent designs between 1940 and 1953. These designs included models manufactured for sale by large companies such as Epiphone and National-​Valco. The functionality of these devices ranges from the built-​in, three-​tuning selector switch of National’s Triplex

188    Oxford Handbook of Country Music to the individually adjustable strings of the Epiphone Varichord.30 The three-​way selector seen in the Triplex—​which capitalized on the close relationships of the A major, E major, and C# minor 7th tunings seen in Table 9.1—​also appeared as a separate attachment that could be added to a lap steel either by a manufacturer or a player.31 The shift toward multi-​neck steel guitars mounted on legs facilitated the introduction of foot pedals as a means to activate devices designed to affect the tension of the strings. The eleven patents relating to pedal-​operated steel guitars submitted between 1936 and 1950 present three main goals.32 The first is to facilitate access to multiple steel guitar tunings, including ones based on minor and diminished triads; triads with added sixths; and extended tertian structures such as 7th, 9th, 11th, and 13th chords that reflected the more complex chords required for playing other types of jazz as well as songs in the Tin Pan Alley style. The second goal is to generate new and different musical figures, albeit of an unspecified nature. Such rhetoric speaks to a general drive toward technological innovation for its own sake and parallels the technological utopianism envisioned by early adopters of the electric steel guitar. The final goal is the creation of instruments that are “easy” to play—​that is, those that use technology to obviate the need for advanced technique. The earliest documentation of an electric lap steel with pedal devices is a 1936 patent by Antony P. Freeman of San Francisco.33 This patent shows a lap steel in the style of Rickenbacker’s famous “frying pan” model mounted on a stand and operated by two pedals. The tension of three of the guitar’s strings is adjusted via the pedals, whose three different positions—​“neutral, toe, and heel”—​provide three different pitches for each string. The result, as Freeman claims, is that “the utility of the [Hawaiian] guitar in modern arrangement and orchestrations is immeasurably increased,” as the instrument is “capable of supplementing the instruments of an orchestra to produce unheard of tonal effects.”34 In the early 1940s, the earliest commercially produced pedal steels demonstrate both the collaborative processes of invention and innovation, as makers and players worked together to find solutions to the musical problems presented by the limitations of the steel and the way that different approaches to the mechanisms aligned with different stylistic priorities. The patents relating to two early models, the Gibson Electraharp and the Harlin Brothers Multi-​kord, illustrate the different motivations of their inventors and their response to specific musical contexts. The Electraharp was developed by machinist John Moore in consultation with jazz player and bandleader Alvino Rey, who sought the means to emulate the sound of a full, big-​band horn section.35 Their 1940 patent expressed the musical aim to “permit the playing of numerous types of chords making chord progressions complete without objectionably increasing the number of strings.”36 The fifteen chordal possibilities listed include some typical jazz chords (D7th, G9th, Dmaj7th, D augmented, B minor 7th) and some more esoteric sonorities (including the eight-​note chord Db–​A–​F#–​D–​B–​Ab–​Eb–​D and an enharmonically spelled minor-​major seventh chord Db–​A–​F–​D). Reflecting the Harlin Brothers’ primary business as instructors of Hawaiian music, the Mulit-​kord’s design is presented in terms of the Hawaiian tunings rather than the jazz-​oriented chord vocabulary of the Gibson patent. In his 1947 patent, J. D. Harlin clearly aims at the amateur player, expressing

Invention, Innovation, and the Pedal Steel Guitar    189 his wish to “[make] it possible for players having only rudimentary skill to give performances comparable to the performances of players of much greater experience and accomplishment.”37 Following in the footsteps of Alvino Rey, several West Coast swing players continued to use pedals to access additional chords and tunings in the 1940s. In February 1948, the virtuoso steel guitarist Wesley “Speedy” West received a triple-​neck console steel with four pedals made by Paul Bigsby, a machinist-​turned-​luthier whose instruments had been adopted by several high-​profile musicians.38 West’s use of pedals was just one among an arsenal of techniques and special effects, including slamming the bar onto the strings in conjunction with manipulation of the volume pedal and tone controls. Whereas many of West’s techniques were intended to be visual displays of virtuosity, West obfuscated his use of the pedals by attaching a front panel to his steel and using a volume pedal to mask the changes. Once musicians figured out how West achieved his unprecedented variety of harmonies, Bigsby was inundated with orders for new instruments, including the double-​neck pedal steel delivered to Nashville-​based player Bud Isaacs in 1952. Although Isaacs’s instrument was designed with the same purpose as the pedal-​activated tuning devices of the previous decades, his repurposing of them for audible effects can be seen as the “birth” of the modern pedal steel.

A Technological Call and Response: The Evolution of the E9th Pedal Steel Guitar, 1954–​1975 In early 1954, Bud Isaacs’s new style of playing was featured on Webb Pierce’s hit single, “Slowly,” establishing a new paradigm for the instrument and initiating a major change in its trajectory.39 Players began using pedal mechanisms not just to facilitate chord changes but also to create audible harmonic changes and melodic gestures.40 Over the subsequent two decades, the pedal steel’s development took the form of a technological call and response, as players and makers refined the instrument’s mechanisms and techniques through a collaborative process of musical and technological problem-​ solving. The dissemination of this style was itself technologically mediated—​a dialogue conducted through sound recordings. The “call” by Isaacs and others, sounding in ten-​ second increments, generated a response by players and makers who, in the early days, had to reverse engineer the technologies that enabled it. The flow of innovation was also mediated therefore by aesthetic and commercial concerns of the music industry, as the pedal steel’s initial development was most prominently displayed in the introductions and instrumental solos of country recordings. In this section, I will trace the evolution of the E9th pedal steel guitar from its emergence to the early 1970s, when it was largely stabilized in its modern form.

190    Oxford Handbook of Country Music After receiving his Bigsby pedal steel in 1952, Isaacs experimented with the melodic possibilities of the pedals, aiming to imitate the sound of two fiddles playing in harmony.41 At the November 1953 session for “Slowly,” Isaacs was ready to put this technique on display when producer Owen Bradley asked him to use it in an instrumental introduction. Isaacs’s performance on “Slowly” is a brief but distinctive musical gesture that presents a clear shift from a style emphasizing parallel chromatic slides (as can be heard in Don Helms’s playing on many of Hank Williams’s hits of the previous five years) to one that showcases a smooth, diatonic chord change with chorale-​like voice leading. The combination of this melodic and harmonic complex—​with two pitches changing in contrapuntal motion against a sustained common tone—​and the shimmering tone of the steel bar is the essence of the pedal steel’s musical identity. Isaacs’s Bigsby was a double-​neck model with two pedals. The front neck was tuned to an E9th tuning similar to the one in Table 9.1, with two pedals that provided access to the closely related A chord. The tuning shift was divided between the two pedals, with one operating the upper strings and one affecting the lower strings (see Table 9.2). The distinct sound of the “Slowly” introduction is created by Isaacs’s use of his first pedal in conjunction with movement of the bar from the eighth fret to the fifteenth. Playing on the top three strings, the pedal allowed him to oscillate between a first inversion triad and the root position triad a fourth higher, first from C major to F major and then from G major to C major. In each chord change, one string is raised a half step, one string is raised a whole step, and a common tone is retained on the top of the chord. The result is a very quick I-​IV-​I-​V-​I progression, as can be seen in Figure 9.3. Countless players have recounted their reactions to this opening gesture, as well as other passages in Isaacs’s accompaniment in which he uses the pedal to play diatonic scalar figures harmonized in thirds. Although these latter figures are possible without the pedal, the quickness and accuracy of their execution are immediately recognizable, especially in combination with the held note. Table 9.2 Bud Isaacs’s Tuning and Pedal Setup, ca. 1953 String

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Pitch

E4

B3

G#3

F#3

D3

B2

G#2

E2

++C#4

+A3 ++E3

++C#3

+A2

Pedal 1 Pedal 2

Figure 9.3  Webb Pierce, “Slowly” (recorded 1953), pedal steel intro by Bud Isaacs (0:00–​0:04).

Invention, Innovation, and the Pedal Steel Guitar    191

Figure 9.4  Faron Young, “Sweet Dreams” (recorded 1956), pedal steel introduction by Buddy Emmons (0:00–​0:06).

In the months and years following the release of “Slowly,” players and instrument makers worked to recreate the success of Bigsby’s instruments and Isaacs’s musical innovation. This pursuit prompted the establishment of new companies dedicated to pedal steel manufacture and the renewed exploration of its designs by larger companies such as Gibson, Epiphone, and Fender. The three-​year wait for a Bigsby, in addition to its substantial cost, led to a somewhat mythic explosion of jury-​rigged pedal systems and set the stage for the much more securely documented growth of a cottage industry of instrument modification. One of the most important figures in the subsequent evolution of the pedal steel was Buddy Emmons, who was not only at the center of the group of musicians who developed its sounds and techniques but also was instrumental in the founding of two of the most successful pedal steel manufacturing companies. Like many professional steel players, Emmons began by creating new permutations using Isaacs’s pedal setup, which was replicated on the Bigsby he received in 1955. An example of this can be heard in Faron Young’s 1956 “Sweet Dreams,” for which Emmons essentially plays the “Slowly” gesture in reverse, beginning in the upper register and moving down to a V-​I cadence in D major at the fifth fret (see Figure 9.4).42 Elsewhere in Nashville, dobro player and machinist Harold “Shot” Jackson exploited his musical and industrial training to add pedal mechanisms to existing console steels. Word of Jackson’s modifications spread throughout the country, and players would even ship instruments to him for retrofitting. After several years of modifying instruments in his garage, Jackson recruited Emmons (who had developed a reputation for experimenting with his instruments) to help him create a new pedal steel from the ground up. Their efforts were an unqualified success; and taking its name from the first three letters of each of its founders, the Sho-​Bud Guitar Company was formed in 1957.43 On the West Coast, the first pedal steels by Leo Fender were manufactured in 1957 and 1958, joining the Telecaster as a staple of California country bands. The first major addition in the pedal steel’s musical functionality came around 1957 when Emmons divided the two-​string raise of Isaacs’s pedal onto separate pedals, typically referred to as Pedal A (raising the B string to C#) and Pedal B (raising the G# string to A). Several of the melodic and harmonic possibilities facilitated by this split are demonstrated on singer Ernest Tubb’s 1958 single, “Half a Mind,” which Emmons recalls as the first recording he made with the split pedals.44 As shown in Figure 9.5, Emmons first uses the A pedal to create a new chord voicing that combines the pedal with a bar slant (m.2, beat 4). This is followed by a gesture on beats 1 and 2 of the third measure that

192    Oxford Handbook of Country Music

Figure 9.5  Ernest Tubb, “Half a Mind” (recorded 1958), pedal steel intro by Buddy Emmons (0:00–​0:12).

creates the illusion of a sustained inner voice, countering the descending major second of the outer voices by raising the string a whole step as the bar moves back two frets. At the end of the figure, the B pedal is used to play a triad with a suspended fourth (soon thereafter a ubiquitous pedal steel gesture), and the two pedals are used together at the end of the phrase for a flourish that combines pedal action reminiscent of “Slowly” with multiple octaves of artificial harmonics (indicated with diamonds). As Emmons recalled, his enthusiastic explorations of the new pedals while rehearsing the song drew an admonishment from Tubb: “Can you stick a little closer to the melody, son?”45 This policing of Emmons’s playing highlights a contradiction of the Nashville recording scene: musicians were expected not only to play to a high degree of perfection and to contribute creative hooks and licks to enhance a track’s salability but also to limit their musical expression to the “service of the song”—​or perhaps more accurately to the song’s enactment of the conventions of its genre. This phenomenon is certainly not limited to Nashville or even country music, and instrumentalists are often firmly positioned in the contested ground between the stable familiarity of the old and the emergent excitement of the new.46 The evolution of the E9th tuning continued rapidly at the end of the 1950s, incorporating ideas from Emmons’s Nashville compatriot Jimmy Day and West Coast players such as Ralph Mooney. Mooney expanded the tuning upward by adding a high G# string that was also raised to A and raised the high E string to F# for melodic playing (which was adopted in Nashville as the “C” pedal). Around this time, the standard instrument for a professional player became a double-​neck instrument with ten strings on each neck (see Figure 9.6, left). One of these necks featured the E9th tuning, and the other featured the C6 tuning that was typically used for western swing and jazz. A typical Nashville E9th tuning from around 1960 is shown in Table 9.4. A crucial development in the pedal steel’s melodic capabilities came in 1962 when Emmons added two strings to the upper register of the instrument: a D# and an F# that filled in the melodic gaps of the existing strings. These strings, which were placed outside of the core E9th tuning, can be heard on Ray Price’s 1962 track, “You Took Her Off My Hands.”47 The lyrical melodicism displayed in this solo can be seen as a parallel to the move away from the “rustic” sounds of older steel guitar styles that lead to its tenuous position in the pop-​leaning formulations of the so-​called “Nashville Sound” of the late 1950s (see Figure 9.7).

Figure 9.6  Left, detail from Ronald T. Lashley and Buddie [sic] G. Emmons, Guitar Tone Changing Device (US Patent 3,447,413, filed March 18, 1965, and issued June 3, 1969); right, detail from Delmar E. Mullen, Tone Control and Tuning Apparatus for a Stringed Instrument (US Patent 4,077,296, filed February 3, 1976, and issued March 7, 1978). Images from the website of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, www.uspto.gov.

194    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Table 9.3 Buddy Emmons’s E9th Tuning and Setup, ca. 1957 String

1

Pitch

E4

Pedal A

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

B3

G#3

F#3

D3

B3

G#2

E2

++C#4

Pedal B

+A3

Table 9.4 Nashville E9th Tuning, ca. 1960 String

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Pitch

G#4

E4

B3

G#3

F#3

E3

D3

B2

G#2

E2

Pedal A

++C#4

Pedal B

+A4

++C#3 +A3

Pedal C

++F#4

++C#4

Figure 9.7  Ray Price, “You Took Her Off My Hands” (recorded 1962), pedal steel solo by Buddy Emmons (1:56–​2:16). The reentrant strings are marked with a pointer.

Table 9.5 Open Strings of Emmons’s E9th “Chromatic” Tuning, ca. 1963 String

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Pitch

F#4

D#4

G#4

E4

B3

G#3

F#3

E3

D3

B2

Although he was initially unsure about keeping these strings, they were well received by many players, and Emmons had his instrument modified so that they could be placed as strings 1 and 2 (see Table 9.5). By placing these strings out of the logical sequence of high-​to-​low (which would have resulted in the top four strings being tuned to G#-​F#-​E-​D#), the open chordal tuning at the heart of the steel guitar tradition was preserved, and the nonlinear sequence also facilitated a variety of uniquely pedal steel techniques and gestures. In the mid-​1960s, Emmons founded his own steel guitar company, as Jackson resisted his suggestions for improvements to the instrument’s design. Realized by maker Ron

Invention, Innovation, and the Pedal Steel Guitar    195 Lashley, the Emmons pedal steel (now known as the “push-​pull” due to its fundamental mechanics) allowed a greater flexibility in configuration while retaining the stability of the early Sho-​Buds. Sho-​Bud soon introduced the first of several “all-​pull” models, designed by Shot Jackson’s son, David. With the added flexibility of these designs, the pedals were increasingly supplemented by the addition of the knee levers (as seen in Figure 9.6, right), which functioned similarly to the pedals and allowed for even more choices. One popular knee lever lowered the second string of Emmons’s new tuning one whole step, paving the way for one of Emmons’s most distinctive gestures, a contrapuntal line spinning out of a two-​string unison. This can be heard in his introduction to Price’s “The Healing Hands of Time” (1966), which ends in a Bach-​like cadence made possible by the sleight of hand in which a pedal is used to create the illusion of a held note (see Figure 9.8).48 Although Emmons was at the forefront of the pedal steel’s evolution, a host of other players contributed to its technological and stylistic vocabulary. These include session player Lloyd Green, who is credited with popularizing the “F” lever, raising the E strings one half step, which is used in conjunction with the A pedal to create a major triad inversion between the “no-​pedal” and “pedals-​down” positions used in Isaacs’s “Slowly” gesture (see Figure 9.3). This lever, along with another lowering the E strings to D# (usually called the “E” lever), allowed musicians to play ever more intricate chord progressions with a single right-​hand articulation of a single group of strings, extending the aesthetic of smooth counterpoint initiated by Isaacs (see Figure 9.9). By the early 1970s, the pedal steel was refined into a loosely standardized form consisting of one or two ten-​string necks (one tuned to E9th, the other to C6th) with up

Figure  9.8  Ray Price, “The Healing Hands of Time” (recorded 1966), pedal steel intro by Buddy Emmons (0:00–​0:17).

Figure 9.9  Chord progressions using the “E” and “F” knee levers on strings 5, 6, and 8.

196    Oxford Handbook of Country Music to eight foot pedals and five knee levers. The most common single-​neck configuration is the E9th tuning shown in Table 9.6, with 3 pedals and up to five knee levers, selected from a host of options to suit each player’s musical and ergonomic preferences.49 The standardization of the pedal steel was also driven by forces beyond the community of professional players. The advent of country rock helped to solidify the pedal steel (particularly the E9th tuning) as a “country” instrument, acting as a signifier of the genre on albums by the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Poco. Some rock guitarists sought to imitate the sound of the pedal steel using devices like the B-​bender; others, including Jerry Garcia, Jimmy Page, and Steve Howe, took it on as a secondary instrument, simultaneously raising its profile and, as many pedal steel aficionados decried, lowering the bar for new players. A growing amateur market influenced the manufacture of less expensive, entry-​level instruments that ultimately contributed just as much to the public perception of how the pedal steel looked, sounded, and functioned as the professional models. Last, the dissemination of pedal steel knowledge shifted from a predominantly aural/​oral transmission to the written word. The publication of the first pedal steel instruction manuals—​notably Winston and Keith’s (1975) Pedal Steel Guitar, published by the well distributed Oak Publications—​fostered a more homogenized body of techniques and contributed to an emergent narrative of the instrument’s history and traditions.50 This increasingly amateur-​centered, notation-​driven music furthered a shift from a pattern of exploration and innovation to a focus on the mimesis of past explorers and innovators. This pattern was reinforced by the emergence of a canon of recordings through which amateurs could study the techniques and styles of players both past and present. And so, some forty years after its emergence as a technological Table 9.6 E9th “Chromatic” Tuning, ca. 1970, Showing Multiple Possible Knee Levers String

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Pitch

F#4

D#4

G#4

E4

B3

G#3

F#3

E3

D3

B2

Pedal A

++C#4

Pedal B

+A4

Pedal C

+A3 ++F#4

Knee D

++C#3

++C#4

−​D4/​C#4

−​C#3

Knee E

−​D#4

−​D#3

Knee F

+E#4

+E#4

Knee G

+G4

+G4

Knee H Knee V

−​​F#3 −​A#3

−​A#2

Invention, Innovation, and the Pedal Steel Guitar    197 concept, and twenty years after the “birth” of the modern style, the pedal steel reached its maturity as an instrument, a technology, and a musical tradition.

The Pedal Steel in the Twenty-​First Century Although the pedal steel reached a point of stability in the mid-​1970s, new ideas about its techniques and technologies have continued to emerge, acting now as extensions and explorations of the existing tradition. Just as the individual players of the 1950s and 1960s pursued their own musical ideas while navigating the instrument’s developing technology and the demands of the recording industry, players after the 1970s were equally able to exercise their individual agency in deciding their approach. The instrument has even found a place in numerous styles outside of country music, from rock to jazz to Nigerian jújù—​in fact, the highest-​profile steel guitarist of the past decade is likely Robert Randolph, a player from the sacred steel tradition whose use of the pedal steel diverges sharply from its country origins.51 Although some steel guitarists have continued to operate within the context of the country music industry, others have pursued highly divergent paths for their playing. The opposite ends of this spectrum can be seen in the work of two players: session player Paul Franklin and avant-​garde musician Susan Alcorn. From the time he began playing in the mid-​1970s, Franklin pursued a different conception of the pedal steel, seeking to develop his own voice by drawing inspiration from the sounds and techniques of other instruments, from saxophones to synthesizers, and studying jazz theory texts such as George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept.52 He also propelled the steel into new territory by playing with both Dire Straits and Steely Dan, two rock groups known for their virtuosic musicianship. Franklin’s innovations on the E9th neck have been widely adopted due to his ascension in the 1990s as one of the most recorded session musicians in Nashville. These include not only an ultra-​precise right-​ hand technique and an atmospheric style of using chimes, but also several distinctive pitch changes, which furthered the steel’s diatonic melodic capabilities. Many of these changes can be heard in a solo played by Franklin on a live video of the Players, a band comprised entirely of top Nashville session musicians.53 In this performance, Franklin showcases the melodic possibilities of his setup in a style that echoes the integration of musical and mechanical ideas by players like Buddy Emmons in the 1960s. The precision of his playing also demonstrates a virtuosity that balances his exploration of his instrument with the hyperperfectionist demands of the Nashville recording scene of the 1980s and 1990s. As seen in Figure 9.10, Franklin begins by using the A pedal and two of his knee levers to execute a diatonic figure whose melodic simplicity belies the complicated choreography of his legs and foot (m. 1). The most distinctive of Franklin’s gestures is found in m. 3, where uses his vertical knee lever (V) to dramatically drop

198    Oxford Handbook of Country Music

Figure  9.10  The Players, “My Little Ballerina” (recorded ca. 2006), pedal steel solo by Paul Franklin (2:02–​2:32).

from a D (with Pedal B) to the A below and back again. In m. 5, he ornaments a simple scalar descent from F# to B by raising strings 1 and 2 to unisons with strings 3 and 4. After his cadence on the I chord in m. 7, Franklin plays a multiple-​octave-​spanning gesture in his characteristic chimes style, which features a pure crystalline sound and an unaccented attack (via the volume pedal), and ends the solo with a slow activation of his fourth pedal (popularly known as the “Franklin” pedal), bending an E down to the tonic D note while sustaining the A above. The sheer volume of annotations to this transcription demonstrates the total integration of the pedals and knee levers into Franklin’s technique and style, which is an exemplar of the instrument’s technological and musical potential. Franklin’s obvious continuity with the pedal steel’s tradition is contrasted by the music of Susan Alcorn, which reflects her self-​described musical double life, rife with the disorientation of listening to free jazz icon Albert Ayler in the car on the way to country gigs.54 Although she was pursuing her interest in jazz by playing with “straightahead” jazz groups, correspondence with pianist and composer Paul Bley encouraged her to “throw away the real book” and to move toward free improvisation.55 In 1990, Alcorn found a clear direction through the first of several collaborations with composer-​ performer Pauline Oliveros, whose philosophy of “deep listening” greatly impacted her own thinking about the building blocks of music and how they intersected with her instrument. As Alcorn describes it Every note, every musical sound and every instrument is alive. I try to give each of these room to breathe. My pedal steel guitar is a co-​creator, in every sense of the word, with its own voice, so I try to give it space to tell its story. Also, for the notes, if you give them space, then they can begin to tell their story too. You can hear it in all the subtle inflections and in the universe of harmonics interacting with harmonics.56

Invention, Innovation, and the Pedal Steel Guitar    199 In 1997, Alcorn shifted her primary focus to solo performances in which she incorporated ideas from vastly disparate sources, including Javanese gamelan, Japanese koto music, the nuevo tango of Astor Piazzolla, and the meditative compositions of Olivier Messiaen.57 Although she consciously eschews conventional pedal steel techniques, their echoes can be heard in her playing alongside references to her other inspirations, as evidenced by her 2002 solo composition “Twin Beams.”58 Her technical vocabulary includes permutations of the conventional techniques of bar slants (1:02) and chimes (0:55), but with the former obscured by atypical tonal structures and the latter played as an ornament to an already struck note rather than as a distinct tone. She invokes Ralph Mooney’s hammer-​on technique as she casts spiraling reminiscent of the electric piano of late-​1960s Miles Davis (2:30–​2:40). She also incorporates extended techniques, using both the bar (sometimes multiple bars) and her fingerpicks to strike the strings, in a melding of the iconoclastic piano techniques of Henry Cowell, George Crumb, and Cecil Taylor with the bar slams of Speedy West. Alcorn’s vision of the solo pedal steel as a vehicle for avant-​garde composition and free improvisation can be seen as both a radical departure from the instrument’s tradition and an extension of the creative impulses that fueled its development. After all, the inventors of the first pedal mechanisms proclaimed their devices to exist in the service of searching for new musical ideas and previously unheard sounds. Later manufacturers advertised the “universality” of their devices, enabling any and all sounds that could be imagined. However, Alcorn clearly exists far outside of the easily recognizable pedal steel tradition—​her skills are recognized by many players but hardly embraced by fans of Ray Price, Ernest Tubb, or Merle Haggard. Through these contradictions, she embodies the both the closure of the instrument as a “country instrument” and the perpetual openness that arises from any individual’s interactions with a technological object.

Conclusion The pedal steel guitar is an embodiment of some of the inherent contradictions of country music: a complex machine developed within the experimental undercurrents of a genre ostensibly grounded in the simplicity of “three chords and the truth.” The musical and technological innovations of its makers and players exemplify the side of country music populated not by fictive cowboys, moonshiners, or “simple” folk but by master musicians, craftspeople, and entrepreneurs. The innovators within the pedal steel community expanded on their own internal history, influenced by their professional obligations in the context of the country music industry and their participation in a broader community of musicians that moved across multiple genres and geographic locales. From a musical standpoint, this focus on specific instrumental traditions and player communities offers insight into the flow of musical ideas within country music, as well as from other genres into country, and from country outward. Further, the emergence of new instrument technologies (and more “traditionally” technological items such as

200    Oxford Handbook of Country Music recording hardware and software) within the carefully constructed musical world of country music demonstrates the potential impact of individual inventors and innovators within a society.

Notes 1. Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton painting, The Sources of Country Music (1975) video, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum website, http://​countrymusichalloffame.org/​ ContentPages/​thomas-​hart-​benton1 2. See critic Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer Prize-​winning article, “Pearls Before Breakfast: Can One of the Nation’s Great Musicians Cut Through the Fog of a D.C. Rush Hour? Let’s Find Out,” The Washington Post Magazine, April 8, 2007, https://​www.washingtonpost.com/​ lifestyle/​magazine/​pearls-​before-​breakfast-​can-​one-​of-​the-​nations-​great-​musicians-​cut-​ through-​the-​fog-​of-​a-​dc-​rush-​hour-​lets-​find-​out/​2014/​09/​23/​8a6d46da-​4331-​11e4-​b47c-​ f5889e061e5f_​story.html 3. John Tresch and Emily I. Dolan, “Toward a New Organology: Instruments of Music and Science,” OSIRIS 28, no. 1 (January 2013): 278–​298; Eliot Bates, “The Social Life of Musical Instruments,” Ethnomusicology 56, no. 3 (September 2012): 363–​395; Kevin Dawe, The New Guitarscape in Critical Theory, Cultural Practice and Musical Performance (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010); Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); John Baily, “Music Structure and Human Movement,” in Musical Structure and Cognition, ed. Peter Howell, Ian Cross, and Robert West (London: Academic Press, 1985), 237–​258. 4. For an extensive analysis of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, see Peter-​Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 49–​95. 5. Ibid. 10. 6. Geoffrey Hindley suggests that the mechanical automation of the piano and other keyboard instruments reflects a distancing from the immediacy of musical instruments that are played “directly” and that the dominance of these instruments in the Western musical tradition fostered a separation from the “organic[ism] of the natural world”; Geoffrey Hindley, “Keyboards, Crankshafts, and Communication: The Musical Mindset of Western Technology,” in Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hans-​Joachim Braun (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 33–​42. 7. See, for example, Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Developments in the History and Sociology of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 8. Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, “The Social Construction of the Early Electronic Music Synthesizer,” in Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hans-​Joachim Braun (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 67. 9. See Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/​Building Society:  Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); David Nye, “Does Technology Control Us?,” in Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 17–​31; and Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch, eds., How Users Matter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

Invention, Innovation, and the Pedal Steel Guitar    201 10. See, for example, the discussion of the hip hop turntable as a musical instrument in Mark Katz, Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-​Hop DJ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 61–​66. 11. A folkloric approach to the instrument’s history is found in Kenneth Brandon Barker, “The American Pedal Steel Guitar: Folkloric Analyses of Material Culture and Embodiment” (PhD dissertation, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2012). Steel guitarist Marty Muse and anthropologist Jeff Himpele have conducted significant interviews in preparation for a forthcoming documentary film. Himpele discusses their endeavor in “Making a Film About a Sound: The Steel Guitar from Hawaii to the Hony-​Tonk,” Anthropology News 52, no. 1 (January 2011): 4, 6. 12. The steel guitar is thus distinguished from the bottleneck or slide guitar style in which the player holds the guitar in its normal orientation, and wears a hollow cylinder of metal or glass on one finger, allowing for a hybrid technique. (It should also not be confused with the steel-​string guitar, a term used as a foil to the nylon-​strung Spanish or classical guitar.) Scholars of the blues guitar have long held that African instruments were the definitive source of the bottleneck guitar style, and perhaps the ultimate source of the Hawaiian style. See, for example, David Evans, “Afro-​American One-​stringed Instruments,” Western Folklore 29, no. 4 (October 1970):  229–​245; and William Ferris, Blues From the Delta (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978). This theory is challenged by John Troutman’s research on the presence of native Hawaiian musicians in the southern United States in the first decades of the 1900s. He asserts the likelihood of a scenario in which African American musicians adopted the slide after direct exposure to Hawaiian players; John Troutman, “Steelin’ the Slide: Hawai’i and the Birth of the Blues Guitar,” Southern Cultures 19, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 26–​52. 13. Kekuku makes this claim himself in a method book published ca. 1930, quoted in Lorene Ruymar, ed., The Hawaiian Steel Guitar and its Great Hawaiian Musicians (Anaheim Hills, CA: Centerstream Publishing, 1996), 11. This collection of essays and anecdotes relating to the instrument typifies the “popular” historiography that surrounds many instrument traditions that fall outside of the purview of art music. The first major scholarly treatment of the Hawaiian steel guitar tradition is historian John Troutman’s Kīkā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 14. Other narratives point to other potential “inventors” of the style, including James Hoa and Gabriel Davion, and suggest the possible influence from other traditions such as the South Indian gottuvadayam. Other precedents for the use of a “steel” include zithers of European origin such as the scheitholt, the hummel, and the épinette des Vosges—​each of which can be played with a wooden “noter,”—​and the Japanese ichigenkin and nigenkin: small zithers that are played with an ivory cylinder. For more on these instruments, see Timothy D.  Miller, “The Origins and Development of the Pedal Steel Guitar” (master’s thesis, University of South Dakota, 2007), 43–​46. 15. George T. Noe and Daniel L. Most, Chris Knutsen:  From Harp Guitars to the New Hawaiian Family, History and Development of the Hawaiian Steel Guitar (Everett, WA: Noe Enterprises, 1999), 46. Examples of Kekuku’s playing can be heard via the UCSB (University of California, Santa Barbara) Cylinder Audio Archive, http://​cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/​. 16. Charles Hiroshi Garrett, Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 168.

202    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 17. A short history of the resonator guitar, from its invention to the early twenty-​first century is found in Peter T. Veru, “The National-​Dobro Guitar Company: How the Resonator Guitar Survived the Age of Electrical Amplification” (master’s thesis, George Washington University, 2009). See also Bob Brozman, ed., The History and Artistry of National Resonator Instruments (Fullerton, CA: Centerstream Publications, 1993). 18. Patents for these designs include John Dopyera, Stringed Musical Instrument, US Patent 1,741,453, filed April 9, 1927, and issued December 13, 1929; George D. Beauchamp, Stringed Musical Instrument, US Patent 1,808,756, filed March 11, 1929, and issued June 9, 1931. 19. The exact origin of the amplified guitar is a highly contested subject. For the story of a late nineteenth-​century electric guitar, see Matthew Hill, “George Breed and his Electrified Guitar of 1890,” Galpin Society Journal 61 (April 2008): 193–​203. 20. For a biography of Dunn, see Kevin Coffey, “Steel Colossus:  The Bob Dunn Story,” in The Country Reader: Twenty-​five Years of the Country Music Journal, ed. Paul Kingsbury (Nashville, TN: The Country Music Foundation and Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 90–​109. For more on the steel guitar in western swing, see also Cary Ginell, Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing (Urbana–​Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 1994); and Jean A. Boyd, The Jazz of the Southwest:  An Oral History of Western Swing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 113–​142. 21. Roy Smeck, Radio City Album for Hawaiian Electric Steel Guitar, comp. and ed. Harry Reser (New York: Edward B. Marks Music Corporation, 1953), 2. 22. Daisy Murmann Stryker, Hawaiian Guitar, E7th Tuning, Natural Pitch (New York: Daisy Murmann Stryker, 1955), 3. 23. For more on Byrd’s career and his musical innovations, see his autobiography, It Was a Trip:  On the Wings of Music (Anaheim Hills, CA:  Centerstream Publishing, 2003); and the interview with Jerry Byrd in Andy Volk, ed., Lap Steel Guitar (Anaheim Hills, CA: Centerstream Publishing, 2003), 27–​35. 24. The tunings are generally referred to by the chord that they spell (e.g., A6th, E11th, C#m7th). 25. Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, “Steel Guitar Rag” (featuring Leon McAuliffe), Columbia C1479, 1936. McAuliffe’s composition draws on several models, including “Guitar Rag” by blues guitarist Sylvester Weaver. John Mark Dempsey, The Light Crust Doughboys Are on the Air: Celebrating Seventy Years of Texas Music (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2002), 57–​58. 26. The full gamut of these inventions is documented in Miller, “Origins and Development,” 61–​81. 27. Edwin David Wilbur, Stringed Musical Instrument, US Patent 1,259,062, filed June 1, 1916, and issued March 12, 1918. 28. John T. Kaufman and Chris Kaufman, Stringed Musical Instrument, US Patent 1,809,710, filed July 13, 1928, and issued June 9, 1931. 29. Arthur R. Harmon, Musical Instrument, US Patent 1,924,854, filed November 25, 1932, and issued August 29, 1933. 30. The design of the Triplex is documented in John B.  Cousineau, Stringed Musical Instrument, US Patent 2,519,824, filed April 29, 1949, and issued August 22, 1950. The Varichord is documented in Dominick A. Maffei and Clyde C. Doerr, Stringed Musical Instrument, US Patent 2,234,718, filed September 22, 1939, and issued March 18, 1941. Both instruments can be seen in George Gruhn and Walter Carter, Electric Guitars and Basses: A Photographic History (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1994), 17, 36.

Invention, Innovation, and the Pedal Steel Guitar    203 31. Herbert M. Hise, Stringed Musical Instrument, US Patent 2,641,1521, filed July 5, 1949, and issued June 9, 1953. 32. A more detailed analysis of the mechanisms themselves is found in Miller, “Origins and Development,” 82–​99. 33. Antony P. Freeman, Musical Instrument, US Patent 2,122,396, filed December 14, 1936, and issued July 5, 1938. 34. Ibid. 35. Per Rey’s recollections in 1990, documented in Fred Hall, More Dialogues in Swing: Intimate Conversations with the Stars of the Big Band Era (Ventura, CA: Pathfinder Publishing, 1991), 88–​89. 36. John J. Moore, Stringed Musical Instrument, US Patent 2,234,874, filed August 23, 1940, and issued Mar 11, 1941. The first Electraharp model was only produced from around 1939 to 1942, when Gibson’s production facilities were diverted to the war effort. According to Gibson historian Walter Carter, only thirteen instruments of this model were ever sold (Gruhn and Carter, Electric Guitars, 27). An example is housed at the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota. http://​nmmusd.org/​Collections 37. J.  D. Harlin, String Musical Instrument with Chord Tuning Mechanism, US Patent 2,458,263, filed August 21, 1947, and issued January 4, 1949. 38. For more on Speedy West, see Speedy West, interview by Douglas B. Green, November 18, 1974, interview OHC193-​LC, transcript, Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. See also Rich Kienzle, Southwest Shuffle:  Pioneers of Honky-​Tonk, Western Swing, and Country-​Jazz (New York: Routledge, 2003), 193–​220. For more details on Bigsby and his instruments (although focused heavily on instruments other than his steel guitars), see Andy Babiuk, The Story of Paul Bigsby: Father of the Modern Electric Solidbody Guitar (Savannah, GA: FG Publishing, 2008). 39. Webb Pierce, “Slowly,” Decca 9-​28991, 1954. 40. One precedent for the audible retuning of strings during a performance is found in several compositions by banjo player Earl Scruggs, including “Earl’s Breakdown” (1951) and “Flint Hill Special” (1952), which lead to the development of special pegs with tunable stops. A crucial difference between this and the pedal steel is that Scruggs’s detunings were a disruption of normal technique rather than a foundation of his playing. 41. Bud Isaacs and Geri Mapes, interview by John W. Rumble, May 9, 1989, interview OHC63, transcript, Country Music Foundation Oral History Project, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. 42. Faron Young, “Sweet Dreams,” Capitol F3443, 1956. 43. For Emmons’s recollections about Sho-​Bud, see Buddy Emmons, “Buddy Emmons: Pedal Steel King (as told to Tom Bradshaw),” Guitar Player 10, no. 5 (May 1976): 34, 36. 44. Ernest Tubb, “Half a Mind,” Decca 9-​30685, 1958. Many of the technical details of Emmons’s innovations are detailed in Ernie Renn, ed., “Buddy Emmons Q & A,” http://​ www.buddyemmons.com/​QA.htm. 45. Emmons recounts this incident in Renn, “Emmons Q & A.” Other details of this period of Tubb’s career, including his interactions with Emmons, can be found in Ronnie Pugh, Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubadour (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 229–​232. 46. As explored in Richard Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 47. Ray Price, “You Took Her Off My Hands,” Columbia 4-​42658, 1962.

204    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 48. Ray Price, “Healing Hands of Time,” on Another Bridge to Burn, Columbia CL-​2528, 1966. 49. For a discussion of the process of selecting knee levers, see Winnie Winston, ed., Pedal Steel Guitar: A Manual of Style (Henderson, TN: Pixenbar Music, 1980), 14–​15, 42–​44. 50. Winnie Winston and Bill Keith, Pedal Steel Guitar (New York: Oak Publications, 1975). 51. For more on Robert Randolph and the sacred steel tradition, see Robert L. Stone, Sacred Steel: Inside an African American Steel Guitar Tradition (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 52. Biographical information drawn from Cal Sharp, “Paul Franklin: New Directions in Pedal Steel,” Guitar Player 14, no. 10 (October 1980): 44–​46; and James Sallis, “Paul Franklin: New Breed Steel Player,” Steel Guitarist nos. 6 and 7 (May 1981): 26–​34. 53. The Players “My Little Ballerina (Live),” YouTube video, 4:26, Chris Whitehead, uploaded on May 17, 2007, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=YOZ0BY_​VoWA. 54. Bret McCabe, “Learning to Listen: Susan Alcorn Charms Stories Out of Her Pedal Steel Guitar,” City Paper [Baltimore], January 23, 2008. 55. The “real book” is a popular collection of notated jazz standards, which helped to define the jazz repertory in the 1980s; “Susan Alcorn,” Deep Listening Institute, http://​www.deeplistening.org/​site/​node/​1055). 56. Spencer Grady, “Awaiting the Resurrection Of the Pedal Steel Guitar:  Susan Alcorn Interviewed,” The Quietus, In Extremis, September 1, 2010, http://​thequietus.com/​articles/​ 04879-​susan-​alcorn-​interview-​touch-​this-​moment. 57. She has recorded a solo arrangement of Messaien’s vocal quartet, O Sacrum Convivium, and made reference to his orchestral composition, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorm, in her composition, “And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar.” 58. Susan Alcorn, “Twin Beams,” YouTube video, 8:44, live performance, ca. 2007, uploaded May 30, 2007, http://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=4x5UEEbnVQU

Chapter 10

C ou ntry M u si c a nd the Rec ording I ndu st ry Charles L. Hughes

In 1948, honky tonk star Ernest Tubb urged his record company Decca to consider a new name for the recordings that they and other labels had been marketing under the name “hillbilly.” In use since the 1920s, hillbilly had become one of the most successful genre markers in the record business, a key identifier for records by stars from the Carter Family to Roy Acuff. Still, the “hillbilly” moniker struck Tubb as both insulting and inaccurate. Not only did it reinforce stereotypes of backwardness and provincialism, but it failed to reflect the music’s growing commercial prominence and stylistic diversity in the post-​World War II era. Speaking to Decca executives, Tubb proposed what he felt was a more suitable alternative: “Most of us are from the country originally—​call it country music.” Bowing to the wishes of their biggest star, Decca began marketing their former hillbilly catalog as Country, or Country & Western, in 1948. By the early 1950s, other record labels had followed Decca’s lead, as did radio stations and trade papers like Billboard and Cashbox.1 As Tubb’s pioneering example indicates, the very idea of “country music” is an invention of the recording industry. From Jimmie Rodgers to Taylor Swift, the sounds and images identified as “country” (or “hillbilly” before that) have been constructed and reimagined by artists, producers, and executives for the purpose of selling records. Generally speaking, this approach has worked. Country music has been one of the most profitable and influential recorded genres for a century, even sustaining or reinvigorating the recording industry during periods of downturn. The rebranding of “country” is a key moment in a much larger strategy that brought the music to the center of the American recording industry.2 But, as Tubb’s words also suggest, “country” has historically meant much more than a commercial designation of a musical genre. It is also a crucial and contested marker of identity meant to indicate a certain set of beliefs, practices, and traditions among listeners and practitioners. This symbolic power has led to an extended debate over what kind of music—​and what kind of people—​count as “real country.”3 Fans, critics, musicians,

206    Oxford Handbook of Country Music and scholars continue to debate the relative authenticity of country artists or subgenres, usually asserting that a particular set of sonic characteristics or cultural signifiers represent country’s true voice.4 In this tenacious discourse, the recording industry often gets cast as the villain. In ongoing quests to “save country music” from supposed dilution or destruction, record companies and their leaders are routinely cast as the adversary to the traditions and motivations of authentic country music and its makers.5 Charges of “selling out” and “going pop” use record-​business terminology to make a broader claim of cultural betrayal or inauthenticity. Nashville—​or, perhaps more accurately, the “Nashville” of cultural myth—​has become shorthand for the deleterious effects of commercialism on country traditions. More generally (and strangely), the economic ascendance of country music is positioned as a degenerative and perhaps irreversible trend that is inversely proportional to its quality or “realness.”6 Nearly the entire history of country-​identified artists—​again, from Jimmie Rodgers to Taylor Swift—​have been accused of abandoning the legitimate roots of country culture in favor of crossover success. And a series of alternatives—​folk traditions, live performance, indie labels, alt-​country, and so forth—​ have been held up in supposed opposition to the hegemonic power of mainstream record companies, “Nashvegas” glitz, and broader industry imperatives. But a historical appreciation of the country recording industry reveals a much more complex story. For one thing, it illustrates that the recording industry has welcomed both the traditionalist and crossover impulses that have driven country’s commercial growth. Certainly, the oft-​vilified moments in which country records grasped for greater mainstream acceptance or crossover popularity—​like the “Nashville sound” of the 1960s or the discofied “urban cowboy” of the late 1970s—​were fueled by record companies’ desire for new and larger audiences. At the same time, those styles often lionized as moments of resistance against the country mainstream—​like the rockabilly of the 1950s or the Outlaw movement of the 1970s—​have been embraced or even directly nurtured by those same mainstream record companies. To be sure, the record business was often motivated by cynical motives. And record companies have initially resisted many innovations, pushed only to include them by the demands of artists and audiences. Still, in their pursuit of new listeners, incorporation of new styles, and adaptation to new technologies, the recording industry has been a central site for the debate over what country music—​“authentic” or otherwise—​was supposed to sound like. They have also directly shaped country’s cultural connotations. “Though its apparent realism, sincerity, and frank depictions of everyday life are its most obvious stylistic hallmarks,” Diane Pecknold argues, “it has always been defined as a genre by its relationship to business.”7 The very notion of country authenticity is a function of the attempt to establish country as a distinct and sellable genre. As Richard Peterson notes, “authenticity and originality [were] fully fabricated [as] the country music industry fully institutionalized,” making record companies an important participant in the development of what Peterson influentially termed the dialectic between “hard-​core” and “soft-​shell” country music.8 Whereas Petersen notes the centrality of this process in country’s early decades, Joli Jenson traces its continuation in subsequent eras: “People in the country

Country Music and the Recording Industry    207 music business—​writers, producers, performers, fans—​care deeply about protecting the ‘essence’ of country music from dilution or pollution,” even as they also expand its musical borders.9 Intriguingly, this process is often generational. Nearly every icon held up as a symbol of earlier authenticity in contrast to contemporary pop sellouts—​from the Carter Family to Hank Williams to Merle Haggard and beyond—​recorded for major labels and were directly connected to the pop industry even as they were promoted as embodying integrity and tradition. Entire subgenres, such as bluegrass or Western swing, which began as attempts to marry the sounds of the past with the innovations of the present are subsequently rewritten as the musical “old home place” that contrasts with the genre’s new and unfamiliar locales. And the crossover figures of previous eras—​even Elvis Presley or Garth Brooks—​are later reclaimed as heroes of genre tradition. Although ironic, these contradictions are entirely of a piece with the larger historical relationship between country music and the recording industry throughout the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. Rather than an ongoing struggle between bitter enemies, or a fight to either abandon or maintain country’s authentic qualities, this uniquely successful partnership can best be understood as a shifting field in which artists, audiences, and businesspeople negotiate the complementary and conflicting imperatives that have driven country music as both art and commodity. These desires have been “in tandem and in tension,” in the phrasing of Timothy Tyson, continuously throughout the first century of the genre’s history.10 Exploring this complex relationship offers an important opportunity to explore the music’s contours and contradictions. What follows is an exploration of that relationship. I do not provide a comprehensive history of country recordings, nor do I even begin to cover the range of artists, locations, and subgenres that have made up country’s vibrant sonic tapestry. Instead, this chapter offers a brief (and admittedly cursory) overview of some of the key moments in country recordings that also offer illustrative glimpses into these important tensions. The first generation of hillbilly recordings were both a continuation and a divergence from the early decades of the American recording industry. Although folklorists and “songcatchers” regularly traveled into rural areas seeking to document the sounds of supposedly isolated communities in the American South, it was a group of record-​company entrepreneurs—​including Okeh’s Ralph Peer and Columbia’s Frank Walker—​who recognized the market potential of the music of southern whites. Armed with field recording equipment and healthy budgets, these executives hoped to appeal to one of the only populations that the recording industry had ignored in their first decades.11 In the early days, American record companies built their business by making records that offered clear—​and often clumsy—​attempts to appeal to Italians, Jews, and other ethnicities by making records that bridged culturally specific traditions with modern professionalism and new technologies. But the music of Southerners—​black, white or otherwise—​remained mostly absent from the catalogs of major record labels. Now, faced with a stagnating business in the early 1920s, producers like Peer and Walker turned south and created two new genre categories. One, “race records,” was a catchall

208    Oxford Handbook of Country Music name for blues, gospel, and other styles associated with African Americans; while the other—​“hillbilly”—​focused on white musicians and white-​identified musical styles. Initially, the record men expected that their recordings of fiddlers, mountain balladeers, and the like would sell primarily to white Southerners, or the waves of southern expatriates migrating North and West as part of what James Gregory calls “the Southern Diaspora.”12 But they soon realized that these recordings held much broader appeal thanks to their connection to a well-​worn vein of southern pastoralism and American nostalgia. They recognized that these recordings could tap into the same desires and myths that made minstrel shows—​with their idealized (and racist) visions of the “sweet sunny South” and the “old folks at home”—​into the primary form of pop culture among northern Americans in the mid-​nineteenth century and kept minstrel songs a profitable favorite in the catalogs of music publishers and, soon, record companies. The artists seemingly represented “authentic” southern whiteness through their locations and performance styles while also playing a pivotal role in the modern commodification of American music. Early hillbilly recordings thus commodified the past for a music business and nation that was changing rapidly.13 This took some fancy rhetorical footwork from both artists and producers, which is perfectly demonstrated by the first major hillbilly hit, Fiddlin’ John Carson’s 1923 Okeh single, “Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Gonna Crow”/​“Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane.” As Charles K. Wolfe notes, Ralph Peer “was developing a new commercial art form [so despite] all his public relations posturing about ‘pre-​war melodies’ and ‘old mountaineer tunes,’ [he] did not hesitate to tinker with his acts’ styles and their repertoires.”14 He found one of his most successful clients in Carson, a well-​known fiddler and live performer who came to Peer’s attention thanks to Atlanta-​based phonograph dealer Polk Brockman. Brockman recognized the potential profitability of selling recordings of fiddlers and other performers who congregated at festivals and historical commemorations in the area around Atlanta, then at the crossroads of “Old South” memorialization and “New South” boosterism. Hillbilly recordings represented an opportunity to link both impulses, and Carson’s earliest selections affirmed the duality. “Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Gonna Crow” was a traditional fiddle tune, while the more famous side, “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane,” was written by a Northern songwriter named Will Hays for use in minstrel shows. “Here are the two tap roots of country music,” Don Cusic notes, “a folk tune of no known origin and a song written for a commercial stage production.”15 In keeping with its minstrel roots, “Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane” helped to establish many of the narrative tropes that had been so common in minstrelsy and became central to the country repertoire. Many early record executives were nonplussed by the musicality of hillbilly recordings—​one Okeh executive infamously referred to Carson’s vocals as “pluperfect awful”—​but their success birthed a new and expansive hillbilly market. The artists that filled this market—​such as Charlie Poole or Gid Tanner’s Skillet Lickers—​followed Carson’s example of mixing seemingly traditional folk material with songs that had clear and traceable roots in the American pop-​music marketplace. Despite early resistance, major labels caught on quickly: in 1924, New York-​based pop singer Vernon Dalhart had

Country Music and the Recording Industry    209 a huge national hit with “The Prisoner’s Song” for Victor Records, and soon every significant American recording company launched hillbilly (or “old-​time”) catalogs. In the early 1920s, hillbilly records led to a boom in the recording industry, in tandem with the simultaneous and often connected explosion of race records. The parallel success of “hillbilly” and “race” records structured country’s long ambivalence toward the participation of African Americans. Although this was certainly informed by historical southern racism and contemporary national anxieties, the recording industry played a crucial role in racializing and separating these musical styles. Black and white music and musicians had long intersected in the American South, and the musical traditions that informed hillbilly’s development—​and even some of the music’s early repertoire—​had their origins in blues, gospel, and other African American traditions. (The banjo, after all, originated with black musicians, while country fiddling often incorporated African American performance styles into its Scots-​Irish core.)16 Moreover, as Patrick Huber has demonstrated, many early hillbilly sessions—​and even records issued in hillbilly catalogs—​featured black musicians.17 But, in the 1920s, the recording industry established and enforced what Karl Hagstrom Miller calls “the musical color line.”18 Through the creation of separate “hillbilly” and “race” lines, record companies created an artificial musical separation that paralleled the rise of Jim Crow segregation, structured the marketing of the newly powerful genres, and made these commercial products into recognizable shorthand for racial difference. Connected to this, as Miller details, was the fact that hillbilly artists were given “more freedom to record a wide variety of music” that included the incorporation of contemporary pop songs next to the “old-​time” melodies.19 A similarly uneven dynamic emerged along gender lines. Among many other artists recorded at his pivotal “Bristol sessions” of 1927, Ralph Peer launched the careers of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, arguably the genre’s first two major artists and tenacious templates for future country stars. Barry Mazor and Richard Peterson argue that Rodgers was perhaps the genre’s first thoroughly modern figure, who—​according to Peterson—​“established country music as something more than a romantic, backward-​ looking ‘ethnic’ music primarily merchandised to rural white Southerners.”20 Rodgers’s diverse repertoire and appearances in promotional films strengthened his image as a bridge figure between country’s musical and cultural roots and modern pop stardom.21 A crucial element to this was Rodgers’s outlaw image, affirmed through his “rambling man” persona and frank discussions of sex, drugs, and disease that Victor foregrounded in their marketing. Rodgers’s success established a template for country masculinity that record companies repeatedly revisited when marketing new generations of male stars. The Carter Family’s sisters Sara and Maybelle, meanwhile, became country’s archetypal women by affirming secured country’s links to spirituality, domesticity, and tradition through their homespun image (no more a constructed persona than Rodgers’s “singing brakeman”) and their folksy gospel-​and-​ballad repertoire. Their records and promotional materials offered an image of female artists as connected (both physically and thematically) to home and family, which contrasted with Rodgers’s independence and inscribed the activities of women in country music from that point forward.22

210    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Despite its 1920s success, the hillbilly record business collapsed in the new decade. Fueled by the Great Depression and part of a significant industry downturn that lasted through World War II, national record companies drastically downsized or eliminated their hillbilly divisions. Radio did much better, particularly with the rise of “barn dance” programs like radio station WSM’s Grand Ole Opry; but hillbilly records were no longer a priority for either artists or executives. The primary stars of this lean period were individual male singer-​performers who built on Jimmie Rodgers’ mixture of old-​fashioned persona and modern pop synthesis. One particularly interesting example of this relationship were Gene Autry and other “singing cowboys” who tapped into even older narratives of Wild West freedom for a new vision of white male independence. Just as with the first generation of hillbilly stars, the singing cowboys—​many of whom worked in Hollywood—​evoked the mythic past while embodying the cutting edge of the US entertainment industry. Songs like “Don’t Fence Me In”—​a hit for both Autry and Roy Rogers—​sounded like timeless western ballads but were often written by Tin Pan Alley professionals: “Don’t Fence Me In” was cowritten by Cole Porter, one of many singing-​cowboy anthems to be a product of New York’s pop empire.23 (They also helped develop the new “crooning” vocal style provoked by the introduction of electric microphones, which transformed all genres of pop recording in the 1930s.)24 Additionally crucial to the success of the “singing cowboys” was their ability to achieve what is today called cross-​platform success by becoming radio and film stars in addition to scoring hit records. “Singing cowboys” became national pop stars even as they reaffirmed country music’s connection to the mythical traditions of America’s past. A similar negotiation took place in the development of honky tonk, Western swing, and other dance-​focused subgenres that took root in Texas and Oklahoma and made stars out of Ernest Tubb, Bob Wills, and others. Despite their roughhewn image and connection to Wild West mythos, these genres relied on modern innovations from the electric amplification of instruments to the incorporation of jazz. When promoting these artists, record companies employed the language and iconography of the Wild West (in both past and present) but also the uptown modernity of contemporary pop artists. These releases gained particular play on jukeboxes, which became the lifeblood of the hillbilly record business during the 1930s downturn. Often located in the rowdy rural nightclubs that gave honky tonk its name, jukeboxes provided important exposure and distribution for these dance-​focused subgenres as well as offering a crucial opportunity to sustain the hillbilly business during this lean period. Thanks to these innovations, hillbilly recordings withstood the industry downturn of the 1930s and—​in the new decade—​survived wartime vinyl rationing and internal infighting between record companies, radio broadcasters, song publishers, and the ascendant American Federation of Musicians (AFM). In fact, these challenges provided an unexpected moment of opportunity for hillbilly records. For one thing, artists like Gene Autry and others produced patriotic “V-​Discs” sent to soldiers overseas and cementing the music’s reputation as the voice of patriotic Americans. Additionally, the battles between radio stations and song publishers led to the formation of a new

Country Music and the Recording Industry    211 organization—​Broadcast Music International (BMI)—​which advocated for the rights of country songwriters and increased the profitability of recorded country material. And, as Jocelyn Neal notes, “the first record companies to settle with the AFM” after a crippling strike in 1943 “were Decca and Capitol, both of which featured large country divisions. Thus, when new recordings finally became available again, many of the first ones were country.”25 Although still often presented (by both supporters and opponents) in the postwar years as old-​fashioned, leading to Ernest Tubb’s demand at Decca and other assertions, the newly named “country music” leapt to the forefront of the music business. Indeed, one of the first steps in securing this foothold was to abandon the earlier “hillbilly” tag in favor of a more inclusive and respectable category. Even beyond the insulting connotations of “hillbilly,” the name “country” abandoned the regional and old-​fashioned connotations of the previous moniker. Through this new catalog designation, record companies asserted country music as a forward-​thinking, nationally important genre and claimed “country” identity as a musically transcendent cultural identifier. Just as in earlier generations, country records became a mechanism through which Americans could assert their connection to a better and more authentic past while also embracing the changing dynamics of the present. This increased the music’s relevance, reputation, and—​most important, perhaps—​sales figures. A key mechanism in this process was the series of pop covers of country material that found huge chart success. On recordings such as Patti Page’s version of “Tennessee Waltz” for Mercury Records, or Tony Bennett’s take on “Cold, Cold Heart” for Columbia, producers and artists integrated country songs and musical textures into recordings that could be sonically palatable for a mainstream national audience. Although this involved instrumental sweetening and different arrangements, there was a great degree of common ground between the country originals and their pop covers; after all, both country and pop had been transformed by the “crooning” vocal style and the repertorial exchange that had existed since the days of Vernon Dalhart. “Tennessee Waltz,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” and many of the crossover hits were controlled by publisher Fred Rose, who—​along with his partner, hillbilly star Roy Acuff—​founded the powerful Acuff-​Rose publishing company that became a key engine for country music’s postwar expansion. A seasoned professional who had written both country and pop hits and worked with Gene Autry and other singing cowboys, Rose understood that the genre’s pursuit of legitimacy would be greatly supported by strengthened connections to the pop industry. Diane Pecknold notes that “Rose took country material and brought it into line with standard pop conventions,” making it easy for artists like Bennett and Page to cover country material. “Even more important, though,” Pecknold insists, “was [Rose’s] ability to work with the pop industry … to secure performances of Acuff-​Rose compositions by mainstream pop stars.”26 Rose’s most important contact was Mitch Miller, the influential producer and executive who produced both Tony Bennett’s “Cold, Cold Heart” and Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz” and oversaw the pop recording of numerous Acuff-​Rose country hits during the early 1950s. The collaboration between Miller and Rose, and the larger partnership between Nashville and

212    Oxford Handbook of Country Music New York, “provided a basis upon which country music could emerge as a consolidated national industry.”27 Somewhat unexpectedly, Rose and Miller found a particularly rich vein of material in honky tonk. Even as the rough-​and-​rowdy music was often positioned as the outsider alternative to the increasingly pop-​minded sound of mainstream country, many of the most crucial pop crossovers emerged from the pens of honky tonk songwriters. Biggest of all is the greatest embodiment of the outlaw myth, Hank Williams, who wrote “Cold, Cold Heart” and numerous other hits for pop singers during the early 1950s. Despite his notoriety as an insurgent who bucked the system, the popularity of Williams’s material with Mitch Miller and other pop producers not only secured his own posthumous reputation as one of country’s greatest artists but also pioneered a new business model to the country recording industry. Joli Jensen writes that “Williams’s career demonstrated that a good deal of country material, if performed without traditional country vocals or instrumentation, could be successful in the pop music market and that songs that were not original country material could be placed with a country performer and become successful. The nature of Williams’s broad appeal was a lesson to the emerging Nashville-​based music business that the boundaries that divided pop from country were permeable, if dealt with appropriately.”28 In 1950, Mercury Records became the first major label to open an office in Nashville. Columbia, RCA, and the others quickly followed suit, ensuring the city’s reputation as the capital of country music and a crucial part of the national music industry. Although the Grand Ole Opry had made Nashville a destination for radio performers since the 1920s, it was not until the late 1940s that labels, studios, and song publishers emerged along the city’s famed “Music Row,” and musicians and songwriters flocked to the city hoping to make records. Important country recordings were made in established industry centers like New York and Chicago, and small labels around the country provided crucial complements and counterpoints; but the literal and metaphorical consolidation of country music around Nashville became a crucial chapter in its undeniable growth and its ambivalent reputation. Not only did the city represent the commercial center of the industry, but “Nashville” became geographical shorthand for debates over country’s musical and cultural legitimacy. As Nashville achieved predominance over the mechanics and meanings of country recording, independent labels located elsewhere sought to record the artists—​and fill the market niches that the “Music City” majors ignored.29 Alongside crucial labels like Cincinnati’s King and the Texas-​based Starday, perhaps the most famous is Memphis’s Sun Records, a center for the development of rock and roll and perhaps the primary symbol of its creative and commercial challenge to Nashville’s country dominance.30 This moment has become ubiquitous in histories of American popular music, and common in larger stories of US history, as a symbol of cultural changes at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement and Cold War. In these narratives, the emergence of rock and roll artists—​particularly Elvis Presley and other white “rockabillies”—​galvanized a rebellious fan base and threatened the powerful Nashville-​based country industry, whose recordings now sounded hopelessly old-​fashioned in comparison to the raging

Country Music and the Recording Industry    213 rhythms and playful vocals of the rock and rollers. This, in turn, symbolized the coming transformations in American racial and gender politics and presaged the turbulent 1960s.31 It also continues to offer a convenient piece of evidence for stories that claim country music as the stylistically and politically conservative alternative to the liberating forces of rock and roll or other insurgent forms. Rock and roll certainly challenged the hegemony of Nashville-​based country music and threatened its place within the larger recording industry. When rockabilly artists such as Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Presley emerged from Memphis, their records became major country hits and caused an uproar among many of country’s older fans. Michael T. Bertrand describes how “traditional fans protested [that Presley] was ‘not real country,’ but instead “ ‘mongrel music’ ” that added too much black musical influence.”32 But the rockabilly moment can also be understood as part of the same pop crossover as the Patti Page and Tony Bennett covers of the early 1950s. As Diane Pecknold notes, because rockabilly “was perceived as country music” by many in “the pop industry,” that industry “interpreted the rockabilly craze as evidence of country’s popularity and ability to influence the pop field.”33 Nashville-​based record companies seized on this opportunity by incorporating rockabilly textures and songs into recordings by artists ranging from a young George Jones to older stars like Hank Snow. Additionally, the Nashville offices of major labels signed many of the first generation of (white) rock and roll artists, hoping to capitalize on their exciting sounds by pairing them with Nashville’s studio expertise and promotional apparatus. Most prominent was Elvis Presley, who was signed by RCA in 1956 and recorded a late-​1950s run of hits—​including “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Don’t Be Cruel”—​that topped country and pop charts and shaped both genres in the coming decades. RCA producer Chet Atkins, one of the city’s most dogged crossover advocates, gave Presley credit for a musical innovation that is often understood as part of Nashville’s reactive musical counterpoint to the upstart sounds of rock and roll. In 1957, journalist Ben Green reported that Atkins believed that “the modern trend to have background singing accompaniment is largely the result of Elvis Presley’s remarkable success,” part of a larger trend in which “pop artists come in search of the ‘Country sound’ for their own records. He traces this to the striking success of several Country artists in the pop field.”34 Working as a producer, musician, and executive for RCA, Atkins was a key architect of the “Nashville sound,” a sophisticated and expansive production strategy that characterized the next decade in country music and led to a broadened audience and approach for the Nashville-​based industry. The “Nashville sound” was, first and foremost, a promotional strategy designed to increase business for Nashville studios, publishers, record companies, and recording artists. It was also a musical approach, defined by the use of string sections, background vocalists, and other techniques from the latest hits in pop, jazz, and rhythm and blues (R&B). And it was a cultural statement, an assertion by Nashville-​based record companies that—​particularly in contrast to the ragged sounds and questionable mores of rock and roll—​country music was more respectable, professional, and more suitable for adult listeners. In all respects, the “Nashville sound” was a huge success: as Business Week

214    Oxford Handbook of Country Music reported in 1966, “The ‘Nashville Sound’ has hit the $600-​million popular music business, and it’s the hottest thing around. The fiddles, the guitars, and the nasal Southern wail … have become part of the national idiom, every bit as important as rock ‘n’ roll.” 35 Chet Atkins’s infamous description of the Nashville sound as the sound of “coins jingling” was glib but not inaccurate. As the Business Week article suggests, the ongoing dialectic between tradition and reinvention existed even within this ostensible moment of pure crossover. Joli Jenson notes that “supporters of the Nashville Sound adopted many of country music’s authenticity markers” in descriptions of Nashville’s relaxed studio environment and the promotion of artists like Patsy Cline—​who “defined herself as a country singer” even though “her pop-​styled material was what made her widely successful”—​and Eddy Arnold, who mixed sweeping ballads like “Make the World Go Away” with cowboy callbacks like “Cattle Call.”36 “In defining a Nashville-​based mystique,” Jensen suggests, “they found a way to make the uptown seem downhome.” 37 By the mid-​1960s, the Nashville sound had become the stylistic center of country music and made it into one of the most successful in the recording industry. Increasingly, other artists sought to incorporate country’s musical textures and work directly with musicians and producers in Nashville. (Even R&B star Ray Charles got into the act, recording the massively successful Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music in 1964, which—​while not supported or promoted by country radio—​became a number-​one pop hit and was subsequently heralded by the country industry as an example of the genre’s broadmindedness and commercial dominance.)38 But, as in earlier generations, some fans and journalists questioned whether the recording industry’s image of country music had strayed too far from the genre’s roots.39 Now that “Nashville” had become synonymous with the country recording industry, it made sense that the proposed alternative to the mainstream sound would be defined geographically. Emerging from California, the “Bakersfield sound” has become been one of the most commonly invoked alternatives to Nashville in popular and scholarly discourse. During its 1960s heyday, Bakersfield offered both physical and spiritual home to artists like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens who embraced the honky tonk sounds, hard-​bitten lyrics, and rock and roll rhythms that the Nashville sound avoided. Both Haggard and Owens scored a string of hits in the 1960s, offering a musical alternative to Nashville sound sweetness and inspiration to a growing number of rock artists who recognized the Bakersfield outlaws as kindred spirits.40 Bakersfield and Nashville may have been musically and geographically separate, but they were both key pieces of the same record-​industry infrastructure. Jocelyn Neal points out that despite Bakersfield’s outsider reputation, “its larger impact on country music came more from their proximity to Los Angeles, where session musicians, recording studios and record labels—​both small and large—​provided the necessary infrastructure to market this music to a national audience.”41 Particularly important was Capitol Records, the only major label located in Los Angeles and a significant competitor to the recording centers of New York and Nashville in the 1950s. “Jazz and pop remained Capitol’s bread and butter,” Peter La Chapelle notes, “but country waxings

Country Music and the Recording Industry    215 served as a consistent and often much-​needed source of income.”42 Capitol positioned itself as an alternative to the solidifying Nashville industry, and it built this reputation on its support of California-​based artists who emerged from the “Okie” migrant subculture that emerged in California in the 1940s and 1950s. As La Chapelle discusses, artists like Merle Haggard—​with their roots in honky tonk and Western swing, their hard-​bitten lyrics about the experience of poverty and prison, and their biographical bona fides as the literal children of the “Okie” migration—​were perfectly suited for a marketing campaign that positioned Bakersfield as the alternative to Nashville and a cousin to rock and roll. These became the terms by which Haggard, Owens, and Bakersfield were understood contemporaneously and subsequently. They also preceded Haggard’s late-​1960s emergence as the artistic figurehead of an industry attempt to link country music—​and the Nashville-​based country industry—​to the emergence of the powerful “New Right.” Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side of Me” topped the Country charts, crossed over into Pop, and were heralded by listeners, writers, and politicians as the voice of the forgotten Americans whose voices had been drowned out in the chaotic chorus of Civil Rights demonstrations and antiwar protests. Although Haggard’s personal politics remained murky, he became the most prominent symbol of a period in which country artists and records represented the “dominant metaphor for … the collapse of the New Deal order” and the favored soundtrack of conservative politicians like Richard Nixon and George Wallace as they made their appeals to disaffected voters.43 But while the link between the New Right and the country industry reflected ideological affinity and realpolitik demographics, it was ultimately a business arrangement that reflected the success of the country recording industry at making itself indispensable to the American cultural mainstream. Diane Pecknold suggests that “the ultimate argument for taking country seriously lay in its commercial power rather than its musical quality or its ability to represent the folk. Just as commercialism had been mobilized to represent the respectability of country and its audience, it could also be used to demonstrate the music’s potential political value.”44 From an industry perspective, the support of conservative leaders and voters not only meant a boost in record sales but also a further positioning of country music as “America’s music,” a campaign begun by the Country Music Association in 1952 and more broadly reflective of the historical impulse to affirm the music’s marketability and shed its regionally specific reputation. Even as country tightened its connections to the New Right, it also worked to demonstrate its diversity—​in both sound and skin color—​during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Most prominent here was Charley Pride, who became the genre’s first major African American star during this period. Many in Nashville presented Pride as a symbol of their commitment to colorblindness, but they marketed him in such a way that would not alienate country’s core audience while also capitalizing on the novelty of a black country singer. Country star Red Sovine discovered Pride and supposedly convinced Nashville executives to listen to Pride by saying “you gotta hear my nigger”; while Chet Atkins (an avowed liberal) initially did not include Pride’s picture on album covers for fear that his blackness would alienate country’s core audience.45 Pride’s success led to

216    Oxford Handbook of Country Music the signing of other black country singers, such as O. B. McClinton and Linda Martell, many of whom found minor success but none of whom duplicated Pride’s success. They, too, saw this within the framework of a recording industry that simultaneously desired to prove its racial inclusivity and limited opportunities in a genre long sold as a representative of white identity. “Many people … looked on Charley Pride as an accident,” McClinton lamented, and the country industry failed to embrace another black country artist until the twenty-​first-​century rise of Darius Rucker.46 Early in Pride’s career, he opened shows for Willie Nelson, a veteran singer-​songwriter who had composed hits since the “Nashville sound” days but now stood on the precipice of a new phase. In the early 1970s, Nelson and Waylon Jennings, another veteran, became the leaders of the “Outlaw” movement, a group of artists who rebelled against the seeming restrictions of the country industry and the Nashville studio system. In much of the popular and critical imagination, The Outlaws continue to represent one of the most obvious breaks from the commercial hegemony of the Nashville-​based country recording industry. But despite their name and the defiant rhetoric that surrounds them, the Outlaws did not abandon the rules of the recording industry as much as they tried to bend them more firmly in their direction. They demanded greater freedom in the making of their recordings by insisting on the ability to choose their own material and producers, and they insisted that their contracts be renegotiated to give them a larger percentage of profits and reflect the better deals that many of their friends in rock and pop were able to wrangle from their record companies. Interviewed in 1977, Outlaw artist Tompall Glaser revealed the sophisticated commercial strategy at the heart of the movement’s challenge. He described the importance of forming his own independent production company that could exist outside the control of his record label. “That was when I first began to know the power of business. … Managers and people have been taking advantage of the hillbillies and the hillbilly music fans. There’s been a lot of rip-​offs going on.” Describing his interest in wresting control from the record companies, he invoked one of the major figures in the longer history of country’s commercial legitimacy: “They quit programming Ernest Tubb, so they made him obsolete. The put him on the scrap-​pile before he died. But he’s not obsolete. There’s a market for him.” Glaser saw the reclamation of honky tonk and other seemingly unfashionable subgenres as key to exploiting country music’s particular cultural reputation. “Country music is very close to the people who listen to it, and they need to hear the sincerity and the reality of it,” he noted. “Well, there’s no reason why country music can’t be just as big a music as rock was.”47 He did dismiss, though, the notion that the Outlaws saw their aim as destructive: “When we started, people thought we were going to destroy Nashville. Who wants to destroy Nashville? It’s a long way from my mind. … But if he’s got a good, decent alternative, all he’s got to do is keep doing it, and pretty soon the whole fucking industry will be doing it, because there are too few people in this town that know what the fuck to do.”48 These illuminating words reveal a central contradiction of the Outlaw movement. Although presented as a resistant move against the oppressions of a mainstream

Country Music and the Recording Industry    217 recording industry, Outlaw emerged within the terms of that very business. Glaser, Jennings, Nelson, and others fought to gain greater creative autonomy and commercial reward from their music—​especially that which was not gaining sufficient attention or promotion—​and employed economic models and artistic inspiration from the booming rock economy. Also, despite their resistance to the real and metaphorical “Nashville,” most of the Outlaws (like their colleagues in the “progressive country” scene that emerged around Austin, Texas, in the 1970s) would record the genre’s classic works in Nashville studios.49 Most important, perhaps, these companies quickly learned to accept and exploit the latest generation of seeming outsiders, just as they had done with rock and roll two decades earlier. Glaser’s interview came shortly after the release of 1977’s Wanted! The Outlaws, the compilation that became the signal moment in the “Outlaw” insurgency while also being a pure Nashville product. It was released on RCA in hopes of capitalizing on the rising popularity of artists like Jennings and Nelson by repackaging their efforts with a catchy name and evocative iconography. As Barbara Ching notes, the album was composed entirely of previously released material, making the album less of a new beginning than an opportunity to introduce old music to new audiences.50 And, thanks to a large-​ scale marketing campaign that marshalled the resources of RCA and its allies in radio and retail, Wanted! The Outlaws became the first country album to go platinum. This is not to suggest that Wanted! The Outlaws—​or the Outlaw movement more generally—​ was not a genuinely insurgent moment. The Outlaws symbolized not only a musical challenge to the powerful Nashville system but also a direct assault on its commercial hegemony. But it also serves as a powerful reminder that the most important debates and paradigm shifts within country music have occurred by shifting forces within the recording industry rather than between outsiders and insiders. The Outlaws were only the most prominent examples of a series of mid-​1970s confrontations over whether country music had drifted too far from its musical and cultural roots. One of the most famous moments occurred in 1975, when Charlie Rich presented the Country Music Association’s (CMA’s) Entertainer of the Year Award to John Denver, whose gentle songs and genial persona had made him a massive star in multiple formats. But, like Glen Campbell, Olivia Newton-​John, and other crossover stars of the period, Denver faced criticism from those who believed that he was not an authentic country voice. When Rich opened the envelope and saw Denver’s name, he lit the envelope on fire. Rich’s intentions with this gesture are ambiguous, but he became a defiant heroic figure in the ongoing rebellion against the dilution of real country in favor of commercial success.51 Still, Rich was no purist. He began his career in Memphis, making R&B-​and jazz-​ influenced records that failed to chart before moving to Nashville and working with influential producer Billy Sherrill. Sherrill became the primary architect of the “countrypolitan” style that followed in the footsteps of the “Nashville sound” by incorporating significant pop, jazz, and soul influences. Charlie Rich became one of Sherrill’s best clients, and—​with 1975’s Behind Closed Doors—​his musically hybrid, openly romantic approach gave him a major hit album. He owed his success, and his presence on the

218    Oxford Handbook of Country Music CMA stage, to the incorporation of pop influences, the patronage of the biggest advocate of “countrypolitan” crossover, and the full support of an RCA country division that had once helped Elvis Presley and others bridge the gap between country and pop. Yet, with the striking of a match at the CMA awards, he became a hero to those who felt that all of that represented a step away from country’s true identity. But just as the career of Charlie Rich troubles easy conclusions about the supposed binary between realism and commercialism, country music in the 1970s was defined by the recording industry’s skillful negotiation of audience expectations, artistic opportunities, and commercial imperatives. The embrace of artists like Denver or Newton-​ John from outside country’s traditional stylistic (or geographic) boundaries was part of the same commercial strategy and creative approach that also included the Outlaws and other gestures toward the music’s real and imagined traditions. Both were part of a larger plan to find new listeners and react to changing socioeconomic circumstances for its core audience. No one demonstrated this fluidity more strongly than Dolly Parton, who became one of country music’s most important stars in the 1970s and 1980s. During her long and successful career, Parton transformed herself from the homespun “Tennessee Mountain Girl” to the glitz-​and-​glamour superstar of crossover hits such as “Here You Come Again” and the discofied “9 to 5.” Parton’s shifting image and musical eclecticism became a key mechanism in a larger trend for the country industry in this era. Eric Weisbard calls Parton “the best example … of how country—​the genre of working-​class and rural white southerners—​reinvented itself. Too often viewed as conservative or betraying rural tradition, country became pop with a different accent, as determined a claiming of consumer of America as anything in rock and R&B-​driven Top 40.” Parton, he suggests, “challenges the view that commodification destroyed country’s essence. … Like country, Parton achieved her identity through commodification.”52 Parton’s success—​ along with that of artists associated with the poppy “Urban Cowboy” movement and others—​led to a boom period in country record sales, an expansion in the number of country radio stations, and a reanimated campaign among Nashville record companies to demonstrate the music’s continued relevance and revenues.53 But it also provoked criticism from many critics and musicians who saw this move as an abandonment of country’s identity, or at least the triumph of “soft-​shell” sounds over “hard-​core” authenticity. When the crossover bubble burst in the mid-​ 1980s, country record executives again looked to artists who invoked the twangy traditions that Parton and “Urban Cowboy” seemingly rejected. Like their honky tonk or Outlaw predecessors, “neo-​traditionalists” such as George Strait or Randy Travis were promoted as a shot in the arm for a moribund business and as saviors for country traditions. But, as Eric Weisbard notes, the “neo-​traditionalist” moment masked a more tenacious continuity: “In 1979, country aspired to be Dolly Parton. In 1989, country was becoming Garth Brooks.”54 Garth Brooks—​and the other 1990s “new country” acts who accompanied him—​ brought with them another boom in country record sales, along with the attendant panic over the supposed loss of authenticity they represented. But even as they were

Country Music and the Recording Industry    219 criticized as inauthentic and set up as foils with the emergent “alt-​country” movement, “new country” artists like Brooks were perfect representatives of both country’s crossover impulse and its ongoing connection to real and mythic traditions. In anthems like “Friends in Low Places,” Brooks invoked the honky tonk traditions and working-​class solidarity that had characterized the genre and reaffirmed the centrality of “don’t get above your raisin’ ” themes that Bill C. Malone argues are central to country music’s identity and necessary for its continued cultural distinctiveness.55 But Brooks also openly incorporated pop and rock into his recordings, and his spectacular live shows recalled the era’s pop megastars like Guns ‘N’ Roses or Michael Jackson.56 Additionally, Brooks was one of the earliest country artists to benefit from the recent emergence of music videos. With the rise of Country Music Television, record companies like Brooks’s Capitol Records followed in the steps of their forebears by embracing the creative and financial possibilities of the new medium. (After all, even Jimmie Rodgers had made promotional films.) Additionally, the rise of line-​dancing clubs led to a “remix” culture in country music that equaled the more famous varieties in hip hop and other genres.57 Even the hit “new country” acts who were more clearly situated in the traditionalist camp, like Alan Jackson (who mocked the genre’s newfound popularity and fair-​weather fans in “Gone Country”), utilized music videos and offered “extended mixes” of hits like “Chattahoochee.” The success of Brooks, Jackson, and other “new country” artists was aided, or at least properly tabulated, by the introduction of the Soundscan system in 1991, which transformed the American recording business and had a particularly significant impact on “specialized” genres like country music. Designed to provide a more accurate count of record sales, the computerized Soundscan system replaced the previous model that had been used to tabulate Billboard chart rankings and thus determine the relative power of artists and genres. Nashville executives had long claimed that the older system, which relied on sales reports sent in by retailers, underrepresented country’s sales figures. As Don Cusic notes, most country sales took place in discount retailers like Wal-​Mart that did not provide sales reports to Billboard, and even the geography of record stores contributed to this process: “Country music had its own section, generally at the back of the store, while pop records were displayed up front. So country music was not even considered in calculating pop sales unless an album sold so well that it was moved to the front of the store.”58 Soundscan made such marginalization impossible. Brooks’s Ropin’ The Wind was one of the first albums to top the Billboard charts in the aftermath of Soundscan’s introduction, and country soon became recognized as one of the most successful recorded genres in American music.59 Country music had once pointed to the music’s success in bars to assert its legitimacy and power. Now it turned to barcodes. The “new country” boom offered yet another chance for country artists and businesspeople to link the quantifiable evidence of country’s commercial success with the genre’s longer narratives. The Soundscan numbers—​like the sold-​out concerts and predominance of radio stations—​became part of a larger campaign to woo new listeners by convincing them that country music was both exceptional and for everyone. Perhaps the most controversial example was the CMA’s 2001 slogan “Country. Admit it. You Love it,”

220    Oxford Handbook of Country Music which, as Pecknold notes, “both drew attention to and mocked the popular imagination of the country audience as lowbrow and lowdown.”60 Indeed, since the hillbillies of the 1920s, country recordings had been seeking new audiences while maintaining its supposed links to real and mythic traditions. New country in the 1990s was no exception. Particularly sought after, but also often vilified, was the large audience of suburban women that formed the center of political constituencies and the country audience. Within country music, the oft-​invoked “soccer moms”—​marked by both class and gender, and implicitly by race—​became central to the commercial success of “new country” but also brought the ire of those who condemned this latest move toward crossover appeal. As Pamela Fox notes, “Garth Brooks and Shania Twain have become just as vilified as the earlier Crystal Gayle or Olivia Newton-​John for catering to a base of ‘suburban moms.’ ”61 Shania Twain’s rise in the late 1990s became a favorite symbol for both the possibilities and pitfalls of country’s rising commercial prominence. A Canadian singer-​songwriter who partnered with heavy-​metal producer Robert “Mutt” Lange, Twain’s recordings built on the pop sheen and rock power of “new country” acts like Brooks by adding an even higher degree of guitar-​driven hooks and dance-​ready rhythms meant to appeal to pop listeners. With her 2002 album Up!, Twain made this even more blatant by releasing three versions of the album, all of which contained the same recordings but were mixed differently to appeal to different listening audiences and radio stations: “pop,” “country,” and “international.” Jocelyn Neal calls it the most “extreme” version of a longer attempt by the recording industry to appeal to multiple audiences simultaneously while still asserting an identifiable audience and sound for country music.62 It seemed appropriate that Up! was issued on Mercury, once the company that pioneered pop-​country crossovers through the release of Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz.” As Twain enacted this sophisticated, if blunt, move toward market expansion, another of country’s most prominent female artists explored a return to tradition. Also in 2002, the Dixie Chicks released the evocatively titled acoustic album Home on Columbia Records. Emerging in the late 1990s with a series of hit records that mixed pop hooks with banjo, fiddles, and other musical markers of country authenticity, The Dixie Chicks deftly balanced traditionalist and crossover gestures as they became stalwarts at the top of the Country charts around the turn of the twenty-​first century. (Even the group’s name signified on their regional bona fides.) Their popularity aligned with the brief return of bluegrass and other “traditional” country forms as a commercial force with the significant success of Alison Krauss and the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou?, a return to the “roots” that many suggested represented a rejection of—​or at least a reaction to—​the pop orientation of the country recording industry in the post-​Brooks, post-​Twain era. Upon its release, Home appeared to be the Dixie Chicks’s attempt to capture this zeitgeist and capitalize on the resurgent popularity of roots music. The album’s first single, “Long Time Gone,” made this even clearer. Written by Darrell Scott, “Long Time Gone” invoked the rural past to claim that contemporary country had lost the “soul” that it once possessed. In the final verse, the Chicks even punned on country history and bemoaned that modern singers “sound tired, but they don’t sound

Country Music and the Recording Industry    221 Haggard” and “have money, but they don’t have Cash.” In an even more defiant lyric, they claim that modern artists “have Junior but they don’t have Hank,” a direct reference to Hank Williams Jr., who was initially marketed as a new version of his father—​another attempt to capitalize on the ghost of Hank Sr.—​before breaking away from this maudlin image and establishing a more successful career as a raucous, rock-​inspired artist. Upon its release, “Long Time Gone” reached #2 on the country charts and became the Chicks’s first single to cross over to the pop Top 10. Eventually, even despite the infamous boycott that occurred following lead singer Natalie Maines’s 2003 comments about George W. Bush, Home became another massive hit for one of country’s highest-​selling artists. The larger debates threaded through Home (especially “Long Time Gone”) about the supposed decline of “real” country music and the record industry’s complicity in provoking this cultural degeneration are much longer and wider than the Dixie Chicks. But, as in earlier moments, it is again worth nothing that this debate took place entirely within the confines of the mainstream recording industry. It may seem ironic that Columbia Records (and the larger Nashville industry) would promote a song that directly criticized its practices, except for the fact that the country industry had long recognized the marketability and relevance of such protests. It would seem equally ironic that the specific choices for symbols of country authenticity—​Cash, Haggard, and Hank Sr.—​were all major-​label stars who benefitted directly from the strength and commercialization of the country recording industry and whose image as outsiders was nurtured within promotional infrastructures established by that industry. But this, too, is less unexpected given the fact that outsider artists had long been a crucial component of country marketing and had long been valued by country record companies for both their sales and sincerity. This is not to suggest, of course, that the Dixie Chicks—​or songwriter Darrell Scott, or the song’s many fans—​had no standing to level these charges. But it reveals the centrality and complexity of the way that the recording industry has both created country music and constructed its most tenacious and vexing debates. The combined impact of the Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain accompanied a moment of prominence and even dominance for women in country music. The 1990s boom saw massive increases in the number of women on country charts and radio playlists; in 1998, 52% of Billboard number-​one country hits were performed by women.63 Of course, from the Carter Family to Kitty Wells to Dolly Parton, female artists have pushed the country industry both artistically and commercially. But the late 1990s and early 2000s were a particularly central moment for women in terms of sales and significance. Many stars played critical roles, but The Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain were the most successful not just because of their quality but also because of their exceptional ability to balance country music’s aesthetics, symbolism, and commodification. Both were hugely popular, ultimately controversial, and equally representative of the music’s historical push–​pull remixed for a new century. It was all the more disappointing, then, that women had been remarginalized by the late 2000s. Though artists like Miranda Lambert remained top sellers, much of the genre’s energy was directed toward what Jody Rosen influentially called “bro-​country” in 2013.64 Rosen described bro-​country as “music by and of the tatted, gym-​toned,

222    Oxford Handbook of Country Music party-​hearty young American white dude,” and the commercial dominance of male artists such as Luke Bryan and Florida Georgia Line connected to a gendered narrowing of opportunity and identity within the genre. Part of bro-​country’s controversial power arose from its sound, which—​although specific to a twenty-​first-​century musical moment—​was part of a much longer debate. “There isn’t a fiddle or pedal steel in earshot,” in the thumping, hip hop influenced sounds. “The vocals have a regional ring,” but have abandoned “the desolate croons and bent notes” of country’s past in favor of a “cosmopolitan” sound that could compete in the modern pop marketplace. Indeed, much of the subsequent criticism of “bro-​country” (though not in Rosen’s article) was based in its seeming straying from the sound and iconography of country’s roots. As in earlier moments when country artists incorporated musical styles with black origins and dance-​music orientations, these critiques were suffused by racial anxiety and gender condescension. Also as in earlier moments, a seeming alternative emerged in the burgeoning “Americana” movement, which grew in popularity and prominence in the 2010s as a seeming antidote to “bro-​country” tyranny. Like the honky tonkers or Outlaws, many prominent Americana artists—​such as Chris Stapleton or Kacey Musgraves—​had direct connections to the Nashville mainstream and recorded for major labels. But perhaps the most interesting—​and certainly the most successful—​negotiation of these competing gender and stylistic impulses came from its most mainstream star, Taylor Swift. Not only has Swift incorporated pop, rock, and other styles into her sound, but she has also updated the country industry’s long embrace of new technologies and business models. Although much of her fame is based on the standard mixture of record sales, radio airplay, and concert attendance, Swift has also demonstrated skill with social media, viral videos, and other components of the media landscape facing recording artists in the 2000s. Part of this has to do specifically with artist revenues in a digital age. Just as the 1940s and 1970s saw country artists involved in similar battles over compensation, Swift came to the forefront of debates over streaming music and artist compensation. In 2014, just after the release of her massive hit (and heavily pop-​influenced) 1989 album, Swift removed her recordings from Spotify in protest of the popular streaming service’s low royalty rates. Although not the first artist to boycott Spotify or streaming more generally, Swift’s decision earned national attention and provoked a larger debate over the economic practices and larger impact of the streaming model on artists, songwriters, and the recording industry more generally. In some respect, Swift’s decision reflected her connection to an older business model that had driven the growth of country music for decades. By demanding greater royalties for her work, and trying to direct listeners to purchasing her album through downloads or CDs rather than streaming on Spotify, Swift resisted the larger changes of the music economy in favor of traditional modes of music consumption. But Swift did not remove her music from streaming services like Apple Music (which offers higher royalties) and also relies on YouTube streams to promote her videos. Ultimately, then, Swift demonstrated the flexibility and forward thinking that had long defined the country

Country Music and the Recording Industry    223 music business. By asserting the rights of creators within a new model of popular-​music consumption, Swift echoed the longer attempts by the Nashville-​based country industry to assert its significance on the musical landscape, as well as to pioneer a new paradigm for the production and consumption of popular culture in the twenty-​first century. Her hugely successful music—​which remained rooted in country traditions while increasingly grasping for pop success—​was a perfect soundtrack.65 Taylor Swift is the latest example of the way that the central artistic and cultural debates in country music have been inextricably intertwined with the commercial operations of the recording industry. Moreover, the recording industry—​rather than being a passive or adversarial participant—​has been a crucial (if sometimes problematic) actor in constructing the aesthetic and ideological parameters around which country music has been appreciated and understood.

Notes 1. This story was first reported by Ronnie Pugh in his autobiography of Ernest Tubb, Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubador (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 236–​237; and it was subsequently analyzed by Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 81–​82. 2. Pamela Fox terms this as Tubb’s search for “industry respectability.” See Fox, Natural Acts, 82. 3. Aaron Fox offers an illuminating discussion of the cultural practices and politics that fuel this debate in Real Country:  Music and Language in Working-​Class  Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Other works have recently added even greater complexity to this question and centered different notions of “real country” within the formation of identities. For a particularly important recent example, which focuses on queerness and sexualities, see Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers & Country Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 4. This even extends into the common practice of songs that define what and who “country” is. These songs usually base their arguments around explicit or implicit claims of country’s musical and cultural realness. Some examples include Loretta Lynn’s “You’re Lookin’ At Country,” Barbara Mandrell’s “I Was Country (When Country Wasn’t Cool),” O.  B. McClinton’s “Country Music (That’s My Thing),” or—​more recently—​Ashton Shepherd’s “Where Country Grows.” 5. The phrase “saving country music” is currently the title of a well-​known blog that seeks to spotlight artists who the authors feel represent true country sound and attitude. See http://​ www.savingcountrymusic.com. 6. Diane Pecknold beautifully describes commercialism as the supposed “falsehood to authenticity’s truth, the fabrication to authenticity’s spontaneity” and “the shameful secret that country music’s pretensions to authenticity must labor to obscure.” See Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2. 7. Ibid. 8. Richard Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 2.

224    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 9. Joli Jensen, The Nashville Sound:  Authenticity, Commercialization and Country Music (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press, 1998), 8. 10. Timothy B. Tyson, “Robert F.  Williams, ‘Black Power’ and the Roots of the African American Freedom Struggle,” Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (September 1998): 540–​570. 11. Barry Mazor, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), 55. 12. James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill, NC:  University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 13. See Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music, Reprint ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003); Barry Mazor, Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America’s Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 14. Charles K. Wolfe, “The Legend That Peer Built: Reappraising the Bristol Sessions,” in The Bristol Sessions: Writings about the Big Bang of Country Music, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and Ted Olson (New York: McFarland, 2005), 26–​27. 15. Don Cusic, Discovering Country Music (New York: Praeger, 2008), 8. 16. For the black roots of the banjo, see Cecilia Conway, African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995); and Tony Thomas, “Why African Americans Put the Banjo Down,” in Hidden in the Mix:  The African American Presence In Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 143–​170. 17. Patrick Huber, “Black Hillbillies:  African American Musicians on Old Time Records, 1924-​1932,” in Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix, 19–​84. 18. Miller, Segregating Sound, 5. 19. Ibid. 216–​217. 20. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 42–​43. 21. Barry Mazor explores these connections in Meeting Jimmie Rodgers. 22. As Jocelyn Neal describes, the woman-​led Carters became the template for one of country’s primary artist images—​“wholesome, churchgoing Appalachian-​mountain family”—​in contrast with the “hell-​raising good old boy” image associated with Jimmie Rodgers. This affirmed an association between women in country (both performers and fans) with home and family that structured the music’s commercial and creative history; as Bill C. Malone notes, it “enshrined domesticity and virtue as icons.” This sometimes had practical repercussions by restricting the opportunities of female country artists to tour and record as freely as their male counterparts. See Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 63; and Jocelyn R. Neal, Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 52. 23. Many of the era’s most prominent urban pop songwriters were directly influenced by both hillbilly and Western music. Porter adapted the song from a Montana farmer named Robert Fletcher, who is listed as cowriter of the lyrics. For discussions of “Don’t Fence Me In,” see Holly George-​Warren, Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 132–​133; and William McBrien, Cole

Country Music and the Recording Industry    225 Porter: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1998), 271–​274. For a discussion of this process, see David Cantwell’s entry on Bing Crosby’s version of “Don’t Fence Me In” in David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-​Warren, Heartaches By The Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press/​Country Music Foundation Press, 2003), 235–​ 236. The phenomenon of urban country songwriters (and its broader implications) paralleled the contemporary rise of what Alan Lomax termed “city-​billies,” young city dwellers who embraced the era’s folk revival while provoking criticism from some (like Lomax) who felt they were inauthentic. For more, see Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society 1945-​1970 (Amherst:  University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 136. 24. Richard Peterson discusses the development of crooning in Creating Country Music, 107. 25. Neal, Country Music, 99. 26. Pecknold, Selling Sound, 62. 27. Ibid. 63. 28. Jensen, Nashville Sound, 74. 29. As David Sanjek notes, independents recognized what the stylistically conservative major labels chose to ignore. “New hybrids emerged in the course of time, among them rhythm and blues, honky-​tonk, bebop, hillbilly boogie, and jump blues. The major labels chose by and large either to overlook or underplay the opportunities that ensued, but the independents lapped up both the possibilities and the profits without regard for the status quo.” See Sanjek, “What’s Syd Got To Do With It,” in Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix, 316. 30. Starday moved its operations to Nashville in 1957, becoming a subsidiary of Mercury Records and launching the careers of George Jones and other artists who began in the label’s early period. 31. These changes and conflicts are deftly mapped in Michael T. Bertrand, Race, Rock & Elvis (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 32. Ibid. 104. Bill C. Malone tells an evocative story of his own reaction to Presley, who he first saw when he opened a show for country star Hank Snow. Malone was horrified by Presley’s wild sound and the unhinged reaction of the singer’s fans. “I do not know whether my discomfort arose most acutely from my puritanism or my musical conservatism. Whatever the source, I felt that Presley was a disrupter and that … the future of country music was dim.” From Bill Malone, “Elvis, Country Music and the South,” in All That Glitters: Country Music in America, ed. George H. Lewis (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993), 51–​58, 51. 33. Pecknold, Selling Sound, 86, 88. 34. Ben A. Green, “Chet Makes Guitar Talk with Rhythm and Melody,” Country and Western Jamboree 3, no. 7 (Winter 1957), reprinted in Stimeling, The Country Music Reader, 148–​149. 35. “Country Music Snaps Its Regional Bounds,” author unknown, Business Week, no. 1907, (March 19, 1966), 96–​103, quoted in Cusic, Discovering Country Music, 109. 36. Jensen, Nashville Sound, 97. 37. Ibid. 161–​162. 38. Diane Pecknold, “Making Country Modern: The Legacy of Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music,” in Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix, 82–​99. 39. Pecknold insightfully demonstrates how these debates often occurred within (and were manipulated by) the very industry that was supposedly the site of conflict. See Pecknold, Selling Sound, 133–​161.

226    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 40. For histories of the Bakersfield scene, see Country Music Hall of Fame, The Bakersfield Sound:  Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and California Country (Nashville, TN:  Country Music Hall of Fame Press, 2012); Gerald W. Haslam, Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California (Berkeley: Heyday Books/​University of California Press, 1999); and Robert E. Price, The Bakersfield Sound:  How a Generation of Displaced Okies Revolutionized American Music (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2015). 41. Neal, Country Music, 223–​224. See also Peter La Chapelle, Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music and the Migration to California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 81–​83. 42. La Chapelle, Proud to Be an Okie, 83. 43. Pecknold, Selling Sound, 201. 44. Ibid. 221–​222. 45. I discuss the complexity of Pride’s early career in Charles L. Hughes, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 133–​134. 46. McClinton quoted in Gerry Wood, “Nashville Scene,” Billboard, November 15, 1986, 135. 47. Glaser quoted in Michael Bane, “The Outlaws: Revolution in Country Music,” reprinted in Stimeling, Country Music Reader, 215. 48. Ibid. 219. 49. Willie Nelson was a notable exception, recording in New York; Muscle Shoals, Alabama; and Texas. Additionally, Travis Stimeling perceptively examines how the recording of live albums in Texas in the 1970s was a crucial signifier of outlaw or countercultural authenticity for artists. Travis Stimeling, Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin’s Progressive Music Scene (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2011), 77–​92. 50. Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 123. 51. Neal, Country Music, 271–​272. Neal called Rich’s gesture a literal “flash point,” and named Olivia Newton-​John’s similar success at the CMA Awards as the other “flash point.” 52. Eric Weisbard, Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 72–​73. 53. In October of 1979, for example, Billboard magazine declared that “Label Chiefs See Country Growth on Upbeat,” with numerous executives in Nashville and elsewhere discussing the genre’s potential, even within a recessed American economy and stagnant record business. Such optimistic appraisals were commonplace in the era’s trade publications. See “Label Chiefs See Country Growth on Upbeat,” Billboard, October 27, 1979, 36. 54. Weisbard, Top 40 Democracy, 72. 55. See Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’. 56. For an evocative illustration of this moment (and those live shows), see Bruce Feiler, Dreaming out Loud: Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, Wade Hayes, and the Changing Face of Nashville (New  York:  HarperCollins, 1998), particularly pages 257–​268, which are reprinted in Stimeling, Country Music Reader, 280–​289. 57. See, for example, Debbie Holley, “Country Dancing Sparks Club Growth: New Nightclubs, Remixes Target Trend,” Billboard 104 (June 6, 1992): 1, 76; reprinted in Stimeling, Country Music Reader, 290–​294. For more background, consult Jocelyn Neal’s ­chapter  21 in this book.

Country Music and the Recording Industry    227 58. Don Cusic, “Country Green:  The Money In Country Music,” in Reading Country Music:  Steel Guitars, Opry Stars and Honky-​Tonk Bars, ed. Cecelia Tichi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 200–​208, 201. 59. Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., second revised ed. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002), 420. 60. Pecknold, Selling Sound, 237. 61. Pamela Fox, Natural Acts, 162. 62. Neal, Country Music, 394–​395. 63. Ibid. 400. 64. Jody Rosen, “Jody Rosen on the Rise of Bro-​Country,” New York Magazine, August 19, 2013, reprinted at http://​www.vulture.com/​2013/​08/​rise-​of-​bro-​country-​florida-​georgia-​ line.html. 65. See, for example, Sarah Whitten, “Taylor Swift Slams Spotify, Praises Apple,” 8/​4/​2015, at http://​www.cnbc.com/​2015/​08/​04/​taylor-​swift-​slams-​spotify-​praises-​apple.html; and Rob Wile, “How Taylor Swift’s Punches are Hurting Spotify,” 8/​5/​2015, at http://​fusion.net/​ story/​178022/​spotifys-​payouts-​to-​taylor-​swift-​show-​why-​apple-​responded-​so-​fast-​to-​ her-​tumblr-​post/​.

Chapter 11

C ountry  Ra di o The Dialectic of Format and Genre Eric Weisbard

In 2015, Sony Music’s head of Nashville operations, Gary Overton, said, “If you’re not on country radio, you don’t exist.”1 Also in 2015, programming consultant Keith Hill declared, “we’re principally a male format with a smaller female component. I’ve got about 40 music databases in front of me, and the percentage of females in the one with the most is 19%. Trust me, I play great female records, and we’ve got some right now. They’re just not the lettuce in our salad. The lettuce is Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are the females.”2 Both remarks, it almost goes without saying, were controversial. But we can use the notoriety of these declarations to identify some enduring aspects of the relationship of radio to country music. First, radio as a format plays a central role in the definition of country, a commercially driven mediation of identity that works against applying an artistically driven musical genre definition. Second, radio makes assumptions about what audiences want that have consequences; in particular, though class gets blurred and whiteness is presumed, these debates revolve around gendered presentation and women as listeners and performers.3 Country radio is the format of choice on more stations in the United States than any other musical rival, and it is also the commercial format that has most resisted subdivision. This gives it an unusual power to introduce new performers and preserve older ones. If the history of country, as Richard Peterson so influentially described it, involves a dialectic of hard-​core and soft-​shell, then radio has been the strongest form of plastic ever invented.4 Yet there is also a periodization to suggest here, which I will explore in this chapter. From the 1920s through World War II, radio’s prominence in country turned on live radio shows as the media introduction of southern whites. Disparaged by the northern and urban show business people centered in New York’s Tin Pan Alley and increasingly Hollywood, these hillbillies were presumed illiterate and poor. But they had the right—​ in the traditions of tabloid culture and Jacksonian democracy, and unlike blacks—​to speak with their own voice, use their vernacular in the public sphere. This defined the

230    Oxford Handbook of Country Music first era of country radio, with its performance-​based and barn-​dance-​themed variety programs, notably The Grand Ole Opry. A second era, from the end of the war to mid-​1970s, saw a shift to disc jockeys and records: personality radio. This produced a boom: Hank Williams to “Tennessee Waltz.” Then rock and roll happened, Top 40 claimed country radio channels, and an industry now centered in Nashville founded the Country Music Association (CMA), the most consequential trade organization in music. The group marketed the country audience to advertisers, measuring success in radio stations that switched to full-​time country but accepting a range of definitions of that term. Format radio country, a tighter programming approach, solidified from the mid-​ 1970s to the mega mergers of the late 1990s. Top 40 methods, pioneered on AM radio, moved to FM as country joined a multiple mainstreams disposition that absorbed hippies, black power, and white backlash. Country radio played fewer songs, all sonically calibrated to balance traditional and contemporary. The sales of Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, and others eclipsed predecessors and surpassed other pop styles. But many complained of “Murder on Music Row”: country losing its soul. Most recently, in an era of Internet access and new business models for music, networked radio, country has confronted a lack of progress. One of its own, Taylor Swift, left for pop with all her format wisdom now operating in a larger sphere. Country radio seemed reduced to “bro-​country” acts with little chance of crossover. But the power of the format to break new performers and extend careers continues, unabated, almost a century from its origin point.

Barn Dances and Hillbilly Havens: Live Country Radio, 1920s–​1940s On March 15, 1922, Atlanta and the South’s first radio station, WSB, owned by the Atlanta Journal, debuted with no intent to popularize hillbilly culture. As Wayne Daniel has noted, the first daily schedule printed in the paper included Earl Fuller’s Original New York Jazz Orchestra; and station management was prone to disparaging its old-​ time talent, even in public documents. Yet within eight days of the first broadcast, Fiddlin’ John Carson, a middle-​aged millworker with a dusty vocal affect and a history that included both citywide fiddle contest wins and an inflammatory song about soon-​ lynched Leo Frank, became a station fixture. As Radio Digest proclaimed a couple of years later, because it was still news, “Radio Made ‘Fiddlin John Carson’ Famous.”5 He was anything but alone. By 1930, the station hosted more than 100 acts aimed at a rural audience. Carson translated radio celebrity into releases on Okeh Records. So did Roba Stanley, the first woman recording old-​time music and a WSB regular. Riley Puckett of WSB became Columbia Records’ first country act. It was on WSB, arguably, that the term hillbilly was initially popularized when George Daniell’s Hill Billies

Country Radio: Format and Genre    231 appeared in 1925. The station, like all radio then, broadcast content for different audiences; programs aimed at farmers aired early in the morning and during midday dinner breaks. Sears sponsored Dinner Bell R.F.D. (Radio Farmers Democracy). Crazy Water Crystals, a quack patent medicine, sponsored the Tweedy Brothers. Men dominated, but women performed; comedians steeped in minstrelsy told questionable jokes; and acts travelled the broadcast area to perform: radio time was used to brand an act, not get paid. Radio of this sort, Pamela Grundy has argued, created an accommodation: a version of hillbilly performance, tamed by sponsorship, making strong vernacular connections through audience response that worked across gender lines and effaced class prejudice.6 WSB came first in identifying an audience, but Sears-​owned WLS in Chicago produced country radio’s first pivotal format:  the radio barn dance. The National Barn Dance, a Saturday evening program that took a variety approach to mixing dance tunes, sentimental ballads, comedy skits, and any other material that fit, began in 1924, making a star of the mountain balladeer Bradley Kincaid; not coincidentally, George D. Hay, soon to start the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, was a WLS station announcer at the time. By 1931, 2,400 people waited to watch live each week; by 1933, some thirty stations in addition to 50,000-​watt WLS heard the program on the NBC network, sponsored by Alka Seltzer—​a more respectable patent medicine. Gene Autry, Red Foley, and Patsy Montana were among the major performers the program helped launch.7 WSM, which stood for “We Shield Millions,” a Nashville station owned by National Life and Accident Insurance Company, made the barn dance format eternal with the Grand Ole Opry. WSM began broadcasting in October 1925; Hay arrived the next month. Even before that, Dave Macon, the banjo playing vaudeville pro who’d be the Opry’s first big star, had appeared in what later became the Opry’s home and “mother church of country music,” the Ryman Auditorium, for a policemen’s benefit remote broadcast on WSM. As Charles Wolfe writes, all elements were already in place: big station, area rich in folk material, eager listenership. Hay was the catalyst. “The Solemn Old Judge” was a conservative populist: he took WSM’s favorite string band, led by a country doctor and modeled on Paul Whiteman’s hotel orchestras, and dressed them down as hillbillies. He kept a list of names like Gully Jumpers and Dixie Clodhoppers to bestow on new acts. He would prove suspicious of women, drums, and even Roy Acuff ’s austere vocals. He told his own blackface minstrelsy jokes over the air; and even after helping break harmonica player Deford Bailey as country radio’s one black performer of this era, limited what Bailey could perform and eventually pushed him off the airwaves, calling him too lazy to try new material.8 We lack recordings and scripts for the Opry before 1939: it is not clear if it thrived because of Hay or in spite of him. Macon, a farmer and mule-​pack hauler before trucks drove him to show business at age fifty, resisted Hay’s rulebook just as he neglected to sing into the microphone—​his sensibilities rougher though showy. The Vagabonds, the first professional singers on the show, infused the intimacy radio could offer, followed by the Delmores, who did that but maintained a traditionalism the softer Vagabonds lacked. Acuff and bluegrass patriarch Bill Monroe, both arriving in the late 1930s, offered the package—​containable radio traditionalism with room for gospel, weepers, high harmonies, and jokes. The Opry finally got its national broadcast slot on NBC in

232    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 1939, and WSM dominated country music nights in the 1940s and 1950s, even as other radio switched to disc jockeys playing records.9 But the Opry had competitors. John Lair, capitalizing on the WLS National Barn Dance, created the Renfro Valley Barn Dance in 1937, forbidding cowboy attire and winning a General Foods sponsored CBS network pickup for his “Valley Where Time Stands Still” homespun mix—​including all-​women string band the Coon Creek Girls; comedians in overalls Homer & Jethro; and a young, already media savvy, Red Foley.10 In Shreveport, Louisiana, the last of the big radio barn dances, the Louisiana Hayride, began in 1948. Launching Hank Williams early on and Elvis Presley a few years later, the Hayride became known as “the cradle of the stars.” The Opry forbade drums; the Hayride welcomed them. The Opry was slow to welcome women singers; the Hayride gave a start to Kitty Wells and Rose Maddox. Honky tonk had a prominent place, from Webb Pierce to a young George Jones, but so too the pop experiments of Slim Whitman yodeling “Indian Love Call” and smooth Jim Reeves. Presley’s black pop covers were welcomed on a flagship station, KWKH, that also featured Hayride announcer Ray Bartlett as a R&B (rhythm and blues) DJ, “Groovie Boy.”11 Country music, as a category of American commercial music, emerged through live radio broadcasts, which mediated rural identity and pop packaging. By 1944, Billboard counted 600 regular country radio shows in the United States, aimed at around 40 million listeners, both barn dances and some 250 single-​artist programs. The music, like all American popular music, was a hybrid of folk and show business traditions. But radio, replacing records during the Depression years, had a strong role to play, favoring a manufactured intimacy that cemented country’s artist–​fan bond. As Bradley Kincaid said, “When I sing for you on the air, I always visualize you, a family group, sitting around the radio, listening and commenting on my program. If I did not feel your presence, though you be a thousand miles away, the radio would be cold and unresponsive to me, and I in turn would sound the same way to you.”12 Country figures lacked other media outlets: singing film cowboys aside, mainstream channels were closed. If black performers found radio much less congenial, jazz and swing represented music at its most contemporary. Southern, working-​class, white performers were typecast as hillbillies. Country radio became the place to succeed within the stereotype, feel and challenge its limits. Richard Peterson’s study of country music authenticity begins with rural-​themed radio, which created, Peterson says, “an ongoing interplay between performers, diverse commercial interests, fans, and the evolving image.” Country radio gave structural employment to a generation-​plus of performers. It coded the music as separate from pop and anti-​urbane, old-​timey. Yet it could not be too homogenous: a variety approach prevailed. Radio cycled between crossover and traditionalism. Neither disposition had a monopoly on commercial image polishing. Where Bill Malone, in his potent histories of country, still defaulted to a notion that the music at its best was “as ‘country’ as rapid urbanization and commercial pressures will allow it to be,” Peterson saw the fabricating process as itself definitional. The shifts the Opry witnessed, between slick Vagabonds and craggy Roy Acuff, were the essence of the category: country was built on a fault line.13 Kristine McCusker’s research has added a crucial gender and class component to this revisionist analysis. She recalls Linda Parker, the Kentucky maiden and “Little Sun

Country Radio: Format and Genre    233 Bonnet Girl,” cut down tragically young, who sang old mountain songs like “Bury Me Beneath the Willows” on the National Barn Dance. Parker was actually Jeanne Meunich, nightclub singer from Indiana with a delinquent’s background, refashioned by John Lair in a roots fabrication. To McCusker, “Linda Parker seemed to be the middle class’s ideal woman whose music, voice and character tamed a world out of control from her radio microphone, who provided a sanctuary for her listeners.”14 The “girl singers” of early live country radio opened space for women to perform and also to listen (as radio invaded the home), singing ballads in contrast to faster male numbers on the barn dance shows. Parker inherited middle-​class women’s domesticity, but her youthful vibrancy spoke to twentieth-​century celebrity culture. McCusker surveys other barn dance radio era women: Lily May Ledford, the “banjo pickin’ girl” beloved by the Roosevelt administration; and Opry breakout comedienne and working class impersonator Minnie Pearl. Country radio used vaudeville’s eclecticism and mockery of convention—​and that style’s mandate to make women central as actors and audience.15 A portion of a Grand Ole Opry broadcast from 1949, widely available on YouTube, offers a glimpse of country radio in this first phase.16 Red Foley, host of the network and Armed Forces Opry segment, starts with “Mammy’s little baby loves ‘Shortnin’ Bread,’ ” with only a hint of dialect. Comedian Rod Brasfield goes into full dialect, and yucks about a friend who answered his question: “the best thing you could do with your week (weak) end is put a hat on it.” It’s hard to listen through. “Famous Montgomery singing personality” Hank Williams sweeps out the old with hillbilly boogie, “You’re Gonna Change (Or I’m Gonna Leave)”—​yodel and sustained falsetto as rhythmic and electrifying instrument akin to the steel guitar that duets with him to audience clamor. Wally Fowler and his Oak Ridge Quartet take a bouncy gospel: “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” Red Foley evokes family, fried chicken, and Aunt Lucy on the organ singing hymns like “Cleanse Me,” which he croons like Bing Crosby might. We are only a dozen minutes in. Minnie Pearl comes out of the break with a “how-​dee!” and jokes about lust—​her exaggerated fake accent its own electricity. “One of the nation’s leading folksingers,” Little Jimmy Dickens, gives an anthem for the decades to come, “Country Boy”—​a plain old one, tater eating, party Saturday, church Sunday, steel guitar solo right now. He, Foley, and Brasfield do the then-​current pop hit “Mule Train,” whip sounds and all, to more audience delight.

Country Music’s Disc Jockey Association: Personality Radio, 1940s–​1970s In the three decades after the end of World War II, country music experienced a golden age that included, but critically did not pivot on, radio. Nashville’s emergence as a center of music production was the dominant story. Syndicated television shows made performers iconic, inheriting the barn dance radio role. Still, this was a transformation for radio, from live to “personality” based, meaning disc jockeys playing records

234    Oxford Handbook of Country Music on full-​time country stations. The shift opened new issues of crossover because records can go anywhere. Country radio flirted with and feared both pop and rock and roll in this era, from a smooth Patti Page waltz and Elvis Presley’s amplified hillbilly act to John Denver or Olivia Newton MOR (middle-​of-​the-​road) music and Willie Nelson and his fellow Outlaws. Even as the number of stations exploded, country radio was not powerful enough to create mega-​smashes or define the genre by narrowcasting the format. Country can thank radio for its music publishing:  BMI, or Broadcast Music, Incorporated, was started by the National Association of Broadcasters to challenge the Tin Pan Alley music publishers of ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers). BMI leveraged styles ASCAP scorned, primarily black pop and hillbilly. New institutional players grew up, so a Fred Rose, partnering with Opry idol Roy Acuff in Acuff-​Rose, could establish a publishing wing on the growing Music Row in Nashville, followed by recording studios. If Rose’s key signee, Hank Williams in 1946, embodied the honky tonk image country would rely on, it mattered as much that Rose could network with Mitch Miller, head of A&R at Columbia in New York, to get Williams’s songs covered by Tony Bennett. Nashville, to the consternation of some fans already, was becoming an industry town. Our best account of this is Diane Pecknold’s The Selling Sound, which focuses on the creation of the CMA in 1958 out of the former Country Music Disc Jockey Association. By 1950, some 1,400 DJ programs devoted to country music existed nationally; record spinners began meeting regularly at Opry home WSM’s annual Disc Jockey Festival. BMI attended; ASCAP did not. Yet by 1956, country disc jockey power was waning, as full-​time Top 40 stations crowded out part-​time specialty country play and fears of payola limited radio jock music choice. In 1953, 65% of American radio stations played country on at least one show, with 236 stations more than 20 hours a week. As of 1961, only 36% offered a country show, and only 112 stations played even eight hours a week of the music.17 In response, country leaders pursued full-​time broadcasters. The CMA sponsored sales pitches to stations considering the switch. These positioned country listeners as a distinct audience: blue collar in jobs and taste, yet urbanized and in postwar prosperity spending a middle-​class income. “Country Music: A Gold Mine for City Broadcasters,” the CMA insisted, calling the audience a rarity: valuable and not covered elsewhere. Stations created a less homey manner of presenting country. In California, the emphasis moved from “talking hillbilly” to a staff that, as Joe Allison recalled, could “keep it smooth.” By 1960, Allison consulted in transforming the Bay Area’s KSAY to an all-​ country station billed as the “Blue Collar Giant.” At KRAK, Sacramento, in 1962, he devised a loose format approach, mixing new and old country styles and talking the general manager out of equipping salesmen with red cowboy hats. By 1965, New York and Chicago came aboard following the same approaches. “Country is just a word for another kind of specialized radio,” a sponsor said. When WJRZ in New York City switched to country, a memo from management told staffers, “It will be sophisticated, it will not be ‘hokeyed up.’ ”18

Country Radio: Format and Genre    235 The results were a spectacular success: the 81 fulltime country stations of 1961 had swelled to 606 in 1969; legendary figures such as Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and Merle Haggard emerged into prominence; the new image of country as a savvy pop culture style led to Johnny Cash’s hosting a national TV show; and a film was made, The Nashville Sound, that captured a city succeeding from its busy recording studios to rockers looking for a country retouch. Yet there were also relative weaknesses, detailed in Paul Hemphill’s account of the music at the start of the 1970s, also titled The Nashville Sound. It remained a big deal that Music City’s WENO offered all-​country programming; the fabled WSM still did not, though its late night DJ, Ralph Emery, was the biggest mover and shaker in the field, coronating stars. Program directors (PDs) moonlighted in other areas, such as the WENO PD who introduced producer Shelby Singleton to the performer who would be renamed Jeannie C. Riley and given the massive “Harper Valley PTA,” which sold 4.8 million copies because it was aimed as much at a pop audience as a country one.19 Pop loomed as a jackpot, and hillbilly associations were now a liability. Chet Atkins, legendary industry figure, worried that country was “going to lose its identity.” Jack Stapp of Tree Publishing said about country radio, “they started modernizing it more because disc jockeys began to get more requests whenever something came out that was a little smoother, like an Eddy Arnold song. … So it just got smoother and smoother, and then it started blending with more pop music.” The benefits were irresistible: Webb Pierce, selling 100,000 singles on a country song he wrote, made $6,500; Roger Miller made $130,000 on two million sold with a pop crossover.20 The tone of country radio had changed. Gone were older DJs “with names like Cousin Jake and Barnyard Bob, good old boys with exaggerated drawls and hayseed jokes.” Now the image was “play Glenn Campbell a lot, talk nice to those misunderstood housewives, take an occasional shot at the liberals and the left-​wing students, show some class, don’t say ‘ain’t,’ work like hell, and advertise.” Hemphill noted several influential DJs like Spartanburg, South Carolina’s, Billy Dilworth. But there were no big chains yet, just glimmers; like Plough’s WPLP in Atlanta following the company’s WJJD; Chicago, and WCOP; Boston, with an emphasis on promotions, good DJs, and the slogan “Now Country.”21 Ralph Emery’s autobiography illustrates how personality radio operated. Growing up on radio in the Depression, he recalled “the intimacy of the medium. I knew that Roosevelt was speaking to millions. But somehow, I felt that he was confiding only to those inside my grandpa Fuqua’s house.” Emery aspired to the same role. He discarded “the good ole boy, broken English delivery that had traditionally been the country music disc jockey’s signature,” aiming for “dignity” and “homespun honesty.” Though he spun records, he also talked with guests, more Johnny Carson than Wolfman Jack. Emery helped establish performers such as Buck Owens, buddied up with Marty Robbins, and even married Skeeter Davis for a time; but he was less identified with a particular style of country than an ability to draw out disparate guests. Looking back, the setup seems casual. For a time, Emery was paired with partner Tex Ritter, a singing cowboy of another era—​he made that work. As a bonus, he was given an early morning TV

236    Oxford Handbook of Country Music program that suited his host, rather than radio programmer, instincts. In 1983, when the personality role was no longer as viable on format country radio, he took the outdated style to television (as the barn dance had previously), anchoring Nashville Now on TNN.22 As Emery’s story illustrates, the success of the Nashville Sound in providing country a selling sound that included personality radio did not, in this era, lead to genre homogenization. Much worked in the other direction. Nashville in the 1960s had the rival realm of Bakersfield, California: Buck Owens’s rock but not pop friendly pledge to resist crossover; Merle Haggard’s embrace of a working man’s identity. Nashville in the 1970s had the competing vibe of Austin, Texas, with Willie Nelson leading a “progressive country” fusion, again via rock over pop. The allure of a more feminized (in performers or listeners) adult contemporary (AC) and Top 40 crossover, to artists and labels seeking airplay and sales, to country radio seeking familiar songs for listeners, kept format boundary lines soft. Even so, the increasing polarization of American music between rock, soul, and country countercultures—​each opposing a crossover Top 40 or MOR—​branded country as toxic to liberals. Fervent audience requests for Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” or Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man” were irresistible, even as managers worried that ad buyers would find new reason to disdain their “not the Jet Set” listeners and preferred their “maturing” format’s sexy new songs, like Sammi Smith’s Kris Kristofferson-​penned “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Kim Simpson’s work on commercial radio formats in the early 1970s captures a time that saw not only country but soul (aka “urban contemporary), rock (aka AOR, “album oriented rock”), MOR (aka “adult contemporary”), and Top 40 (soon to be renamed CHR, “contemporary hit radio”) given a significant format refit for FM radio and a divided United States. Country formats boomed for a second straight decade: a 1977 study found that market share had gone up by 52.3% in only five years. But sonically, country radio remained more soft than modal. Winning stations blended formats or favored established country artists with general-​appeal sounds, attracting programmers with Top 40 or MOR backgrounds. They fretted, like Ted Cramer of KCKN-​Kansas City, about “message music” like “Okie from Muskogee” offending the non-​hardcore; the subject matter had “gotten out of hand,” Cramer said. Houston station KENR gave a late-​night airing to pop songwriter Jim Croce’s “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim” in 1972, and audience aplomb moved the hard country station to country pop. Purity now concentrated in late-​night programs catered to truck drivers, like Mike Hoyer’s Country Music USA. MCA made crossover a specialty, Top 40 hits for Conway Twitty, Olivia Newton-​John, and Jeanne Pruett. As Simpson notes, Charlie Rich, celebrated in country for burning the card that named John Denver CMA Entertainer of the Year in 1975, himself gained from country pop, with saccharine like “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.”23 Many of country music’s most iconic figures came of age in this era of growth on records, radio, and syndicated television, and the conflicting testimony in their memoirs nod at the lack of a single defining trend. Johnny Cash felt stifled by the programming

Country Radio: Format and Genre    237 of country radio, putting an ad in a trade publication for his Bitter Tears album accusing stations of wanting to “wallow in meaninglessness” and only registering his ambitions on his TV show.24 Loretta Lynn, by contrast, used the support of country DJs like California’s Hugh Cherry to build her first, independently released single, “Honky Tonk Girl,” into a chart hit, the first of many. Her memoir chastised country radio for resisting playing her ode to birth control, “The Pill,” but even it enjoyed enough support to become a number 5 single, in a season that also saw stations playing Olivia Newton-​ John’s “Have You Never Been Mellow.”25 My research on Dolly Parton shows how the era of Nashville primacy and personality radio yielded mixed results for major figures, with women choosing between a dwindling hardcore traditionalism and crossover pop—​rarely rock-​styled “outlaw” country. Parton started as a child on live country radio, Knoxville’s Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour. Arriving in Nashville after high school in 1964, she embraced a modernizing industry, writing for other performers, singing backup, and showcasing her no “Dumb Blonde” personality. An invitation from Porter Wagoner to be his TV girl singer, in 1967, became her breakthrough, but it also presented a dilemma:  Wagoner’s fans favored a more traditional presentation, reflective of hillbilly radio, whereas the personality era wanted poppier products. Parton was brilliant at writing neo-​traditional country songs, notably “Coat of Many Colors,” but few received airplay. So she adapted, contemporizing her beat on tracks like “Joshua” and “Jolene,” then singing love songs, from the bland “Love is Like a Butterfly” to the proto-​power ballad “I Will Always Love You.” By the mid-​1970s, Parton could compete within an AC-​tempted country radio world, but there was no reason to slow down. After a failed attempt at a rock move, she went number one pop with a fully AC tune, “Here You Come Again”: next stop, Hollywood.26

“Ain’t Nothing Wrong with the Radio”: Tight Formats, Big Sales, 1970s–​1990s Here is a revolution that failed: “progressive country” was offered as a format in 1973 by the Austin, Texas-​based KOKE-​FM. That approach, what we might now call Americana, was abandoned by 1977, when KOKE switched formats again.27 Here is a revolution that succeeded. Bob Pittman, still in his early twenties, a Mississippi native who’d go on to develop MTV and run Clear Channel, became program manager for WMAQ, Chicago, after it changed to a “rural contemporary” country format in 1975. It became the most listened to country station in America. Pittman’s partner in the shift was Ed Salamon, lifting first WEEP in Pittsburgh, then New York’s powerful WHN, which supplanted WMAQ with a similar approach: “a researched format with a short playlist and a contemporary Top 40 presentation.”28

238    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Pittman told Radio & Records, “WMAQ plays Country music with the tightness of Top 40 radio, but with the class and warmth of Pop/​Adult radio.” Notably, WMAQ was cautious about MOR acts. “We’ve found some great discrepancies between record sales and our call-​out research. For example, an Olivia Newton-​John or a Glen Campbell tends to appeal to these very passive people that don’t buy records and don’t call request lines.”29 Pittman wanted active listeners and a strong format identity, modeled on rock radio; he paid for song research, sponsored attention-​getting promotions, and kept playlists tight. Pittman’s approach was successful but controversial. Asked if he saw himself as one of the most talked-​about program directors in the country, Pittman replied, “Most hated,” recalling the boos that greeted him at the Country Radio Seminar when he announced his move to 35-​record playlists, down from the then typical 60–​70.30 Between the mid-​1970s and the early 1990s, in a process whose full details still await book-​length study, country radio committed to the “formatics” dominating FM and became the most powerful player in the country industry. When music sociologist Keith Negus visited Nashville in 1996 for a study of different corporate music genres, he was struck by the obsession everybody had with radio: “one phrase, and a rather old cliché at that, kept recurring: ‘The tail has started wagging the dog.’ There was a widely held belief, constantly asserted, that radio had become so influential and powerful that it was having a direct impact on who was being signed to publishing and recording contracts and was ultimately influencing the way in which artists were recorded.” Radio had become the “funnel that we all have to go through.” More than 2,000 stations now played country, yet “most were following the programming policies and practices of the two or three leading stations.” Playlists had become “relatively narrow and restricted.” 31 Similarly, Billboard country editor Edward Morris called radio “New, Improved, Homogenized.”32 But the results were evident: country radio could now launch stars as successful as those in any other category of commercial music. A reading of Radio & Records (R&R), a key trade journal, in these years, offers a glimpse of the twists and turns in this roughly 25-​year process at century’s end. Salamon, 26 in 1975, told R&R, “I’m actually more into radio than into any kind of music. I feel, in programming, that no matter what format you’re in, there are rules of good radio that need to be followed.” That meant a clear “mass-​appeal” agenda, though aimed at adult listeners, 25–​49, and avoiding MOR: “everything you play must be accepted by your audience as a country record.”33 In this first iteration of modern country format programming, which included playing the Eagles in New York, the emphasis was what Parton later achieved with songs like “9 to 5”: being better at adult contemporary than AC itself, to a point where, as programmer Randy Michaels said, “Country music is, all of a sudden, very fashionable, very hip and the Pop/​Adult stations are picking up on the most compatible of Country music and playing it.”34 It helped the format that many AM stations, abandoned by other music formats for FM, switched to country. With Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, crossover pop formats lightening black music coverage after the disco backlash, the hit movies Urban Cowboy and Coal Miner’s Daughter and the hit television series Dallas, one often heard the claim that, as Detroit PD Bill Ford put it, “Country radio is the Adult Contemporary or MOR of the 80’s.” He added, “As people

Country Radio: Format and Genre    239 are thinking more and more of patriotic things, this has helped Country radio more than anything.”35 Yet how patriotic was John Travolta riding a bull, or Parton and Kenny Rodgers comparing themselves to islands in a stream? Country proved stronger than disco, but faced consequences for embracing a pop culture role. Programmers warned of “the 35+ set, that are the Country base,” not “jumping into the cowboy craze.”36 Country “carries a strong lifestyle identification with it” and “should not be tempted to dilute its position, or image,” a marketer advised.37 These debates about how to commodify country, not whether to, had gender implications, as when consultant Jim Wood said, “Barbara Mandrell is a very nice-​looking lady, and I’m sure she doesn’t drive a pickup truck with a gun rack.”38 Consultant John Lund believed a rising female audience went with the AC-​minded country push: “It used to be that Country music meant a lot of males. Today there are country stations that get 60-​65% females.”39 Country, slicked up, threatened those who had succeeded earlier. Emery hated the new rules: “I’m afraid I’m a throwback to the days of personality radio. I never have liked formats.” WHN jock Lee Arnold agreed: “I had to learn to structure and discipline myself to conform to the format.” Indianapolis’s Don Nelson noted that with country to AC crossover, “What is good for the country artist is not necessarily good for Country radio. We have lost our exclusivity.”40 By 1985, the Urban Cowboy boom had receded; sales of country albums were down to pre-​boom levels; and, in an era of MTV superstars, even AC rejected songs from country people. An R&R study found that Top 40 stations, featuring under 2% country-​ originated songs before the boom, and 5–​6% from 1980–​82, now played none; while in AC, the numbers were 4–​7% before, 12–​15% during, and now 7–​9%. “Country seems to be fading into a world of its own,” editor Ken Barnes wrote, while the New York Times speculated the genre itself might be dying out.41 In 1987, WHN dropped country for an all-​sports format; talk radio took over many AM channels. As would be seen often in the decades to come, country was a forever “maturing” format, stigmatized by advertisers. R&R writers complained of “format bigotry,” with Chicago GM Drew Horowitz noting the continuing perception that “all Country listeners are ignorant, blue-​collar shitkickers.” Media buyers, often college-​educated women in their twenties, were said to still be “adhering to the ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ listener stereotype.”42 Once again, issues of class intersected issues of gender in assumptions about music and audience. Country reinvented itself to spark a much larger boom. Working with producer and label head Jimmy Bowen, who brought Los Angeles clout to record selling, young performers such as George Strait, Reba McEntire, and the Judds created a “neo-​traditional” country that avoided AC crossover or older, wilder identities, turning on songs of a highly crafted, contemporary sounding blend. RCA’s Joe Galante noted that whereas in the past, half of sales were catalog, now that was 15–​20%. “That shows me the consumer is saying, ‘Give me new music—​something fresh.’ ”43 It left less space for performers such as Parton, dropped by RCA, but more for Randy Travis, Ricky Skaggs, and Dwight Yoakam. As a Seattle programmer put it, “These acts work so well because they sound traditional to the upper demos while also being acceptable to the younger demos. This is

240    Oxford Handbook of Country Music due to the sound and production values they embody.”44 It mattered, for the new sonic emphasis, that country was now fully centered on FM stations. The stage had been set for Garth Brooks, said to have a “neo-​traditional style” in the first ad run for him in Radio & Records. Brooks led New Country: rock influenced, baby boomer friendly, marketing savvy, and uninterested in crossover. Listenership became younger, helped by a Top 40 and rock radio decline fostered by polarizing genres like heavy metal and rap. In Nashville, WSIX and the FM version of WSM warred for primacy, emphasizing the reigning oxymoron of format radio country: New Tradition. In Chicago, WSUN program director J. D. Spangler boasted, “Country has the hottest current music in the world.”45 By the end of 1991, country had bested AC: where four years previously, ACs held 35% of listeners 25–​54 in Top 100 markets, and country 26%, now the numbers were 46% country to 24% AC. Bowen trumpeted: “You’ll notice no attempt was made to cross Garth Brooks. We consciously kept the biggest act of the last two years in Country.”46 Country was “sizzling,” which created a problem. In radio terms, that meant “Hot,” a variety of AC aimed at younger adult women. By 1992, an R&R analysis of station tag lines found “the most frequently used lines now contain the word ‘Hot.’ Even stations that have not changed their music mix have incorporated the word into the positioning statement.” That strategy was epitomized by Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Achy Breaky Heart,” a line dance, pop-​country hit with a hunky singer watched by adoring women. But if younger listeners rose, listeners over 35 fell in 1992. And Cyrus’s hit crossed to AC and Top 40. As the president of a radio group, Norm Schrutt, put it, “country records that cross over always have the highest degree of burn.”47 Though country had never been hotter, it was once again internally conflicted. Listener numbers plateaued in 1993, then dropped in 1994 and beyond. Radio exec Rick Torcasso warned, in early 1995, “I get the sense that people’s passion for Country has dropped dramatically in the last year. They don’t seem to like the new music as much.”48 R&R country columnist Lon Helton wrote, “The once tranquil world of Country radio has turned into a maelstrom of competition.”49 At the end of 1995, he concluded, “1995 will go down as the year programmers, consultants, and researchers detected waning ‘passion levels’ for the music among Country listeners.”50 The fire had gone out of New Country. All those programmers, consultants, and researchers—​typical of commercial radio by the mid-​1990s—​contributed to the cynicism about radio’s country dominance that Negus discovered. Reporter Bruce Feiler portrayed Columbia trying to break Wade Hayes. Even before Hayes released his first album, some $250,000 was spent flying him to meet radio programmers. Eight independent promoters worked his first single full-​ time. Overall, Feiler wrote, “there were probably two dozen people around the country whose primary purpose was cajoling the 183 stations that reported to Radio & Records to add ‘On a Good Night’ to their playlists.” Ultimately the song was just okay, a safe choice that wouldn’t make stations nervous about listeners switching off but not striking enough to win fan adoration. It was understandable, Feiler thought, that labels were now cautious: there were many more of them, 31 in 1996, up from six in 1990, competing

Country Radio: Format and Genre    241 for the same number of radio slots on those tight playlists. The process created a “need for blandness.”51 Even at this late date, country as a format remained fragile in national terms. When WYNY, the FM that had replaced WHN as New York’s country station, switched back to its disco roots as WKTU in 1996, it left the nation’s biggest city without a country channel for what would prove to be 17 years. As country again reverted to the bottom of the pop menu, old anxieties of crossover, factored in gender terms more than anything else, were revived. A young LeAnn Rimes, sounding like Patsy Cline (icon of country to MOR crossover), was “generating polarizing opinions among listeners” and “high burn scores”—​audience backlash—​in 1996 with “Blue,” though the song remained loved “among upper-​demo females.” 52 By 1997, Rimes had bigger crossover success singing Diane Warren’s “How Do I Live”; and even that paled compared to Shania Twain’s international smash, “You’re Still the One,” which made Come on Over the top selling album of the decade. These were, Radio & Records noted in a rhetoric the Cline era could have employed, “songs that sound far more mainstream than twangy.” Luke Lewis, president of Twain’s label, Mercury/​Nashville, said, “We don’t want to wreck a career just because we want to maximize a record. Shania’s concerned about it, too. But at some point it becomes unfair to an artist to say, ‘We’re not going to get as much exposure as possible, because we might piss off some people at Country.’ ”53 The anguish over country’s unprecedented success, strange unless one recalls the equal ambivalence that accompanied grunge’s rock breakouts from Seattle or the hip hop wars of West and East coasts, preceded the megamergers that followed Bill Clinton’s deregulatory 1996 Telecommunications Act. Country became a music of strict formats before Clear Channel was Clear Channel. One result was that its stars could now compete in stature with stars of any other category. Another result was that those stars wore out their welcome on country radio. Neither Garth Brooks nor Shania Twain had regular country hits by the early 2000s. George Strait, who had preceded them but never risen as high, had barely slowed down, and Reba McEntire wasn’t far behind. The country radio ideal remained a certain sound, modern and homey, without a meddling star image to complicate matters or threaten intrusion into another format category. It was a problem, some now believed, for country to get too hot. Professionally upbeat, aware they needed a bigger slice of the listening demographic than most formats to stay relevant to both record industry and advertisers, country programmers were not inclined to complain about artists or listeners. But when they did, it was often about women, like old-​timer Mike Sheppard who said in 1998 that country took off because of young females, “But now they’re driving the bus.”54 A couple of years later, San Antonio program director Roger Allen said he wanted to ask, “what’s going on with male listeners and Country. When I think about pop-​sounding country music, I think female-​leaning. Are male Country listeners feeling left behind?”55 As a new century and new technological paradigms loomed, a host of battles were about to ensue in answer.

242    Oxford Handbook of Country Music

“Never Ever Getting Back Together”: Country Radio in a Divided New Century The expulsion of the Dixie Chicks from country music in 2003 after singer Natalie Maines said she was ashamed that George Bush was from Texas in the run-​up to the second war in Iraq struck many observers as a radio story. The group moved, Chris Willman reported, from charting in one format to charting topically in another: talk radio, which loved to fan flames—​Glenn Beck said that Maines should be shoved into an airplane propeller. Talladega, Alabama’s WTDR became the first country station to boycott Dixie Chicks songs, though the group had the number one song in the format. Everybody followed, in large blocks, because the end of ownership limits with the Telecommunications Act meant a Cumulus Media decision affected 260 stations; Clear Channel’s ban, never fully admitted, more than 1,000 stations. Chuck Browning, who ran the Cox chain, said, “we did some callout research, and the vast majority said we don’t want it.” A sociological study later supported that finding, but the Big Brother quality of the Dixie Chicks becoming un-​Country was frightening. John McCain, no liberal, ran a congressional hearing, asking radio execs, “Would you do that to me? Then why do it to a group of entertainers?”56 Looked at as a gender story, the Dixie Chicks saga was no less troubling. Their purging came during a 22-​month period that saw no solo female performer have a number one country hit. Only 4 of 34 top 10 country hits in the first half of 2003 featured women, compared to 14 in 1998. Mike Dungan, CEO of Capitol Nashville, said, “Women, for the most part, were making very, very pop records. We finally pushed the format too far in that direction.” Shania Twain crossover had been replaced by Dixie Chicks, who played instruments and sounded traditionalist on “Long Time Gone”: “We listen to the radio to hear what’s cookin’,/​But the music ain’t got no soul./​ Now they sound tired but they don’t sound Haggard,/​They’ve got money but they don’t have Cash.” When they proved too liberal, the next standard bearer, ending the almost two-​year drought, was Gretchen Wilson with her Walmart working class themed “Redneck Woman.” But making a woman as hardcore as Hank Williams Jr. or Toby Keith proved unwieldy. Wilson was replaced by polished American Idol winner Carrie Underwood, just hard enough with “Before He Cheats.” Underwood’s handlers kept her crossover contained, releasing different songs to AC. Galante said, “My experience is that country gets upset when you take a record to top 40 or AC before you take it to them or if you’re working on a record simultaneously, but we’re not. We’re working two separate records.”57 If neo-​traditionalism paved the way for Garth Brooks, an era that saw country radio divided over what to do with women and their tendency to succeed beyond format definitions was fated to receive a Dear John letter from Taylor Swift. Neither southern

Country Radio: Format and Genre    243 nor working class, Swift name-​checked New Country favorite “Tim McGraw” in her first single and said, “radio is the biggest priority for me and building those relationships.” But she also covered rapper Eminem live in concerts and courted contemporary pop culture. Her label head, Scott Borchetta, said, “We wanted her to be viral, and she was—​particularly with the younger, internet-​savvy crowd.” Radio programmer Becky Brenner admitted, “Her popularity on MySpace was a big deal for us.”58 While Swift was recognized at the highest level of country accolade, winning CMA Entertainer of the Year in 2009 and 2011, her success threatened to outshine country. Already, in 2011, more traditional singer Miranda Lambert took ownership of the Female Vocalist category. And in 2013, despite first-​week sales of more than a million copies and critical acclaim, Swift’s Red lost Album of the Year and venerable George Strait beat her for Entertainer of the Year. If Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” had been shared by country and AC, with sizable Top 40 support, and “Red” aimed at country radio, “I Knew You Were Trouble,” cowritten with Swedish pop producers Max Martin and Shellback, left no room for country airplay. Perhaps the CMA results were payback. Swift made her next album, 1989, entirely pop focused and left country altogether. Kicking its biggest artists out of the category left country radio with what critic Jody Rosen in 2013 called “bro-​country,” meaning “music by and of the tatted, gym-​ toned, party-​hearty young American white dude.”59 Alongside Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean, and others, Rosen cited “Cruise” by Florida Georgia Line, then enjoying a record-​breaking 22nd consecutive week atop the country charts, on the way to 24 total. Country radio had never loved a song this much, at a time when—​arguably, at least—​it had never loved women so little. This was party music by boys and for boys. Women’s role was to be ornamental: as “Girl in a Country Song” by Maddie & Tae put it, “it’s gettin’ kinda cold in these painted on cut-​off jeans./​I hate the way this bikini top chafes.” The anti-​bro anthem concluded, sadly, “We used to get a little respect./​ Now we’re lucky if we even get/​To climb up in your truck, keep our mouth shut and ride along/​And be the girl in a country song.” If the backlash against women in country had started with concerns about pop crossover, the ascent of “Cruise” to a high place on the Top 40 charts—​its remix featured the Florida Georgia Line bros rapping alongside Nelly—​raised no hackles. Men flirting with rock or now rap somehow never did. Less remarked on, in the castigating of twenty-​first-​century country radio, was that once again it had become just one strong player among many. At the beginning of the century, the massive popularity of the multiplatinum O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, built on traditional songs such as “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” and “O Death,” had demonstrated the popular appeal of country music as a genre, defined in large part as the antithesis of format radio. Increasingly, performers such as Eric Church and Jason Isbell demonstrated an ability to come off as what a hipster rock fan would call indie: interested in pushing the envelope topically, if not always sonically, positioned to appeal to fans who defined their taste as not fully mainstream. And notably, this

244    Oxford Handbook of Country Music paradigm shift was often led by women, beginning with Lambert, who despite having first emerged through the reality competition Nashville Star, was a committed experimentalist and feminist, introducing other women performers with her band Pistol Annies. The success of Kacey Musgrave’s 2013 hit “Merry Go ‘Round,” a cosmopolitan glimpse of small-​town life, owed as much to support from outside country radio as inside it. As Dungan, more sympathetic to this iteration of women in country and head of Musgrave’s label put it, “We have been watching an influx of younger, hipper people to our music, people who don’t necessarily listen to country exclusively.”60 At the CMA Awards in 2015, Chris Stapleton—​utterly unplayed by country radio up to that point, which made his inclusion an example of how the trade organization, at times, saw its role as nudging rather than echoing airplay decisions—​gave a performance with Justin Timberlake that made him instantly the biggest new name in the category. Country radio, once centered on live radio, then personality radio, then format radio, now manifests as what might be provisionally called networked radio: not the big networks, like ABC and CBS, that in the 1950s migrated to television from radio, but the new powers that made even those big broadcasters shrink: Internet sites such as YouTube, satellite broadcasts from SiriusXM, musical discovery via one’s peers on Facebook, record recommendation services such as Pandora, and streaming companies like Spotify. Individual superstars, like Swift, were now their own brands. Everybody else had to rely on network effects: creating coalitions of support, strategies of affiliation and disaffiliation, from songwriting gigs to synch deals. That hustle became the underlying narrative of the new Nashville: from the television program Nashville, which regularly portrayed the town as a place where East Nashville hipsters and out gay songwriters collaborated with mainstream arena acts and reality show producers, to the actual city, booming in its postindustrial creative class reincarnation. We can end with a version of country radio that’s both postmillennial and utterly familiar, Mornings with Storme Warren on SiriusXM’s mainstream Nashville channel, The Highway. Warren, a Generation X version of Ralph Emery, is more host than music picker:  comfortable talking with his female staffers and guest artists about everything from Stapleton’s musically supportive wife on the CMAs to removable man buns, a toned-​down bro with adult contemporary appeal. His show lacks, notably, commercials—​country radio in this iteration sells subscribing, more like HBO than the mass-​appeal versions of the past. The playlist, consequently, is longer than in the height of the format era. Heard over the course of a couple of hours, Mornings with Storme Warren finds room for Sam Hunt incorporating hip hop and R&B moves, for Little Big Town’s gender bending “Girl Crush” and other moves that could be called daring within the center—​even a little confrontational about that subject position in the case of Church’s great recurrent “How ‘Bout You.” Yet the dominant tone is anything but risky: this is comfortable programming to get you through those long stretches of road between, say, Tennessee and Alabama. And nothing suggests that it, or its influence, will be fading anytime soon.

Country Radio: Format and Genre    245

Notes 1. Nate Rau, “Sony Nashville CEO Talks Importance of Country Radio,” The Tennessean, February 25, 2015, accessed November 22, 2015, http://​www.tennessean.com/​story/​ money/​industries/​music/​2015/​02/​20/​sony-​nashville-​ceo-​talks-​importance-​country-​ radio/​23768711/​. 2. Russ Penuell, “On Music and Scheduling,” Country Aircheck, May 26, 2015, accessed November 22, 2015, https://​www.countryaircheck.com/​pdfs/​current052615.pdf. 3. I  more fully explore these topics in Eric Weisbard, Top 40 Democracy:  The Rival Mainstreams of American Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 4. Richard A. Peterson, “The Dialectic of Hard-​Core and Soft-​Shell Country Music,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 1 (1995): 273–​300. 5. Wayne Daniel, Pickin’ on Peachtree:  A  History of Country Music in Atlanta, Georgia (Urbana–​Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 1990), 93; Radio Digest XV, no.  5 (November 7, 1925): 4. 6. Daniel, Pickin’ on Peachtree. See also Pamela Grundy, “‘We Always Tried to Be Good People’: Respectability, Crazy Water Crystals, and Hillbilly Music on the Air, 1933-​1935,” Journal of American History, vol. 81 no, 4 (1995): 1591–​1620. 7. Chad Berry, ed., The Hayloft Gang:  The Story of the National Barn Dance (Urbana–​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 8. Charles Wolfe, A Good-​Natured Riot:  The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999). 9. Ibid.; Craig Havighurst, Air Castle of the South:  WSM and the Making of Music City (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 10. Pete Stamper, It All Happened in Renfro Valley (Lexington:  The University Press of Kentucky, 1999). 11. Tracey E.  W. Laird, Louisiana Hayride:  Radio and Roots Music Along the Red River (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 12. Charles Wolfe, “The Triumph of the Hills: Country Radio, 1920-​50,” in Country: The Music and the Musicians, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Country Music Foundation/​Abbeville Press, 1994), 41–​63. 13. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 6; Bill Malone, Country Music, U.S.A.: A Fifty Year History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). 14. Kristine M. McCusker, “‘Bury Me Beneath the Willow’:  Linda Parker and Definitions of Tradition on the National Barn Dance, 1932-​1935,” in A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music, ed. Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 5. 15. Kristine M. McCusker, Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-​Tonk Angels: The Women of Barn Dance Radio (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 16. “Hank Williams -​Grand Ole Opry -​1949,” YouTube video, 24:32, accessed November 22, 2015, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=vGl7_​ZMJqSI. 17. Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound:  The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 18. Pecknold, Selling Sound, 133–​167. 19. Paul Hemphill, The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music (New York: Pocket Books, 1971).

246    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 20. Ibid. 34, 42. 21. Ibid. 117, 122. 22. Ralph Emery, with Tom Carter, Memories:  The Autobiography of Ralph Emery (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1991), 14, 85. 23. Kim Simpson, “Country Radio’s Growing Pains in the Music Trades, 1967-​1977,” American Music 27, no. 4 (2009): 500–​514; see also Kim Simpson, Early ’70s Radio: The American Format Revolution (New York: Continuum, 2011). 24. Johnny Cash, with Patrick Carr, Cash:  The Autobiography of Johnny Cash (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1997), 197. 25. Loretta Lynn, with George Vecsey, Coal Miner’s Daughter (New  York:  Vintage, 2010 [1976]). 26. Weisbard, Top 40 Democracy, 70–​111. 27. Simpson, “Country Radio’s Growing Pains.” 28. Ed Salamon, WHN:  When New  York City Went Country (Los Angeles:  Archer Books, 2013), 29. 29. Jim Duncan, “Country” column, Radio & Records, October 1, 1976. 30. “Bob Pittman: The R&R Interview,” Radio & Records, November 19, 1976. 31. Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (New York: Routledge, 1999), 103–​130. 32. Edward Morris, “New, Improved, Homogenized: Country Radio Since 1950,” in Kingsbury, Music and the Musicians, 65–​77. 33. Jim Duncan, “Country” column, Radio & Records, February 21, 1975. 34. “A Conversation with Randy Michaels,” Radio & Records, February 24, 1978. 35. Jim Duncan, “Country” column, Radio & Records, January 18, 1980. 36. Jim Duncan, “Country” column, Radio & Records, September 26, 1980. 37. “Media Marketing” column, Radio & Records, February 6, 1981. 38. Jim Duncan, “Country” column, Radio & Records, May 22, 1981. 39. Lon Helton, “Country” column, Radio & Records, July 22, 1983. 40. Lon Helton, “Country” column, Radio & Records, October 7, 1983. 41. Ken Barnes, “On the Records” column, Radio & Records, July 26, 1985; Robert Palmer, “Nashville Sound: Country Music in Decline,” New York Times, September 17, 1985. 42. “State of the Country” package, Radio & Records, March 7, 1986. 43. Lon Helton, “Country” column, Radio & Records, December 19, 1986. 44. Lon Helton, “Country Radio: A Format in Metamorphosis,” Radio & Records, February 20, 1987. 45. Lon Helton, “Country” column, Radio & Records, October 25, 1991. 46. “Country Music Conquers New Heights,” Radio & Records, March 5, 1993. 47. Ibid. 48. Lon Helton, “Country” column, Radio & Records, January 27, 1995. 49. Lon Helton, “Country” column, Radio & Records, March 3, 1995. 50. Lon Helton, “Country” column, Radio & Records, December 15, 1995. 51. Bruce Feiler, Dreaming Out Loud: Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, Wade Hayes, And The Changing Face Of Nashville (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 224–​233. 52. Steve Wonsiewicz, “Sound Decisions” column, Radio & Records, August 2, 1996. 53. Steve Wonsiewicz, “Sound Decisions” column, Radio & Records, January 30, 1998. 54. Lon Helton, “Country” column, Radio & Records, July 17, 1998. 55. Lon Helton, “Country” column, Radio & Records, October 27, 2000.

Country Radio: Format and Genre    247 56. Chris Willman, Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music (New York: The New Press, 2007); Gabriel Rossman, Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 59–​70. 57. Weisbard, Top 40 Democracy, 245–​248. 58. Ibid. 59. Jody Rosen, “Jody Rosen on the Rise of Bro-​Country, Vulture, Radio Vulture, August 11, 2013, accessed November 28, 2015, http://​www.vulture.com/​2013/​08/​rise-​of-​bro-​country-​ florida-​georgia-​line.html. 60. Carlo Rotella, “Kacey Musgrave’s Rebel Twang,” New York Times Magazine, March 15, 2013.

Chapter 12

C ou ntry Mu si c and Telev i si on Tracey E. W. Laird

If country music’s history on television has a chronological apex, it must be the year 1969. That year debuted Hee Haw, a program that positioned many of country music’s most enduring legends amid the hay bales and cornfields of mythical Kornfield Kounty, stuck somewhere at the imagined intersection of Southern and Midwestern rural America. As it remains tempting to do today, critics commonly dismissed Hee Haw for its over-​the-​top visual mash-​up of “hillbilly” stereotypes: from blacked-​out teeth to sleeping hound dogs, ramshackle shacks to scarecrows. Yet no program with a country music focus and a variety show format enjoyed the long history and cultural resonance of Hee-​Haw. One reason for its success was that it wed the homespun, rural feel of the old radio barn dance with the most cutting edge approach to television production, particularly editing, of its time. Something old met something new on Hee Haw—​the longstanding duo of country music and comedy met a televisual style that foregrounded the program’s mediated character. For this reason, Hee Haw epitomizes country music’s entire history on television, at least in the twentieth century. Hee Haw’s debut roughly coincides with two other memorable country music variety shows: the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour and the critically acclaimed Johnny Cash Show. Although both were comparatively short-​lived, they portrayed characteristics or at least a spirit that continued in later examples of country music television, and that differed from Hee Haw. Glen Campbell’s show carried on the bid for a more cosmopolitan and urbane, sport-​coat-​wearing paradigm for country music that began with the Nashville Sound. Its host was a product of television. He conveyed through his dress and comportment a quality carried over in successors like The Barbara Mandrell Show during the 1980s, in music videos, and in glitzy award show performances that shake off the most stereotypical visual trappings of country music history and a number of its musical ones. Johnny Cash conveyed deep roots in country music and a personal gravitas heavy enough to offset the “27-​piece pit orchestra of strings, horns, and woodwinds” brought in

250    Oxford Handbook of Country Music initially for pop-​oriented guest performers “to supplement the Tennessee Three.”1 Cash’s show was recorded in Nashville at the historic Ryman Auditorium, a location anchoring the program’s roots in tradition. Regular segments led viewers to connect the historical dots between gospel, comedy, Western, Nashville Sound, or between young and old performers. At the same time, Cash hosted musicians from a wide range of styles as well as comedians and other entertainers, asserting country music’s place within a broad range of US culture.2 This won the show critical acclaim, as did its televisual style and conscientious topicality. The former included multiple camera angles to add visual variety. The latter included attention to historic and contemporary topics—​prisons, indigenous people, and the Dust Bowl, for instance—​through “Ride This Train” segments. These wed music with prefilmed images or narrative sequences related to the song lyrics.3 The Johnny Cash Show presented country music as one chamber of America’s musical heart, distinctive and yet connected to other musical styles of folk, blues, and rock. It continues in conceptual and commercial frameworks like Americana, or roots music before then. It also remains alive in the public television institution Austin City Limits that, like Cash minus his presence as charismatic curator, showcases country music as one aspect of a seamless historic American musical tapestry.4 As much as critics loved The Johnny Cash Show, they maligned Hee Haw. And yet Hee Haw picked and grinned its way through the small screen memories of more than one generation of American viewers, outlasting its contemporaries by two decades. Starting in 1969 on the CBS network, it was cancelled in 1971 despite its popularity. The show carried on via syndication, independently produced and distributed, for two decades longer, ending in 1992. During that time, Hee Haw established its quintessential position in country music’s history on television for how it looked to the past for rural forms of humor and musical tradition, to the present for contemporary country music icons, and to the future for newer technology-​driven editing and formatting possibilities. All three 1969 examples trace precedents back to television’s earliest attempts to pair country music to its potential audiences through the small screen. When television started in earnest, the “radio barn dance” was a well-​established country music spin on the variety show format, popular with radio audiences across the country. It was natural to extend the model from radio to television: live audience plus musical acts, comedy sketches, novelty performers, and one or more host personalities. This was partly practical: recording a television signal was so much a conundrum that the medium remained live for its first few years.5 The earliest producers simply looked for ways to add visual interest to the sounds, like NBC’s Village Barn, a late-​1940s broadcast of square dancers in a New York club by the same name (1948–​1950).6 During this “awkward adolescence” of TV programming, ambition extended little beyond a “minimal visualization of the audio.”7 Variety shows were a step up from this, eventually integrating pretaped segments into an otherwise live broadcast. Outside country music, Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan made lasting impressions as variety show hosts and set precedents that extended into the 1970s with programs hosted by Carol Burnett (beginning in 1967), Sonny and Cher, and the Osmonds.

Country Music and Television    251 The radio barn dance format likewise could easily extend to the new medium: an announcer introduces a variety of performers, mostly musical, who bring upbeat comedy and heartfelt sentiment to weekly audiences. With the live audience already in place, now the television audience could see as well as hear the performers. Yet although it seems a simple enough matter of turning on the cameras, only a few of the early radio barn dances recast for television survived for long. Material limitations partly explain why. Many pioneer programs of this nature originated from local television stations lacking the equipment and the personnel to pull off a professional-​looking show. Among non-​network attempts, the Hometown Jamboree in Los Angeles, California, stands out as a successful, long-​running favorite on local stations. Most others tried and failed. Another explanation for the difficulty of transferring a radio barn dance to TV is more philosophical, having to do with differences between these media as experienced by an audience not physically present for the event. Media scholar Marshall McLuhan famously characterized this difference as “hot” versus “cold.”8 Colorful acts on the radio barn dances lived in the imaginations of radio listeners, their colors heightened and boosted through the medium’s “theater of the imagination.”9 A quality of immediacy characterizes radio. By comparison, these same acts shown on television seemed distant and remote, their colors not just dulled but rendered black, white, and gray on early television screens.10 Pacing likewise works differently on radio versus television. Rules of good public speaking dictate radio, where listeners depend on audio cues in a way that necessitates a pace slow enough to not lose the thread. But the same pacing can have very different results when experienced through the small screen. What unfolds in a satisfying arc on radio—​a conversation between an announcer and a performer, or even the narrative trajectory of a story song—​can drag on television. Thus, networks experimented with part-​time or temporary coverage for some of these programs, such as Chicago’s National Barn Dance that aired as the half-​hour ABC Barn Dance from February to November 1949.11 They kept trying well into the 1950s. Pee Wee King hosted a program on Louisville’s WAVE-​TV that was picked up by ABC in summer 1955. The matriarch of radio barn dances, The Grand Ole Opry, televised from 1955–​1957 and was carried part-​time on ABC for nearly a year, from mid-​October 1955 to mid-​September 1956.12 Cincinnati’s Midwestern Hayride enjoyed an especially long run, beginning in 1948 when it switched to television. Between 1951 and 1961, its location, schedule, network, and hosts changed, but the country music variety show format remained.13 Also notable, the Ozark Jubilee began televised broadcasts from Springfield, Missouri, in January 1955 on the ABC network. Through a couple of name changes, including Country Music Jubilee (1957–​1958) and then Jubilee, U.S.A., the show aired regularly until November 1961. As host, Red Foley arguably “set the tone for all country music TV shows: easygoing host, cornball comedians, and, oh yes, country singers.”14 His protégé for combining these elements was Porter Wagoner, once a frequent Ozark Jubilee guest, whose own weekly half-​hour, music-​driven television show began in 1961 and lasted two decades; famously, it introduced Dolly Parton. Foley’s three elements wove together as the basic fabric of Hee-​Haw, but in a way that also took in more specifically televisual considerations. And while its design links back

252    Oxford Handbook of Country Music to the radio barn dances of yore, Hee Haw was, at its core, a product of the 1960s. Its two hosts had established themselves during the decade leading up to the show. Buck Owens was a country music superstar with previous television experience via a syndicated program broadcast out of Oklahoma City.15 His string of hits was slowing down as the 1960s drew to a close, and Hee Haw meant a chance for him to shift focus. Roy Clark was a string virtuoso—​twice a national banjo champion—​with a fun-​loving spirit and personal warmth that communicated uncannily well through the small screen. Clark had already gained television exposure as a guest performer on The Beverly Hillbillies, playing either the guitar-​picking businessman Cousin Roy Halsey or, in drag, his mother Myrtle.16 In those appearances, just as on almost any episode of Hee Haw, Clark looks beside himself with delight and a natural for television.17 Both musicians had also visited as guests on The Jonathan Winters Show, where Clark further demonstrated his prowess as a comedian. More critically, he there made a behind-​the-​scenes connection with the two writers who created Hee Haw. John Aylesworth and Frank Peppiatt got their start as the first successful television sketch comedy duo in their native Canada. Each went on to establish successful careers as writers for US television, accumulating years of experience conceiving variety shows for the likes of Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Dean Martin, and Julie Andrews. For Aylesworth and Peppiatt, two sources of inspiration fueled the spark of an idea that became Hee Haw. One was the phenomenal success of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-​ In, which started in January 1968.18 Another was the prominence of both rural-​themed TV programming and country music. In his memoir about his long association with the show, Aylesworth writes, “Back in our office, we looked at the latest Nielsen ratings. Practically the entire Top Ten were CBS country-​oriented sitcoms, leading off with The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction. Then, in a real movie moment, we glanced over at the coffee table and saw a copy of a magazine with a full-​page photo of Loretta Lynn on the cover and the headline ‘COUNTRY MUSIC HOT!’ in big red letters.”19 Besides Clark, other country musicians had found their way onto television sitcoms during the 1960s. They repeatedly demonstrated country music’s ability to create atmosphere or evoke a more or less specific set of associations on rural-​themed shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies or The Andy Griffith Show. In the case of the latter, the show drew on a sense of nostalgia for presumably simpler times.20 Musing on the contemporary and the continuing appeal of Andy Griffith reruns, one writer pinned it to the show’s “clear moral code” and how it “captures a romantic myth that continues to entice and satisfy our yearning for a simpler world, one filled with hope, purpose, respect, love, laughter, understanding, and a sense of belonging and permanence.”21 Music played a key part in this appeal. For example, beginning in its third season in 1963, the Dillards regularly appeared as the four Darling Brothers on The Andy Griffith Show. Prior to the television gig, the Dillards had moved to Los Angeles where they performed in a bluegrass club called the Ash Grove and signed to Elektra Records.22 Griffith, also a guitar player, had urged their hiring because he wanted “to provide an atmosphere of genuine country music.”23 As Doug Dillard recalled, the group spoke only one line ever—​“Great

Country Music and Television    253 beans, Aunt Bee”—​when she brought them food at the jail.24 Their role was primarily musical, in other words. At the same time it was atmospheric, as they conveyed an air of “comic menace” every time their jalopy rolled into “peaceful Mayberry with their superstitions, jugs of moonshine, and bluegrass.”25 The Beverly Hillbillies set up plots around performances of other country musicians besides Clark, notably the bluegrass duo Flatt and Scruggs, also responsible for the sitcom’s chart-​topping theme song. “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” established the rural associations of characters and summarized the show’s premise: a bumpkin family without schooling and positively countrified accidentally strikes it rich. They move to California, with implications both comic but also potentially critical of the urbane materialism of modern life.26 Years later, beginning in 1979, another rural-​themed program, The Dukes of Hazzard, struck a parallel chord when it opened each week with the equally iconic Waylon Jennings. More atmosphere than summary, the Dukes theme conveyed the romantic innocence of two “good old boys” whose free-​spirited and adventuresome ways get them into dilemmas; at the same time, their good intentions and common sense always manage to skirt serious trouble and to best their bumbling, cartoon-​like antagonists. Then, as in 1969, country music was both commercially popular and evoked values of simplicity, good-​heartedness, humor, or free-​form nostalgia. Hee Haw writers and creators Aylesworth and Peppiatt lacked experience with country music or even rural life at the time when their inspiration took hold. Their solution underscores another reason for Hee Haw’s success: the believability of its cast. Based in California, Aylesworth and Peppiatt determined early on that tapings would occur in Nashville, an indicator of their desire to build a show with genuine appeal to the same audiences responsible for the Loretta Lynn magazine cover. They searched for well-​ established rural comedians to join both on-​screen and writing teams. Archie Campbell, for example, came to Hee Haw with a comedic background that included several albums recorded in the 1960s and regular appearances on The Grand Ole Opry. Their search also led them to longtime comedian Minnie Pearl as well as Louis Marshall “Grandpa” Jones, Lulu Roman, and David “Stringbean” Akeman.27 Junior Samples was a rotund character in overalls from Cumming, Georgia, who, in a very different age of television successfully bid for his Hee Haw audition in the lounge of a Holiday Inn.28 He won the part, and played himself for the next fourteen years, until his death in 1983. Both longtime professionals like Campbell, Jones, and Pearl, and spotlight newcomers like Samples, presented a tone of rural humor that navigated stereotypes with a sense of insider awareness and a wink. Pearl, for example, spun much of her humor from relationships with characters around her, or with characters who emerged in her storytelling. A sense of human connectedness to audience members partly accounts for her longevity as an entertainer. She once told an interviewer, “I am tempted to say some Southern humor is gentler than other forms of humor. … I don’t make fun of people’s frailties, except in the way I am guilty of the same frailties.”29 Other writers and performers on Hee Haw lacked direct ties to country living but brought a feel for rural-​themed comedy and storytelling. In some cases, they also brought a passion for research that served well the imaginary backwoods landscape

254    Oxford Handbook of Country Music of “Kornfield Kounty” and countered any lack of “authenticity” for their rural credentials. As Campbell reportedly quipped, “ ‘An old joke is brand new if you’ve never heard it before.’ ”30 Cast member and comedy writer Don Harron mined “from dusty tomes at the university library,” reaching back as far as Samuel Johnson in mid-​eighteenth-​ century London.31 He delivered much of this material on Hee Haw during his KORN newscasts as Charlie Farquharson, a character he had first introduced on Canadian television in 1952. Campbell, too, borrowed an “occasional wheeze” from Joe Miller’s Jests, a book first published in 1739 and attributed to a London-​based actor and wit.32 The need to generate fresh material in a short time frame saw other Hee Haw contributors looking to the past as well. For the stories he told on air, Grandpa Jones drew material from 1940s rural comedian Herb Shriner. He also reached back a decade earlier to Bob Burns, famous for appearing on Bing Crosby’s radio show and for once inventing a funny musical instrument out of a “gas pipe and a whiskey funnel.”33 Burns dubbed his creation the “bazooka,” a name later transferred to the not-​funny World War II-​era rocket launcher with a similar long cylindrical shape. As the show went on, Hee Haw producer Sam Lovullo eventually hired Gene Autry’s once upon a time screen partner Pat Buttram to write rural-​themed material as well. All in all, one of Hee-​Haw’s most interesting aspects, comedy-​wise, was the deep, deep roots for many of its jokes, tall tales, and other short bits. Musically, the show revolved around Owens and Clark, often set up in a respective straight-​man–​impish-​man relationship. As Aylesworth recalled, they envisioned the two of them “like a rural version of Rowan and Martin.”34 They played off one another, for example, during the “Pickin’ and Grinnin’ ” segment, a regular Hee Haw feature where they interrupted fast-​paced musical interludes with corny jokes while the whole cast looked on. These joke-​laden musical segments, as well as other canned verbal exchanges and puns, echoed comedic tunes like “Arkansas Traveler” with roots extending well back into the nineteenth century.35 From the start, Archie Campbell sealed the central place of musical humor when he first performed the comedy tune that would become a Hee Haw staple: “Pfft, You Were Gone.” He evidently neglected to mention to his producers that he was not the song’s composer, an oversight brought to the fore when Bix Reichner, best known for the hit “Papa Loves Mambo,” showed up at a taping to claim his ASCAP rights. Reichner settled with Campbell and continued to compose new verses for this endlessly flexible musical nugget in years to come.36 As seasons progressed, musical humor segments became more and more a regular feature on Hee Haw. The format of a fixed chorus with flexible verses structured other comedic chestnuts like the “Gossip Girls” song and, beginning in 1973–​1974, the moonshine-​soaked lament “Gloom, Despair, and Agony.” The country music luminaries who appeared as guest star musicians each week—​ Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, Merle Haggard, Tammy Wynette, George Jones, Sonny James, and on and on—​increasingly participated in these comedy songs or in other bits like the “cornfield” segments where different cast members popped up to tell short jokes. These guests also performed their songs in a studio setting, often with haystacks and the trappings of a barn as the backdrop. An alternative set that more resembled a living

Country Music and Television    255 room with a fireplace was devised after Merle Haggard refused to perform against bales of hay.37 Even more than its union of music and humor, production elements distinguished Hee Haw most dramatically from its contemporaries like the Campbell or Cash-​ led variety shows. Hee Haw skipped the live audience and instead filmed entirely in a studio. This allowed for more nuanced approaches to television lighting than a stage show could easily achieve, particularly in an era when the camera lens required very bright surroundings. Even more than lighting, however, the editing for Hee-​Haw was on television’s vanguard. It followed the same rapid-​fire aesthetic as Laugh-​In, a quality some television commentators now characterize as “postmodern.”38 Laugh-​In was “a loud, colorful, freeform program that battered viewers with a rapid-​fire barrage of verbal and visual humor with no time to process incoming information. It was simply gag after gag after gag after gag, with no rest, no let up, until a commercial broke the flow.”39 In ways comparable to other 1960s television shows like the Monkees or Batman and Robin, Laugh-​In foregrounded the medium itself. So did Hee Haw. There was no break between, say, the end of a song and the next joke in a cornfield or a short sketch from Junior Samples’s car lot. A musical number by Roy Clark might be spiced up by cartoon pigs in overalls dancing across the bottom of the screen, with Clark doing a double take as he apparently sees them there. Some of these production elements had antecedents to a degree. For example, Eddy Arnold hosted a mid-​1950s variety show also without a live audience. It grafted songs onto loosely narrative skits complete with sets and costumes.40 In the mid-​1960s, The Jimmy Dean Show incorporated musical and comedic interactions with Rowlf the Dog, pioneer among Jim Henson’s Muppets who went on to gain his own fame. Yet, these experimental elements were couched within a framework of televisual continuity. Jimmy Dean spoke directly to the screen audience about what was about to happen and walked over to the fence to begin his conversation with Rowlf.41 Eddy Arnold’s songs in some way fit into the structure of a narrative plot, flimsy though it was, involving a lady and some threatening cowboy outlaws. Hee Haw, by contrast, seemed random. Fragmentation was both its aesthetic and its practical reality. Never rehearsed, Hee-​Haw was executed using cue cards and taped mostly in batches:  all the season’s musical numbers in two weeks or so, then all the segments of the spoof soap opera “The Culhanes of Cornfield County,” then Archie Campbell’s barbershop sketches, Roy Clark’s Empty Arms Hotel sketches, “The Naggers” skits, a series of cornfield pop-​ups, and so on.42 When performers flubbed the lines on the cue cards, those mistakes became “bloopers” that wove their way into the collage of any given episode. A stale or dated or corny joke was punctuated by a fence board slapping its teller on the backside or a cartoon skunk holding its nose as it walked, head shaking in mock disgust, from one side of the screen to the other. Hee Haw producer Sam Lovullo wrote that his prior experience with The Jonathan Winters Show convinced him that one-​ liners trumped sketches in terms of what worked best in television comedy. Hee Haw did both along with musical numbers, all of it taking place for the first decade in the small studio space at Nashville television station WLAC—​the “matchbox” they called it.43

256    Oxford Handbook of Country Music The reels of tape then returned to Los Angeles with the show’s production team where the new EECO editing system used computerized time coding to advance the accuracy and reliability of the editing process way past razors cutting across the tape. Hee Haw was the first television program to be edited completely using this revolution in technology, and its original longtime editor Marco Zappia won the show’s only Emmy award for his work.44 The final edited episodes were then “sweetened” using a 1950s invention by engineer Charley Douglass. Aylesworth described the machine as “a compact black box that stood two feet in height and had a keyboard resembling that of a typewriter.”45 It could add different types of canned audience reaction—​including an assortment of laughs, applause types, as well as groans, oohs, ahhs, and so on—​and it required a judicious hand to operate effectively. Hee Haw’s streamlined approach helped it weather the topsy-​turvy and precarious nature of the television business. Despite its high degree of popularity, CBS pulled Hee Haw from its programming roster in 1971 in a move more than one writer dubbed the “rural purge” that likewise axed The Beverly Hillbillies, Andy Griffith, and all the others.46 One of two explanations account for the controversial decision: either new president Fred Silverman’s distaste for the genre or his need to increase revenue by more directly appealing to sponsors in the largest urban markets.47 Regardless, Hee Haw moved to syndication the following Fall, an option only possible because of its relatively light logistics and tightly efficient taping schedule. After an initial struggle to find national advertisers, Hee Haw established its continuing appeal to living room audiences across the country. It produced new episodes for two more decades, a run that ended May 30, 1992, often ranking at or near the top of all “non-​network television”48 Hee Haw got what a lot of producers missed in the medium’s earliest days when television sprang forth from its radio parent. In many ways, the show maintained the feel of the radio barn dance but executed it with a high degree of media savvy. It bucked against the bid for glamour or, at any rate, middle-​class respectability that one brand of country music industry performers strove to achieve during the same era. But it also moved quickly and communicated a sense of spontaneity, fun, and sincerity that resonated with millions of viewers. It fully embraced its televisual potential, with bright, colorful sets, boldly costumed characters, animated bits, and quick cuts. Yet structurally, it echoed the radio barn dances with a balance of music and humor—​both from big name guests and regular cast members—​executed to an updated tempo. Despite the absence of a linear narrative framework, the Hee Haw characters came across as familiar and sincere—​certainly not real, yet somehow genuine. Certain performers manage to wed hayseed or cornball humor with a sense of intentionality in a way that conveys both hipness and nostalgic longing, all at once, and neither of which should be taken too seriously. Hee Haw musician and comedian Grandpa Jones typified this quality. He reportedly only grasped what the show was intended to be after seeing the first edited episode, and turned to his producer with a smile to exclaim, “It’s merely foolish!”49 And while its day seems to have come and gone, Fall 2015 saw the debut of a Broadway-​style musical based on Hee Haw in Dallas, Texas. The New York Times covered the stage production, summing up its precedent as “the television variety show that

Country Music and Television    257 during its run from 1969 to 1992 painted a fun-​house version of rural America, lowbrow but knowing.”50 As Hee Haw neared its end in the early 1990s, the television medium was dividing and subdividing into more fine-​tuned specialty channels. The idea that country music connoted feelings or values or associations outside the sounds and lyrics of the songs took on more and more weight as proliferating channels tried to carve a niche audience and a marketable brand. Even a decade before, when The Nashville Network was a fledgling cable upstart, its then general manager David Hall saw country music as one aspect of a multifaceted but clearly delineated “themed programming service” that included “gospel, blue grass, game shows, situation comedies and sports.” He elaborated the characteristics of his anticipated audience: “If you say TNN, you’re talking about middle America, the blue collar, middle management person that loves country music.”51 Over the years, programming expanded to include interview segments, backstage looks, and dance shows; programs about fishing, cooking, or home improvement; and NASCAR.52 All targeted the interests of an audience group that personally identified with country music. By 1992, these notions continued to guide people who ran the increasingly competitive and proliferating television business, as they do so today. This idea of hyperspecific, musical niche carving has gotten more complicated and more politically charged in recent years. One analyst suggests, in a kind of reversal of dynamics from the “rural purge” days of CBS, that the FOX network relies on country music to underscore its programming with associations of rural or heartland values. In an age of extremes, then, Dave Robinson argues that country music reinforced the FOX brand at a time when “the political middle ground was disappearing fast and that success relied on positioning FOX News clearly on one side of the divide.”53 He suggests that, recognizing the need for clear, strong market branding, FOX employed country music’s “iconic all-​American imagery” as one element of a larger strategy to “place a relatively new, foreign owned, cable television channel at the heart of the nation’s identity.”54 In a similar, if less politically charged, way, country music’s symbolic trappings led to the National Football League’s hiring of country music stars—​first Hank Williams Jr., then Faith Hill, and now Carrie Underwood—​to sing its weekly lead-​in theme song for Monday Night Football broadcasts. Thus, country music’s role as a signifier moves across time from simplicity or gentle nostalgia amid rural living rooms or barnyards to pumped-​up enthusiasm amid colorful explosions or team contests, the latter of which might equally characterize the opening of an NFL football broadcast or a network news program. Beginning in 2012, the ABC prime-​time soap opera Nashville presented yet another approach to country music on television, depoliticized and lacking any sentiment for rurality. The pilot episode establishes a plot fueled by the themes of political power, money, distrust, lust, love, jealousy, loyalty, artistic aspiration, ambition, regret, vengefulness, ruthlessness, competitiveness—​all the stuff of soap opera drama—​set in a sexy and cosmopolitan version of Nashville. A replica of Nashville’s famous Bluebird Café anchors the locale. A soundtrack of country music, most original compositions,

258    Oxford Handbook of Country Music diegetically anchors the story. These drive Nashville in a way similar to Empire, the contemporary hip hop themed nighttime drama. Both shows blur the lines between television and music stardom and invite newspaper headlines about their conflation: “ ‘Empire’ and ‘Nashville’ have incredible songs on TV. Why is it hard to make them into real-​life hits?”55 Nashville signals changing directions in music and media more generally: how it is created, marketed, and sustained, the latter a question still up in the air. In tone and spirit, it bears little resemblance to Hee Haw or any of its other televised precedents, and whether it will alter the presentation of future country music on television remains to be seen. Taking the long view over three-​quarters of a century, Hee Haw might be understood as a cross section of all of country music’s history on television, maintaining the “feel” or atmosphere of the radio barn dances but executing it with a high degree of media savvy. Its precedents range from live broadcasts of square dancers from a New York City nightclub to rural-​themed sitcoms portraying backwoods caricatures or evoking wistful sentimentality. Its successors include slick Hollywood-​style mini-​narrative videos, glitzy award shows, and mediated intersections of news and entertainment designed to reinforce a presumed set of market-​determined values and expectations for a branded viewing audience. It carried on the spirit and style of what came before, just as it established the pacing and self-​consciousness of what came after. Hee Haw lacked nuance but communicated a sense of genuine fun, a lilting-​and-​twanging, pickin’-​and-​grinnin’ epitome of country music on television.

Notes 1. Frederick E. Danker, “Country Music and the Mass Media: The Johnny Cash Television Show,” Popular Music & Society 2, no. 2 (Winter 1973): 125. 2. YouTube includes segments of Cash performing with Roy Orbison, Linda Ronstadt, Pete Seeger, and Derek [Eric Clapton] and the Dominos, among many others. See John Scott Colley, “The Sound Seen: Country Music on Television,” The Journal of Country Music 3, nos. 3–​4 (Fall–​Winter 1973): 110–​111; Danker, “Country Music and the Mass Media,” 125; and Ken Tucker, “9 to 5: How Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson Qualified for ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’” in Country: The Music and Musicians, ed. Paul Kingsbury, 2nd ed. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994), 258; the latter also mentions the broad lineup of The Johnny Cash Show. Also see Leigh Edwards, Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 21, 62. 3. See Edwards, Johnny Cash, 76–​77. “Ride This Train” was also the title of an album Cash recorded in 1960. Also see Danker, “Country Music and the Mass Media,” 141–​142. 4. See Tracey E.  W. Laird, Austin City Limits:  A  History (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2014). 5. Barbara Moore, Marvin R. Bensman, and Jim Van Dyke, Prime-​Time Television: A Concise History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 44. 6. Alex McNeil, Total Television: A Comprehensive guide to Programming from 1948 to 1980 (New York: Penguin, 1980), 750. 7. Moore, Bensman, and Van Dyke, Prime-​Time Television, 79.

Country Music and Television    259 8. See Marshall McLuhan, “Media Hot and Cold,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1964). 9. This theme threads throughout the author’s previous examination of the radio barn dance, Tracey E. W. Laird, Louisiana Hayride: Radio and Roots Music Along the Red River (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). The notion comes up more generally in Peter Fornatale and Joshua E. Mills, Radio in the Television Age (Woodstock, NY:  Overlook Press, 1980). It also frames a recent study of radio drama by Neil Verma, Theater of the Mind:  Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2012). 10. It could be argued that the experience of television has “heated up,” according McLuhan’s concepts, as picture quality improved and television became more ubiquitous over the years. To stretch cultural theorist Walter Benjamin’s terms, perhaps its mediated quality—​ rather, the distance between a viewer and the live musical experience—​is so much more in the foreground when watching television as opposed to listening to radio. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Art in Modern Culture:  An Anthology of Critical Texts, eds., Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1992), 297–​307. 11. Colley (“Sound Seen,” 109) also mentions that the relatively short-​lived Dumont network carried these programs (perhaps due to their low production costs), and notes programs hosted by Ernie Lee on WLW-​TV in Cincinnati (1947), Lulu Belle on WNBQ-​TV in Chicago (1949), and others. 12. McNeil, Total Television, 287. This contradicts Colley, who indicates that The Grand Ole Opry was broadcast over NBC in 1955. 13. See McNeil, Total Television, 465. Hosts were Willie Thall (1951–​1955), Hugh Cherry (1955–​1956), and Paul Dixon (1957–​1961). Moore, Bensman, and Van Dyke (Prime-​Time Television, 115) identify Dixon as a humorous lip-​syncer. Produced as a syndicated show, it was picked up during summers by NBC (1951–​1952, 1954–​1955, and 1959) and ABC (1957–​ 1958), and for the entire 1955–​1956 NBC broadcast season. 14. Tucker, “9 to 5,” 258. Dates and names come from McNeil, Total Television, 534. McNeil (Total Television, 287) indicates that the Grand Ole Opry’s network run was as a once-​per-​ month replacement for Ozark Jubilee. 15. Sam Lovullo and Marc Eliot, Life in the Kornfield:  My 25 Years at Hee Haw (New York: Boulevard Books, 1996), 13; Lovullo mentions Owens’s program, which originated from WKY and was called the “Buck Owens Ranch Show.” 16. He also made memorable television appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson as well as on The Odd Couple in 1975; thanks go to Travis Stimeling for pointing out the latter, a stunning performance still accessible via YouTube, “Roy Clark -​Malaguena (The Odd Couple),” You Tube video, 3:12, published on May 12, 2012, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=-​xssnp7R51A. 17. Lovullo and Eliot, Life in the Kornfield, 14. Incidentally both Clark and Owens had appeared on an episode of The Jackie Gleason Show dedicated to country music in 1966; see Billboard (October 1, 1966): 22. 18. Lovullo and Eliot, Life in the Kornfield, 11. 19. John Aylesworth, The Corn Was Green:  The Inside Story of Hee Haw (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 18. 20. Nostalgia has been a critical element of American culture since at least the 1970s. One useful source is Lawrence Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

260    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 21. Richard Kelly, The Andy Griffith Show, rev. ed. (Winston-​Salem, NC:  John F.  Blair, 1994), 103. 22. Ibid. 139–​140. 23. Ibid. 51. 24. Ibid. 140. 25. Ibid. 51–​52. 26. Media historian Janet Staiger notes a shift in critical reception of The Beverly Hillbillies. Early critics echoed sentiments like the one she quotes from Jack Gould writing for the New York Times in 1962 that the show was “steeped in enough twanging-​guitar, polkadot gingham, deliberative drawl, prolific cousins and rural no-​think to make each half hour seem as if it contained 60 minutes.” The vitriol softened as the show’s ratings soared, to make room for it as social commentary on misled contemporary values or as a celebration of traditional American values. See Staiger, “The Beverly Hillbillies,” in Blockbuster TV: Must-​See Sitcoms in the Network Era (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Gould quote on p. 55. 27. Grandpa Jones embodied the link between radio and television country music variety shows, having been mentored by beloved radio singer and guitarist Bradley Kincaid, the first to dub him “Grandpa,” beginning in 1935. See Bill C. Malone, “Early Commercial Hillbilly Music,” in Country Music, U.S.A., rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), as well as later editions. 28. Aylesworth, Corn Was Green, 46. 29. Kristine Fredriksson, “Minnie Pearl and Southern Humor in Country Entertainment,” in Country Music Annual, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 85. Fredriksson makes the point about relationships on p. 82. 30. Aylesworth, Corn Was Green, 69. 31. Ibid. 72. 32. See Lovullo and Eliot, Life in the Kornfield, 66–​67; and Aylesworth, Corn Was Green, 85–​87. 33. See Gordon L. Rottman, The Bazooka (Oxford, England: Osprey Publishing, 2012), 16; also Aylesworth, Corn Was Green, 72–​73. 34. Aylesworth, Corn Was Green, 19. 35. Ken Tucker reprints the Time magazine piece titled “The Corn Is Still Green” from August 8, 1969, the same summer Hee Haw premiered. It dates “Arkansas Traveler” to around 1860. Also see Malone, “The Folk Background” in Country Music, U.S.A. 36. Aylesworth, Corn Was Green, 85–​87. Also see Lovullo and Eliot, Life in the Kornfield, 66–​67. 37. Aylesworth, Corn Was Green, 43. 38. Moore, Bensman, and Van Dyke, Prime-​Time Television, 143. Also see Doyle Greene, Politics and the American Television Comedy: A Critical Survey from I Love Lucy through South Park (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 132; Wiley Lee Umphlett, From Television to the Internet: Postmodern Visions of American Media Culture in the Twentieth Century (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006). A useful but much broader meditation on postmodernism that resonates with the structure of Hee Haw might be Dick Hebdige, “A Report on the Western Front: Postmodernism and the ‘Politics’ of Style,” in Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, 331–​341. 39. Moore, Bensman, and Van Dyke, Prime-​Time Television, 146. 40. Michael Streissguth, Eddy Arnold:  Pioneer of the Nashville Sound (Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 141–​143. An example episode of Eddy Arnold Time can be

Country Music and Television    261 found on YouTube, “Eddy Arnold -​Variety Show,” YouTube video, 26:32, published on September 11, 2015, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=tUZo2y2ObD0. 41. A segment of The Jimmy Dean Show featuring Rowlf can be found on YouTube, “Rowlf on The Jimmy Dean Show,” YouTube video, 9:57, uploaded on September 19, 2006, https://​ www.youtube.com/​watch?v=o-​dHo7sIIb4. 42. Lovullo and Eliot, Life in the Kornfield, 17, 32. 43. Ibid. 13. 44. Aylesworth, Corn Was Green, 60, 117. Note that EECO stands for the Electronic Engineering Company of California. 45. Ibid. 61. 46. See Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 203, among many other sources that mention the 1971  “rural purge” on CBS. 47. Kelly, The Andy Griffith Show, 68; Kelly writes that recently placed executives “felt that they [rural shows] were disgracing CBS with their mindless, down-​home humor, [and] they canceled them all with one devastating blow.” Sam Lovullo argued that it was more a business move. 48. Tucker, “9 to 5,” 264. In 1992, Hee Haw made an ill-​fated attempt to update its image with dance floor and shopping mall sets, younger cast members to replace longtime characters—​particularly women—​and a new name: The Hee Haw Show. Needless to say, it bombed. 49. Lovullo and Eliot, Life in the Kornfield, 18. 50. Jon Caramanica, “Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally on ‘Moonshine:  That Hee Haw Musical,’” New York Times online version, September 14, 2015, http://​www.nytimes.com/​ 2015/​09/​15/​theater/​brandy-​clark-​and-​shane-​mcanally-​on-​moonshine-​that-​hee-​haw-​ musical.html?smid=pl-​share&_​r=0. 51. David Black, “Having the Franchise: Country Music TV from the Third Coast,” in Country Music Annual 2001, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 14. 52. Bill Ivey, “The Bottom Line: Business Practices That Shaped Country Music,” in Kingsbury, Music and Musicians, 304–​305. 53. Dave Robinson, “Country Crooners and FOX News: Country Music and the FOX Brand,” in Rock Brands: Selling Sound in a Media Saturated Culture, ed. Elizabeth Barfoot Christian (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 227. 54. Robinson, “Country Crooners,” 227. If he is correct, then country music’s history on television has devolved, at least as FOX uses it, to no more than a jingoistic signifier aimed at inspiring a knee-​jerk identification and surge of team spirit in its viewers; a reaction only possible in the atmosphere of a tribalistic marketing contest that characterizes recent US politics and its purported media coverage. Perhaps in its lack of nuance and in its format of stringing together titillating sound bites, the nature of this presence of country music on television in some ways resembles that on Hee Haw. On the other hand, the spirit of Hee Haw—​never taking itself too seriously but also somehow coming across as genuine—​is flip-​flopped. 55. See Emily Yahr’s piece in The Washington Post, November 11, 2015, accessed online, http://​ www.chicagotribune.com/​entertainment/​tv/​ct-​empire-​nashville-​tv-​songs-​hits-​20151111-​ story.html. ABC cancelled Nashville after four seasons, but it was picked up by CMT (Country Music Television) for a fifth season, to be available for streaming via Hulu.

Chapter 13

C ountry Musi c a nd  Fi l m Barry Mazor

Country music, its makers, its audience, and its cultural context have all had roles to play on film screens and in motion picture scores even longer than country music has been an organized, marketed commercial genre—​even longer than the movies have talked. The interplay of the music and big screen productions, affecting both, has been ongoing for over a century. Yet, that reciprocity—​what country music brought to the movies and the movies brought to country music (to slightly modify the subtitle of Hillbillyland, J. W. Williamson’s significant 1995 book on the hillbilly image on screen)—​ has been only infrequently studied, analyzed, and written about.1 As Travis Stimeling has indicated in the introduction to this volume, systematic research and serious consideration of commercial country music’s history began in earnest in the 1960s, often within academic folklore departments open to the previously underdeveloped subject. Bill C. Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A., the first academic history of the field, was published in 1968; and in the decade that followed, country music, as a subject for both historic research and critical studies, began to take hold.2 In essentially the same time frame, the academic discipline of cinema studies (or “film studies”) was born, most often based, initially, at universities that had working film production departments. With varying degrees of focus on film history, theory, and criticism at different institutions, that new discipline quickly grew to be an operating field of critical study, with whole schools dedicated to it in universities around the world. The two fields have common roots in the developing realization of the significance and worthiness for study of the popular commercial arts, and both have experienced development of more systematic methods of study derived from that understanding, yet there has been little significant interaction between cinema studies and country music historians and critics through over 45 years of coexistence. The orientation of each has made that unlikely. To date, country music historians and critical studies practitioners have interacted little with cinema studies. Apart from passing mentions in biographies of the on-​ set experiences of country stars who have appeared on the big screen, and occasional nods in the direction of the moving image when discussing the general “hillbilly” stereotype or country music visual representations, studies of motion picture depictions

264    Oxford Handbook of Country Music of country music performance, of its audience, and the impact of those depictions on the music’s nature, or how country music has been employed in film soundtracks, have been rare.3 Two seminal critical considerations of the development of country music would nevertheless be significant starting points for any study of this subject. Malone’s 1993 book-​length lecture Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers remains an important introduction to the elements in southern culture that led to the prominence of those country music performance images.4 Richard A.  Peterson’s Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity approaches the postmodern “hillbilly” and “cowboy” image-​creation story further from a sociological perspective, examining the ways the developing country music industry evolved and marketed the music and images over time.5 Neither book, however, makes film representation of country or film employment of the music a central element. One glaring exception to this general lack of examination of country music and film is the singing cowboy movie era, which has received considerable attention, including book-​length histories, biographies of the performers, and critical analyses.6 Yet there has not been, thus far, a single book-​length critical examination, or a useful reference filmography, on country music in film and films on country music as a whole. Many of the most commonplace questions in cinema studies—​how an image or sequence arrived on the screen as it did, the authorship and manufacturing process and commercial and even philosophical contexts that led to that representation, and what the succession of images and sequences can tell us—​have rarely been applied to discussions of country music on film by those studying country music because the methodologies are from an unfamiliar realm. That country historians and critics have commonly delved into similar questions when looking at the making of country recordings, and the musical results of their production details, makes the lack of research into analogous cinematic backgrounds all the more striking. Researchers hoping to explore the intersections of country music and film are presented with several significant logistical challenges. Searches for such topics as “country and western” or “hillbilly” in the American Film Institute’s (AFI) vast AFI Catalog of Feature Films yield meager and spotty results at best. The dependable Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (CMHOF&M) boasts in its promotional literature of “more than 30,000 moving images” in nine formats, a query system based on Past Perfect software, and an ongoing program to digitize moving image holdings; but the holdings are not comprehensive and systematically acquired, nor has the CMHOF&M created an inclusive descriptive catalogue of subgenres, artists, and songs in film. The Moving Image Section of the Library of Congress has a searchable “Jazz on the Screen” filmography of over twenty thousand film and television productions, based on filmographies first assembled by David Meeker over forty years ago, but there is no equivalent resource for country music. As such, it is nearly impossible to acquire even the most basic control of the country music filmography. Scholars will also discover that the available materials for basic research are not only inaccessible but often nonexistent. Many of the professionals who worked behind the scenes in the making of country-​music-​related motion pictures were never interviewed,

Country Music and Film    265 leaving important details unreported about how a country performer or performance came to appear in a picture; the rationale for using particular settings, costumes, and narratives in a film; the projected audience for various productions; and budgeting, promotion, and distribution plans. Archival evidence, however, is perhaps more available for film scholars than for scholars of recorded country music, as documents concerning film production and promotion have been preserved more often than cavalierly treated recording documentation. Yet there is no central film archive devoted to country music on-​screen. Scholars must scour film and television archives around the world, as well as the holdings of amateur collectors, to locate film prints of major releases and the more ephemeral footage—​including newsreel footage—​that could be revealing. Even then, many prints have been lost to physical deterioration or misplacement, moreso because many in film studies have found little interest in such valuable materials as a Cindy Walker short from the 1940s; a limited-​distribution, drive-​in movie, country music featurette from the 1950s; or a Loretta Lynn television commercial from the 1970s. These archival shortcomings are magnified when we consider country music’s popularity on an international scale. Not only are films that include country music of relevant significance; those that might be considered “country music pictures without country music” could be exceptionally useful in allowing scholars to examine the depiction of rural white music making on film. One illustrative example can be found in the 1936 Twentieth Century Fox release Banjo on My Knee, directed by John Cromwell and featuring Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, Buddy Ebsen, and Walter Brennan. The film depicts Depression-​era, down-​home, corn-​liquor-​swilling, banjo-​playing, singing-​and-​dancing families that live on “shanty boats” anchored on the Mississippi. The songs they sing and dance to, however, are uniformly light gospel, ersatz uptown southern pop, or Stephen Foster-​ style minstrel songs—​never anything that sounds remotely like the country music heard on radio and recordings in 1936. The maneuvers or misunderstandings required to avoid country music, given the characterizations and setting, are worthy of study; but the film would be unlikely to be categorized anywhere as a “country music movie” in a database search of the category. Two decades later, things were not much different for Hollywood “A”-​level features. Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg’s A Face in The Crowd (1957) is set around Deep South courthouses and middle-​class barbecues, places where country music thrived during the post-​War country boom then at hand. Though June Carter was an advisor to the production, and Grand Ole Opry comedian Rod Brasfield appeared in it as an actor, the well-​known story of “Lonesome Rhodes” (played by Andy Griffith) as an “Ozark guitar picker” who rises to fame, then potential political power through 1950s media exposure, consistently substitutes vaguely gospel-​inspired southern pop and urban folk music for country music. (The film’s musical director and score composer was New York folksinger Tom Glazer.) As these examples illustrate, scholars must be aware that country music appears in motion pictures where we might not expect to find it and can be absent from films in which its presence would seem most appropriate.

266    Oxford Handbook of Country Music

Country Music and the Silent Film Era Commercial country music started to be recorded systematically in 1924, when Okeh Records recorded Fiddlin’ John Carson, then Henry Whitter, and began marketing both in a line of commercial products that targeted lovers of “Old Familiar Tunes,” as their sales catalogue put it—​especially down-​home, working-​class rural, and “moved to town” southern whites.7 Commonly, if almost never officially, multiple labels and some in the audience called it all “hillbilly music,” of course, but such early characterizations of the field as “Old Familiar Tunes of the Sunny South” had been around before record companies employed them.8 Rick Altman has noted that as early as 1922, Pittsburgh music publishers Volkwein Bros., Inc., advertised collections of older, once-​popular songs that could be useful as accompaniment to silent motion picture sequences in motion picture trade publications and other publications that targeted professional musicians. Published with the title Bits of Old Time Hits, they included songs from the broad musical neighborhood that would eventually be called “country”—​including “Arkansas Traveler,” “Fisher’s Hornpipe,” “Turkey in the Straw,” “Reuben, Reuben,” and “My Old Kentucky Home”—​though they included older pop material as well. The “Old Time” song snippet medleys in these collections, they suggested, could be useful for moving pictures, banquets, and dances alike.9 Although it was relatively unusual to include vocal “bits” as the Volkweins did, similar collections of instrumental music—​ often for solo piano—​served successive cinematic technologies. Organized by emotions, intensity, and content of movie scenes, such publications were common for nearly thirty years and eventually evolved into cue sheets or scores provided by the film distributors to be played along with specific films and scenes.10 Even before the pre-​World War I nickelodeon era of silent movies, music had been called on to accompany magic lantern still slide shows, talks, and introductions to scenes on late nineteenth-​century melodramas, which so often were set in southern locales.11 During the silent film era, which extended from the turn of the twentieth century through the last few silent features of the early 1930s, American picture marketers, with useful feedback and encouragement from regional movie exhibitors, began to address the audience segment that hillbilly music would target later—​and those pictures needed music.12 It is well known that silent westerns were wildly successful, from Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery of 1903 right through that era. Not as well known are the popular “eastern” films, dramas and comedies concerning Appalachian mountaineer love triangles and Hatfield–​McCoy inspired feuds and their remarkable popularity. Historian J. W. Williamson gathered plot synopses from movie trade publications (most often from The Moving Picture World) of 476 silent films released between 1904 and 1929 with such “hillbilly” themes as family feuding, mountain love, moonshining, coal mining life, and other closely aligned topics.13 A majority of the known films had such titles as The Feud and the Turkey (1908), Madge of the Mountains (1911), The Stranger at Hickory Nut Gap (1914), and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1914). Evidence suggests

Country Music and Film    267 that these films were initially intended for small-​town and rural, working-​class southern white audiences and extended to whatever traffic would bear beyond them. Animated films with rural settings were also produced during this period, including Paul Terry’s Down on Phoney Farm (1915) and Farmer Alfalfa Sees New York (1916). Williamson does not discuss the kinds of music that were played in theaters as these hundreds of mountaineer movies were unspooled hundreds or thousands of times, but there should be little doubt, as articles and advertisements in trade publications such as The Moving Picture World attest, that the music was often no different than that played with other melodramas or comedies, with an accent on light classical themes. An early peak in interest in such stories came between 1910 and 1915, as nickelodeon films gave way to twenty-​to twenty-​five-​minute “two reelers” and still longer features. This period also witnessed movie exhibitors and producers becoming more conscious of the value of specific musical accompaniments for specific scenes and settings. As Altman observes, for instance, commentary in The New York Dramatic Mirror decried a pianist who played “Turkey in the Straw” during a scene in which a rural girl prayed at her mother’s knee. The need to broaden the emotional range of the musical accompaniment for these mountaineer stories was clear. “Music for the Picture,” a regular column in The Moving Picture World, written from 1910 to 1917 by former theatrical melodrama music director Clarence E. “The Cue Music Man” Sinn, addressed the role and use of music in varied movie theater presentations, especially the effective pairing of sight and sound for emotional effect, and answered enquiries from movie accompanists who improvised music for multiple pictures each day.14 “Get in all of the local suggestion possible,” Sinn advised, “ ‘Cheyenne,’ ‘Idaho’ etcetera for the cowboy pictures; ‘Old Kentucky Home’ and Southern songs for the South.” For the postbellum drama A Dixie Mother (1910), Sinn suggested in his column of December 1910, “The whole picture is full of pathetic Southern tunes, and when it comes to [the] latter part … your audience should be keyed to that pitch where the tears come easily.” Tellingly, the sort of tear-​ inducing “Southern” tune he goes on to suggest is “Massa’s in the Cold Ground,” a popular nineteenth-​century minstrel song. Collections of musical themes for movie house piano players would soon feature such tunes under the heading “Southern,” in addition to ones more likely to be labeled “pre-​country” today. Relatively few down-​home “folk” tunes struck the columnist as fitting; and with John A. Lomax’s recently published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads not yet widely known, Sinn lamented the slim pickings of cowboy songs to turn to as well.15 By the late silent-​film era, the impact and ubiquity of commercial country music recordings can be seen in sequences such as that in Buster Keaton’s 1928 feature Steamboat Bill, Jr. in which a jailed Buster pantomimes singing Vernon Dalhart’s “The Prisoner Song” to lyrics that are conveniently posted on the cell wall. Musicians in the movie house (inevitably, and by design) would play the song as he sang—​an example of “built-​in” country music becoming part of a film narrative before sound arrived. An organ score for Keaton’s 1923 southern family feud film Our Hospitality had been praised in the publication American Organist for the ways that music anticipated and aided the

268    Oxford Handbook of Country Music changing moods of scenes. All of this suggests that trade publication music ads, surviving movie cue-​sheet collections, local newspaper reports on movies, and musical theme books for theater musicians are ripe fodder for further research into connections between film and the music that came under the hillbilly “Old Familiar Tunes” umbrella with the advent of ongoing country music recording.

Prewar and Wartime Sound Era, 1929–​1945 It was no coincidence that country music’s star system began just as talking picture technology took hold. The coming of country stardom paralleled film’s transition from “story theme as the attraction” to singling out the vaguely identified “Biograph Girl” and then on to the massive promotion of Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford, or Charlie Chaplin.16 Country stars would soon become singing personalities for whom image and sound buttressed each other in creating audience impressions and connections. The promotion of country star personalities occurred on multiple media fronts and involved the interplay of recordings; live, radio, and film performances; print coverage; and consumer product advertising and endorsement ties. Throughout the concurrent first decades of sound film and the country music genre, the reach and interplay of these media—​and their own audience targeting strategies—​directly affected the nature of country music and its audience. Casting a hillbilly or cowboy star in a substantial on-​screen role often suggested the perceived possibility of broad pop appeal. How the music they performed on screen and elsewhere changed when that was the case has been a subject for further study. Alternately, some films featuring country music—​whether shorts, B-​movie features, or even newsreel reports—​targeted rural and small-​town audiences in the southern and western United States. There are stories in numerous musical biographies (ranging from the boyhood stories of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings to that of B. B. King) that suggest, anecdotally, that singing cowboy films were especially popular in the small-​town South and West. Research into the distribution patterns and circumstances of country music films—​including their location on the bill or their coincidence with a live appearance by a leading actor–​singer—​would potentially be more revealing regarding who saw what, where, and how that came to pass. This information might suggest, for example, whether the stars and sounds featured were thought to have only regional appeal or were thwarted from national resonance by the studios’ limited distribution budgets. That famous Variety headline “Sticks Nix Hick Pix” appeared on July 17, 1935, in the wake of repeated, but disappointing, Hollywood attempts to market more rural themed movies to the countryside.17 The films did not have a firm record of appealing more to “country folk” than other movies, but the studios had been testing if they could.

Country Music and Film    269 The first short sound films in this arena were produced within weeks of each other in 1929. Jimmie Rodgers’s The Singing Brakeman and Otto Gray and His Oklahoma Cowboys were produced in Camden, New Jersey, and New York City, respectively, and employed presentation approaches that would be predominant in country and western musicals for years. The Rodgers film places him in a railway station along with two interested grandmotherly ladies who want to hear what he has to sing. The perfunctory dialogue showcases Rodgers’s “Singing Brakeman” persona and sets up the performance of three of his songs. The Otto Gray film presents a film version of the cowboy star’s nationally known vaudeville revue, with head-​on shots that recreate the experience of a live theater audience. The film featured vocal solos, choreographed group musical numbers, rope tricks, dancing, and stage patter, but no narrative element at all. Both films, in fact, could well be considered examples of what film theory terms the “cinema of attractions.” Introduced by cineaste Tom Gunning in a seminal 1986 article that distinguished the goals and tendencies of the peep show machine and early nickelodeon theater era’s loosely linked audiovisual attractions and effects from the appeal of the more narrative-​ intense, plot driven movies that followed, the classification offers a framework for placing and evaluating B-​movie country musicals, for example—​outings often dismissed as disposable for being little more than a succession of musical numbers intended to please country or rockabilly audiences.18 In practice, such musicals work much like westerns, for example, in which the dress and look and body language of the cowboy star and the fistfights or (more relevantly here) the songs said cowboy may stop to perform, are clearly more central audience attractions than the film’s cursory or hackneyed storyline. For example, many vaudeville style reviews, whether country or not, were framed by a flimsy dramatic narrative in which the show might be cancelled as a result of local resistance, financial exigencies, or the ill health of a leading performer. Closer comparison of early country music films reveals deeper connections between the fields of pop and hillbilly music. When Rodgers’s on-​screen debut is compared with other filmic representations of popular singers from the time, for instance, efforts to use film to market Rodgers as a pop-​leaning hillbilly artist become clear. In the film’s roughly nine minutes of footage, Rodgers banters with his appreciative little audience about singing their favorite song, imitates a train whistle, casually ad-​libs “Sing ‘em, boy!” between phrases, and brings off some nice, ingratiating close-​ups. Two years earlier, the groundbreaking “Toot, Toot Tootsie, Goodbye” number in The Jazz Singer—​introduced by Al Jolson’s era-​commencing line “Wait a minute! You ain’t heard nothing yet”—​ showed the famed pop vaudevillian setting the pattern for much of that: bantering with his audience about getting to hear the song they already loved, imitating a bird whistle, ad-​libbing “Hey, hey!” between musical phrases, and taking even longer close-​ups. The similarity between the two filmic representations certainly suggests that Rodgers’s on-​ screen presentation reflected an existing, if still new, pop template—​as do, of course, his pairings with musicians ranging from Hawaiian steel guitar payers to Louis Armstrong on records.19 Similarly, “country revue” films that followed Otto Gray’s debut were often essentially the same in structure as the “Big Broadcast” films of the 1930s that featured such mainstream radio stars as George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, W. C. Fields,

270    Oxford Handbook of Country Music and the Benny Goodman Orchestra. The popularity of the country music revues, as we will see, would remain strong well through the B-​movies of the 1960s, when they were often derided as inane fodder for undemanding down-​home audiences. It is unlikely that many southeastern mountaineer sound musicals would even have been made without the extraordinary success of the singing cowboy movies that proliferated after 1935. Following in the footsteps of Jimmie Rodgers, who died in 1933, several of his “blue yodeler” imitators—​including, most notably, Gene Autry—​exchanged the drifting rounder image for the sleek, modern saddle tramp as the Depression took hold.20 These cowboys were employed and possessed a mission, self-​determination, exciting costumes, and freedom. Whether set in the past or a fantastic western present, singing cowboy films offered action and a diversion from more depressing tales of unemployed drifters. Early examples of on-​screen cowboys who attempted to sing include Ken Maynard and John Wayne, whose singing was so rough that it had to be dubbed. Country music historian Douglas B. Green has carefully documented the multimedia origins and contexts of the singing cowboy trend.21 One of the earliest singing cowboy stars to make use of the multimedia strategy was Gene Autry, who was already well known for his appearances on Chicago radio’s cowboy-​friendly National Barn Dance and his recordings for the American Recording Company, which shared ownership with Republic Pictures, the studio that produced his films.22 Green has also detailed how the creation of cheap, assembly-​line, B-​movie westerns was a product of both the motion picture industry’s need to offer double features to lure people back into Depression-​struck theaters and the arrival of the restrictive Hollywood “Production Code” in 1934, which increased the need for wholesome, family-​friendly pictures that downplayed sex and violence. Cultural critic Peter Stanfield notes that the “family friendly” imperative of 1930s singing cowboy films combined with the “cinema of attractions” format generally employed by singing cowboy film directors yielded relatively disjointed narratives that often came to a halt to allow the leading man to sing a romantic ballad, especially when the lead singer was good-​looking, friendly, and had a nice cowboy outfit. Stanfield—​as well as musicologist Stephanie Vander Wel—​also observes that the presumed wholesomeness of the singing cowboy stars was not undermined by the subtle sexualization of the film’s heroes (tailored for female audiences) or the occasional understated fist fights and other action scenes (which spoke to the young boys who also frequented the films).23 Singing cowboy films exhibited limited but notable gender and racial diversity. “Cowgirl” singers appeared principally in one-​time guest performances, such as Patsy Montana’s appearance in Autry’s Colorado Sunset (1939). Significantly, a number of performing women who have been little noted in recording-​centered histories of country music had substantial on-​screen singing careers and deserve further attention, including Carolina Cotton, Dorothy Page, Mary Lee, Penny Edwards, and Ruth Terry. African American actors also appeared occasionally in singing cowboy films, chief among them Herb Jeffries. Michael K. Johnson, in his book Hoo-​Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos, examines the representation of those musical “bronze buckaroos” and their sidekicks in films intended to reach black audiences, finding that saloon stage performances by

Country Music and Film    271 black musical performers were conceived and received differently when both the on-​ screen and intended theater audiences were themselves African American.24 Adam Gussow has examined contemporary, hip hop era, African American singing cowboy issues in his essay “Playing Chicken with the Train.”25 Meanwhile, as Latin music became a force within American popular music in the 1930s and 1940s, singing cowboy films and recordings also explored the permeable musical border between Texas and Mexico, with songs such as Lorenzo Barcelata and Bob Russell’s “Maria Elena” (1941) becoming a hit for Gene Autry. Moreover, through the efforts of music industry visionary Ralph Peer, Tito Guizar became a singing cowboy star first in his native Mexico and later in the United States, singing “Granada” and “You Belong to My Heart” as a sidekick in the 1948 Roy Rogers vehicle The Gay Ranchero.26 The singing cowboy was so dominant during the 1930s and 1940s that if a performance of a song more “country” than “western” was seen in the movies at all, it was likely sung by a celluloid cowboy, with no subgenre distinction made. For example, Tex Ritter sang “You Are My Sunshine” in Take Me Back to Oklahoma (Monogram, 1940), the picture that brought western swing bandleader Bob Wills to the big screen. When “southeastern” hillbilly and emerging Nashville acts were seen in films in this period, it was often as “guest” acts in westerns, such as the Callahan Brothers performing “Old Joe Clark,” cowboy style, in the Jimmy Wakely picture Springtime in Texas (1945). Hollywood’s embrace of the singing cowboy as a modern figure whose music could be presented in a way broadly acceptable as mainstream pop impacted country performers’ repertoire’s both on-​screen and off. How so and how often remains a subject for further investigation. For example, as Bob Wills’s biographer Charles R. Townsend has documented, Wills had just expanded his Texas Playboys further into the horn-​rich jazz arena when he received a multipicture motion picture contract from Monogram Pictures in 1940. The contract called for only a smaller string band version of his group; it is this stripped-​down group that he appeared with on-​screen, and soon, also on record.27 Wills and the Texas Playboys appear in the Take Me Back to Oklahoma picture as themselves, making personal appearances and offering what Wills anachronistically calls “an old blues number,” despite the film’s setting in the nineteenth-​century American West. Such concatenations of time and technology, biographical star reality and period fantasy, were typical of the musical westerns. Also in 1940, stars of the Grand Ole Opry began to appear in films that combined a different set of fantasies and dislocations. It was no coincidence that such pictures started to be produced as the Opry was picked up for national radio network broadcast on NBC. That combination of network syndication and Hollywood interest (and the creation of BMI that same year, which would extend country music’s broadcasting presence) anticipated and contributed to the postwar country boom. According to Opry historian Charles K. Wolfe, Republic Pictures’ 1940 film The Grand Ole Opry, featuring performances by Uncle Dave Macon, Roy Acuff, and the Weaver Brothers and Elviry, was first conceived as a vehicle for Gene Autry to introduce the show’s stars to movie fans.28 It evolved into a story in which the Opry cast are all unknown residents of rural “Hopeville” and are called on to perform on radio to support a New Deal style “farm

272    Oxford Handbook of Country Music bill” campaign. The film took advantage of the fact that the Opry’s vast audience did not know what the show, broadcast from Nashville’s War Memorial Auditorium, actually looked like.29 The country music stars are portrayed as working to establish the talent, dignity, and luster of their region and their class and actively supporting the fair treatment and acceptance of their audience—​not just broadcasting to sell records and their sponsors’ laxatives. Being depicted that way was entirely in line with the early stages of the emerging country music industry’s agenda, its “struggle for respectability,” as chronicled by Jeffrey J. Lange.30 Filmic depictions of southeastern artists were often, like their western counterparts, highly fictionalized in an effort to broaden their audiences. Such efforts were sometimes met with resistance, as Acuff biographer Elizabeth Schlappi has shown. With varying degrees of success, Acuff resisted attempts to present him as a cowboy, a singing sheriff, and a performer at the “Cowboy Canteen.” On the other hand, he clearly cooperated with film presentations that showed him as modern and surprisingly pop. By Sing, Neighbor, Sing (1944), he is portrayed as star of a radio station with a massive modern tower, a nattily dressed pop music hero for coeds studying psychoanalysis, and as a versatile musician as willing to lead a brass band as a string band. The musical choices and characterization of Acuff in Sing, Neighbor, Sing can be a revelation for those who associate him only with his later musical conservatism and hard-​shell, down-​home styles.31 Similarly, before playing lead roles, honky tonk mainstay Ernest Tubb appeared on screen as a musical guest in such Charles Starrett’s westerns as Riding West (1943) in which his band was billed not as the Texas Troubadours but as the “Singing Cowboys.” As biographer Ronnie Pugh notes, Tubb’s trips to Los Angeles for filming increased his West Coast touring, resulted in appearances with the likes of Rudy Vallee and the Ritz Brothers, and helped him become mainstream enough to record with the Andrews Sisters.32 The “Soundies,” the three-​minute musical films produced from 1940 to 1946 for use in the short-​lived film jukebox phenomenon, were open to a variety of popular music, including country music.33 Because the films’ producers paid very little for appearances, most of the artists who appeared in them—​with such notable exceptions as Rosalie Allen, Cindy Walker and Dorothy Dandridge—​are generally not well-​known, including such obscurities as Tom Emerson’s Hillbillies, Redd Harper, and Zeke Canova (brother of the better-​known Judy). Dorothy Dandridge, known for her work in jazz, not western music, was dressed in a cowgirl suit to perform a memorably jive version of “Cow Cow Boogie” for a saloon full of bronze buckaroos. Histories of the format have generally focused on the technology and the production of the films rather than their content and audience, and, like other films discussed here, it is unclear how strategically films were distributed to different regions.34 “Soundies” are a reminder that peripheral examples of country music on film may be as useful for scholars as celebrated feature films. Although rarely referred to by country music scholars, motion picture media promotional packages—​including behind-​the-​scenes production stories created for public consumption—​regularly offer cinema historians useful starting points for research, and film advertising campaigns can sometimes add to understanding of the music and musicians’ representation. For example, a 1944 theatrical poster in my collection for Republic

Country Music and Film    273 Pictures’ Jamboree, with Ernest Tubb and the comic Freddie Fisher & His Schnickelfritz Band, touts “Radio’s hottest hillbilly hepcats” and “cornfed comedy with a batch of babes and beaux.” The offhand characterization of Tubb and company as “hillbilly hepcats” complicates the generally accepted and analyzed shock value of Elvis Presley’s presentation as “the Hillbilly Cat,” as well as its supposedly understood racial connotations, a decade later. Clearly, study of film marketing and promotion information on that order could clarify and amplify the implications of later campaigns and iconography. The stationing of GIs from all US regions in southern army bases during World War II, and hillbilly migration to Northern industrial cities in the 1940s, are regularly referenced as key factors in the postwar country music boom. There is little question that the wartime appearance of country music and its stars on network radio, and the migration of country performers—​those famed for records and radio and others who were not—​ to film shorts and feature appearances, were also vital contributing factors in the music’s growing recognition and acceptance. The promotional synergies and publicity created, the patterns and evolution of the genre’s (and soon, radio format’s) acceptance will be better understood when more attention is paid to the on-​screen aspects of that chapter in country history.

The Country Boom Years, 1945–​1970 It is a frustrating fact, and perhaps an irony of the country music and film timelines, that at the very time country music exploded in popularity and reach, theatrical motion pictures were in crisis, challenged by the arrival and rapid spread of home television.35 Pictures were at first shell-​shocked, then went very wide screen, three-​dimensional (3-​D), whatever might be unlike television—​but there were not going to be 1950s color Cinemascope epics or 3-​D shockers set in country music contexts. Saga theme songs from some “adult” Westerns or comedies by a Texas Ritter, Johnny Horton, or not very “country” Frankie Laine aside, not much country music was heard or seen on big screens in the early 1950s, even as the old singing cowboy movies became daytime television fodder. How that exclusion from the 1950s big screen mainstream affected country music growth and influence has been little studied. One mitigating circumstance may be that audience expansion and mainstreaming opportunities for emerging country stars were more likely to be found on the small screen.36 For example, multifaceted entertainer Tennessee Ernie Ford, who appeared in an uncredited role as a hillbilly performer in the classic postwar feature The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), did not go on to a big-​screen career in tandem with his recording success in both country and pop, but instead became a television fixture as the host of his own variety shows and a recurring role in 1954–​1955 as “Cousin Ernie from Tennessee” on I Love Lucy. The same could be said for Merle Travis. Following musical screen appearances ranging from B westerns to From Here to Eternity (1953), Travis went on to spend more time on small screens than large ones. Similarly, “Lonesome” George Goebel

274    Oxford Handbook of Country Music hosted his own highly successful, prime-​time television variety show after prior success as a country radio singer on WLS Chicago’s National Barn Dance. Grand Ole Opry stars Carl Smith, Marty Robbins, and Webb Pierce appeared in Raiders of Old California (1957) and Buffalo Gun (1961), both Albert C. Gannaway Productions. Gannaway also produced and directed the 35-​mm color Stars of the Grand Ole Opry syndicated television shows, which Smith, Robbins, and Pierce sometimes hosted. More straight acting film roles deemed right for stars presold by their country music status lay ahead. Through the 1950s and early 1960s, country music’s competition with early rock and roll was evidenced on-​screen in varied ways. In essentially the same semiautobiographical narrative mode that had applied to country star vehicles in the 1940s, films such as producer Hal Wallis’s 1957 Elvis Presley feature Loving You—​which bore the early working title Lonesome Cowboy—​presented a fictionalized dramatization of Presley’s emergence as a rockabilly star from the Hank Snow touring company.37 Significantly, the highly fictionalized Snow figure is presented as down on his luck and unable to reach audiences with his increasingly antique country music. Rural-​themed Hollywood features of this era often substituted rockabilly or urban folk music in place of country music, as was the case with Kazan’s critically acclaimed A Face in the Crowd (1957) and the 1965 drama Baby, the Rain Must Fall, starring Steve McQueen as the singer. Capitalizing on the commercial folk music boom, too, was the folk craze exploitation picture Hootenanny Hoot (1963), which included Johnny Cash, Sheb Wooley, and George Hamilton IV within its “cinema of attractions” format. Yet just as had been the case for Roy Acuff more than two decades earlier, much of the film is set on a college campus, and no artist is described as coming from country music. At the same time, several small B-​movie production companies turned to Nashville—​ by then, the unchallenged country music capital—​to feature country music as a selling point of their pictures. Produced in the wake of Country Music Holiday (1958), these films were essentially marketed as “of the hillbillies, by the hillbillies, and for the hillbillies.” Such titles as Country Music on Broadway (1965), 40 Acre Feud (1965), Second Fiddle to a Steel Guitar (1965), Hillbillies in a Haunted House (1967), and The Road to Nashville (1967) featured top country stars of the day in memorable musical performances that were, nevertheless, shot and staged on the cheap and hung on the flimsiest of plots. These films offered contemporary audiences the opportunity to see George Jones, Lefty Frizzell, Kitty Wells, Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Connie Smith in color, while the casts were augmented by has-​been and second-​tier screen and broadcast personalities—​including Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey of the Bowery Boys, Arnold Stang, Doodles Weaver, Basil Rathbone, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Mamie Van Doren—​who were dragged in for between-​song business. In addition to the important, quality performances filmed, however, there is invaluable material for added understanding of country music performance evolution, the business growing around it, country star reception, and even depiction of the music’s audience lurking in those low-​budget, industry stepchild films. Odd and virtually postmodern sequences such as that in Country Music on Broadway in which Hank Snow sets up a projector and screen and shows a young, tearful Hank Williams Jr. “home movies he

Country Music and Film    275 took of his dad while on tour with him up in Canada one time,” are loaded with implications and reverberations. The “home movies” turn out, in fact, to be footage from Hank Williams’s (1952) Kate Smith Show television appearances. It was not a coincidence that Audrey Williams, Hank Williams one-​time wife, was involved in the production, or that the sequence’s inclusion followed on the heels of the 1964 Hank Williams biopic Your Cheatin’ Heart, with George Hamilton playing Williams. That narrative, allegedly biographical feature, a major MGM release, received and continues to receive more attention than any of the revue films. The first country star biopic presented and marketed as such, it contributed to the ongoing construction of Hank Williams as a tragic, heroic icon.38 Although the distribution patterns of these films remains unclear, there is little question that many were seen in the context of multiple bills at drive-​in movies, particularly in the South. For instance, the Nashville newspapers’ display ad for the local launching of Second Fiddle to a Steel Guitar at the now long-​gone Montague Drive-​In, was emblazoned “TENNESSEE PREMIERE of the first movie filmed and produced HERE!” Drive-​in exhibitors’ interest in getting people out of the cars to buy refreshments and the logistics of in-​car dating led to a preference for films that were short on plot and long on explosions of violence, sex, intergalactic invasions by immense arachnids, and musical numbers.39 The “cinema of attractions” was as prevalent in this format as in the days of the nickelodeon. The films, mentioned briefly at most in country music histories and reviewed, if at all, mainly in trade publications, were generally dismissed as cheap, corn-​pone hokum—​and as if the hoary revue setup was something freshly invented for unsophisticated country audiences. By the mid-​1960s, there was once again, as in the 1940s, room for semiserious, semibiographical feature films that played on a country performer’s image and helped to add layers to it. Waylon Jennings’ Nashville Rebel (1966) serves as a valuable example—​and an artifact of the era when Nashville’s identity as “Music City USA” and “Home of the Nashville Sound” were being heavily promoted even, somewhat ironically, in a marketable storyline that highlighted the lead character’s rebellion against the country capital’s ways—​one starting point for the “Outlaw” country image to come. Country performers were also seen regularly as actors in features only residually about the music, or not at all, in screen performances of Kris Kristofferson; Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash; Jerry Reed and Hoyt Axton; and eventually, of Dolly Parton, Reba McIntyre, and Faith Hill in big screen and “made for TV movie” roles. Any evaluation of their art, image, and reception must take the images these roles presented into consideration.

Country Music in the “New Hollywood,” 1970–​1995 In the 1970s, the edging of “outlaw” country stars into coverage within the new rock journalism, along with increasing mainstream taste for country style, led to the production

276    Oxford Handbook of Country Music of widely distributed major motion pictures with country music related themes. Among the films produced were performer biographies, country star vehicles, country and cowboy scene stories of varying flavors, and even a few country music business stories. This era can seem, in retrospect, to be a golden age for more ambitious country music films in the director-​driven “New Hollywood” and for writing about those films by film critics. As a number of commentators have observed, country music frequently found its way onto film soundtracks, as producers saw that country compilation soundtrack albums could sell large quantities and that recordings added to the appeal and texture of the movies. Musicologist David Brackett has assayed the growing prominence of country music in film during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and has explored the significance of country songs in varied scenes, the evolving on-​screen depiction of country performance and the country music industry, and the ways that the means of production of Hollywood scoring combined with new appreciation of the power of genre music to open the door for country music to play a new role in film. He detects, not for the first or last time in discussion of this subject, the current “tendency to work over tropes related to the idea of ‘authenticity’ as a ‘truth-​to-​self ’ … connected to the white (usually male) working class.”40 Cultural critic Barbara Ching, in her examination of some of the same films, notes that country music is frequently used as a marker of national cultural identity and can be heard as “sounding the American heart.”41 Yet Ching also notes that this national view often neglects the political and social implications of such representations. As Dana C. Wiggins has observed, country music’s place in film (as well as prime-​ time and cable television) was affected by broader conservative cultural and political trends in the 1980s as the popularity of culturally “cool” Urban Cowboy and 9 to 5 at the decade’s start slowly eroded by the end of the decade and more traditional sounds and images dominated country music.42 The 1970s also bore witness to the rise of the country music “biopic.” As musicologist Molly Brost has discussed, these films were often treated as if they were dependable documentaries, the “real story” of the subjects; and, in contrast to the typical “keeping it country” gauges for country music authenticity, were often criticized for the factual accuracy of their depictions. Brost parses the means by which that perceived biographical authenticity was achieved (to varying degrees) in Hollywood feature films focusing on Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline—​and, later, Johnny Cash and June Carter—​and in Shut Up and Sing, the 2006 bio-​documentary on the career experience of The Dixie Chicks. She finds the films’ depictions of the country performers’ relation to concepts of private space at “home”—​versus their public work on “the road”—​as central in defining their characters in the films, and for the women in particular. Brost also suggests that the impetus to produce and market “real story” movie narratives about country performers may diminish in our era of star personality media saturation.43 Our understanding of country music culture’s place in film during the 1970s has been shaped by continued anxieties over the genre’s cultural respectability. Given the early challenges that commercial writers and academics alike faced when attempting to convince editors and academic committees that country music was worthy of focused treatment, it should be no surprise that relevant films that lack surface significance and clear

Country Music and Film    277 thematic ambition, or focused meditations on gender, race, class, and regional culture, have received little scholarly or critical attention. Such entertainments of that era as W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings (1975), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), and Every Which Way But Loose (1978) have been little recalled in the literature and, when they are mentioned, are frequently cast as an extension of the 1960s hillbilly exploitation pictures rather than as artifacts or art that merit analysis on their own terms. An admirable exception is Mary Bufwack’s 1983 essay “Taking the Class Out of Country,” which includes such pictures as The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia (1981) and Honeysuckle Rose to examine the ways that country music films of the era regularly substituted country performers’ personal family conflicts for any depiction of their struggle to buck against class limitations.44 Considering that industrial sagas and melodramas have been staples of the film industry since the 1920s, with Edna Ferber’s Showboat, Giant, and Come and Get It model examples, it is curious that there has been no epic screen drama set against the backdrop of the rise and growth of the broad country music field over time. Some of the first efforts to make sense of the country music industry on screen emerged during the 1970s in fictional narrative films such as Payday (1972), Rhinestone (1984), and Songwriter (1985), which related stories of professional performers within the country music industry. Celebrated widely by critics and scholars alike, Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) stands as an important document of the industry at that time, even though its makers have contended continuously that it was not particularly meant to be about country music, the country music industry, or even the city of Nashville, Tennessee—​except to the degree they worked as metaphor for the relation of the unheralded and unheard to the famous and powerful in American culture and politics. Since the film’s release, writers in a variety of venues have debated whether the groundbreaking film mocked Nashville, country music, the business, its makers and its audiences; saluted all of them and their shared striving in a backhanded way; or was essentially metaphorical. Much of this debate is traced in Jan Stuart’s The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman’s Masterpiece, including how and why the soundtrack songs were written and produced as they were.45 Published twenty-​five years after the initial release of the film, the book portrays the uneasy relationship that the writers, director, and cast had with both the music and Music City. The critical wars that broke out after the film’s release are also immortalized; they read, today, like arguments between film critics who knew little about the city of Nashville, next to nothing about country music culture, and considered both too trivial to serve as metaphors and film critics who knew little about the city of Nashville, next to nothing about country music culture, but defended their use as metaphors. The emergence of country music as culture and industry as compelling, marketable metaphors or story background for narrative features distributed by major studios certainly marked a milestone—​and arguably, a high-​water mark—​for the relation of the music and the movies. There is certainly room and reason for further study of the relation between that peak and the explosion in interest, within the United States, in country

278    Oxford Handbook of Country Music albums and soundtracks and the added sense of context those provided regarding the performers. The burgeoning, merging, and globalizing corporations that marketed both the albums and the films, and sometimes the prime-​time television appearances of the country stars as well, soon sought larger fish to fry.

Millennial Developments—​and a Note on Documentaries The era in which quirky, independent film-​like, character-​driven surprises ruled the day in Hollywood, with room for depictions of smaller-​scale aspects of everyday American life across history, country music included, ended fairly abruptly. It was terminated almost as quickly as “New Traditionalist” and quirky individualist 1980s country did, when the music business found out how much a Garth Brooks record could sell and demanded more returns on that order—​and for the same reasons. Much as when, thirty years earlier in the time of the television threat, Hollywood turned to Cinemascope, big-​time moviemaking moved into a new era of effects-​driven blockbusters and down-​ to-​earth country music-​related features declined. In twenty-​first-​century country, pyrotechnic effects would be seen in live arena stage extravaganzas, but little that could be called “special effects country” has appeared on the big screen. As with the apparent effect of broadcast television in the 1950s, country music videos, dedicated country cable channels, and “made for cable” narrative country movies and documentaries appear to have contributed to decreasing demand for country movie experiences in theaters. One obvious exception—​which combined big-​screen cinema of attractions explosiveness, special effects, a mythic storyline that served country music’s own mythology well, star power, and a country music soundtrack—​was the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2001). O Brother coupled familiar cultural imagery and mythology with contextually accurate settings and performers who were deeply knowledgeable within the musical traditions heard and sometimes performed on-​screen. The power of that singularly unified whole had a predictable, if one-​time, impact. The film sparked a hit album, a live tour of artists who had appeared on its soundtrack, and a theatrical documentary of the tour. Soundtrack sales and the general reception of O Brother were the impetus for the establishment of new record labels such as Lost Highway, multiple anthologies of “roots music,” and the expansion of the niche-​marketed alternative country music into the now growing Americana format and field. It sparked a resurgence of interest in bluegrass by association and media misidentification (because there was very little outright bluegrass in the film) and the career of bluegrass pioneer Ralph Stanley, in particular. General interest newspaper and magazine coverage of popular culture attempted to explain the so-​called O Brother phenomenon, which veered toward discussions of a flight to nostalgia and safety after the September 11th terrorist attacks that year, despite a storyline that was neither safe nor consistently nostalgic. O Brother, along with Urban

Country Music and Film    279 Cowboy, would be on the very short list of specific films included in the second, 2012 edition of The Encyclopedia of Country Music as films that sparked musical trends.46 Although it is still early to make definitive generalizations, country music feature films have tended, over the most recent decades, to fall into familiar patterns and revisit earlier concepts. The tangled love story of Johnny and June Carter Cash presented in Walk the Line (2005) is not drastically different from the tale of Hank and Audrey Williams’s tormented relationship as presented in Your Cheatin’ Heart. The 2009 Jeff Bridges vehicle Crazy Heart, multiple reviewers noted, was not far different in its depiction of a grizzled (or soon to be grizzled) country outlaw star, said to be based on Hank Thompson, from the 1973 Rip Torn vehicle Payday (which was said to be based on Waylon Jennings).47 George Strait’s Pure Country (1992) took audiences back to the more idealized country star film plots of the Ernest Tubb days. And Country Strong (2011) went to a familiar form that had been relatively untapped on the big screen: a country music business soap opera reminiscent of A Star is Born. The country music documentary has also thrived since the beginning of this century. Often intended for television, few country music documentaries have been designed for big screen release; and, because of the challenges of documentary distribution, theatrical releases have more often been viewed on the film festival circuit than in commercial theaters.48 The occasional brief newsreel report or government-​funded short aside (such as Willard Van Dyke’s 1945 To Hear Your Banjo Play, with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie documented on film, not commercial country artists), the production of documentaries on aspects of country music emerged from the same perspective and at the same time as the first academic studies on the genre. Alan Lomax’s films from the 1960s tended to focus on artists who were part of the then-​current commercial folk circuit, including some musicians who had recorded commercially—​Jimmy Driftwood and the latter day Coon Creek Girls in Billy in the Lowgrounds (1966), for example. John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers filmed Bill Monroe in Kentucky in The High Lonesome Sound (1963), as well as Sara and Maybelle Carter in Sara and Maybelle (1980). As documentarians have sought wider distribution and financial backing for their films in recent years, country music documentaries have focused on the genre’s cultural credibility and respectability as well as subjects that have documented crossover appeal to commercial folk, bluegrass, pop, and rock audiences. There are enough bluegrass-​ related features regularly released that a competitive Bluegrass Film Festival was instituted in 2014 as part of the annual International Bluegrass Music Association “Bluegrass Week” events. It is not an accident that, among recent country music documentaries that have seen some theatrical showings, the subjects have been the likes of the last working years of pop-​crossover hero Glen Campbell (James Keach’s I’ll Be Me [2014]), the rock-​ and folk-​friendly Johnny Cash and Carter Family saga (Beth Harrington’s The Winding Stream [2014]), and Béla Fleck’s How to Write a Banjo Concerto (2015). It has also been much simpler for a film like Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music (1969) and Earl Scruggs: The Bluegrass Legend: Family & Friends (1970), both featuring Bob Dylan appearances; and Heartworn Highways (1976), featuring Americana-​leaning Texans Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, and Steve Earle to find an afterlife on

280    Oxford Handbook of Country Music television, DVD, and theatrical showings because of their crossover power. Successful theatrical screenings of commercial country music concert films (some of which were beamed live to theaters) from such performers as Tim McGraw and Kenny Chesney, and even Grand Ole Opry performances, further blur the borderline between television and theatrical intentions and audience segmentation. As it has since fictionalized versions of the Hatfields and McCoys first feuded their way onto silent movie screens with more (or less) rural background music provided by theater piano players, the nature of country music, near-​country music, or substitutes for country music heard on twenty-​first-​century, big-​screen surround-​sound speakers remains determined by film producers’ perceptions of what audiences want when the country music screen moment arrives. The depiction of country music’s makers and audience by filmmakers remains subject to the same cultural identifications or discontinuities as ever. And the workings and connections between all of these, so infrequently studied in depth, will remain worthy of more concerted exploration.

Notes 1. J. W. Williamson, Hillbillyland:  What the Movies Did to the Mountains & What the Mountains Did to the Movies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 2. Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). 3. Notable exceptions include Alison Graham, Framing the South:  Hollywood, Television, and Race During the Civil Rights Struggle (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 81–​ 115; Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly:  A  Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 4. Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers:  Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993). 5. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 6. See, for instance, Douglas B. Green, Singing in the Saddle:  The History of the Singing Cowboy (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press and the Country Music Foundation Press, 2002); Peter Stanfield, Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy (Urbana–​ Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 2002); Raymond E. White, King of the Cowboys, Queen of the West: Roy Rogers and Dale Evans (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); Holly George-​Warren, Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 7. See, for instance, Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (July–​September 1965): 204–​228; Patrick J. Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 43–​102. 8. Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 23–​50. 9. Reproduced in Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 314. 10. Ibid. 346–​353. Many of these cue sheets have been archived by the Silent Film Sound & Music Archive, http://​www.sfsma.org.

Country Music and Film    281 11. Altman, Silent Film Sound, 181–​208. 12. Finola Kerrigan, Film Marketing (Amsterdam: Butterworth-​Heinemann, 2010), 42. 13. J. W. Williamson, Southern Mountaineers in Silent Films (Jefferson, NC:  McFarland & Co., 1994). 14. Clarence E. Simms, “Music for the Picture” columns in The Moving Picture World, 1910–​ 1917, https://​archive.org/​details/​movinwor06chal. 15. John Avery Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New  York:  Sturgis & Walton, 1910). 16. For additional background, consult the essays in Lucy Fischer, ed., American Cinema of the 1920s: Themes and Variations (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). 17. Variety Staff, “Sticks Nix Hick Pix,” Variety (July 17, 1935). 18. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-​Garde,” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall 1986): 63–​70. 19. Barry Mazor, Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America’s Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 91–​94. 20. Ibid. 121–​154. 21. Green, Singing in the Saddle, 94–​119. 22. George-​Warren, Public Cowboy No. 1, 141–​142; Stephanie Vander Wel, “The Lavender Cowboy and ‘The She Buckaroo’:  Gene Autry, Patsy Montana, and Depression-​Era Gender Roles,” The Musical Quarterly 95 nos. 2–​3 (2012): 207–​209. 23. Stanfield, Horse Opera, 34–​35; Vander Wel, “Lavender Cowboy.” 24. Michael K. Johnson, Hoo-​Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 102–​126. 25. Adam Gussow, “Playing Chicken with the Train:  Cowboy Troy’s Hick-​Hop and the Transracial Country West,” in Hidden in the Mix:  The African American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 234–​262. 26. Barry Mazor, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2014), chaps. 4–​6. 27. Charles R. Townsend, San Antonio Rose:  The Life and Music of Bob Wills (Urbana-​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 206–​214. 28. Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-​Natured Riot:  The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press and the Country Music Foundation Press, 1999), 262, 264. 29. Concern over the absence of visual cues ran throughout not only barn dance programming, but much radio programming, more generally. See, for instance, Michael Ann Williams, Staging Tradition; John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 76; Virginia Seeds, “Back Stage Ramble: Cowboys and Cow Belles Enjoy the Barn Dance,” Stand By (February 8, 1936): 5, 11, reprinted in Travis D. Stimeling, ed., The Country Music Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 64–​68; Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 30. Jeffrey J. Lange, Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly:  Country Music’s Struggle for Respectability, 1939-​1954 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). 31. Elizabeth Schlappi, Roy Acuff, The Smoky Mountain Boy (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1993), 173–​181. 32. Ronnie Pugh, Ernest Tubb, The Texas Troubadour (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 80–​83. 33. Scott MacGillivray and Ted Okuda, The Soundies Book (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2007).

282    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 34. It is known that some sets of songs were prepared specifically for military canteens, for instance. See MacGillivray and Okuda, Soundies Book. 35. See, for instance, Christine Becker, It’s the Pictures That Got Small: Hollywood Film Stars on 1950s Television (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008). 36. For more information on country music on television, consult Tracey E.  W. Laird’s ­chapter 12 on “Country Music and Television” in this book. 37. Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994), 344, 370. 38. The creation and production of the film are tracked in an appendix to the revised edition of Colin Escott’s Hank Williams: The Biography (New York and Boston: Back Bay Books/​ Little, Brown, 2004). A  sampling from Stanford Whitmore’s screenplay for the film is included in The Hank Williams Reader, ed. Patrick Huber, Steve Goodson, and David M. Anderson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 117–​121. Predictably, that more narrative, allegedly biographical feature received and continues to receive more attention than the revue films, or that sequence, ever have; first, because it was a major MGM release, but also, the critical record suggests, because it’s easier to reiterate a plotline or mention a few points about its fabled subject than to engage with non-​ narrative screen images and sounds. The film, the first country star biopic presented and marketed as such (however little depiction of Hank Williams’ actual life was involved), added to the ongoing construction of Hank Williams as a tragic, heroic icon. 39. For further background on B-​movies of this era, consult David Sterrit and John Anderson, eds., The B List: The National Society of Film Critics on the Low-​Budget Beauties, Genre-​ Bending Mavericks, and Cult Classics We Love (New York: Da Capo Press, 2008); Blair Davis, “Small Screen, Smaller Pictures:  Television Broadcasting and B-​Movies in the Early 1950s,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 28, no. 2 (June 2008): 219–​ 238; Chris Nashawaty, Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman: King of the B Movie (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2013). 40. David Brackett, “Banjos, Biopics, and Compilation Scores:  The Movies Go Country,” American Music 19, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 249. 41. Barbara Ching, “Sounding the American Heart: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Contemporary American Film,” in Soundtrack Available:  Essays on Film and Popular Music, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knights (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 202–​225. 42. Dana C. Wiggins, “From Countrypolitan to Neotraditional: Gender, Race, Class and Region in Female Country Music, 1980-​1989” (PhD dissertation, Georgia State University, 2009). 43. Molly Brost, “Mining the Past: Performing Authenticity in the Country Music Biopic” (PhD dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2008). 44. Mary Bufwack, “Taking the Class Out of Country,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 28 (April 1983): 21–​23. 45. Jan Stuart. The Nashville Chronicles:  The Making of Robert Altman’s Masterpiece. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 46. Paul Kingsbury, Michael McCall, and John Rumble, eds., The Encyclopedia of Country Music, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 375, 535. 47. Randy Lewis, “Hank Thompson: ‘Crazy Heart’s’ Real-​Life Bad Blake,” Los Angeles Times, December 8, 2009. 48. In practice, documentary makers are generally happy to see their work shown in most any format, so the lines between “for film” and “for television” or “for digital streaming” are porous here.

Chapter 14

The So ciol o g y of C ountry Mu si c Richard Lloyd

Sociology, Modernity and Country Music What can sociology tell us about country music? And conversely, why should country music interest scholars in the discipline? The first question remains to a significant degree speculative because to date, country music has not interested sociologists very much, with one crucial and outsized exception. Whereas sociologists have made key contributions to shaping the broader discourse surrounding popular music, country music has largely eluded such consideration for revealing, if ultimately unsatisfactory, reasons. After all, the genre emerged from the American South, a region US sociologists have tended to dismiss as a bastion of reactionary antimodernism. Country music is further distinguished among popular genres by its association with musical traditionalism, political conservatism, religious conviction, and pastoral conventions. In these terms, the genre would appear disqualified from the considerations that have shaped the sociology of music and indeed the discipline as a whole. In this chapter, I aim to challenge that perception, arguing that the sociological perspective can, in fact, show country music in a new light. Moreover, consideration of the genre can reciprocally improve our understanding of central disciplinary concerns, including economic, racial and ethnic, political, and (perhaps most counterintuitively given the “country” label) urban sociology. It proceeds by complicating country music’s longstanding appeal to traditionalist authenticity and demonstrating the surprising modernity at the core of the commercial genre. In a similar vein, relatively recent moves in the humanities have identified the vernacular modernism in country music’s aesthetic, previously obscured by the long tradition of shoehorning it into the frameworks of folklore studies and cultural anthropology.1 My approach is complementary, though as a sociologist I emphasize the structural contexts of production and reception rather than the consideration of formal aesthetics.

284    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Given the wide array of methodological tools and theoretical perspectives in the contemporary sociological field, it is useful here to identify a principle of disciplinary coherence, which is also the organizing principle for my sociological consideration of country music. From its nineteenth-​century intellectual foundations through its early twentieth-​century institutionalization as an academic discipline, sociology is distinguished by its focus on modernity.2 The work of major thinkers like Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and W.  E. B.  DuBois, and of the pioneering American department of sociology at the University of Chicago, addressed the decline of isolated, segmented society integrated by traditionalist worldviews; the extension of capitalism, industry and the division of labor; the rise of political and cultural pluralism; rationalization and “the disenchantment of the world”; the explosive growth of cities; and new forms of geographic and social mobility.3 In contrast, anthropologists and folklorists took up the study of traditional society, ferreting out presumably isolated environments and static ways of life, in non-​western contexts or in the embattled mores of the rural countryside. But while country music makes overt appeal to the mythos of rural traditionalism, in this chapter, I will demonstrate the myriad ways in which in its formation as a commercial genre corresponds to social change and intersects with the core features of modernity that animates the sociological enterprise. Contemporary sociology adds to the classical tradition themes including globalization, the restructuring of capitalism and of the nation state, and, crucially for this discussion, the commodification of culture. The middle of the twentieth century was marked by an evident explosion of the cultural marketplace and of popular music in particular, a crucial dimension in the extensions of postwar consumer society and today of the globalized economy.4 Popular music is an especially relevant example of this process, given its unique ability to permeate the intimate and the quotidian spaces of social life.5 From modest origins as a regional niche product aimed at working-​class consumers, country music has emerged as a commercial juggernaut and a major, if still regularly disparaged, genre within the American field of popular music. Nashville, the capital city of the country music industry, today ranks with New York and Los Angeles as a music industry center, a surprising development that tracks ongoing patterns of political, social, and demographic dynamism in the United States. In the postwar decades, Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School employed Marxian critical theory to examine the growth of the cultural industries, linking the standardization of popular music to the logic of advanced industrial society and identifying “the regression in listening” it entailed as a tool of social domination.6 This powerful but overtotalizing approach has since proven a persistent foil for subsequent moves in the sociology of music. Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci, British scholars of the Birmingham School such as Stuart Hall and Dick Hebdige concede the hegemonic properties of popular music while also positing opportunities for its production and consumption to provide a platform for resistance and the elaboration of subcultural identity, particularly among working-​class youth.7 Advancing the Birmingham tradition of cultural studies, scholars such as Andy Bennett, Paul Gilroy, and Angela McRobie have nuanced the consideration of popular music in relation to

Sociology of Country Music    285 the social construction of generational, racial, and gendered identities.8 In France, the work of Pierre Bourdieu complicates the sociological consideration of both taste and “the field of cultural production,” showing each to be embedded in but not entirely continuous with logics of social class domination and “the field of power.”9 Despite their varied approaches and substantive arguments, these major European considerations of the sociology of music are nonetheless grounded in a shared Marxian perspective, or, as it is commonly labelled in American sociology, conflict theory. In the United States, sociologists largely reacted implicitly or explicitly against these dominant European traditions. Howard Becker and Herbert Gans take a more populist and functionalist approach to the constitution and differentiation of the cultural field.10 Functionalism, rooted in the classic work of French sociologist Emile Durkheim, places a greater emphasis on cooperation rather than conflict, eliding considerations of class power via a culturally pluralist approach and emphasis on the division of labor. Similarly, the influential “production of culture” perspective, pioneered by Richard A. Peterson and Paul DiMaggio, employs the tools of institutional analysis and takes a narrower view of the proximate contexts shaping cultural output, deliberately eschewing the ambitions of Marxian sociologists to embed the study of popular music in a societal-​level critique.11 Whatever the controversies animating the sociology of music, approaches on both sides of the pond remain embedded in the consideration of modern life and the links, variously conceived, between musical production and the broader social structure. University of Chicago sociologists from Paul Cressy to David Grazian depict commercial music venues as artifacts of “urbanism as a way of life” and the distinctly modern modes of alienation and integration it engenders.12 If their scope and conclusions diverge, both the Frankfurt School and the production of culture perspective address the commodification of culture and the ascent of new dissemination technologies elevating the range and power of the culture industries. Bourdieu and the Birmingham School both react against the mid-​century “mass culture” critique, focusing on the modern category of class as an enduring principle of differentiation. Given the history of the transatlantic slave trade and periodic waves of mass immigration, considerations of race and ethnicity also figure prominently into the American study of popular music, just as postcolonialism has become elevated in European contexts.13 This backdrop helps us to decipher the persistent neglect of country music by sociologists. While consumer demographics have shifted markedly over several decades, the country music audience remains stubbornly and overwhelmingly white. Country consumers are on average older than typical pop audiences and today largely reside in suburban environments, and thus are especially remote symbolically and geographically from the spaces of academic knowledge production.14 Country music’s global appeal has been limited, given that it is largely predicated on a distinctly American and increasingly anachronistic rural imaginary. In the post-​9/​11 world, the genre’s commitment to nationalist and reactionary sentiments was dramatically displayed by the messy excommunication of the Dixie Chicks from country radio for voicing heterodox antiwar sentiments, buttressing its longstanding conservative reputation.15 Country music frustrates the inclinations of many sociologists of music to focus on youth culture, urban music

286    Oxford Handbook of Country Music scenes, globalization, racial and ethnic minorities, and the elusive principle of counterhegemonic “resistance” in the production and consumption of commercial culture. Thus, popular genres such as jazz, punk rock, and rap and hip hop have eclipsed country in the scholarly field, if not always in American popular taste. The crucial exception to this neglect is the influential work of Richard A. Peterson, undertaken from his serendipitous perch at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University.16 Peterson powerfully challenges the folkloric interpretation of country music and its conventions, demonstrating the active and strategic fabrication of authenticity claims within the commercial genre. Peterson’s consideration of the institutionalization of country music, in fact, strikes familiar sociological notes, including the rationalization of cultural enterprise; the impact of new technologies such as radio and sound recording; and the importance of such cities as Chicago, Nashville, and Atlanta to fostering cultural production. Peterson’s work then provides a point of departure for mining the still underrealized potential for country music and the discipline of sociology to mutually illuminate one another, not despite the disciplinary preoccupation with modernity but because of the ways that country music is embedded in modern social processes in the twentieth century United States. Like the blues and its various generic offspring, country music was birthed at the intersection of motley folk conventions and modern business practice and midwifed by the increasing urbanization of the American South and the dispersal of the southern population. By the mid-​twentieth century, the Tennessee gateway city of Nashville would play a role for country music similar to that of neighboring Memphis for the blues, facilitating the institutionalization of the music into a popular genre whose reach would ultimately transcend the boundaries of region. Indeed, from its origins as a commercial enterprise, country music starkly illustrates the quintessentially modern shift in the meaning of popular culture—​from a user-​ created culture made by economically subordinated populations to a commercial culture made by professionals for stigmatized consumers.17 Given the relatively backward state of the US South in the early twentieth century, this was abetted by northern interlopers, and also occurred virtually simultaneously with the advent of new disseminating technologies, particularly sound recording and radio. These twentieth-​century technologies are crucial to understanding the evolution of country as a popular genre, just as the rise of digital dissemination now throws its twenty-​first-​century present and future into flux.18 Moreover, Nashville’s surprising prominence in the geography of pop culture production corresponds to shifts in the nature of post-​Civil Rights American politics and, more recently, the changing logic of American cities.

Country Music and the Modernization of the American South If modernity means capitalism, industry, urbanization, democracy, and secularization, then, entering the twentieth century, the southern United States was largely disqualified

Sociology of Country Music    287 on all fronts. Modern capitalism, as Max Weber observes, is based on “the rational organization of ‘formally free’ labor,”19 and while the Civil War violently eradicated the slave economy, this was replaced by a quasi-​feudal system of indentured servitude, backed by a racial caste system that was the foundation of the regional elite’s hegemonic subordination of both poor black and white Southerners.20 The tenacious commitment to this anachronistic model effectively locked the South into an agricultural economy and quasi-​colonial dependency vis-​à-​vis the more developed North.21 The South was the nation’s least urbanized region, with many Southerners living in poor and socially isolated small-​scale rural and mountain communities lacking even rudimentary modern amenities. The iron vise of the Southern Democratic Party denied the democratic principle in which power regularly and peacefully changes hands among competing factions; not only the region’s blacks but its entire subordinate population was practically disenfranchised.22 The overwhelming majority of regional whites also lived in grueling rural poverty, with the status advantages of Jim Crow a largely symbolic palliative to which they nonetheless clung tenaciously. Under these conditions, not surprisingly, fiercely held commitment to kinship and traditionalist religious belief formed an added and resilient pillar of southern distinction. Though the region may have failed in its bid to formalize the arrangement, the sense that the South was “a separate country” was shared on both sides of the Mason–​Dixon Line.23 For Northerners, the South was primitive, opaque, and exotic, as well as a handy repository on which to dump blame for the nation’s sins—​a durable disposition that has shaped and sometimes distorted academic considerations of the South and its music, particularly insofar as the latter is associated with white rather than black producers.24 Early scholarly attention to the region emphasized its social and cultural isolation, ferried by a “strategic alliance between anthropologists and literary studies scholars interested in promoting [American] folklore as a legitimate field of study within the modernizing university.”25 Not surprisingly, in the South, essentialist racial conceptions informed this project. Karl Hagstrom Miller notes, “Folklorists provided authoritative new ways to talk about racial and cultural authenticity. … Folklore offered a portrait of fixed and distinguishable racial cultures deeply rooted in history.”26 Beyond cleaving regional music into prefabricated racial categories belying the more complicated patterns of exchange between black and white performers, scholars in this tradition regularly censored the considerable influence of the popular music produced in New York’s Tin Pan Alley on regional musicians. Miller argues, “Folklorists asked the ‘folk’ to conform to an image of cultural isolation that did not reflect their everyday lives.”27 Southern music in the 1920s attracted commercial as well as academic interest. In 1927, Ralph Peer ventured to Bristol, Tennessee, to scout “hillbilly” talent on behalf of Victor Records, netting in the process foundational country music icons Jimmy Rodgers and the Carter Family. As with folklore scholars, Peer had distinct ideas about what he was looking for, but his motivation derived from economic rather than academic considerations. The success of earlier recordings of musicians like Fiddlin’ John Carson and barn dance radio programs broadcast from Atlanta, Chicago, and Nashville demonstrated a

288    Oxford Handbook of Country Music market for “authentic” hillbilly music. As Peterson notes, Rodgers, already a musician of considerable ambition, had at his disposal a wide-​ranging repertoire of popular musical styles, but he “[understood] Peer’s expectations very well. Peer was looking for old songs that had not yet been copyrighted and newly written songs that sounded old-​fashioned to fill the recently discovered demand for ‘old time tunes.’ ”28 If motivated by the bottom line, Peer also had a legitimate appreciation for regional music and the artists he cultivated.29 This was not shared by the northern cultural industries that bankrolled him. As Peterson notes, the lazy and/​or bigoted expectations of northern promoters informed the fabricated images of authenticity constructed in the early years of country music recording. Echoing the preconceptions of folk scholars, northern marketers made another critical decision in the packaging of regional music, cleaving it into mutually exclusive categories based on the race of the performers—​“race records” for black artists and “hillbilly” for whites.30 This practice, rather than Jim Crow, put an end to not infrequent integrated ensembles in the region, and entrenched the segregation of southern sound.31 “Hillbilly,” a parochial and pejorative moniker that dogged white southern musicians for decades after, reinforced the image of cultural isolation, untouched by the contaminating currents of modern life and culture.32 In reality, from the earliest recordings and radio broadcasts, the music that would come to be called country was emblematic of social change, not traditional repetition, even when “timeless” folk standards provided the source material.33 New technologies pierced the rural isolation of the region, with radio displacing amateur performance as the means by which rural families were entertained. Increasingly, as Bill Malone notes, radio allowed talented regional musicians to imagine music not only as a diversion but also potentially a career.34 Other regional dynamics, including urbanization and nascent industrial development, dramatically altered the social landscape, with a tremendous increase in geographic mobility.35 It is widely acknowledged that the Great Migration ferried the blues to points afar, mixing southern styles with northern influences in Kansas City, Chicago, Detroit, and New York, among others. Less popularly considered is the fact that large northern cities had hillbilly belts as well as black belts, populated by displaced whites who similarly fermented regional exchange.36 Later, the dustbowl migrations brought a distinctively southwestern version of country music to Bakersfield, California, the second generation minting icons like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, and the influential “Bakersfield Sound.”37 Lyrical conventions of country music, as it evolved from early commercial origins through to its postwar consolidation, further belie the fantasy of country music as an emblem of bucolic stasis. Songs are about missing home, not being home, depicting a social reality of increased geographic mobility and urbanization.38 They signal not an unbroken circle but a fast disappearing rural way of life, supplying the music with its often noted—​and distinctly modern—​elegiac quality.39 Country music regularly addresses the decline in the regulatory power of traditional social mores, with songs about drinking, gambling, cheating, and divorce. In The Division of Labor in Society, Emile Durkheim argues that the small-​scale, segmented, and kinship-​based social organization of traditional rural life is integrated by

Sociology of Country Music    289 strongly held shared sentiments—​the collective consciousness of the group.40 Such sentiments are symbolically expressed in religious terms, with their durability buttressed by the relative absence of exposure to competing points of view as well as the sensual temptations of anonymous and secular society. Durkheim terms this rigid form of integration “mechanical solidarity.” As society becomes more complex and differentiated, a phenomenon associated with the advanced division of labor and the impersonality of urban environments, this mode of social belonging and social control is weakened. Durkheim argues that a more individualistic form of organic solidarity emerges to replace mechanical solidarity, but he also notes that the process is not seamless or immediate. As older norms wane and new temptations emerge, a state of anomie may occur, with negative effects including increasing crime and higher rates of suicide.41 One can see how country music—​as well as the blues—​emblemizes this transition in the American South, illustrating the stark tensions between spiritual yearnings and secular temptations that ran through a changing region—​and its music—​like an electric current.42 The new challenges to traditional ways of life were largely an effect of the changing economic reality of the region and the decline of agricultural dominance in the region. While work and its discontents quickly became a durable motif in the evolving genre, such toil is rarely performed on the farm.43 Country songs instead addressed the ascent of proletarian (low) wage labor in new urban contexts. Indeed, in a powerful counterhistory to the standard narrative, Patrick Huber demonstrates that even before World War I, I country music was significantly shaped by the emerging industrial towns of the Piedmont South and the stylings of factory “lintheads” rather than rural farmhands.44 Moreover, trains, and later automobiles—​symbols of modern mobility—​are durable and dominant motifs in the lyrical conventions, from Jimmie Rodgers through later genre superstars Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. The biographies of foundational genre icons further illustrate the changing southern reality. Far from living a rooted, traditional life, Jimmie Rodgers was a railroad worker and itinerant professional musician even before he was discovered by Ralph Peer. This distinctly modern association with mobility was accentuated in his musical persona, as he regularly performed in a train conductor’s cap and coveralls and counted among his numerous nicknames “The Singing Brakeman.” Moreover, in a not uncommon pattern, Rodgers was tutored musically by black musicians in the Mississippi trainyards and was well versed in a wide variety of traditional and contemporary musical styles, from the blues to Tin Pan Alley pop.45 If Rodgers’s music and persona exemplify the vagabond spirit present at the creation of commercial country music, this is typically contrasted with Peer’s other great find, the Carter Family. A trio comprised of husband-​and-​wife A. P. and Sara and A. P.’s sister-​in-​ law, Maybelle, the Carter’s carefully crafted an image of domestic stability, one belied by the fact that A. P. and Sara quietly divorced at the height of their popularity. They performed in modest garb using traditionalist instruments and arrangements, with arguably their most famous recording A. P.’s reworking of the traditional hymn “Can the Circle Be Unbroken?” But in a brilliant consideration of the aesthetic modernism in early country music, Edward Comentale argues, “If [the Carter Family’s] music proved

290    Oxford Handbook of Country Music essential to American lives it was because they confronted the pain and alienation of a specifically modern life and turned contemporary feelings of loss and detachment into a virtue of form.”46 Such sentiments are not the other of modernity. In fact, they would be senseless without it. Peterson’s charting of the creation of country music culminates in the singularly iconic figure of Hank Williams, in whom is resolved the seeming contradictions of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family—​contradictions that were always in fact two sides of the same modern coin. His oeuvre ranged from the salty “Honky Tonkin’ ” to the spiritual “I Saw the Light,” standards the lanky troubadour delivered with equal conviction in the same live performances. Notes Peterson, “In a way unique for the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, his repertoire embodies the full range of Hillbilly sentiments, from sacred to lusty.”47 Williams’ personal biography and stage persona illustrate the contradictory modernity of the genre he would come to personify. Repeating popular conventions, Williams described the “hillbilly” singer in terms of rural labor in a press interview: “You’ve got to know a lot about hard work. You’ve got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly.”48 If taken at his word, Williams would be personally disqualified. Afflicted by an undiagnosed case of spina bifida that was aggravated by a childhood fall, Williams was a poor candidate for manual labor, and he began caging small change as a street performer at an early age. He was tutored by the African American bluesman Rufus “Tee-​Tot” Payne, a mentorship Williams regularly acknowledged after he achieved fame. Moreover, he was not raised on a farm or in any particular proximity to the smell of manure. His single mother operated a boarding house in Greenville, Alabama, exposing young Hank to a succession of rootless men, not the rootedness of rural tradition.49 Though ever impeded by the relentless self-​medication of drugs and alcohol that resulted in his death at age twenty-​nine, Williams was nevertheless an ambitious and savvy entertainer. He was attuned to and inspired by popular entertainment, particularly motion pictures and the “singing cowboy” genre. His band was named the Drifting Cowboys, and his signature white hat was taken from the movies as well, not the sartorial conventions of his native Alabama. Music was virtually his sole source of support during his short life, with the one exception providing yet another example of southern modernization. Exempted from service during World War II (a conflict that conscripted the rest of the Drifting Cowboys), Williams instead worked in a ship-​building plant in Mobile, part of the military-​industrial buildup that would goose the South on its belated path to industrialization. Thus the Marxian examination of a changing class structure, taking hold later and in distinctive ways in the American South, is also reflected in the emergence of country music as a commercial genre. Rather than depicting a stubborn rural identity, country music can illuminate the reactions to the belated emergence of wage labor and the contradictions this engenders. Indeed, classic country shares with the United Kingdom punk examined by Hebdige the simple chord progressions and working class base, as well as complicated racial politics. British punk pioneers such as Joe Strummer and John

Sociology of Country Music    291 Langford in fact explicitly acknowledge the influence of this southern American style and icons like Williams, in contrast to the Blues fixations of predecessors the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. The stigma attached to the hillbilly label illustrates the violence of class-​based cultural distinction analyzed by Bourdieu, at a time when displaced southern whites were also becoming a visible and alarming presence in northern cities like Detroit and Chicago. Moreover, as we will see following, the commodification of the music would unfold in a new urban context, fostering its increasing standardization and rationalization.

Atlanta, Nashville, and the Urban Roots of Country Music Peer’s seismic expedition to Bristol took place only four years after the initial phonograph recording of “Fiddlin’ ” John Carson, widely viewed as the first commercial country record. Significantly, it was made and marketed in Atlanta, Georgia, an emblem of still nascent regional urbanization. Given the lack of industry in the rural region, southern cities were comparatively rudimentary settlements entering the twentieth century, mostly concerned with the logistics of exporting agricultural output and importing everything else in trade with the North.50 Peterson points out, “From its origin as a railroad junction before the Civil War, Atlanta had been a point of transshipping, and, with the decline of river transport after the war, it increasingly became the hub of commercial activity and light industry for the entire region.”51 Carson, well into middle age when he made his seminal recording, was among the itinerant southerners to wash up in the region, combining sporadic paid musical performance with varied stints of wage labor. The relative density of settlement in Atlanta allowed his first recordings to fly off local shelves, bridging rural styles with the new urban reality of consumers. To today’s ears, Carson’s music does indeed sound “ole-​timey,” the jarring fiddle scratch a stark contrast to contemporary pop, including the slickly produced music played in the country radio format. But as Comentale notes, “The power and allure [of Carson’s music] rests not just in the opposition it establishes between rural life and tradition, but rather in its ability to accommodate one to the other.”52 From nineteenth-​ century Paris to twentieth-​ century Los Angeles, Memphis, New York, and Nashville, cities have been durably implicated in the production of modern popular culture, concentrating consumers as well as technical and business infrastructure. In fact, this link has been undertheorized in the sociology of culture, and the history of country music provides a telling, if counterintuitive, opportunity to examine the urban dimension of cultural production.53 Peterson identifies Atlanta, not Bristol or Nashville, as the birthplace of commercial country music, with Carson’s recordings providing the spark. Atlanta was essential to cultivating a “five component system of

292    Oxford Handbook of Country Music industrial production” that would be further elaborated in Nashville in the coming decades.54 According to Peterson, these components were 1. Commercial recording:  While most pop recording during the era was done in New York, the distance as well as the prejudices of northern professionals made Gotham an unwieldy site for the production of profitable but disparaged race and hillbilly records. Peer and Atlanta businessman Polk Brockman teamed up to make Atlanta the regional alternative, with Peer scouting talent and Brockman developing the local infrastructure for recording and pressing physical product to distribute. 2. Radio: In 1922, Atlanta radio station WSB became the first substantial radio station in the South. While widely viewed as a rival medium to recording, Brockman gleaned that in fact radio was a potent marketing mechanism for his phonographs. He worked to develop a synergistic relationship in which his artists gained valuable exposure performing on WSB. 3. Touring: Neither radio performance nor recording offered much in direct financial compensation to early-​twentieth-​century southern musicians, but as Peterson notes, “records, and, even more, radio appearances were vital in making it possible for these semiprofessional musicians to become full-​time professionals.”55 The exposure allowed for musicians to convert prestige into relatively lucrative live performance, with Atlanta’s regional centrality (an attribute shared by Nashville) making it an ideal launch pad for hustling artists to hit the road. 4. Song publishing: In New York’s Tin Pan Alley, the industrial system of song publishing produced sheet music that would then become the material for performance and recording. In contrast, southern musicians typically created and passed on musical numbers through performance. Brockman enlisted professionals to transcribe the raw musical materials into standard notation, allowing songs to be copyrighted and turned into an independent source of commercial opportunity. 5. Songwriting: Finally, Brockman began to directly commission the writing of new songs consistent in the emerging commercial idiom, institutionalizing a new division of labor between songwriters and performers similar to that of Tin Pan Alley. Anyone familiar with the history of Nashville’s country music industry will recognize the durability of this model. It was implemented piecemeal from 1925, with the first broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry, to 1955, when Owen Bradley built a recording studio in a dilapidated urban renewal district that would come to be known as Music Row, the nerve center of the country music industry for decades since.56 As in Atlanta, Nashville’s ascent as a music industry hub intersected with other dimensions of southern modernization. The Tennessee port city was a center of regional finance, and although it has since ceded this role to Atlanta and, especially, Charlotte, in the 1920s, Nashville numbered among its many nicknames “the Wall Street of the South.”57 WSM was owned and operated by the insurance giant National Life and

Sociology of Country Music    293 Accident; the call sign stands for “We Shield Millions.” The station quickly lured radio impresario George Hay away from Chicago’s WLS, where he was the announcer for the National Barn Dance, combining the northern vaudeville variety format with southeastern musical conventions.58 National Life gleaned the potential of a Barn Dance style broadcast to advertise its products to rural consumers. That this format was actually pioneered in the Windy City is a testament to the already substantial migration of Southerners, black and white, to northern industrial cities, while Hay’s move to Tennessee further illustrates the permeability of the Mason–​Dixon Line in the other direction.59 The show earned its iconic name at some point in 1926, when its live broadcast followed a syndicated airing of classical symphony produced in New York. “For the past hour we have been listening to music taken largely from Grand Opera,” Hay reportedly announced, “but from now on we will present the Grand Ole Opry.”60 And so it has been ever since, today the longest running live radio broadcast in American history. The Opry initially featured a motley assortment of regional musicians playing widely disparate styles, including the Harmonica stylings of the black performer DeFord Bailey, who endured routine racial slights while nevertheless counting as the most regular member of the evolving revue in its early years.61 Corresponding to the recording division of Hillbilly and Race Records, whiteness emerged among the defining conventions of the Opry broadcast, as its music became more recognizably consistent with what we now call country—​conventions that the Opry was deeply complicit in creating and disseminating. Bailey was thus the first black performer on the broadcast and also the last until the remarkable Charley Pride came along in the late 1960s. The broadcast relied on regional talent, largely culled from the neighboring Appalachian Mountains. Nevertheless, as Louis Kyriakoudes notes, “The Opry functioned as an urban [emphasis added] institution that worked to reshape rural culture, developing as it did out of the interaction between the culture of the rural South and the imperatives of 20th century business enterprise.”62 Under the National Life and Accident banner, “Ole Timey” sounds promoted modern actuarial science. Other Nashville enterprises similarly hocked their wares on the program, from Martha White Flower to the Standard Candy Company, maker of the Goo-​Goo Cluster. Over the decades, the local business elite would evince considerable discomfort with the asset they created, as Nashville increasingly came to be known as the Hillbilly Music Capital of the World.63 As the Opry’s popularity eclipsed regional competitors in Atlanta and Shreveport, Nashville increasingly magnetized top regional talent, which was becoming more professionalized and which collectively innovated new generic conventions. Folk styles provide only one part of the raw material for the new sound. The subgenre bluegrass illustrates the modern principle of hybridity, combining previously disconnected instrumental style into an ensemble, innovated by pioneers like Bill Monroe on the Opry stage.64 Northern popular music also influenced Nashville musicians ever on the lookout to expand their commercial reach, culminating in the “Nashville Sound” of the 1960s, a slicker style of recording that effaced many traditional genre conventions.65

294    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Not only musicians were drawn to Nashville by the Opry. To the initial surprise of WSM executives, fans of the show began to show up, demanding to see their favorites perform. Initially broadcast from cramped studios in National Life and Accident’s downtown office tower, the Opry was moved to a succession of larger venues and lodged from 1943–​1974 in the downtown Ryman Auditorium, a former tabernacle revered today as the Mother Church of Country Music. The new and still current Grand Ole Opry House opened on the eastern outskirts of the city in 1974, doubling the Ryman capacity and adjoined by a theme park, Opryland USA. The theme park is gone, but the gaudy Opryland hotel—​the largest hospitality complex in the United States outside of Las Vegas—​continues to operate as a major tourist destination. The modern technology of radio contributed to the breakdown of southern sonic isolation and the commercial consolidation of regional styles into a recognizable popular genre. While radio pierced once insurmountable barriers with its seemingly place-​ annihilating reach, both radio and recording also illustrate an important sociological principle of twentieth-​century popular culture production: The increase in the reach of disseminating technologies is accompanied dialectically by the intensified urban concentration of productive infrastructure and business enterprise. As with Atlanta’s WSB, WSM paid a pittance wage to its talent, who monetized Opry fame through touring. Nashville’s centrality, which had already made it the traveling salesman capital of the southeast, was another crucial advantage when combined with WSM’s potent signal. Nashville is within six hundred miles of thirty US states, as Bruce Feiler points out, “a number that is significant because it’s the amount of territory a [tour] bus can travel overnight.”66 This included much of the Midwest, where displaced hillbillies provided a key element of the music’s expansive geographic reach. Peterson’s other components emerged gradually, nourished by the magnetic force of the Opry. In 1942, Roy Acuff, dubbed the “King of Country Music” and the Opry’s biggest star, partnered with Fred Rose, a composer with considerable experience in the commercial pop music enterprises of Chicago and New York, to form Acuff-​Rose Publishing. The first of many, many publishing companies in Nashville, Acuff-​Rose’s fortunes were secured when it signed Hank Williams in 1948, the same year that Acuff relaxed his longstanding opposition and allowed the mercurial artist onto the Opry stage. The first proper recording facility in Nashville, Castle Studios, opened in the National Life and Accident Building in 1946, operated by two WSM sound engineers and illustrating the importance of technical savvy and infrastructure as well as musical talent to the creation of a culture industry agglomeration.67 Another WSM veteran, Harold Bradley, opened Bradley Studios nine years later in a repurposed frame home near Vanderbilt University, plopping an army surplus Quonset Hut in the backyard a year later to serve as a “film and recording studio.” This makeshift and ungainly facility was the seed from which sprouted Music Row, the agglomeration of recording studios, music publishing companies, performing rights organizations, and record labels that accumulated around it with stunning rapidity in coming decades.68

Sociology of Country Music    295

The Soundtrack of the Silent Majority If country origins since the 1920s reflect the modernization of the American South, after World War II, the region still had one substantial hurdle to overcome on its path to modernity, due to the persistence of one-​party rule and the racial caste system of Jim Crow.69 As has been amply demonstrated, these twin systems remained a significant source of regional stigma and an impediment to the modernization of the economy.70 The economic sclerosis and isolation particularly frustrated the ambitions of the business elite in “New South” cities like Nashville, Atlanta, and Charlotte—​including leaders in the increasingly consolidated country music field, who wished to escape the box of southern exoticness and create a product with national reach.71 The Civil Rights Movement, while fiercely resisted in the Deep South, produced the unintended consequence of catalyzing regional development, with an explosion of investment and new population since the 1960s.72 This is particularly evident in the growth of southern cities and suburbs, a phenomenon that urban sociologists have been slow to recognize given their historic fixation on Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.73 The patterns of southern economic development are marked by sprawling metropolitan regions and exurban industrialization, including “low-​road” production in textiles and poultry packing, surging foreign direct investment in the automobile industry, and the public–​private partnerships of the military industrial complex.74 The political and social upheavals of the 1960s also augured a major political realignment in the United States, with the white South, once firmly Democrats, now increasingly essential to the Republican base.75 The correspondence between these seismic developments and the ascent of country music as a national brand sheds surprising light on issues in political sociology and the changing cultural geography of the United States. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” and appeals to “the silent majority” are regularly cited in examinations of the post-​Civil Rights era defection of the white South into the Republican column.76 The nature of this appeal reflects a changing political reality, one in which racial resentment could no longer be expressed with George Wallace’s vulgar forthrightness.77 Instead, race is leveraged obliquely, via dog whistles like welfare, busing, and crime.78 These are combined with appeals to patriotism, the work ethic, and religion that resonate strongly in the culturally conservative South, while proving to have surprising national appeal.79 New South cities like Nashville, Charlotte, and Atlanta—​“the city too busy to hate”—​ extolled their racial moderation, even as the northern model of segregation via geographic isolation and “white flight suburbs” was quietly subbed in for Jim Crow. Indeed, as historians Kevin Kruse and Matthew Lassiter have shown, the emerging new conservatism found its base less in the rural Deep South, the primary terrain of the massive resistance, than in booming Sunbelt suburbs surrounding these “progressive” southern cities.80 Neoconservative political appeals also found fertile terrain in the white

296    Oxford Handbook of Country Music northern suburbs, culminating in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, buoyed by the defection of “Reagan Democrats” in the Midwest and Northeast. Thus, what appeared a bitter defeat for southern reactionaries in the 1960s created the context for enhanced regional influence in American politics. Intriguingly, these developments coincide with the changing identity of country music, which also increasingly transcended regional limitations by brokering a music remarkably congenial to white suburban America. The national ambitions of the Nashville-​based country music industry are evident in the concerted efforts to shed the hillbilly designation and its parochial connotations, an effort increasingly spearheaded by the trade Country Music Association, founded in 1958 and headquartered on Music Row.81 The massive resistance to Civil Rights, cresting in 1965 with the shocking televised images of Bloody Sunday in Selma, appalled Northerners who preferred a subtler brand of racial segregation, and the industry kept its distance from this latest example of southern “otherness.”82 Stars overwhelmingly eschewed confederate iconography and association with demagogues like Wallace, while also regularly expressing antiwelfare and pro-​war sentiments consistent with Nixon’s appeals to the silent majority and emergent sunbelt conservatism. While the perceived “whiteness” and nostalgic impulses of country music remain durable genre conventions, the symbolic power of this racial identification in a changed cultural landscape is enhanced by the degree to which it is implicit rather than overt.83 Whereas the political inclinations of performers were never uniform, the general tenor of the commercial genre aligned well with the backlash politics that emerged alongside the new social movements of the 1960s. The primary target of the effort to rename the commercial genre may have been “hillbilly,” but “country” was also a means to distinguish it from “folk” and its left-​wing associations. As Peterson shows, folk had in fact initially been a strong candidate for the new genre designation, given its capacity to subsume a range of regional “roots” styles and its proven popularity in northern markets. That is, Peterson argues, until Pete Seeger’s disastrous appearance before Joe McCarthy’s Committee on Un-​American Activities. Seeger’s “folk group” the Weavers had scored a major hit with the traditional standard “Goodnight Irene,” the flexibility of the regional source material evident in the fact that it was also popularly recorded by country artist Red Foley and the bluesman Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter. But in the face of Seeger’s brazen Stalinist sympathies, Peterson observes, in Nashville “folk was out and the word ‘country’ was simply dropped in its place.”84 The social conflicts of the 1960s amplified the symbolic division between Nashville and the Urban Folk Revival taking shape in locales like New York’s Greenwich Village, home to by-​then elder statesman Seeger and young stars like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.85 On the ground, the boundaries were more permeable, as Dylan famously recorded three seminal albums in Nashville during the late 1960s, and Johnny Cash regularly made the pilgrimage to the Newport Folk Festival.86 Still, country music largely distinguished itself by expressing sentiments consistent with those of Nixon’s “silent majority,” in stark contrast to folk and rock music. Bakersfield’s Merle Haggard provides an excellent example, with his hippie-​baiting “Okie from Muskogee” and the pro-​war “Fighting Side of Me.”87 Cash largely straddled the line, antagonizing partisans in the folk community

Sociology of Country Music    297 when he accepted an invitation to perform at the Nixon White House. There, the Man in Black politely declined the President’s requests that he perform “Okie from Muskogee” and the Guy Drake novelty song “Welfare Cadillac,” claiming (almost certainly disingenuously) that he did not know them.88 In the spring of 1974, Nixon himself would aptly depict country’s growing status as the soundtrack of a national, and not just regional, silent majority. Dogged by Watergate and only months from resigning in disgrace, Nixon was running out of places to speak without enduring a humiliating torrent of boos. At the gala opening of the new Grand Ole Opry House, he found one. There he outlined in startlingly prescient terms the link between country music and the best face of the neoconservative movement: “Country music is American. … It comes from the heart of America, because this is the heart of America, out here in Middle America. Country music talks about family. It talks about religion. … And we all know country music radiates a love of this nation—​patriotism. Country music, therefore, has those combinations that are essential to America’s character, at a time when America needs character.”89

Sociology and the Changing Face of Country Music That Nixon’s personal failings of character supply his characterization of country music with a substantial amount of irony should not distract us from the essential point. No longer was country music the property of disparaged hillbillies; and indeed, in coming decades, it would reach once unimaginable commercial heights, its popularity anchored in the booming suburbs of the nation over. In part this success owes to the capacity of Nashville to produce music consistent with the cultural dispositions of older and more conservative Americans at a very high level of technical accomplishment. It further owes to the flexibility of the format in adapting to changing musical tastes, retaining the primacy of lyrical content while incorporating musicological and performative conventions of 1970s arena rock. In the 1990s and beyond, the genre was increasingly fueled by the distinctive nostalgia of middle class, aging, white baby boomers residing in the suburbs.90 This shift is reflected in the fact that country fans today exceed national averages in measures of education, income, and homeownership, a sharp contrast with the genre’s fan base during the 1950s and 1960s.91 Rumblings of a coming country juggernaut could be gleaned in the crossover pop stardom of Dolly Parton, the breakout recordings of Willie Nelson following his move to Austin, Texas, and the popularity of film treatments such as Urban Cowboy and Coal Miner’s Daughter.92 Still, no one was quite prepared for the news brought by the advent of Nielson Soundscan in 1991. Soundscan, the first of many digital revolutions to rock the music industry, replaced the older haphazard model of music sales accounting (based on a shockingly unscientific survey of record store clerks) with a far more precise

298    Oxford Handbook of Country Music system of bar code scanning. Garth Brooks was the first country artist to hit number one on the Soundscan chart within months of its debut, becoming over the decade the best-​ selling male artist in North America.93 Intriguingly, Soundscan revealed the surprising commercial heft of country music as well as that of rap and hip hop, or “urban” music.94 As their respective appellations suggest, both genres profoundly root authenticity claims in racialized and mythologized spatial imaginaries, of the white rural countryside and the black “inner city.” Seemingly opposites, these spaces were in fact united in the 1990s by a social reality of economic crisis, population depletion, and social isolation. The wide-​ranging appeal of genres that had formerly been ascribed a niche status in the American cultural marketplace challenges older perceptions and opens up new portals for sociological analysis and empirical research. Rural whites and urban blacks remain committed consumers of these respective genres, but no music can achieve the commercial success that they enjoy on the backs of such paltry and economically deprived populations. The outsize success of both country and rap instead is accounted for largely by white suburban consumers, though differentiated to a degree by age and political inclinations. Today the once seemingly ineffaceable boundaries separating country from rap music seem even more permeable, with the rise of “hick-​hop” in the stylings of artists like Jason Aldean and the stunningly successful 2012 collaboration between the rapper Nelly and Florida Georgia Line in the remix of Florida-​Georgia Line’s “Cruise.”95 This surprising hybridity is consistent with the identification of increasingly omnivorous musical tastes among American consumers, surely abetted in intriguing ways by new disseminating technologies.96 It also illustrates the pastiche attributed to postmodern culture, though a longer consideration of the history of American popular music in the twentieth century indicates that the novelty of this principle may be overstated.97 Still, the substantial backlash against hick-​hop and other popular genre mutations, including Taylor Swift’s pop maneuvering and the frat house-​friendly “bro country” of artists like Aldean, Florida-​Georgia Line, and Luke Bryan, indicates that authenticity has not been jettisoned as a principle of cultural value in the country music field. Indeed, the recent success of artists such as Jamie Johnson, the Civil Wars, and Chris Stapleton illustrate the durability of Peterson’s dialectic of “hard-​core” and “soft-​shell” country music, despite shifts in audience demographics and even as the content of the distinction is a moving target. As Bourdieu shows, struggles over the legitimate boundaries of inclusion are intrinsic elements of any cultural field, lending ongoing dynamism to the genre.98 Another contemporary trend that may further illuminate the resilient popularity of country music is the often overlooked rootedness of suburban residents. If country music was buoyed at its inception by the increased mobility of white Southerners, country’s commercial appeal today may thus be the effect of a countertendency that requires rethinking longstanding assumptions about suburbanism as a way of life. Mushrooming in the postwar decades, the suburbs are frequently characterized in terms of rootlessness and the eclipse of history. Such an assessment was understandable in the 1950s and 1960s, when the “crabgrass frontier” revolutionized the landscape of American life.99

Sociology of Country Music    299 But, as Claude Fischer shows, middle-​class white Americans are far less mobile today, and older suburbs are now sites of significant intergenerational continuity.100 Still, the image of a deracinated, inauthentic, and pastless suburban landscape remains powerful in both scholarly depiction and popular culture. Country music in this case fills a void by providing a language of legitimacy for lives of modest ambition, while also claiming a deeply rooted pedigree in the American popular imaginary. Indeed, on its face, country music appears more rather than less likely to affirm rootedness in its contemporary lyrical conventions compared to its formative decades, with songs such as “Dirt Road Anthem,” “Small Town USA,” and “Famous in a Small Town.”101 If rap music nourishes a fantasy of autonomy, power, and excitement for white teenagers frustrated by the cocoon of suburban normalcy, country music soothes their parents with nostalgic appeals to domestic security in an age of middle-​class anxiety and geographic stasis. Meanwhile, Nashville, still the capital of commercial country music, is today an exemplary platform for examining the dynamism in the music industry in recent decades and the changing logic of the US urban system. From the seeds of Bradley Studios and Acuff-​ Rose Publishing, music business infrastructure grew at a staggering pace in Nashville, goosed by the investment of coastal cultural industries. Still, the city remained in 1970 a comparatively modest outpost for the production of music assigned a niche status by multinational major labels. The persistent disregard for country music, despite its reliable profitability, likely allowed Nashville to avoid the pressures toward coastal consolidation that swallowed the once thriving music business of Detroit and Memphis, with labels content to grant considerable autonomy to their subsidiaries based in the Tennessee Music City. The Soundscan revolution brought new levels of attention and investment into the city and its industry in the 1990s; and as the dust settled, the unlikely mid-​sized city in the mid-​South had risen to peer status as a site of music industry production with coastal behemoths New York and Los Angeles, while substantially diversifying the range of its musical output.102 Today, Nashville is ground zero for the restructuring the music business in the face of the seismic upheavals wrought by the digital revolution. Producer T-​Bone Burnett aptly captures its contemporary position: “The world of the musicians has gotten dismantled in the last 20 years due to new realities in technology. And Nashville is the last bastion. Nashville is the Alamo.”103 As Dan Cornfield shows, these musicians are now using the city as a base for the working out of new modes of career management and community building.104 Among the earliest social theorists to take pop culture seriously, Frankfurt School scholars like Horkheimer, Adorno, and Walter Benjamin detailed the effects of mechanically reproduced art and rationalized cultural industries.105 The bureaucratic model of production has largely unraveled, requiring more flexible and entrepreneurial modes of organization and strategic action in the age of digital reproduction.106 These trends in turn illuminate general patterns of economic restructuring in the neoliberal, postindustrial United States. The move of the Grand Ole Opry from the Ryman Auditorium to the city outskirts was symptomatic of a general trend of core city decay around the country, as the suburbs

300    Oxford Handbook of Country Music drained downtowns. While this development goosed the fortunes of the industry, ironically today Music City exemplifies a new style of urban resurgence, fueled by high-​rise condominiums, neighborhood gentrification, tourism, and an elevated role for the arts and culture in city economies.107 East Nashville has emerged as the city’s neo-​bohemia, a space of cultural eclecticism and rising home prices that both challenges the hegemony of Music Row and incubates talent for the industry to mine, from session musicians to recording artists and songwriters like Kacey Musgraves and Shane McNally.108 Meanwhile, the Ryman, long shuttered and nearly demolished following the Opry departure, reopened in 1994, the Mother Church now inscribing a principle of coherence in the Nashville downtown, binding past and present in Music City. The resurgence of core cities following the 1970s urban crisis that first drove the Opry to the suburbs is increasingly in terms of the primacy of culture and entertainment, from creative industries to the growing economic centrality of tourism and place marketing. From its origins in John Carson’s fiddle scratch recordings to Taylor Swift’s global stardom and genre defection, country music has thus intersected with the routine disruptions of modern life, in ways only partially addressed by this chapter. Country music throughout its history turns out to be much less a music of modern refusal and regional idiosyncrasy than either its partisans or detractors might like to believe. Even the political conservatism ascribed to the genre is complicated by multiple internal contradictions; moreover, reaction is not the other of modernity, but intrinsic to it.109 The ascription of “folk” authenticity to the genre always belied its modern character and the profound and ongoing opportunities that this provides for the discipline of sociology, with industry organization, audience differentiation, and genre boundaries, like modernity itself, continuously in flux.

Notes 1. Edward P. Comentale, Sweet Air:  Modernism, Regionalism and American Popular Song (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 2. On this, see Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge, England:  Cambridge University Press, 1971); Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, England: Polity, 1990). 3. See Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin, 1982); W. E. B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia:  The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014); Robert Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1925); Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” in Georg Simmel on Individuality and the Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 324–​339; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New  York:  Dover, 2003); Weber, “Science as a Vocation” in From Max Weber, ed. H. H. Geerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958); Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44 (1939): 3–​24.

Sociology of Country Music    301 4. Andy Bennett, “Towards a Cultural Sociology of Popular Music,” Journal of Sociology 44, no. 4 (2008): 419–​432; Angela McRobbie, In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music (London: Routledge, 1999). 5. Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge, England:  Cambridge University Press, 2000). 6. Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1994); Herbert Marcuse, One-​Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991). 7. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1979); Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance through Rituals (New York: Routledge, 2006). 8. Andy Bennett, Popular Music and Youth Culture (London: McMillan, 2000); Paul Gilroy, “Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a ‘Changing’ Same,” Black Music Research Journal 11, no. 2 (1991): 111–​136; Angela McRobbie, “Settling Accounts with Subculture: A Feminist Critique,” Screen Education 34 (1980): 37–​49. 9. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 10. Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1982); Herbert Gans, High Culture and Popular Culture (New York: Basic, 1974). 11. Richard A. Peterson and N. Anand, “The Production of Culture Perspective,” Annual Review of Sociology 30 (2004): 311–​334; Timothy Dowd, “Production Perspectives in the Sociology of Music,” Poetics 32 (2004): 235–​246. 12. Paul Cressy, The Taxi-​Dance Hall (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2008); David Grazian, Blue Chicago (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2003); Wirth, “Urbanism.” 13. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Jennifer C. Lena, “Social Context and Musical Content of Rap Music, 1979–​1995,” Social Forces 85, no. 1 (2008): 479–​495. 14. Vernell Hackett, “New Statistics about Country Music Fans Revealed at Billboard Country Summit” Billboard (June 8, 2011), http://​www.billboard.com/​biz/​articles/​country/​1177554/​ new-​statistics-​about-​country-​music-​fans-​revealed-​at-​billboard-​country. 15. Andrew Boulton, “The Popular Geopolitical Worlds of Post-​9/​11 Country Music,” Popular Music and Society 31, no. 3 (2008): 373–​387; Chris Willman, Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music (New York: The Free Press, 2005). 16. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Peterson, “The Production of Cultural Change: The Case of Contemporary Country Music,” Social Research 45, no. 2 (1978): 292–​314. 17. John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 2003). 18. Jay Frank, FutureHit.DNA:  How the Digital Revolution is Changing Top Ten Songs (Nashville, TN: Futurehit, Inc., 2009); Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); David Suisman, Selling Sounds:  The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2009). 19. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 21. 20. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2001). 21. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1996).

302    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 22. Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, eds., Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1960); Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 23. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books, 1991); David Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2002). 24. See Karen Cox, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). 25. Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2–​3. 26. Ibid. 3. 27. Ibid. 119. 28. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 33. 29. Barry Mazor, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2014). 30. Kevin S. Fleming and Wayne W. Daniel, “What’s in a Name? Would That Which We Call Country Music by Any Other Name Sound as Sweet?,” International Country Music Journal (2013): 9–​23; Jeffrey J. Lange, Smile When You Call Me Hillbilly: Country Music’s Struggle for Respectability (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004); Peterson, Creating Country Music; William G. Roy, “‘Race Records’ and ‘Hillbilly Music’: Institutional Origins of Racial Categories in the American Commercial Recording Industry,” Poetics 32, nos. 3–​4 (2004): 265–​279. 31. Miller, Segregating Sound. 32. Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 33. Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 2nd rev. ed. (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 2002); David Raines and Tricia Walker, “Poetry for the People:  Country Music and American Social Change,” Southern Quarterly 45, no. 2 (2008): 44–​51. 34. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 32. 35. James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Richard Lloyd, “Urbanization and the Southern United States,” Annual Review of Sociology 38, no. 24 (2012): 1–​24. 36. Chad Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles (Urbana–​Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 2000); Todd Gitlin, Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); Craig Maki, with Keith Cody, Detroit Country Music: Mountaineers, Cowboys, and Rockabillies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). 37. Gerald Haslam, Working Man Blues: Country Music in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Peter LaChapelle, Proud to be an Okie:  Cultural Politics, Country Music and Migration to Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 38. D. K. Wilgus, “Country-​Western Music and the Urban Hillbilly,” Journal of American Folklore 83, no. 328 (1970): 157–​179. 39. Comentale, Sweet Air.

Sociology of Country Music    303 40. Durkheim, Division of Labor. 41. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (New York: The Free Press, 1997). 42. Charles Wilson Reagan, Judgement and Grace in Dixie (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1995). 43. Paul DiMaggio, Richard A. Peterson, and Jack Esco Jr., “Country Music: The Ballad of the Silent Majority,” in The Sounds of Social Change, ed. R. Serge Denisoff and Richard A. Peterson (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1972); Alice Randall, My Country Roots (Nashville, TN: Naked Ink, 2006). 44. Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp:  The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 45. Nolan Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler (Urbana–​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992). 46. Comentale, Sweet Air, 91. 47. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 177. 48. Quoted in Jack Isenhour, He Stopped Loving Her Today (Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 54. 49. Paul Hemphill, Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank Williams (New York: Viking, 2005). 50. Lloyd, “Urbanization.” 51. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 25. 52. Comentale, Sweet Air, 73. 53. Richard Lloyd, “Differentiating Country Music: Legacy, Industry and Scene in Nashville,” in Music City, ed. Alenka Barber Kersovan, Volker Kirchberg, and Robin Kuchar (Hamburg, Germany: Verlag, 2014). 54. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 17. 55. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 22 56. Michael Kosser, How Nashville Became Music City: Fifty Years of Music Row (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2006). 57. Bill Carey, Fortunes, Fiddles and Fried Chicken: A Business History of Nashville (Nashville, TN: Hillsboro Press, 2000); Don H. Doyle, Nashville Since the 1920s (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985). 58. Craig Havighurst, Air Castle of the South:  WSM and the Making of Country Music (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 59. Charles K. Wolfe, A Good Natured Riot:  The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press and Country Music Foundation Press, 1999). 60. Ibid. 21–​22. 61. Paul Hemphill, The Nashville Sound (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). 62. Louis Kyriakoudes, The Social Origins of the Urban South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 63. Hemphill, Nashville Sound. 64. Jennifer C. Lena, Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 65. Bill Ivey, “The Nashville Sound,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 371–​372. 66. Bruce Feiler, Dreaming Out Loud:  Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, and the New Face of Nashville (New York: Perennial, 1998). 67. John Rumble, “Acuff-​Rose Publications,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5–​6.

304    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 68. John Lomax III, “The Center of Music City: Nashville’s Music Row,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 385–​389. 69. Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 70. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986). 71. Jeremy Hill, “‘Country Comes to Town’: Country Music’s Construction of a New Urban Identity in the 1960s,” Popular Music and Society 34, no. 3 (2011): 293–​308; Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 72. Peter Applebome, Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996); James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Economic Development (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 73. Lloyd, “Urbanization.” 74. Applebome, Dixie Rising; James C. Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877-​ 1984 (Lexington:  University of Kentucky Press, 1984); Anne Markusen et  al., The Rise of the Gunbelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Philip Scranton, The Second Wave: Southern Industrialization from the 1940s to the 1970s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001). 75. Thomas Edsall, Building Red America (New York: Basic Books, 2007). 76. Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY:  Arlington House, 1969). 77. Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2000). 78. Ian Haney Lopez, Dog-​Whistle Politics:  How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2015); Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994). 79. Edsall, Building Red America. 80. Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 81. See Pecknold, Selling Sound. 82. Willman, Rednecks and Bluenecks. 83. Geoff Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 73–​100. 84. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 199. 85. Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time:  A  Memoir of Greenwich Village in the 1960s (New York: Broadway Books, 2009). 86. Daryl Sanders, “Blonde Ambition:  Looking Back on Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, the Record that Changed Nashville,” Nashville Scene (May 5, 2011), 17–​26; Steve Turner, The Man Called Cash (Nashville, TN: W. Publishing Group, 2004); Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America (New York: Anchor, 2010), 105–​129. 87. Willman, Rednecks and Bluenecks.

Sociology of Country Music    305 88. Leigh Edwards, Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009), 57. 89. Jack Hurst, Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry: The First Fifty Years (New York: Abradale Press, 1975), 35–​38. 90. Applebome, Dixie Rising; Feiler, Dreaming Out Loud; Laurence Leamer, Three Chords and the Truth (New York: Harper Collins, 1997). 91. Hackett, “New Statistics”; Richard A. Peterson and Paul DiMaggio, “From Region to Class, the Changing Locus of Country Music: A Test of the Massification Hypothesis,” Social Forces 53, no. 3 (1975):  497–​ 506; Maria Elizabeth Grabe, “Massification Revisited:  Country Music and Demography,” Popular Music and Society 21, no. 4 (1997): 63–​84. 92. Eric Weisbard, Top Forty Democracy:  The Rival Mainstreams of American Music (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 93. Gary Trust, “Rewinding the Charts:  23 Years Ago, Garth Brooks Lassoed History,” Billboard 126 (2004): 32. 94. John P. Kellog, “The Urbanization of the Billboard Top Album and Singles Charts: How Soundscan Changed the Game,” MEIEA Journal 13, no. 1 (2013): 45. 95. Jewly Hight, “A History of Hick-​Hop: The 27-​Year-​Old Story of Country Rap,” Rolling Stone (June 27, 2014). 96. Michael Emeson, “Social Class and Cultural Mobility:  Reconfiguring the Cultural Omnivore Thesis,” Journal of Sociology 39, no. 3 (2003): 211–​230; Richard A. Peterson, “Understanding Audience Segmentation:  From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore,” Poetics 21, no. 2 (1994): 243–​258. 97. Storey, Inventing Popular Culture. 98. Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production. 99. Robert Beauregard, When America Became Suburban (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Kenneth T. Jackson, The Crabgrass Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 100. Claude Fischer, “Ever More Rooted Americans,” City and Community 1, no. 2 (2002): 177–​198. 101. J. Freedom DuLac, “Country Music Is Crazy Right Now for Artists Who Sing About Small-​Town Life,” The Washington Post, May 9, 2004. 102. Richard Florida and Scott Jackson, “Sonic City: The Evolving Economic Geography of the Music Industry,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 29, no. 3 (2010): 310–​321. 103. Adam Gold, “Q&A: T-​Bone Burnett on ‘Nashville,’ Elton John’s Comeback, and Retiring as a Producer,” Rolling Stone, December 18, 2012, http://​www.rollingstone.com/​music/​ news/​q-​a-​t-​b one-​burnett-​on-​nashville-​elton-​j ohns-​comeback-​and-​retiring-​as-​a-​ producer-​20121218. 104. Daniel B. Cornfield, Beyond the Beat:  Musicians Building Community in Nashville (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 105. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). 106. Greg Kot, Ripped:  How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (New York: Scribner, 2009). 107. Richard Lloyd and Terry Nichols Clark, “The City as an Entertainment Machine,” Research in Urban Sociology 6, no. 3 (2001): 357–​378; Richard Lloyd and Brian Christens,

306    Oxford Handbook of Country Music “Reaching for Dubai: Nashville Dreams its 21st Century Skyline,” in Global Downtowns, ed. Marina Peterson and Gary W. McDonough (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 108. Richard Lloyd, Neo-​ Bohemia:  Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York: Routledge, 2010); Richard Lloyd, “East Nashville Skyline,” Ethnography 12, no. 1 (2011): 114–​145. 109. Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision (London: Polity, 2007).

Chapter 15

C ountry M u sic a nd  C l as s Leigh H. Edwards

Because of the perceived class inflection of the genre, class is a particularly important category of scholarly analysis for country music studies. Country music is symbolically associated with a southern white working-​class audience and milieu. Linking the two because of the genre’s regional folk culture roots, Bill Malone observes that audiences still consume their fantasy of a southern, rural, white working class through the music,1 even though we know that audiences have always been broader.2 Scholars have tackled this issue with historical accounts of how the genre was commercialized in the 1920s and how the developing country music industry targeted different class demographics. The targeted audiences have varied over time and include a southern white working class but not exclusively a rural audience, as well as Southerners who migrated to northern cities after World War II and also an upwardly mobile middle-​class audience. Some of the most crucial scholarly questions concern how class intersects with race and gender categories in the country genre, and scholars have begun doing important work using intersectionality theory that explores how those categories inform each other. For example, critics such as Michael Bertrand and Erich Nunn have detailed how the genre sparked cross-​racial class bonding, while Diane Pecknold has elaborated on the important history of race and class in the genre, including African American contributions to country music.3 The scholarly collections A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (2004) and Country Boys and Redneck Women: New Essays in Gender and Country Music (2016), edited by Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker, have generated crucial discussions of how gender intersects with class and race in country music history.4 Recent work in the field has disputed the older assumption that country music has a strict gender binary, and instead shows that gender as a category has been much more fluid and complicated than critics once thought, particularly as it is inflected by class.5 In addition to underscoring the importance of discussing class in relation to gender and race in the genre, which I will detail following in case studies about Johnny Cash and about the hillbilly trope, I would also argue for how vital it is to link class to questions of folk culture and mass culture. Country music is a particularly helpful case study

308    Oxford Handbook of Country Music for larger debates about popular culture because it often nostalgically celebrates an “authentic” working-​class folk culture as part of a premodern rural past. This dynamic involves a fantasy of something that somehow exists outside of modernity, staged in the very mass media form that helps perpetuate the conditions of modernity that listeners seem alienated by in their search for the folk and the pure. Similarly, George Lipsitz notes how post-​World War II commercialized leisure, as expressed through mass culture, tends to meditate on the very loss it is furthering.6 Critics such as Barbara Ching and Joli Jensen have urged analysis of the problematic processes whereby people try to script premodern nostalgia onto this popular culture form—​what Jensen calls “purity by proxy”—​whereby “other people and forms manifest and maintain virtue for us” in the genre’s “downhome versus uptown” tension or in fantasies of a supposedly “simpler” time.7 They argue for the importance of reading complexity rather than simplicity in the genre. When listeners consume their fantasy of a southern, white, rural working class through the music, it is through this projected nostalgia for their folk culture as representing somehow a premodern or “simpler” time before modernity, that is, the conditions of social life after the rise of capitalism and industrialization. Efforts to track audiences have concluded that that they are diverse and make varied uses of the music. However, there is some evidence to show that there remains a large working-​class component to audiences spread out nationally, with a high percentage in urban areas.8 One famous study by DiMaggio, Peterson, and Escoe in the 1970s found that core country music listeners are largely “urban living, white adults with rural roots who are established in home, family, and job, and yet who are content with none of these.”9 The symbolic association with a southern, white, working-​class culture continues to matter to the music, as it can express what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling,” or what it feels like to live the beliefs of a particular group at a particular time, here through a musical form that is framed as at once folk poetry and mass media.10 The genre can, for example, speak to the tensions a southern, rural, working-​class subculture experienced as it migrated to cities in great numbers after World War II. Likewise, it addresses how this working class grappled with a suburban middle-​class boom in the 1950s and all the resulting tensions. As examples of some of the genre’s class and gender inflections as they have evolved over time, the honky tonk music of Ernest Tubb or Hank Williams was disruptive to postwar domesticity, a masculine retreat from the pressures of home, with a louder style, strong dance beats, and lyrics about the working-​class bars and dance clubs that generated and showcased this style. Williams and others were also expressing southern poor and working-​class resistance to the new 1950s postwar baby boom, middle-​class norms of modern nuclear family unit domesticity, consumerism, and the rise of the suburbs.11 Richard Leppert and George Lipsitz argue convincingly that Williams undermines an emergent masculinity of middle-​class domesticity because he represented the troubled drifter (in his “Luke the Drifter” persona) who resisted the modern nuclear family. Rather than embracing a return to patriarchy, Williams’s themes featured an effort to get closer to women and not to dominate them, often as working-​class partners (perhaps

Country Music and Class    309 a residual reference to the Depression era South in which women frequently presided over extended families for which the men had to roam to look for work).12 Williams’s identification with a southern, white working class was expressed through musical elements that have been typed feminine (such as a high pitch), here the “high lonesome” voice and the “twang” of the southern, white, working-​class folk culture. Likewise, in my book on Johnny Cash, I have argued that Cash uses rockabilly rather than Williams’s “high lonesome” mode of address but articulates similar themes that trouble the modern nuclear family and critique that middle-​class ideal, although his characters are more clearly torn between rambling and home.13 Meanwhile, Kitty Wells could sing in a honky tonk style that, as a genre, threatened middle-​class domesticity, but she domesticated it with her gendered, demure self-​presentation, gingham dresses, and family orientation. Thus, Wells could sing “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” (1952) and argue that lying men should be blamed for cheating, not fallen women, all while signifying in a nonthreatening, domesticated way. Her signature hit was an answer song to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life” (1952), an earlier song that blamed dance hall women for leading men astray.14 In the mid-​to-​late 1950s, rockabilly merged country (honky tonk) and rhythm and blues (jump blues) styles into a high-​energy performance with themes of youth rebellion, as early rock and roll. Artists like Elvis and Cash were seen as a threat to suburban middle-​class society and signaled the potential of cross-​racial, working-​class bonding. A young Brenda Lee sang in this style but was positioned as a nonthreatening teenybopper. Meanwhile, the smooth Nashville Sound of the late 1950s through the 1960s—​ with lush string and horn sections, background choruses, and a pop-​oriented sound pioneered by singers such as Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, and Eddy Arnold—​was country music’s effort to fight back against an encroaching, disruptive rock and roll that was stealing listeners; and it tried to embrace a middle-​class modern nuclear family ideal.15 Beyond tracing such historical dynamics, another crucial question for country music scholarship is how to theorize the category of class itself most effectively. Some country music studies scholars have used Pierre Bourdieu’s model of taste categories as markers for class hierarchies (with country music being the “low Other”),16 whereas others have used Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist concept of hegemony in class relations, where popular culture like country music shows traces of class struggle or generates “organic intellectuals” who speak for their class.17 Theorist Beverley Skeggs offers another important theoretical model of class as “cultural exchange-​value,” or the way individual subjects try to display identity attributes related to class or other categories like race, gender, and sexuality to accrue power in a symbolic and political economy in contemporary Western contexts. Skeggs details how middle-​class subjects try to display their class status as a property, while working-​class subjects are disadvantaged in this system.18 Country music’s symbolic connection to a southern, white working class has also sparked important questions about the genre’s political affiliations. Some scholars argue that the genre has conventionally been associated with conservative politics, while others find a more flexible, changing, and nuanced set of politics that are sometimes progressive.19 Other crucial areas for further study include class inflections in the musical

310    Oxford Handbook of Country Music content and lyrics, audience reception, and in the stage personae and autobiographies of the country stars. Because country music has so often been framed as “folk poetry” or the expression of a working-​class structure of feeling, the genre raises questions about how certain groups get presented as “authentic,” just as some country music expresses tensions regarding class positioning and stereotyping. More broadly, country music is a particularly apt site for analysis of competing ideological visions of the world, not simply due to its dominance as a popular music genre (long the top radio format in America) but also because of its insistent voicing of the contradictions in American society.20 To link these common themes in country music to broader cultural theory concerns, ideas of contradiction are significant issues in American thought. Some of the more obvious sites of ideological contradiction stem from capitalism and class struggle or the legacy of race slavery and American Indian land dispossession. Popular culture both shapes and reflects understandings of these contradictions; because it is a primary cultural space for meditating on these issues, it has a significant role in discursive battles over meaning. Stuart Hall argues that popular culture is a site where “collective social understandings are created” and texts are involved in a competitive “politics of signification” to normalize their worldviews for audiences.21 Hall’s cultural studies model is helpful for understanding this issue of contradiction because it asserts that cultural texts and practices offer competing ideological significations of the world that engage in conflict and negotiation. Clear examples include instances in which a dominant group tries to make its interests seem universal (for instance, through the norming of bourgeois domesticity at various points in US history) in an effort to naturalize the contradictions caused by power imbalances (of class but also of other hierarchies such as gender or race). In terms of country music’s own favored contradictory themes, the genre has historically been deeply invested in thematic binaries that express the tensions in southern working-​class life. Critics such as Richard Peterson, George Lewis, and Malone have traced the key contradictions within the value systems expressed in the genre. They link these dualisms to sources in southern working-​class history and note that it is the tension between binaries such as rural past and urban present, home versus rambling, and restraint versus freedom that make the genre compelling.22 Along these lines, Peterson has demonstrated that Hank Williams—​in his lyrics and live-​hard, die-​young life—​ exemplifies the dualism of recurring country music themes: “the stark contrasts of hard work and dissipation, family loyalty and alienation, home and the open road, profound love and bitter hatred, good and evil.”23 Lewis argues that the genre’s broad thematic conflicts between self and society arise from massive social changes. Most notably, these include the twentieth-​century labor migrations of poor Southerners. Even as they spread their cultural practices across the country in their travels over the course of the twentieth century, these Southerners experienced a sense of cultural dislocation encapsulated in nostalgia and yearning in the music.

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Authenticity and Folk Culture The country genre makes insistent claims for authenticity, demanding of its performers some proof of credibility (sometimes earned through affiliation with rural life, demonstrable hard-​luck life experiences, or dedication to the Nashville music community). As the scholarly literature has established, in the construction of authenticity in the genre, there is a recurring tension between the market versus purity, or commercial sheen versus hardscrabble rawness.24 This tension in country music as a mass art form is particularly cogent because the genre’s roots are in folk culture, but it has always been commercial.25 Like jazz and the blues, country music developed out of earlier southern folk cultures and defined itself through emergent media forms as it began gaining circulation on radio and through record sales in the 1920s. “Hillbilly music” was drawn from the folk music of the Appalachian Mountains and the rural South, a mix of music carried over by Irish and European immigrants and vernacular music brought by African slaves—​a syncretism of Old and New World, of African and European-​derived influences.26 Because one “founding moment” of commercial country music occurred when Ralph Peer recorded hillbilly acts like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family in Bristol, Virginia, in 1927 for distribution on the Victor recording label to be marketed to poor southern whites, that marketing strategy reflects the longer-​running mythological association between the genre and a southern, white working class. He brought to a mass audience folk or “hillbilly” music (a term sometimes seen as derogatory), what would by the 1940s be less controversially dubbed “country” music. Country music is, of course, not unique in linking folk and mass cultures, as it developed from vernacular culture passed from person to person and evolved into mass culture produced and mediated via mass communication technology, but it does have its own distinct variation on that folk-​mass mixture. It expresses a nostalgia for its folk culture roots, for a pastoral, premodern purity—​even as it traffics in mass communication technology and is comprised of commodities and the products of the mass culture industry, as when we see commercial singers producing mass-​marketed country songs while wearing cowboy hats as props to establish “authenticity” and sing about their nostalgia for a “simpler” agrarian way of life down on the farm.27 The genre scripts that narrative of purity onto idealizations of a rural, pastoral, agricultural way of life. Yet it stages that nostalgic fantasy via mass media, the very form that helps perpetuate the conditions of modernity that the country genre expresses alienation from in its search for the folk and the pure. The rhetorical distinction between folk purity and mass culture commercialism is only true in perception, not historical reality.28 Benjamin Filene has demonstrated how folklorists and music industry executives created a “folk” distinction that was subjective and reflected their cultural values at the time.29 Thus, the distinctions between the categories of folk culture and mass culture are arbitrary and can blur quite easily.

312    Oxford Handbook of Country Music For example, Diane Pecknold has shown convincingly how the country music industry in the 1960s used commercialism to advance itself, often by creating images of professional musicians and respectable, “affluent,” working-​class fans (even though the genre started out with broader audience appeals), which it used to counterbalance negative stereotypes of “hillbillies” or backwoods country bumpkins. Meanwhile, the fans used what they understood to be self-​consciously theatrical representations of a rural past to create an identity for themselves (because many of these fans were rural-​ to-​urban migrants from the South in the 1920s through the 1960s). Always aware of country music’s commercial level, the fans sometimes embraced commercialism in the music and sometimes resisted it. Digging deeply into fan accounts from fan publications and archival records from the Country Music Foundation at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville (and about the founding of the Hall of Fame), Pecknold provides an especially important analysis of fandom. While traditional histories suggest that country fans were resistant to commercialism in their embrace of traditional—​ even past-​obsessed—​culture, Pecknold demonstrates that it would be more accurate to say that fans were aware of commercialism and often embraced it because mass media (especially radio) is precisely what allowed them to engage with a national imagined community formed through appreciation of this music. That paradoxical merger of tradition with modernity is what defines the genre.30 A good example of how country music has evolved as an intricate mixture of folk and mass culture is the figure of the singing cowboy. In twentieth-​century country music, western music and singing cowboys became popular in part through 1930s Hollywood films (with Hollywood’s singing cowboys including stars like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry). Country music’s Western images and influences came from a combination of earlier nineteenth-​century folk culture along with these Hollywood films, another example of folk culture mixing with twentieth-​century mass media fantasies. When Johnny Cash made the 1965 western concept album Johnny Cash Sings the Ballads of the True West, his description of his album illustrates how the tension between folk and mass culture is foundational to the western genre. He used both to engage with the genre, and his double album was received as part of the 1960s folk revival movement. In his liner notes, Cash said he was trying to return to original folk sources rather than simply using the Hollywood film fantasies to recover the “true West.” He wanted his album to tell “the cowboy’s story” through “legends, songs and stories” to get “a glimpse beyond the movies and television, back to when a few tales could show us THE TRUE WEST.” Cash is interested in dispelling myths and getting beyond the mass media’s spin on the cowboy. Yet when he tries to find “pure” folk sources, he can actually only find sources that reflect the folk-​culture–​mass-​culture mix. He searched for folk culture sources by reading John Lomax, Carl Sandburg, and every issue of True West magazine, but he also consulted Tex Ritter, who was a Hollywood singing cowboy as well as a folk music preservationist and stylist. In both the album’s liner notes and a spoken word recording titled “Reflections,” Cash describes his research as what is essentially a folk–​mass culture mix. He explained that he updated the sounds in the songs to a twentieth-​century mass media context because the songs were “meant to be heard” via radio and sound recordings.31

Country Music and Class    313 Cash was using mass media to be nostalgic for an earlier folk culture that was pushed to the margins by that mass media. Cash’s description of the appropriateness of using modern media to deliver his incarnation of the structure of feeling of the “Old West” speaks to one of the central contradictions in country music. Despite its investment in rural origins, it was originated in the 1920s by the decidedly urban forces of recording technology and radio.32 Bill Malone traces the genre’s ongoing fascination with the cowboy to the same nineteenth-​century sources that produced twentieth-​century commercial country music (changes to American life after the Civil War, such as industrialization and a developing market economy, urbanization, wage labor, migration and dislocation, and later nostalgia for a supposedly “simpler” society). As such an example can show, country music’s intricate mixture of folk culture and mass culture, and the genre’s on-​going conversation about those elements, offer one key distinctive foundational rhetoric. Again, that tension between folk and mass culture directly relates to class in country music’s history and themes. There are other genre metanarratives that also illuminate class. For instance, other key binaries of stylistic differences take on class and gender stereotypes. In sociologist Richard Peterson’s well-​ known “hard-​core” versus “soft-​shell” country dialectic, the “pure” roots of traditional country (Hank Williams) oppose the more “pop” or market-​oriented form such as the Nashville Sound and its descendants (Jim Reeves).33 For Peterson, “soft-​shell” involves mainstream country’s use of standard American English, a smooth singing style, the lack of pronounced accents, and broader emotional themes with wide appeal as opposed to “hard” country’s nasal twang, nonstandard English, strong southern or southwestern accents, and a focus on personal stories of suffering and hardship. Likewise, historians have noted how the 1927 Bristol sessions generated two different paradigms of “authenticity”:  the Carter Family’s home, family, and domesticity-​focused traditional music (which they advertised as “morally good”) versus Jimmie Rodgers’s rambler, genre-​ crossing music.34 That Carter ideal of domestic harmony was carefully created and hid familial strife, yet it managed to establish an ongoing paradigm of domestic purity for the country genre.35 These gendered stylistic models have broader applicability. For example, some scholars have critiqued Peterson’s influential account of authenticity in commercial country music, arguing that the distinction between “hard country” authenticity and “soft” country-​pop inauthenticity imports some unexamined gender assumptions. That is, the masculine-​associated “hard” styles enjoy greater credibility, whereas the feminized “soft” styles are seen as “sell-​outs.”36 Such a discussion calls to mind Andreas Huyssen’s examinations of a masculinized modernist celebration of a “pure” or “high” art supposedly in danger of being diminished by a feminized mass culture.37 Here, that stereotypical idea of a purer “hard” country is masculinized and associated with working-​class roots and folk culture, while the idea of “soft” country represents a feminized and potentially middle-​class-​dominated mass culture purportedly watering down the folk culture roots. Of course, country music is a particularly interesting case because the masculinized pure art would be the residual, supposedly premodern folk culture sounds like the “high lonesome” pitch and “twang” in the voice (sounds that can also be stereotyped

314    Oxford Handbook of Country Music as feminine). These stereotypes do not hold up, of course, just as the lines between folk and mass culture have always been blurred. Since the intricate staging of authenticity in country music has been a topic of much critical debate, class becomes an important site for that discussion because class paradigms are strongly linked to authenticity issues. Country music’s gender ideologies become especially complicated in a southern, white, working-​class context. In Barbara Ching’s important arguments about masculinity and class, male “hard country” stars such as Porter Wagoner, George Jones, and Merle Haggard perform masculinity as abject white “redneck trash” in a way that critiques an outsider tourist gaze. In her discussion of class, Ching uses Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of taste as a class marker and his concept of cultural capital.38 Building on Bourdieu’s contention that taste hierarchies are actually versions of class hierarchies in which subjective “good taste” corresponds to “higher” class values, Ching argues that male hard country singers use burlesque to recuperate their own class abjection. That is, when the dominant culture belittles them as “bad taste,” they use a burlesque performance of the “trashy” or “low” to claim their own position and push back against dominant norms and cultural taste hierarchies.39 Ching argues that female singers such as Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, and Tammy Wynette do not enact hard country in this kind of male burlesque model because they are mostly singing about women triumphing and succeeding (often over disappointing husbands) rather than about a “hard country” embrace of “bad taste.”40 Nadine Hubbs argues that in Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman,” Wilson appropriates male “hard country” artists’ performance of masculinity to reclaim white, working-​class, female subjectivity against the abjection projected onto it by middle-​class discourse.41 Dolly Parton’s parodic burlesque is its own case, and she illuminates how a country star’s persona can defend a working-​class persona and reject a middle-​class ideal.42 Parton uses some elements of burlesque in the sense that a display of “bad taste” can critique a cultural hierarchy, especially in her duets with Porter Wagoner. There, they both use a key performance of sincerity, which Wagoner said his mentor Red Foley taught him how to do convincingly.43 When Parton delivers her famous tag line, “it takes a lot of money to look this cheap,” she claims a high culture ironic knowledge of her look as “cheap.” Yet she also parodies the cheapness in a way that critiques that stereotype and the cultural hierarchy on which it is based, all while linking her rhetoric of sincerity and irony to her authenticity narratives: that is, her life story. Thus she does at times use burlesque as a comic mode that can undermine cultural ideals by violating standards of good taste. Within images of white, working-​class femininity, she fashions a marginalized “white trash tramp” image that she combines with a culturally validated image of the white, working-​class, pure “mountain girl.” Thus, within white working-​class femininity, she plays a validated version of femininity off of a subordinated one, uplifting the negative image. More broadly, she also places her “white trash” femininity in resistant opposition to middle-​class womanhood and the norms of domesticity. She thus uses a subordinated white working-​class femininity to critique a dominant white middle-​class definition of femininity, slamming middle-​class norms.44

Country Music and Class    315 Just as Parton can provide a case study of working-​class critiques of middle-​class norms, there are other important examples of that dynamic in country music history, most notably the idea of “hard country” as being a working-​class style that rejects a demeaning middle-​class put-​down of it. Along the same lines as Peterson’s hard–​soft style model, Ching elaborates on why Wagoner as a solo artist would fit a “hard country” model, as a term first used in 1970 pejoratively, but the style it retroactively refers to was evident by the mid-​1960s.45 For Ching, hard country is evident in Wagoner songs such as his chart-​topping, 1955 single “A Satisfied Mind.” The song imagines a moral compensation for poverty, with the speaker suggesting that rich men do not have satisfaction, whereas the suffering, impoverished working-​class speaker does. However, the suffering in the speaker’s voice belies any moral or symbolic satisfaction he claims. In another song with relevant working-​class themes, Wagoner had a popular version of “The Cold Hard Facts of Life.” The lyrics describe a male narrator speaking from prison; he has killed his wife and her lover because he came home a day early, went to the liquor store for champagne, and overheard another man buying alcohol to go cheat with a woman whose husband was out of town. It is only when the speaker watches the man turning into his own driveway that he realizes it is his wife who is cheating, and he kills them both with a knife. He imagines he will “go to hell” or “rot here in the cell.” The final line—​ “who taught who the cold hard facts of life?”—​emphasizes the suffering male speaker who blames the female cheater; but because he has murdered her, the song ends with some degree of ambiguity about which bleak facts are being underscored. That song features male working-​class aggression and possessiveness of women as compensation for a working-​class status, with murderous responses to female infidelity and a claimed moral justification. Wagoner appears as the abject, working-​class, male subject who projects a relatability to working-​class fans. As Ching argues, his speaking position is to return the demeaning tourist gaze by claiming his own “bad taste,” abject position. She notes that Wagoner identified his own “low” positioning on purpose: “ ‘I don’t try to do anything for the uptown people.’ ”46 Wagoner also embraced the fact that people put him down for being “hard country.”47 She notes that Porter’s final riddle in that song toys with the patronizing listener who might simply take the question literally when instead it is figurative and participates in an imaginative tradition where the song is exploring the concept of suffering rather than merely describing it literally.48 As such examples of working-​class themes and associated styles demonstrate, country music history is filled with complex considerations of class. As the previous discussion has outlined, not only does the genre’s engagement with class link centrally to questions of gender and race, but it also illuminates broader cultural categories such as folk culture versus mass culture. At times, country music’s nostalgia for folk culture as opposed to commercialized mass culture is also a nostalgia for a working-​ class affiliation and a critique of a mass media associated with the middle class. Again, because the genre’s nostalgic for some idealized folk purity is itself expressed via mass media, the distinctions between these categories, whether of culture or class, are always blurred.

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Case Study: Johnny Cash, Class, and Masculinity Johnny Cash’s oeuvre provides a telling example of how multivalent class themes in country music can be. The thematic focus on southern, white, working-​class masculinity in his songwriting shares much in common with long-​running thematic traditions in country music. In his classic study, W. J. Cash identifies one of the central tensions in southern working-​class life as the battle between piety and hedonism in the “divided” Southerner, or the “man in the center,” who struggles between his Saturday night carousing and his Sunday morning holiness.49 Correspondingly, Lewis points out that common country music themes about masculinity involve freedom and independence versus the cultural pressure for men to marry and support a family instead of chasing “honky-​tonk angels.”50 Johnny Cash offers more than another link in a long chain of cultural tradition. His texts build on familiar cultural tensions but also present a more complex exploration of these issues because they question gendered class constructions. Cash establishes a heroic working-​class masculinity and explores the uncertainties in that identity. As a case study, Cash can help explicate the careful performance of gender or the arbitrary construction of working-​class identity through popular music in different historical contexts. Malone argues that Cash was the first “bad boy” of country music because he identified so strongly with a rambler trope through his outlaw image, particularly in his prison albums.51 The rambler, the most common figure embodying domesticity versus freedom in the genre, defies social conventions or lives apart from society.52 Malone traces a long-​standing populist admiration for the outlaw character and demonstrates how it could express a resistance to restrictive class lines and social mores. The outlaw could articulate a working-​class fantasy of liberty from the constrictions of work and a nostalgia for the individualism of ruralism that was lost with the advent of sharecropping after the Civil War and the movement from farms to cities in the early twentieth century. The rambler is a hard-​living trickster who jumps trains and often drinks heavily and carouses with women at every station, refusing to be bound by the ties of stable domesticity or family. The convict, portrayed as a sympathetic figure who is falsely accused or who was simply trying to help his family in the face of poverty, is another variation on the rambler theme. The rambler has a long history in country music, popularized by Jimmie Rodgers in the 1920s, Hank Williams in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and by the Outlaw movement headed by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in the 1970s. Although other singers have explored these tensions inherent in southern working-​ class life (from Williams to Merle Haggard), Cash is distinctive for the depth of engagement he has with these themes in his work, the thoroughness with which he explores both sides of opposing forces without collapsing familiar binaries like rambling versus home into an easy resolution, and in the degree to which he incorporates that tension

Country Music and Class    317 into his own media image. As a songwriter (in the over two hundred songs he penned), Cash imagines a version of heroic, southern, working-​class masculinity and yet also questions that gender role construction, devoting a great deal of attention to the uncertainties, ambivalences, and vulnerabilities of that manhood. His protagonist is often a “commonfolk” man who works hard to provide for his wife and their children, takes pride in his labor, and affirms his own sense of worth in the face of frustrations over his class status or struggles to support his family in the midst of an unjust world. At the same time that Cash’s protagonists are devoted to home and family, they are also drawn to the rambling life. They never resolve the tension between compliance with domesticity and a rebellious rejection of social norms, a desire to live at the margins of society, free from social constraints. The male character is drawn to home, mother, religion, and the bonds of family. Yet he simultaneously yearns to jump trains, carouse, revel in licentious love affairs, and rebelliously act out his proletarian and masculine frustrations. For every rambler or working hobo Cash admires for their mobility and freedom (in songs like “Come and Ride This Train,” “Locomotive Man,” and “Ridin’ on the Cotton Belt,”), he writes about men who express their deep desire to return home from their rambling (“Hey, Porter”). Yet his songs do more than examine both sides of the rambling versus family dichotomy. For instance, Cash’s songs about female ramblers, a much less common trope in the genre, interrogate gender role conventions.53 It is Cash’s signature embodiment of both the saint and the sinner, the family man and the rambler, the establishment patriot and the outlaw rebel that is distinctive here. His manipulation of these opposing images is striking for its longevity and circulation, as he deploys these themes throughout his long career to global popularity. What is most distinctive and most important about his opposing images is that he does not resolve them. He leaves the diametric poles in productive tension, exploring each side of the opposition and adding a deep sense of complexity and commitment to both sides. Furthermore, Cash often uses these opposing tensions—​and his insistence on holding onto both sides of the binary—​as a ground for social critique. In this argument, I disagree with Malone, who asserts that Cash, like the country music genre as a whole, tends to offer only personal, individualistic resolutions to labor tensions. Malone uses Cash’s version of the song “Oney” as an example. There, a shop-​floor worker pledges that, as soon as he retires, he will get revenge on his abusive foreman by attacking him physically. Malone sees this example as emblematic of a larger dynamic in country music in which artists rarely question the political or social structure leading to travails in working-​class life and instead focus on individual sympathy for working people and a promotion of conservative moral values.54 He sees country music’s potential for class critique blunted by being deflected into fantasy resolutions: “The problems addressed by country music song lyrics are real, but their proposed resolutions often take the form of fantasy—​nostalgia, machismo, escapism, religion, and romantic love.”55 He contrasts such “individualistic responses” with calls to coordinated action, such as the Populist Movement of the 1890s or the union drives in the 1930s. For Malone, then, the treatment of tensions in working-​class life in this music commonly involves a fantasy resolution, one that might return to emphasizing the love of mother and home or that resolves the

318    Oxford Handbook of Country Music issues by recourse to conservative moral values discourse, especially the idea that the patriarchal household and men’s status there can offer rewards that will counterbalance class anger. Michael Kimmel sees a similar dynamic in “angry man” country music in the 1990s and 2000s (like that of Toby Keith), involving a retreat to individualism and the escapism of sex, cars, and beer rather than any kind of structural social critique.56 However, I would argue that Cash departs significantly from this model in which any potential for class critique is blunted by being deflected into individualistic fantasy resolutions. Some of his song lyrics do imagine fantasy resolutions to the troubles of working-​class life that would fall into the categories of escapist romance narratives or that detach from secular problems by emphasizing a promise of religious salvation. But much more commonly, Cash links sympathy with working-​class men to structural social critiques. Cash’s prison songs exemplify this dynamic. There, he draws on his own work in prison reform advocacy, such as his efforts to win parole for convicts or his testimony at 1972 US Senate hearings on prison reform, where he advocated for employment programs. By dramatizing real-​life cases, his songs urge listeners to agitate for prison reform and accuse politicians and prison officials of corruption in abusive prison conditions. Similarly, in his many songs that explicitly castigate the US Government over ongoing American Indian policies, he makes insistent political critiques. He links his social justice advocacy to his conception of an outlaw, heroic masculinity. Cash is an apt case study for these gendered class questions because he is an iconic figure who projects masculine ideals, yet his performance of gender is one of the most complex of any male superstar. Cash problematizes identity categories. For some, he embodied masculine authority as the patriarch of country music’s “First Family” because he married into the Carter family. Yet his work sometimes questioned traditional gender role identities and socialization. In Cash’s performance of “A Boy Named Sue” (1969), in Shel Silverstein’s lyrics, the speaker wants to seek out and kill the father who left the family and left him with the girl’s moniker, “Sue.” But once found, the father informs Sue that the name has been a pedagogical lesson in how to be tough in a man’s world because it would force the son to fight. Although the song is played for humor, it simultaneously marks gender as a socialized behavior and observes the difficulties individual men can face in navigating gender norms and the directive to perform masculinity in response to societal pressure. By simply bearing a name conventionally associated with girls, the boy, the song imagines, will be the target of continual attacks by those eager to police the strict boundaries of a gender binary (for fear the boy named Sue is troubling gender borders). Yet if gender categories were so natural, inherent, and readily evident (essentialized rather than socially constructed), a social marker such as a name would not spark such violent responses. The song thus speaks to the tenuousness and arbitrariness of gender as a social category, allowing listeners to take multiple identifications away from the song. Indeed, many of Cash’s signature songs focus on core moments of paradox, especially regarding gender role ideals. While “I Walk the Line” assures the speaker’s faithfulness because he “keep[s]‌the ends out for the tie that binds,” the lyrics also suggest the inevitability of failure as he sings “For you I know I’d even try to turn the tide,” a romantic

Country Music and Class    319 gesture but a hopeless endeavor. In his version of the murder ballad “Delia’s Gone,” the speaker kills “his woman” but then feels remorse as she haunts him when he sings of his vision of murder and love, violence and marital union as flip sides of the same coin: “If I hadn’t have shot poor Delia,/​I’d have had her for my wife.” While there is a long tradition of such domestic violence in murder ballads, Cash amplifies the aggression with lines describing Delia as the “kind of evil make me want to grab my submachine.” This kind of thematized troubled masculinity is appropriate coming from an artist who started out in rockabilly, that mid-​1950s fusion of “white” hillbilly music and “black” rhythm and blues, promoted by producer Sam Phillips at his Memphis Sun Studios, which spawned rock and roll and the first rock stars. Critics Mary Bufwack and Robert Oermann have shown how rockabilly stars violated gender taboos, taking on feminized behaviors (such as hip-​shaking, sob-​raking performances). Michael Bertrand has shown how “culturally schizophrenic” Hillbilly Cats crossed both racial and gender taboos. In his study of Elvis, Bertrand details how the rockabilly integration of “white” hillbilly music and “black” rhythm and blues in the 1950s and 1960s South symbolized racial integration and was seen as dangerous in the context of desegregation and the Civil Rights movement. Also incendiary was how the rockabilly stars identified with outsider aspects of black masculinity, drawing on identification between black and white, southern, working-​class cultures, but which also led to appropriation.57 In an artist such as Cash, who later spoke explicitly to social movements targeting racial inequity, the multifaceted identifications and appropriations that comprise his racialized gender performances place his performance and stable identity categories under question.

Hillbilly Deluxe: Critical Histories To trace how a specific working-​class trope has impacted country music history, let us turn to the figure of the hillbilly, which has been either demonized in country music to claim middle-​class respectability for the genre or framed positively to recuperate working-​class abjection. Country music’s treatment of the hillbilly also fits into its larger authenticity narratives that frame the South as a site of rural folk exceptionalism. Similarly, southern studies scholars have critiqued the way US popular culture more generally reinforces narratives of southern exceptionalism.58 Country music’s use of the hillbilly cultural trope is nuanced and reflects a long cultural history of hillbilly images and stereotypes, both positive and negative, in US popular culture—​including music, comic strips, films, and television. The well-​known history of the hillbilly term in country music involves explicit efforts by record executives during the mass commercialization of country music in the 1920s to draw on hillbilly images and an association with a southern, white, working-​class mountain folk culture. Later, by the postwar 1940s, the industry rejected the “hillbilly” music moniker as derogatory and moved to use “country and western” or “country” instead, although there were still some widespread uses of the term “hillbilly music” into the 1950s.

320    Oxford Handbook of Country Music As part of barn dance radio practices of the 1930s, John Lair, in his promotional efforts for his National Barn Dance for WLS in Chicago, famously created a positive stereotype of the mountain girl when he made up the persona of Linda Parker (performed by actress Jeanne Muenich) as the “Little Sunbonnet Girl,” a carefully created image. She could innocently sing “mountain songs,” which often involved stories of the sentimental mountain mother left at home when her children migrated to the city. As for his mountain girl, he insisted on her as a symbol for traditional values, rural folk culture, and a premodern, romanticized sense of a simpler time and place. He would later object to other images of hillbillies circulating in relation to country music, arguing that he did not want negative stereotypes associated with his constructed image of cultural innocence and wholesomeness. Lair made this image distinct from the hillbilly image, which he viewed as a low-​class stereotype; whereas in contrast, the Grand Ole Opry included more degraded hillbilly stereotypes and images. As Kristine McCusker demonstrates, the National Barn Dance’s rural-​to-​urban and South-​to-​North migrants (a significant part of their audience) could articulate their nostalgia for mother and home through this music, even while they adjusted to their new urban context via this imagined community on the radio.59 In Pamela Fox’s account of rusticity in country music history, the concept started as a figure for authenticity in 1930s barn dance programming. She details how that history is gendered. For male performers, the rustic hillbilly stereotype was shameful and feminized, whereas for women, through the postwar period, rusticity framed them as guardians of rural folk culture and conventional domesticity.60 The hillbilly stereotype became popular in comic strips beginning in the 1930s, with series such as Paul Webb’s The Mountain Boys (1934–​1958); Billy DeBeck’s Snuffy Smith (1934–​1944), which grew out of his existing comic strip, Barney Google; and Al Capp’s Li’l Abner (1934–​1977). Some observers, like Lair, objected to what some saw as demeaning caricatures. Lair explicitly objected to Al Capp’s comics. In his history of the hillbilly trope in US culture, Anthony Harkins argued that, since 1900, the hillbilly trope has signified both negative stereotypes (backwardness, ignorance, savagery) and positive ideas (folk culture, ruggedness, independence, devotion to family and home). In his view, the trope also suggests a rejection and an embrace of white working-​class Southerners as “Other,” indicating struggles over the meanings of race, class, gender, and mass culture.61 Because the trope has always been an ambivalent one, it has done different kinds of cultural work at different times, often as a way for audiences to define American identity and to contend with the social changes of modernity and urbanization, technology, and the growth of capitalism.62 For Harkins, the hillbilly figure let a mainstream, middle-​ class, white audience romanticize the past but also recommit to modernity because it offered a negative caricature of premodern, uncivilized society.63 Country musicians have explicitly used this hillbilly trope, most notably Dolly Parton. Some observers saw her voluptuous, blonde, country bumpkin image as her adaptation of the well-​known Daisy Mae Scragg (later Yokum) character from the Capp Li’l Abner comic strip, and she has posed as the character. Harkins argues that the Capp strip was popular because audiences used it during the Depression era to imagine a

Country Music and Class    321 simpler time and place. While handsome Abner Yokum (the name Capp’s combination of “yokel” and “hokum”) embodied a mountain innocence, virtuousness, and pioneer hardiness, his parents were portrayed as almost subhuman, simian, backward mountain folk not taken in by materialism but not recognizably modern and human. Beautiful Daisy Mae, meanwhile, wore her signature polka-​dot peasant blouse, short skirt, and no shoes; and Capp emphasized her voluptuous figure, which led to pop culture responses to her such as pin-​up girl paintings of her on military airplanes. Capp portrayed her as a hard-​working woman determined to get her man, who continually chased Abner, wanting to marry him and finally getting her wish in 1952. One lasting influence the comic strip had is Capp’s creation of Sadie Hawkins Day, where the Dogpatch, Kentucky women could marry any man they captured. That idea led to Sadie Hawkins Day dances in high schools beginning in the 1930s. Harkins notes that Capp’s concept could challenge gender decorum and the idea of feminine deference, but nevertheless reinforced stereotypes linking “impoverished southern mountaineers and aggressive and aberrant sexuality.”64 Daisy Mae was portrayed as stereotypically virtuous in the sense that she was only after one man and rejected the advances of other men, but she was also sexualized and objectified, reinforcing an idea of women as sexualized objects. The comic strips would depict a male-​dominated mountain culture of female subordination, where the women had to work because the men would not. Harkins argues that “images of hillbilly families and kin networks could be used both to challenge supposed norms of male breadwinners and submissive female domesticity and to uphold these ‘traditional’ gender roles by negative example.”65 These hillbilly gender images were seen as the exception that proved the norm. The use of the hillbilly trope as innocent nostalgia in television shows in the 1960s, such as Andy Griffith and The Beverly Hillbillies, might continue more recently in the “hickploitation” genre on reality TV. Series ranging from Buckwild to Here Comes Honey Boo Boo to Redneck Island and My Big Redneck Vacation gaze on working-​class white, rural subcultures as symbols of an imagined pastoral premodern simplicity or sensationalized stereotypes of “white trash” that the outsider tourist gaze frames as abject—​ and they also often frame the hicksploitation subjects as overtly racist. In that television genre, “redneck” becomes shorthand for racism, as stereotypical images of “white trash” are often deployed as symbols of racism in US popular culture, sometimes as foils to categorize other white, working-​class characters as less stereotypical.66 In music, Harkins notes how, since the 1980s, country artists like Dwight Yoakam, Marty Stuart, and BR5-​49 have embraced the hillbilly term to signify neo-​traditionalist authenticity and links to folk music (which is ironic because in 1930s incarnations, for example, it was used in opposition to the authenticity of folk music).67 Others, like psychobilly band Southern Culture on the Skids, have used the trope ironically in kitsch songs like “White Trash.” Some mainstream country artists have used it in an ironic way that nonetheless claims the burlesque abjection, as with Blake Shelton’s “Hillbilly Bone” (2010), which ridicules pretentious put-​downs of a white working class by claiming the hillbilly identity with an atavistic rendering of it as a genetic generational legacy.

322    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Other country singers have drawn on the long history of the hillbilly image as both pure source and fallen stereotype in country music history. I would argue that Dolly Parton, for example, uses exaggerated “rube” humor and slapstick like a burlesque that critiques the outsider tourist gaze that would frame hillbillies as abject stereotypes of “white trash.”68 Crucially, Parton’s hillbilly image is a critical one, in her combination of the hillbilly tramp and the mountain girl. She turns the Daisy Mae type voluptuous mountain girl image into knowing camp and irony. Unlike other female country singers who were her contemporaries, Parton’s response to the country music industry’s sexualization of her was not an uncomfortable embodiment of it but rather an ironic distance that she created through exaggeration, kitsch, and a knowing campiness, using the images and escaping entrapment. If, as Harkins argues, the hillbilly is the “white Other” through which larger cultural anxieties about race, class, and gender can be staged, Parton seizes that “white Other” and turns it into a gender parody, both tramp and pure at once.69 Ultimately, she insists that viewers should not accept a negative tramp stereotype, nor should they judge her by a stereotypical appearance, rather, they should instead separate outside appearance and inner emotions and values. In country music history, the multivalent hillbilly trope meditates on race, class, gender, mass culture, modernity—​specifically what the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and market capitalism did to previous lifeways and folk cultures. The hillbilly idea engages with the fantasy of an unspoiled premodern past, the idea that country music is the literal life expression of simpler folks and times. At the same time, it functions as a “low Other” stereotype of a working-​class figure.

Conclusion The Johnny Cash example demonstrates that country music can make structural critiques of class hierarchies (rather than engaging in simple escapism).70 Likewise, the hillbilly trope shows how complex the genre’s class themes can be, from embracing a folk nostalgia for the working class to importing negative stereotypes about it. An artist like Dolly Parton illustrates how some country music can engage with the full complexity of these themes, particularly as they intersect with gender, and allow the individual songwriter to critique a middle class put-​down of the working class. Indeed, critics and fans have often looked to country artists to deliver class advocacy or function as working-​class “organic intellectuals.” Scholarship about the ongoing importance of class as a category in country music history helpfully references larger cultural politics and pinpoints how class has been important historically to the genre’s development. Ultimately, it may be the genre’s symbolic association with a southern, white working-​class that is most enduring and that prompts the most ongoing scholarly debates because it allows us to question how popular music genres came to be associated with class, gender, or race categories, or with folk versus mass culture, and how the music itself continually transgresses such categories.

Country Music and Class    323

Notes 1. Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), ix. 2. Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp:  The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Charles Wolfe, “Postlude,” in A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music, ed. Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 196–​198. 3. Michael T. Bertrand, Race, Rock and Elvis (Urbana–​Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 2000); Erich Nunn, Sounding the Color Line:  Music and Race in the Southern Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015); Diane Pecknold, ed., Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 4. McCusker and Pecknold, A Boy Named Sue; Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker, eds., Country Boys and Redneck Women:  New Essays in Gender and Country Music (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016). Also see Kristine McCusker’s c­ hapter 17 in this book. 5. Kristine M. McCusker, Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-​Tonk Angels:  The Women of Barn Dance Radio (Urbana–​Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 2008); Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I  Do Best:  Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 2009); Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Travis D. Stimeling, Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin’s Progressive Country Music Scene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 26; Stimeling, “Narrative, Vocal Staging, and Masculinity in the ‘Outlaw’ Country Music of Waylon Jennings,” Popular Music 32, no. 3 (2013): 343–​358; Joli Jensen, “Patsy Cline’s Crossovers,” in McCusker and Pecknold, A Boy Named Sue, 107–​131; David Sanjek, “Foreword,” in McCusker and Pecknold, A Boy Named Sue, vii–​xv. Some of my own previous work in this area provides a larger context for my arguments here: Leigh H. Edwards, Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2009); Edwards, “Johnny Cash’s ‘Ain’t No Grave’ and Digital Folk Culture,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 27, no. 4 (December 2015):  186–​203. Cultural historians have shown that the gendered public/​private sphere was more fluid in practice than critics once thought; Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds., No More Separate Spheres! (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 6. George Lipsitz, Time Passages:  Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 3, 22. 7. Joli Jensen, The Nashville Sound:  Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music (Nashville, TN:  Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), 15. 8. John Buckley, “Country Music and American Values,” Popular Music and Society 6, no. 4 (1978): 293–​301, reprinted in George Lewis, ed., All That Glitters: Country Music in America (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1993), 198, 205. 9. George H. Lewis, “Tension, Conflict and Contradiction in Country Music,” in Lewis, All That Glitters, 209. 10. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1965), 64.

324    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 11. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound:  American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: BasicBooks,1988). 12. Richard Leppert and George Lipsitz, “Age, the Boy and Experience in the Music of Hank Williams,” in Lewis, All That Glitters, 22–​37. 13. Edwards, Cash and the Paradox. 14. Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, Finding Her Voice:  The Saga of Women in Country Music (New York: Crown, 1993). 15. Jensen, Nashville Sound. 16. Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best. 17. Edwards, Cash and the Paradox. 18. Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (London: Sage, 1997); and Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 153. See Nadine Hubbs, “‘Redneck Woman’ and the Gendered Poetics of Class Rebellion,” Southern Cultures 17, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 44–​70. 19. Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). Hubbs has demonstrated southern, white, working-​class queer alliances in country music audiences. 20. Chris Willman, Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music (New York: The New Press, 2005), 6. 21. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 442–​443. 22. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1997); Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’; Lewis, “Tension, Conflict and Contradiction,” 208–​220. 23. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 178. 24. Peterson, Creating Country Music; Jensen, Nashville Sound; Aaron Fox, “The Jukebox of History: Narratives of Loss and Desire in the Discourse of Country Music,” Popular Music 11, no.1 (1992): 54. 25. Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers:  Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music; reprint ed. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2003), 68. 26. Malone, Singing Cowboys. 27. See Caroline Gnagy’s ­chapter 20 in this book. 28. Malone details how folk music did involve commercial relations in Singing Cowboys, 68. 29. Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 30. For fuller discussion of this issue in Pecknold, see my (Leigh H. Edwards) review of her book, Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2007), in Journal of American Studies 44, no. 1 (February 2010): E13. 31. Johnny Cash, “Reflections,” Johnny Cash Sings the Ballads of the True West, Columbia/​ Sony Legacy ([1965] 2002). Cash says, “We aren’t sorry for the modern sounds and modern arrangements on classics like ‘I Ride an Old Paint’ or ‘The Streets of Laredo;’ after all, they were meant to be heard on twentieth-​century record players and transistor radios! For today that same West wind is blowing, although buckboards and saddles are lying out there turning to dust or crumbling from dry rot.” 32. Malone, Singing Cowboys, 7.

Country Music and Class    325 33. Peterson has argued for “hard-​core country” as the “roots of country” in the “raw” singing style, “rough” life experiences, and lack of artifice in artists like Hank Williams or Loretta Lynn. “Soft-​shell country” is “sell-​out” pop of the post-​World War II Nashville Sound and its pop–​country offspring, from Jim Reeves to Kenny Rogers and beyond; Peterson, Creating Country Music. Critics such as Ching, Lipsitz, and Sanjek have examined the problematic gendering of the “hard country” discourse; see Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best; Leppert and Lipsitz, “Age, the Boy and Experience,” 22–​37; Sanjek, “Foreword,” vii–​xv. 34. Sanjek, “Foreword.” 35. Mark Zwonitzer, with Charles Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?: The Carter Family & Their Legacy in American Music (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002). 36. Ching, Wrong’s What I  Do Best; Leppert and Lipsitz, “Age, the Boy and Experience”; Sanjek, “Foreword,” vii–​xv. 37. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide:  Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 38. Ching, Wrong’s What I  Do Best. See Nadine Hubbs for her reading of how Gretchen Wilson garners cultural capital for a “redneck” subject position; Nadine Hubbs, “‘Redneck Woman’ and the Gendered Poetics of Class Rebellion,” Southern Cultures 17, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 44–​70; Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender; Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture. 39. Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best. 40. Ibid. 31–​32. 41. Hubbs, “ ‘Redneck Woman’.” 42. Leigh H. Edwards, “‘Backwoods Barbie’: Dolly Parton’s Gender Performance,” in Pecknold and McCusker, Country Boys and Redneck Women. 43. Alanna Nash, Dolly:  The Biography (1978; updated ed., New  York:  Cooper Square Press, 2002). 44. On emphasized femininity stereotypes, see R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2005); and Michael Kimmel, The Gendered Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 45. Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best, 5 46. “An Interview with Porter Wagoner,” Country Song Roundup (February 1969), 15. 47. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 150–​156. 48. Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best, 15. 49. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 44–​47, 56–​58. 50. Lewis, “Tension, Conflict and Contradiction,” 217. 51. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, 137. 52. Ibid. 119. 53. Lewis notes the dearth of female ramblers in country songs; Lewis, “Tension, Conflict and Contradiction,” 218. 54. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, 49. 55. Ibid. viii, ix. 56. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 231. 57. Bufwack and Oermann, Finding Her Voice, 216; Bertrand, Race, Rock and Elvis. 58. Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2003); Jennifer Greeson, Our South:  Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

326    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 59. McCusker, Lonesome Cowgirls. 60. Fox, Natural Acts, 7–​8. 61. Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 140. 62. Ibid. 4. 63. Ibid. 7. 64. Ibid. 138. 65. Ibid. 8. 66. Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray, eds., White Trash:  Race and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1996). 67. Harkins, Hillbilly, 101. 68. Edwards, “ ‘Backwoods Barbie.’ ” 69. Harkins, Hillbilly, 7. 70. Edwards, Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity.

Chapter 16

R ac e in C ount ry Mu si c Schol arsh i p Olivia Carter Mather

Many of country’s characteristic musical traits were once understood to be African American in association, if not origin:  yodeling, banjo-​playing, blues chord progressions, blues guitar riffs, slide guitar technique, jazz-​inspired solo breaks, backbeat rhythm, and minstrel singing styles thought to be imitations of southern blacks. Country also shares lyrical tropes with African American styles, tropes that include rambling, “the blues,” train travel, relationship loss, murder ballads, dancing, religion, rural-​to-​urban migration, references to other musicians, and abjection. Yet in the discourse of American popular music, country represents white culture. Since its commercial beginnings in the 1920s, the country music industry has presented the genre as primarily white by marketing to whites, promoting white artists, and linking traditional instruments to white rustic stereotypes. Record companies defined country as a white product when they created separate catalogs for “race” and “hillbilly.” This segregation masked hillbilly music’s reliance on black traditions and institutionalized the idea that southerners of different races produced different kinds of music. The careers of the Allen Brothers, Taylor’s Kentucky Boys, and DeFord Bailey attest that a few early artists crossed the color line.1 Exceptions abounded in the postwar period as well: Charley Pride, Stoney Edwards, Darius Rucker, Alice Randall, and others played the Opry, recorded number one hits, wrote hits, or won Country Music Academy Awards. These well-​known exceptions do not threaten the underlying primacy of white experiences in country, just as white fans and white artists do not undermine hip hop’s privileging of black experience. Country remains the music of American whiteness.2 Country music scholarship has always confirmed that African Americans played a part in country’s beginnings. The earliest work in the field—​the 1965 “Hillbilly Issue” of the Journal of American Folklore and Bill C. Malone’s (1968) Country Music, U.S.A.—​ noted the blues as among the styles hillbilly artists recorded in the 1920s. Tony Russell’s Blacks, Whites, and Blues (1970) showed that Southern blues musicians, black and white, played from a “common stock” repertoire made of minstrel tunes, ragtime, fiddle tunes,

328    Oxford Handbook of Country Music and Tin Pan Alley. From this first generation of scholarship have emerged two main narratives about race in country’s history. The first is represented by historical surveys that put whites at the center of country’s history while touting black “influence” on country. These surveys betray a tension between country’s usefulness as a white, working-​class symbol and the music’s original dependence on blacks. They diminish black contributions because they rely on a taxonomy set by the music industry, a taxonomy based in folklorist ideology. The second narrative to derive from early scholarship is a revisionist one; it aims to integrate black music into country’s story and to critique how country music constructs whiteness. This work specializes in the topic of race and is not represented in surveys.3 My purpose in this chapter is to consider how country scholarship has conceived of race and how the field’s conceptions inform and are informed by the grand narratives of the field. This study does not delve into demographic data, identify musical retentions from African or British sources, or survey the history of minorities in country music. It analyzes how scholarship frames these kinds of topics because evidence of the field’s ideology emerges through them. In an attempt to review as much of the field as possible, I sometimes reduce complex scholarship to a single statement or thesis, which I then categorize along ideological lines. This method cannot do justice to the ways that scholars have grappled with a sensitive topic, but it allows us to trace a genealogy of racial thought in the field. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first discusses survey histories to show how they place whites at the center of country’s story. The second reviews authors who revise the survey narratives. This work critiques implicitly (by chronicling black contributions) and explicitly (by analyzing how country music constructs whiteness). The final section suggests three ways we might continue to uncover country’s whiteness and restore black musicians as crucial to the story of country. To recognize country’s whiteness coding process is not to indict every musician, fan, industry executive, or employee. As we uncover discrimination, we will also uncover resilience, cooperation, and innovation. I address race in black–​white relations because these are the terms set by the northern industry and inherited by country scholarship. The industry’s construction of whiteness reflected the high level of anxiety over black–​white interactions compared to any other racialized interactions. Reinforced by legal segregation, the industry established this binary as the dominant conception of race in country music. To be sure, other groups contributed to country and the dearth of research on them speaks to binarism’s affect. Scholarship has little to say about Native Americans other than noting the ancestry of Marty Robbins or Spade Cooley. Whites interacted extensively with Native Americans in the South throughout the nineteenth century, yet virtually no country musical traits are credited to them, perhaps a result of the industry’s narrow conception of southern music. Latin music fares a little better, due to the habañera rhythm’s popularity, western swing’s unmistakable Tejano elements, and the success of Tejano country artists. Given country’s privileging of whiteness, much of what is argued here applies to non-​ black minorities. Further study of race in country scholarship could investigate how

Race in Country Music Scholarship    329 whiteness has affected the field’s coverage of Native Americans, Latin Americans, Asian Americans, and Hawaiians.4

Survey Folklorism Country surveys work much like surveys of other styles of music, by telling a story that begins with the style’s origins and follows its developments through the present day or through its decline. The chronological structure of the narrative requires the author to note some sense of cause and effect, but it also encourages the author to highlight a trajectory, or theme, that characterizes the style and provides meaning across decades of change. In country scholarship, this trajectory often traces how the folk music of southern whites became commercialized but maintained its connection to the white working class, whether in the South or dispersed across America. The story is one of authenticity, sincerity, and identity politics. Surveys therefore sideline black contributions not because authors believe that African Americans did not contribute but because of an ideology that places high value on an authentic connection between working-​class whites and country music. Country scholarship inherited this ideology from folklore studies, a field that contributed much of the seminal scholarship on country beginning in the 1960s. Folklore scholarship attempted to show that communities can preserve their distinctive musical traits (“retentions”) from one generation to the next, that isolation of homologous communities aids in this transfer between generations, and that outside influences compromise the integrity of musical traditions. The field’s most well-​known project, developed at the end of the nineteenth century, was its attempt to prove that white Appalachians had preserved British folk culture. The thesis has since been critiqued, but its continued usefulness for country scholarship shows the lasting impact of folklore scholarship.5 Outside folklore, southern intellectuals such as J. W. Cash, Frank L. Owsley, and George Pullen Jackson turned folklore’s ideas onto their own region to defend the distinctive character of white southerners. This defense of white southerners supported some of the first country scholarship. In his article, “The Sound of the Plain White Folk? Creating Country Music’s ‘Social Origins,’ ” Jeffrey T. Manuel outlines how these southern authors impacted Malone’s early work. Southern intellectuals invented “a new social category, the southern plain folk, who could be identified by their distinctive mannerisms, their non-​Marxist class consciousness, and their location in the southern United States.”6 Just as the northern academy justified the ideal of pure, Anglo-​Saxon southerners, southern arguments for the coherence of southern plain folk culture created a homegrown logic for the study of country music. The existence of a unified hillbilly culture “offered a social explanation for what music listeners were hearing as early as the 1920s and 1930s.”7 These two ideas, music’s direct connection to ethnic identity and the existence of the southern plain folk as a coherent people group, provided early country scholarship with a reasoning for country identity politics. When Malone first published Country Music,

330    Oxford Handbook of Country Music U.S.A. in 1968, he needed to defend country as a legitimate subject of study. He extolled country’s significance as an expression of one of America’s many ethnic groups, an effective approach considering the academy’s sympathy toward vernacular music as folklore. As commercialized folk music, he argued, country spoke to the concerns of a southern working class. His claim, later articulated in Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, is that the music realizes the values, circumstances, and ethnicity of southerners: “[a]‌s one of the greatest commercial manifestations of the South’s musical culture, country music has long served as a barometer of the change that has taken place in the lives of the region’s working people.”8 Malone’s claims were all the more powerful because of the political climate of the sixties. The essentialist logic of folklore, a logic that ascribed meaning to popular music based on social association and matched minority groups with distinct musical styles, re-​inscribed itself in identity politics. As the Civil Rights and Black Power movements increasingly identified soul as the representative style of black resistance, so too would country become the music of a white subgroup. Malone championed whites in the poorest region of the United States during a time when their regional affiliation diminished their place in American society.9 The identity politics of musical styles relied on marketing categories established by the recording industry in the 1920s. In his book Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow, Karl Hagstrom Miller outlines the decades-​long process that led to industry segregation. The division had little to do with the sounds musicians produced. Instead, new segregation laws, technological advances in the recording industry, and a pervasive folklorism drove the industry to conclude that separate marketing categories were necessary. Music that was shared between blacks and whites in the nineteenth century was formally divided by the 1920s in accordance with the logic that “black people performed black music and white people performed white music.”10 Miller’s powerful work tracks how a belief in the essential cultural differences between races developed in the field of folklore studies during the nineteenth century to set the terms for the industry in the 1920s. What the industry promoted as natural, that ethnicity determined musical style, was a relatively new idea that did not fit with the reality of southern vernacular music. During a time when “the differences within African American or white music cultures were more extreme than the differences between black and white musical cultures,” the industry forced a stark separation.11 The industry’s categories inadvertently suggested fields of study for nascent pop music scholarship in the 1960s, thus steering scholarly attention toward country’s whiteness and soul’s blackness. Country historians marginalize African Americans because marginalization is the reality the industry made. Awareness of scholarship’s dependence on industry narratives has been sublimated because scholarship frames country as primarily a preexisting white folk form, “discovered,” commercialized, and then marketed to the people whose culture produced it.12 Folklorism undergirds survey scholarship’s conceptions of race in two ways. First, country history surveys celebrate British folk culture in America as the core tradition at the origins of country music. Second, they relegate black contributions to country’s periphery by corralling them into topics that pertain to the relative past: country’s folk roots, the blues, mentorship, and minstrelsy. Black country stars appear in scholarship’s

Race in Country Music Scholarship    331 larger story as exceptions that make little sense in a romantic narrative of white identity politics. Marginalization happens because minorities are cordoned off into these topics and within discussions of these topics. Miller describes the “stock narratives” that emerge about country and blues when the folkloric paradigm holds sway: This approach yields narratives that lead from social isolation to contact, from pure musical styles to compounds, from music made outside the commercial market to music that is deeply integrated into it. They imply that what is most important about [blues and country] are their respective roots in African American and rural white folk cultures. They suggest that continuities within these traditions are more significant than transformations, the origins of a style more revelatory than the changing ways in which a variety of people may have used it.13

Country scholars cite Miller, but usually as background on the formation of hillbilly and race categories. Few have taken seriously the way his book threatens to overturn country’s origins narrative.

The White Core Narrative Most all surveys define country as a commercialized folk music whose primary characteristics have been inherited from the British Isles. Even in sources that acknowledge the intertwining of African and European music since the seventeenth century, white tradition is the starting point. Writers consistently introduce Appalachian music first in their origins accounts and link this music to the British Isles (sometimes to its individual nations), whereas black folk music is rarely linked to Africa and never to specific nations. Like early folksong collectors, survey authors assume racial homogeneity in Appalachia by locating cross-​racial influence in southern cities, work camps, train yards, coal-​mining towns, and farming communities, but rarely in the mountains. Vocabulary also bifurcates the races into a center/​periphery model; Anglo-​Saxon and Celtic music “survived,” was “central,” or was “preserved,” while African music (music of “blacks” or “African Americans,” but rarely “African music”) “influenced,” “infused,” or was “absorbed.” I discuss here the origins narratives from recent surveys and reference articles by Malone, Jocelyn Neal, and Ivan Tribe. Cecilia Tichi’s often-​cited High Lonesome is not a survey, but as a seminal study of country lyrics, it merits mention here for its demarcation of racial boundaries. Malone’s excerpts come from the latest edition of his Country Music, U.S.A., revised with Jocelyn Neal. Because the quoted passages come from unrevised chapters, I refer to Malone as the author. All these sources deal with race in complex ways that cannot be reduced to their opening chapters; a source may commit to country’s white core in its opening while crediting blacks extensively in later chapters. The purpose of analyzing their conceptions of origins is to show how the field establishes country’s history in racial terms.14

332    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Malone’s first reference to origins in the 2010 edition of Country Music, U.S.A. comes in the preface, as he’s lamenting how historians of the South have ignored the region’s music: Passing references in southern history surveys to Elizabethan balladry, Appalachian dulcimers, or the Grand Ole Opry hardly do justice to the institution that country music has become. … Accounts of the Great Depression, the era of the “common man’s” rediscovery, say virtually nothing about the music of the plain folk, except for a few brief references to Woody Guthrie or the Library of Congress’ Archive of American Folk Song. But almost every radio station in the nation during those perilous years harbored a cowboy balladeer, a gospel quartet, or a hillbilly string band.15

For Malone, knowledge of the South’s music is necessary for understanding the region itself. He lists the styles of music that he believes speak most powerfully about the region’s people, and these are commonly understood as white. Chapter 1 (of Malone and Neal’s edition), “The Folk Background,” places immigrants from the British Isles at the beginning of country’s story, while stating that interaction with blacks was necessary to country’s development: Hillbilly music … evolved primarily out of the reservoir of folksongs, ballads, dances, and instrumental pieces brought to North America by Anglo-​Celtic immigrants. Gradually absorbing influences from other musical sources, particularly from the culture of Afro-​Americans, it eventually emerged as a force strong enough to survive, and even thrive, in an urban-​industrial society. British folk culture of course came to all regions of English-​speaking North America. … It was only in the southern United States, though, that dynamic folk cultural expressions, black and white, evolved into a viable commercial forms in our own time.16

Malone emphasizes the diversity of southern music, but treats white traditions as typical: Therefore, when country music began its commercial development in the 1920s, a large and diverse repertory of songs, religious and secular, southern and nonsouthern, folk and popular, was available to musicians. At the core of the country repertory, however, was the store of traditional songs, both British and American. … Many of the traditional items were ballads; that is, narrative, impersonal songs that told a story. A large store of British ballads survived the trek across the Atlantic, some in long, extended versions, but many in only fragmentary form.17

The “hypothetical folk musician” he describes at the end of the chapter was also white—​but probably not the “Anglo-​Saxon” that romanticists theorize about. He may have been “Celtic,” or German, but most likely was a composite of forgotten European groups, with a bit of Indian thrown in (at least he liked to romanticize himself as part Indian). His music was just as eclectic, being a composite of instrumental and vocal styles and songs, heavily indebted to the various ethnic

Race in Country Music Scholarship    333 groups of the South, and particularly to the blacks from whom his ancestors had borrowed since the beginning of American life.18

In Malone’s account, we see the tension that country’s origins narratives are built on; southern vernacular styles that became country were fundamentally British in origin, but southern white music would not be what it is without black music. African Americans and Native Americans are necessary components in a story about whites. Jocelyn R. Neal’s textbook, Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History, also suggests white folk tradition as the origin of country, while including black influence. She asserts from the beginning that country is “inextricably dependent on black musical styles” and lists blues, jazz, vaudeville, and minstrelsy as among those that supplied early country.19 Yet the first discussion of country’s sources highlights balladry’s heritage: The oldest of these musical sources were the traditional ballads, or songs that told a story, that had been passed down orally from generation to generation. These ballads have long been romanticized as pristine folk songs from the British Isles, preserved in the isolated mountains of the Appalachian region.

She notes that balladry made up little of country’s early repertory, but establishes it as foundational by naming song collectors Cecil Sharp, Maud Karpeles, and Olive Dame Campbell, significant because they “raised public awareness of the rich culture of the Southern Appalachians.”20 Fiddling, gospel hymns, cowboy songs (a handful “could be traced to earlier British Isles sources”), and banjo playing (located “[i]‌n the mountains of the Southeast”) are also addressed as white traditions.21 Neal’s New Grove article on “Country Music” presents white southern styles as prevailing, though as in her textbook and in Malone’s 2010 account, African Americans are included from the very beginning: The origins of country music are the folk music of mostly white, working-​class Americans, who blended popular songs, Irish and Celtic fiddle tunes, traditional ballads, and cowboy songs, along with African American blues and various musical traditions from European immigrant communities.

In the subsection “Origins and Development in the 1920s,” she first lists “[f]‌olk ballads and fiddle tunes from the British Isles, which by the late nineteenth century had developed into their own forms in the mountains of Appalachia”; followed by minstrelsy, medicine shows, Vaudeville, blues, gospel, topical ballads, cowboy songs, and jazz. Only the blues is specifically identified as African American.22 Ivan Tribe’s Country: A Regional Exploration is one of five reference books in a series on American roots music. His version of country’s origins places a specific repertory at the center to be enriched by others: This music derived from Anglo-​Celtic fiddle tunes and ballads and other sounds originating in Europe. Over the years, these influences received supplemental

334    Oxford Handbook of Country Music infusions from nineteenth-​century show tunes, the minstrel stage, the emerging popular music industry on “Tin Pan Alley,” shape-​note hymnals together with singing schools, and cross-​cultural contacts with African Americans.23

This account obscures black influence on country by specifying white styles but relegating black music to “contacts.” Cecilia Tichi’s High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music argues that country’s significance lies in its ability to address important topics in American thought. She compares country songs about loss, travel, and nature to literature and painting about the same themes. As a literary scholar, her focus is lyrics and songwriting: African American traditions have enriched country music instrumentally. … But the emphasis on story separates white country music from black blues. The two divide over a basic difference in form, according to the scholar William Ferris, who contrasts the liquid form of the blues with the narrative ballad form essential to white country music. Blues, says Ferris, descends primarily from the African folk lyric. Each blues stanza can be a stand-​alone entity that might or might not relate to the others in the song. In white country music, by contrast, the story is central, coming as it does through the tradition of the British ballad. And though such country music legends as Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and Bill Monroe learned much from black musicians, their musical center, like that of all country artists, lies in the storytelling ballad.24

For Tichi, formal differences between ballads and blues, whose alleged origins in other continents trump hundreds of years of racial interchange in America, determine a song’s ability to tell a story. Country is therefore distinctive because of its preservation of balladry, a form that lies at the core of country’s creativity. Ambivalence about the strength of British retentions surfaces in some of the same scholarship that asserts balladry’s centrality. In Country Music, U.S.A., Malone asks, “Have historians properly acknowledged and explored the very old musical interrelationship between black and white Americans?”25 He later admits, “[o]‌ur speculations about ‘Celtic’ or ‘Anglo’ origins, or about ‘black’ influences, are frankly guesses based upon the most limited data.”26 In Southern Music/​American Music, Malone argues explicitly against an ethnocentric narrative to establish the extensive intertwining of black and white folk music from the seventeenth century onward. He credits blacks with precountry contributions, but retreats when he gets to commercialization (he does not connect the blues to Jimmie Rodgers or bluegrass). These kinds of doubts about the accuracy of an Appalachian origins thesis have not overturned scholarship’s fundamental premise of country’s white folk origins.27

Peripheral Black Influence If, as surveys maintain, African Americans influenced country’s white styles, how does scholarship address this influence? Just as in origins accounts, accounts of black input

Race in Country Music Scholarship    335 illustrate the tension between country’s whiteness and inevitable exceptions. The field has limited most discussion to four topics: (1) the blues; (2) mentoring relationships between an older, black man and a younger, white one; (3) minstrelsy as inspiration for country comedy; and (4) black stars of country music. In many cases, blacks are given full credit for innovations. At other times, however, their contributions are limited by writing that generalizes black music impact, relegates black contribution to the past, or asserts blacks’ importance without supporting it. In this way, attention to blues, mentoring, minstrelsy, and exceptions can draw attention away from the ways that country’s characteristics depend on African American innovations. Examples of passages that fall into one of these four topics are too numerous to review here. Instead I summarize the common tropes about African Americans in the literature.28 Blues:  Scholarship clusters black stylistic impact on country around the blues, specifically song repertoire, guitar technique, and twelve-​bar song form (or its variants). Historians point out these traits in country styles from the twenties through the mid-​fifties, but as they move from one decade to the next, the blackness of the blues wanes; the style becomes increasingly unmoored from black people and black culture. Coverage of hillbilly boogie and honky tonk enumerates the blues variants they rely on (boogie woogie piano and rhythm and blues [R&B], respectively) but never comments on the racial implications of theses styles, as if their characteristic musical elements are either white or unimportant. An exception is Malone’s identification of specific black musicians important for western swing, yet the racial implications of swing and swing dancing in particular have gone undeveloped. The clear association between country’s blues-​based styles and African Americans culture demands more thorough consideration than country scholars have given it. General assertions of significance without the description of borrowed elements or their racially charged meanings mask the possibility that the country styles were white versions of black styles.29 Mentors: A common narrative throughout country scholarship is that southern black musicians mentored several of country’s early stars. Accounts of A. P. Carter, Jimmie Rodgers, Bill Monroe, Merle Travis, Bob Wills, and Hank Williams cite their relationships with black musicians. Coverage of Carter, Monroe, and Williams often credits their mentors by name (Lesley Riddle, Arnold Shultz, and Rufus “Tee Tot” Payne, respectively). In all cases, these mentoring relationships were brought to light by the white musicians and substantiated by scholarship. Musicians’ claims to one-​on-​one transmission of folk music, especially the blues, bolstered the artists’ authenticity, proving they possessed firsthand knowledge of their sources. Yet even in crediting specific African American musicians, accounts conceal the dependence of country “fathers” on black music because it’s unclear exactly what whites learned from blacks. Historians have allowed artist testimony to drive the narrative, leaving claims uninvestigated. These mentors did not record, except for the rediscovered Riddle, so it is difficult to compare their styles with those of their heirs. Black musicians surely taught the stars in question, but their weight is exaggerated at the expense of more mundane yet impacting experiences. Though Hank Williams credits Payne with “all the music training I ever had,” and though Monroe apprenticed

336    Oxford Handbook of Country Music with Shultz during a formative season, the mentors died before either of their protégés passed the age of twenty.30 It is more likely that black influence came through the daily interactions typical in the South and from music both communities already shared. Through adulthood, these country artists had intense exposure to professional black musicians through live performance and recordings, yet few narratives confirm white artists learning from black artists after the whites established their careers. Rodgers and Wills learned black styles in worksites, whether train yards or cotton fields, a narrative that both reveals constant interaction and mystifies through generalization and childhood memory. Encapsulating black influence into obscure personas of the relative past assigns authenticity to white artists but conceals the likelihood that black music influenced all of country’s early stars, with or without a mentor.31 The ideology behind mentorship narratives is part folklorism (blacks as the qualified source of knowledge about “black music” such as the blues or guitar technique) and part mystification. American popular culture mystifies African Americans, fictional or real, by foregrounding ambiguous origins and stories of the supernatural. In film, this mystification often occurs through what film scholars call a “magical negro,” a black character whose purpose is to help a central white character solve a problem, redeem himself, or find his way. He or she may be spiritualized as an angel, a ghost, or person whose origins are unknown and possesses supernatural power in the form of wisdom or prophetic advice. Films relying on the magical negro “create scenes of trouble-​free and uncomplicated black/​white reconciliation” that “displace the realities of history into more viewer-​ friendly narratives.”32 While none of the accounts of country’s black mentors present them as magical, these mentors have mysterious origins (or deaths), evince racial collaboration, and are crucial for the development of their protégés.33 Erika Brady’s work on Arnold Shultz traces how mystification played a part in the debate over the origins of thumb picking. She notes how John Hartford’s account of Shultz parallels myths about another shadowy southern musician, Robert Johnson: “elements of mysterious absence, then reappearance, of a hero magically transformed; an epic quest to capture a rare gift, and a triumphant return to share it with those who stayed at home.”34 Minstrelsy:  General works summarize minstrelsy’s importance for country in two ways. First, as one of the earliest commercialized forms of popular music in the South, blackface minstrelsy spread its repertoire, both folksongs and professionally penned songs, throughout the region. It also popularized the banjo and fiddle–​banjo duets among whites. Early country musicians from different regions of the South drew on a common repertoire and set of instrumental techniques that minstrel shows had popularized. Second, minstrelsy’s model for live performance was appropriated by radio barn dances, which inherited minstrelsy’s stock characters and variety-​show format. Some country comedians developed white versions of minstrel stereotypes (i.e., the “bumpkin” stereotype so foundational to country visual imagery), while others, such as the Opry’s Lassus and Honey, maintained traditional black characters. Minstrelsy’s conventions transferred seamlessly to country because of the audience’s familiarity with them and because many of country’s early professionals had apprenticed as blackface performers.35 Recent work on barn dances investigates whiteness encoded through minstrelsy. Michael T. Bertrand argues the National Barn Dance used minstrelsy to build a sense

Race in Country Music Scholarship    337 of white community for rural-​to-​urban migrants in Chicago. The all-​white program rejected Jazz Age trappings in favor of home, rural life, and nostalgia for white community.36 Published a year later in 2009, Pamela Fox’s Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music shows how country maintained its image of authenticity as conceptions of class and gender changed during the mid-​twentieth century. Her chapter on barn dance illustrates the ubiquity of blackface in country and country comedy’s reliance on stock minstrel humor. For Fox, race is contingent on class anxieties; as “rusticity came to be associated not only with a feminized class abjection and obsolescence but also with a degraded form of whiteness,” whites legitimated themselves through blackface.37 As the status of rural-​to-​urban whites changed after World War II, so did the ways that country constructed authenticity. Honky tonk embodied new frustrations over changing gender roles and “[r]‌acial mimicry no longer served as the bedrock for this modern, seemingly more transparent, persona.”38 Exceptions: The pull between the centrality of white folk music and the reality of black contribution is perhaps most clear in the cases of black country stars. Every major history of country includes at least one minority artist in its pantheon but has difficulty explaining the artist’s success. Most commentary centers around Charley Pride, the only commercially successful black country singer until Darius Rucker’s move from roots rock to country in the mid-​2000s. Scholars note that as a “white sounding” African American singer, he broke racial barriers in country’s star system but not stylistic barriers. Ray Charles also receives attention in academia and the popular press for his Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962), though Nashville at the time did not consider him to be a country singer. Neal’s textbook is one of the few surveys to address the tension around black stars, namely Rucker: Anomalous cases such as his, however, do not change the fact that musical genre and racial identity are deeply intertwined, and for decades country music has used whiteness as one of its border-​defining features.39

However, much of the book’s coverage of black country is located away from the main text in separate sections on “Race in Early Country Music” and “Race and Contemporary Country.” Scholarship has had a difficult time explaining the significance of black stars because their success is not compatible with folklorism. Black artists are branded as anomalies because they contradict with a genre whose significance lies in its expression of white working-​class life.40

Revisions Surveys and specialized studies can hardly be separated from one another because they depend on each other and, in many cases, share authors. Yet specialized work in country has counteracted the center/​periphery racial divide of the field’s grand narratives. Russell’s 1970 book founded an integrationist line of inquiry that developed in

338    Oxford Handbook of Country Music opposition to white origins narratives. This alternate scholarship gained momentum in the 1990s and produced a flurry of critical studies beginning in 2010 that challenge the field’s ethnocentricity in two ways. The first chronicles black country’s history, especially that of the 1920s and 1930s. The second applies critical race theory, most notably whiteness studies, to show how country’s whiteness was constructed over time.

Blacks in Early Country Chronicling specific black participation works against the narratives of general influence that have obscured the impact of black musicians. Here I review work in early country because it implicitly critiques the origins thesis. Much of Charles K. Wolfe’s work highlights black country, beginning with his 1982 book Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky.41 He details black musicians rarely mentioned elsewhere and then interlaces them into his narrative. His accounts place black musicians like Arnold Shultz in local music scenes instead of the mythological past. For example, he traces the history of bluegrass staple “Molly and Tenbrooks” from its nineteenth-​century origins to its many early recordings by black musicians and describes the integrated music scene in Louisville, where Victor recorded black blues and string bands in 1931. In the early 1990s, Wolfe called for more research on string band music, a topic still understudied in any field of popular music scholarship.42 Scholarly interest in the black banjo peaked in the mid-​1990s with books by Cecelia Conway (African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions) and Karen Linn (That Half-​ Barbaric Twang:  The Banjo in American Popular Culture). This work undercut the white racial symbolism of the instrument by revealing how African Americans pioneered popular folk banjo styles.43 In 2003, Black Music Research Journal published a special issue on black Appalachia claiming black innovation in a region long held to be the font of white folk retentions. Inspired by black Appalachia scholarship and the “Affrilachian” poetry movement led by Frank X. Walker, the issue illustrates Appalachian musical diversity through articles on the blues, jazz, soul, fiddling, and the banjo.44 The early 2000s saw a renewed popular interest in black banjo with multiple recordings and the first Black Banjo Gathering in 2005, resulting in the formation of modern black string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops.45 The most substantial work on black country is the 2013 collection Hidden in the Mix:  The African American Presence in Country Music, edited by Diane Pecknold. Containing chapters on integrated hillbilly records, country soul, hick-​hop, songwriting, old-​time, King Records, and country in the Caribbean, Hidden in the Mix moves beyond the static categories of black “influence.” The anthology depicts decades of interracial collaboration in its aim “to undermine the critical distinctions that have supported racialized genre boundaries and cast black engagements with country as both

Race in Country Music Scholarship    339 historically marginal and aesthetically suspect.”46 Each chapter uncovers black contribution, participation, and innovation, implicitly questioning country’s presumed whiteness.

Whiteness Studies Since 2000, the critical work on race in country focuses on whiteness. These investigations take their cue from the broader interdisciplinary movement of whiteness studies, a line of inquiry that views the status of whiteness as a construction, just as conceptions of racial minorities are constructed. Whiteness studies coalesced in the early nineties around texts such as David Roediger’s (1991) The Wages of Whiteness:  Race and the Making of the American Working Class, and Toni Morrison’s (1992) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. The first substantial scrutiny of country was Richard Peterson’s (1997) Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Though it didn’t rely on whiteness studies per se, it explained how the industry manipulated imagery to match the genre’s supposed white, mountain provenance. Peterson’s work and that of whiteness studies in general prompted work on country’s whiteness in the early 2000s.47 The first book-​length projects about whiteness and country were dissertations. Rebecca A. Thomas’s (2000) dissertation is perhaps the earliest scholarship that critically examines race in country as a genre. She reviews the shared culture of blacks and whites in the South and shows how “segregationist culture” at the time of country’s commercialization redefined the music as white. Historian Peter LaChapelle’s (2002) dissertation, now published as Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California, showed how country was at the center of debates over the racial status of Depression-​era migrants to southern California. J. Lester Feder (2006) and Angela Hammond (2011) focus on how country produced whiteness throughout its history in the Bristol Sessions, minstrelsy in advertising, Klan records, George Wallace’s use of country, promotion of Charley Pride, and industry rhetoric about why blacks don’t listen to country. Feder and Hammond demonstrate that the industry discriminated against African Americans throughout its history, not just in the 1920s.48 Work on class and sexuality has also wielded the tools of whiteness theory. Aaron A. Fox’s (2004) Real Country: Music and Language in Working-​Class Culture is an ethnography of the local country scene in the town of Lockhart, Texas. He argues that working-​class fans perform class identity through language, whether spoken or sung. Given the majority-​white demographics of the scene he studied, his book is useful for its close reading of the ways that whites express working-​class identity.49 Nadine Hubbs contends in her (2014) Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music that listeners don’t link queer sexuality to country music because middle-​class narratives have labeled working-​ class whites as “the bigot class.” Class is central to her arguments about sexuality and country music, but race theory is crucial to her understanding of whiteness as a liability to the working class in the discourse of American values: “Whereas unmarked whiteness

340    Oxford Handbook of Country Music still wields tremendous power as privilege, marked whiteness is a growing burden, carrying racist and imperialist stigma. Disparagement of the working class is not new, but its coding as hyperwhite is a relatively recent development, and so is the central role of imputed whiteness in the group’s ‘continued disparagement.’ ”50 Much of the latest work on race has been spurred by pointed critiques of country’s racial relations by nonspecialists conversant with cultural studies. The most cited by country scholars is Geoff Mann’s (2008) article, “Why Does Country Music Sound White?: Race and the Voice of Nostalgia.”51 Mann contends that country music perpetuates whiteness through nostalgia, a trope that speaks powerfully to white Americans who feel besieged by social changes since World War II. Country forges its association with whiteness through what French theorist Louis Althusser called “interpellation”: country simultaneously draws listeners who identify with it and imposes a framework of whiteness back onto them. Interpellation produces a listener more likely to “hear” whiteness in the music and associate with it: In the construction of an idealized past-​ness, country music not only “talks white”, but it is “whites” who hear it, and whose whiteness is produced and reproduced by what they hear. The songs of a racialized and mythic “used to” sound a present in which whiteness makes sense retroactively, calling white people to their whiteness.52

Characteristics of country (its lyrical tropes and “twang” produced by traditional instruments) make country “sound” white, not simple historical associations. Mann’s article simplifies country’s lyrics, instrumentation, fan base, and repertoire; he also dehistoricizes the music by treating over eighty years of it as unchanging. However, few country scholars have engaged with his vital corrective that country music produces whiteness.53 Three authors of Hidden in the Mix respond to Mann, including Pecknold in her introductory essay: “One aim of this volume is thus to examine how the genre’s whiteness was produced and is maintained, to imagine country music not merely as a cultural reflection of a preexisting racial identity but as one of the processes by which race is constituted.”54 Jerry Wever’s account of country music in St. Lucia directly contradicts Mann’s application of interpellation in country music. Country cannot automatically hail only white listeners, Wever says, because of the agency of black listeners. Wever’s study directly challenges the whiteness narrative because it reveals a contemporary black listenership in a majority black region with other, more Afrocentric musical styles that might align more easily with a folklorist ideology of Caribbean music.55 Barbara Ching challenges Mann’s nostalgia thesis with an account of how black songwriter Alice Randall complicates white-​centered tropes in country lyrics. In a play on Mann’s name, Ching notes that Randall’s songwriting “disrupts the white nostalgia and interpellation described by Mann, but it also draws continual critical attention to class, race, and gender relations in history and daily life. Her writing, in short, talks back to ‘the Man.’ ”56

Race in Country Music Scholarship    341

Toward Integration As we have seen, the folklorism that helps country scholarship represent one marginalized group, the white working class, can marginalize African Americans and limit our understanding of country music. In this section, I propose ways that we might shift from a center-​ periphery paradigm to a conception of country that takes interracial cultural exchange as a given. Much of the work discussed above already models an integrated stance. Multiple modes of scholarship can move such a project forward, but here I highlight three lines of inquiry, each targeting a different aspect of scholarly discourse on country.

Centralizing Race For most of its existence, country scholarship’s purpose has been to chronicle the history of the music and to argue for its significance in American society, not to critique it. The cultural theory that challenged history, literature, and musicology beginning in the 1980s has only recently gained a foothold in country music studies. Pecknold is one of the few inside the field to explicitly call for work that demonstrates how country produces concepts of race, but neither Hidden in the Mix nor scholarship by country specialists approaches this with theoretical grounding.57 The critical work on country comes mainly from non-​country specialists who incorporate race theory (citing Paul Gilroy, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, David Roediger, and George Lipsitz), as well as theories of hybridity, postcolonialism, and subjectivity (e.g., the work of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Louis Althusser). In contrast, jazz studies and pop music studies place race at the center of their concerns, a focus that requires scholars to incorporate critical theory. The high standard of scholarly self-​consciousness in these fields produces work that touches the entire field of American popular music.58 A critical stance on race would not only illuminate country music’s history, but also push country music toward the center of scholarly discourse on popular music. What if country music studies moved from referencing race as a subfield, an exception, a political issue, or a question of roots to investigating it as a fundamental concept? What if country music studies, like jazz studies, became a primary community for dialogue about race in the academy? The changing meanings of country’s racialized musical elements manifest some of the most complex racial dynamics in all of American popular culture. Country presents an opportunity to do the kind of progressive work that not only illuminates racial formation, but the richness of the music as well. What do we make of country that reclaims black experience as central, like black banjo revival or the songs of Stoney Edwards? What is the relationship between the musical success of sometimes-​marginal whites—​ Tejanos, Jews, Cajuns—​and their whiteness status? With an infinite number of potential “whitenesses,” “blacknesses,” or any other racial conceptions, country music, as

342    Oxford Handbook of Country Music constituted by its cultural context, does not uphold a single, ahistorical racial construction. For example, whiteness is connected to rusticity in some traditionalist strains but attached to middle class aspirations in others. (These may tussle within the repertoire of a single artist such as Dolly Parton.) Likewise, racial conceptions may be built on inclusion of a racial “Other”: the kind of whiteness portrayed by Jimmie Rodgers flaunts its familiarity with black culture and even relies on it to construct masculinity.59 The earliest scholarship in country noted these kinds of racial intricacies. To centralize race now is not a wholesale rejection of the field’s roots, but a return to concerns that have not yet been fully addressed. For example, much of Malone’s work carries a subtext of a southern whiteness that necessarily includes blackness For him, white southern vernacular musics are distinctive from those of other regions because of interracial contact unique to the South: “In the South [folk culture] assumed a rich and varied texture, in part because here more than anywhere else in the United States a long and vital interrelationship linked the country’s two greatest folk music traditions, the British and the African.”60 D. K. Wilgus believed the same, as remembered by Norm Cohen: After a few drinks, D.  K.  would identify the essence of hillbilly music as “the Ethiopian in the fuel supply” (to borrow from W. C. Fields); that is, what makes “hill-​ billy,” “blues,” “jazz,” and most contemporary “pop” music (post-​1950) distinctive from “northern,” “New England,” “western,” and earlier pop music is the influence of the African American music. No discussion of hillbilly music should overlook that contribution.61

Wilgus’s admission, while under the influence, frames the interracial “essence” of country as something of a secret. Country is a distinctive southern product because of its hidden blackness, not in spite of it. Malone discerns this when he asks, “Have historians properly acknowledged and explored the very old musical interrelationship between black and white Americans?”62 Centralizing race will press the exploration he calls for and perhaps provide the “data” that will correct our speculations.63

Rethinking Segregation One of the strengths of country scholarship is its ability to show the music as imbedded in a cultural context. Compared to other fields that at times have divorced artworks from circumstances, country scholars conceive of the music as a product of its time that speaks most profoundly to historically situated listeners. Segregation is one historical reality that most all surveys fold into their descriptions of country’s environment. Yet our understanding of it makes it difficult to make sense of country’s indebtedness to black culture. Authors use “segregation” and “racism” as a shorthand for a complex and widespread system. When racism is presented as uniform across times or place, its intricacies and contradictions hide in plain sight.64

Race in Country Music Scholarship    343 Legal segregation’s primary goal was not to prevent all interracial interactions. It was to enforce a racial hierarchy that justified the logic of power and resource distribution favoring whites over blacks. Laws served this power hierarchy first and foremost, not separation itself. In certain sectors, interaction was necessary to maintain racial order. Legal discrimination is central to country’s history, but how that discrimination played out depended on local law, local customs, existing relationships, and enforcement. Black and white musicians might ignore each other in some locales, yet be inseparable in others. Seeing racialized hegemony as local allows us to assume cross-​racial music making instead of exceptionalizing it. Recent work on recording studios has pushed in this direction by outlining the specific racial dynamics of studios and labels. David Sanjek’s posthumously published article on Cincinnati-​based King Records shows how the label allowed for black agency in country through producer Henry Glover, and Charles Hughes’ book on integrated southern soul studios digs into the working relationships of black and white musicians.65 More work on scenes would enable a deeper look into how race affected music in places like Louisville, Kentucky, where Wolfe says black string and jug bands proliferated; or Kentucky counties Muhlenberg and Ohio, which produced innovators in bluegrass and acoustic guitar techniques.66 What if a similar approach were used for style histories of bluegrass, western swing, and country gospel? Instead of asking how black music stimulated white innovation or how whites borrowed from blacks, we could imagine these styles as products of integrated scenes. Country is where we would expect to see complex racial encounters.67 An understanding of segregation and racism as national problems helps us account for the larger forces outside the region that built country. Racial discrimination was not limited to the South, even if it was worse there. Southern segregation did not evolve on its own or according to internal logic free of outside forces. Likewise, country’s whiteness was a product of both national and regional values. Since Russell’s first book in 1970, the field has recognized that executives imposed their categories on an interracial repertoire. And as Miller describes, northern folklorists pushed racial taxonomy on southern music, an ideology then reinforced by the already-​segregationist recording industry. Yet accounts of country’s origins gloss over the long-​term effects of Ralph Peer’s decisions. An understanding of segregation as a trend imposed on southern musicians in this instance encourages the field to rewrite origin narratives to reconfigure the role the industry played in the music’s identity. It helps us see country in the context of a national discourse of genres that form in opposition to one another, often according to their racialization by the record industry.68

Facing the Music Together Multiple fields contribute to country scholarship and with them come sometimes contradictory methods (i.e., literary criticism, archival research, sociology, music theory). These methods rarely intersect in any meaningful way, even in edited collections, and

344    Oxford Handbook of Country Music the most common citations are still general works by historians, literary critics, and music critics. Our interdisciplinarity privileges fields whose methods translate broadly, therefore limiting interdisciplinarity. Studies relying on discipline-​specific methods not widely understood in the humanities have a much softer voice in the field because they rely on “technical” knowledge such as music analysis, cultural theory, or social science methods. Country scholarship is dominated by lyrics, imagery, historical facts, archival research, record cataloging, studies of scenes, and biography instead of by musical sound.69 More attention to country’s sounds may help to answer questions about racialized meaning. Two examples show how the music of “country music” betrays reliance on black style. In a bluegrass blues song, such as Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys’s (1946) recording of “Blue Yodel #4,” the initial connection to southern African American culture is obvious in the use of the blues form. Monroe’s song shares a title and blues style with a 1928 recording by Jimmie Rodgers, but little else. As he did with several of his early blues recordings, Monroe updated the jazz style of the original by increasing the tempo, adding a swing fell with a prominent backbeat, and tightening the ensemble’s execution. Sung verses alternate with Monroe’s yodeling and instrumental solos that sound more like jazz than any other style (the second solo, for mandolin, sounds like an imitation of ragtime banjo). The final solo features a walking bassline played by the string bass. Monroe’s non-​blues recordings also betray a dependence on black music through yodeling, backbeat, jazz solos, and instrumental techniques likely learned from black musicians. These musical characteristics, in addition to lyrical borrowings from black Kentuckian balladry (“Molly and Tenbrooks”) or inspiration from minstrelsy (“I’m Going Back to Old Kentucky”), mean we can no longer call Monroe’s work “folk music with overdrive.” If we were to look for pre-​American retentions, we would be better off looking to Africa than the British Isles. An example from modern country depicts how a single song can reinforce a tenuous link between country as a white genre and its input from African American forms. Brooks & Dunn’s (2005) hit “Play Something Country” tells the story of a female country fan demanding stylistic purity from the band at her local bar. The first verse establishes her as a working-​class, traditional fan: she dates cowboys, drinks whiskey, and prefers Patsy Cline. In case there’s any doubt, the second verse outlines what she does not want to hear: “thumping” music from the “city,” specifically P. Diddy. Remaining lyrics reinforce the song’s definition of country by referencing Hank Williams, George Strait, steel guitar, the woman’s truck, and another bar “out in the country” that presumably won’t annoy its patrons by playing hip hop. The sounds of “Play Something Country” were characteristic of mainstream country in 2005, but depend on blues stylistic tropes. An insistent electric guitar riff undergirds the song as it alternates between I and IV; Ronnie Dunn sings with a swagger and yodels over a modified stop time. The song forges black sounds to a white genre. Building on the idea of common blues repertoire, music theorist Nicolas Stoia demonstrates how black and white musicians shared “preexisting harmonic grounds and melodic structures” through analysis of chord progressions, melody, number of

Race in Country Music Scholarship    345 measures per progression, and text overlay. Analytical comparisons between country substyles and their black musical inspirations would yield a better understanding of how race has functioned in country appropriation. Stoia’s article lays the groundwork for understanding early country’s use of the blues, but what about honky tonk and R&B, countrypolitan and R&B, or hard country guitar styles and Chicago blues? Other than generalized descriptions of accent, very little work has been done on country vocals. In what ways do country singers imitate southern black singers? Specifically, is there any relationship between the delivery of electric blues singers such as Muddy Waters and the rhythmic recitations of Johnny Cash (“One Piece at a Time”) or Jerry Reed (“When You’re Hot You’re Hot”)? Country rapper Cowboy Troy credits Charlie Daniels and Reed as innovators of a vocal tradition in country that emphasizes quick, rhythmic patter and legitimates country hip hop.70 Where does this tradition of vocal virtuosity come from, and is it racialized?

Conclusion Within the grand narratives of country, that it is the musical analog to the white working class experience and that balladry is its aesthetic essence, lie contradictions that the field has struggled to reconcile. The historical surveys treat country’s origins as mixed, but as primarily grounded in Southern white agency. African American contributions are presented as necessary, but not central, even when the evidence would point us toward black innovation. A growing movement of scholars have been opposing the white origins thesis by showing how the industry segregates the music and by writing the history of black country. Our task is to write country’s history in a way that reflects its ability to speak for multilayered concerns of Americans across a wide variety of identities. As a genre that developed out of a complicated regional society, yet was positioned and policed by larger forces, country is a perfect site for exploring race in American culture. It has always been a multiracial enterprise in a racialized society. Its sounds capture the range of interracial encounters and embody influences that have been inextricable from the start.

Notes 1. The white Allen Brothers were mistakenly listed in Columbia’s race catalog in 1927. Patrick Huber estimates that around 1% of hillbilly records before 1933 were made by black artists or integrated bands. See Patrick Huber, “Black Hillbillies: African American Musicians on Old-​Time Records, 1924–​1932,” in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 19–​81. 2. A  2009 survey found that 89% of country listeners identified as white, and 5% has Hispanic or Latino. Tom Webster, “The CRB/​Edison Research 2009 National Country

346    Oxford Handbook of Country Music P1 Study,” SlideShare, accessed January 31, 2016, http://​www.slideshare.net/​webby2001/​ edison-​crb-​research-​2009. 3. Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A. (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1968); D. K. Wilgus, “An Introduction to the Study of Hillbilly Music,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (July–​September 1965):  195–​203; Tony Russell, Blacks, Whites, and Blues (New York: Stein and Day, 1970). Russell’s book is one of the few sources cited by almost all scholarship on race in country, although it is out of print. A reprinting of Russell’s book as well as digital access to issues of The Old-​Time Herald and Old Time Music would encourage more scholarship on early black country. 4. On Latin American or Mexican music and country, see Ann Malone and Bill C. Malone, “Johnny Rodriguez,” in Stars of Country Music: Uncle Dave Macon to Johnny Rodriguez, ed. Judith McCulloh and Bill C. Malone (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 377–​396; Bill C. Malone and David Stricklin, “Expanding Markets: Tejano, Cajun, Hillbilly, Gospel,” in Southern Music/​American Music (Lexington:  University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 58–​70; Jerry Wever, “Dancing the Habanera Beats (in Country Music): The Creole-​Country Two-​Step in St. Lucia and Its Diaspora,” in Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix; Aaron A. Fox, “The Jukebox of History: Narratives of Loss and Desire in the Discourse of Country Music,” Popular Music 11, no. 1 (1992): 53–​72; George H. Lewis, “Mexican Musical Influences on Country Songs and Styles,” in All That Glitters: Country Music in America, ed. George H. Lewis (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993), 94–​101; Roy Brewer, “The Use of Habanera Rhythm in Rockabilly Music,” American Music 17, no. 3 (1999): 300–​317. Intersections between Native Americans and country are noted in reference works such as Elaine Keillor, Tim Archambault, and John M. H. Kelly, Encyclopedia of Native American Music of North America (2013), https://​books.google. com/​books?hl=en&lr=&id=HkuaQRR23K4C&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=encyclopedia+of +native+american+music+of+north+america&ots=K5JewpiqpS&sig=LVuueTAoTOK1 KYYx45TnNwUUFjE#v=onepage&q=encyclopedia%20of%20native%20american%20 music%20of%20north%20america&f=false. Jocelyn R.  Neal notes the complications of race in New Mexico where categories run against traditional conceptions of black, white, and “other.” See Jocelyn R. Neal, “Dancing Around the Subject: Race in Country Fan Culture,” The Musical Quarterly 89, no. 4 (2007): 555–​579. Erich Nunn shows how Jimmie Rodgers’s alleged Irishness masked his performance of blackness. See Erich Nunn, “Country Music and the Souls of White Folk,” Criticism 51, no. 4 (2010): 623–​649. 5. This project came under fire in the late twentieth century for how it romanticized the region and expected cultural purity. See David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native & Fine: The Politics of Culture in An American Region (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-​1920 (Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 1986). 6. Jeffrey T. Manuel, “The Sound of the Plain White Folk? Creating Country Music’s ‘Social Origins,’” Popular Music and Society 31, no. 4 (2008): 421. 7. Ibid. 420. 8. Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 12. 9. This work defends Americans that the “narrating class” denigrates. “Narrating class” is Nadine Hubbs’s term for the media arm of the professional-​managerial class, “the analysts and experts, the language, representation, and knowledge specialists for the whole society.”

Race in Country Music Scholarship    347 The narrating class speaks for the working class from a supposedly neutral position, but judges by middle-​class standards. Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 36–​37. As Karl Hagstrom Miller notes, historical context made the implications of folklorism attractive to scholarship: “[t]‌he politics of segregation and civil rights, white supremacy and black freedom, often encouraged scholars to produce stories of racial difference, separation, or autonomy.” Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 11. Cecelia Tichi makes the link between identity politics and academic prestige clear in her “Introduction,” in Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-​tonk Bars, ed. Cecelia Tichi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 1–​3. She quotes Chet Atkins’s (“country music is our heritage”) to argue for scholarly attention to country in a milieu where “[b]lack blues, jazz, rhythm & blues have all proved exotically attractive to white intellectuals as expressions of a distinctly ‘other’ culture” (Tichi, “Introduction,” 1; emphasis added). 10. Miller, Segregating Sound, 4. Miller further argues that these categories did not produce “separate but equal” sites for racialized music: “As the story of the Allen Brothers illustrates, white southern artists had far more freedom to record blues that black artists had to record ostensibly white styles” (Segregating Sound, 233). I use “folklorism” in a similar way others might use “essentialism,” “homology,” or Paul Gilroy’s “ethnic absolutism:” to refer to the idea that racial identity and cultural products are fundamentally correlated. The most cited of Gilroy’s discussions of “ethnic absolutism” is Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1993). For a sociological approach to early segregation in the music industry, see William G. Roy, “‘Race Records’ and ‘Hillbilly Music’: Institutional Origins of Racial Categories in the American Commercial Recording Industry,” Poetics 32, nos. 3–​4 (2004): 265–​279. 11. Miller, Segregating Sound, 15. The logic of segregated marketing provided protocols for consumer industries of all kinds, but especially those that sold culture: “well-​established mass marketing practices—​as well as respect for the privileged place of white consumers in the South—​dictated that they mark their products for whites as clearly distinct from those sold to African Americans.” J. Lester Feder, “The Whole United States Is Southern: Country Music and the Selling of Southern Conservatism in the Nixon Era,” in Stories of Nation:  Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience, ed. Martin Griffin and Christopher Hebert (Knoxville:  University of Tennessee, 2017), 286. For more on the industry, see J. Lester Feder, “ ‘Song of the South’: Country Music, Race, Region, and the Politics of Culture 1920–​1974” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006). 12. Malone’s early work adopted the industry’s parameters of what qualified as country: “The purpose of this study is to give a general, chronological account of the development of American country music from its commercial founding in the 1920’s [sic] to its present big-​business status.” See Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., viii. 13. Miller, Segregating Sound, 7. 14. The contrast between “African” elements credited to African Americans of undifferentiated nationality and Appalachian retentions traced to specific locations in the British Isles prevails in work meant for the general reader; for example, Fiona Ritchie and Douglas M. Orr, Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage From Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

348    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 15. Bill C. Malone and Jocelyn R. Neal, Country Music, U.S.A, 3rd rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), xi. 16. Ibid. 1. 17. Ibid. 14 (emphasis added). 18. Ibid. 28. 19. Jocelyn R. Neal, Country Music:  A  Cultural and Stylistic History (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2013), xix. 20. Ibid. 6. 21. Ibid. 6–​7. 22. Jocelyn R. Neal, “Country Music,” in The Grove Dictionary of American Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 23. Ivan M. Tribe, Country: A Regional Exploration (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 1. 24. Cecelia Tichi, High Lonesome:  The American Culture of Country Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 7–​8. It is difficult to support her contention that the innovations of Rodgers, Williams, and Monroe were at heart based in balladry. All three specialized in mixing blues features with non-​blues hillbilly music, even in lyrics. 25. Malone and Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., xviii. 26. Ibid. 19. 27. Malone and Stricklin, Southern Music/​American Music. For his critique of the Appalachian thesis, see especially ­chapter 2, “National Discovery” (20–​38). In his Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, Malone again asserts the problems with an ethnocentric focus but upholds this focus in the book’s content. Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993). Norm Cohen’s reference article on country’s sources is one of the more interesting accounts because it devotes most of its five pages to “the less well-​known wellsprings of country”—​many of which are black-​based styles—​yet asserts at the beginning that “[t]‌he most well-​known component of early country music, of course, was the folk music of the largely rural southern United States, much of which can be traced to the folk music of the British Isles.” His is also a rare mention of Sylvester Weaver, a black Kentuckian much less known than Arnold Shultz. Norm Cohen, “The Folk and Popular Roots of Country Music,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, ed. John Woodruff Rumble, Michael McCall, and Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 176. 28. Surveys acknowledge country’s use of post-​1950s styles such as soul, disco, and hip hop but rarely identify any concrete musical interchange. Neal considers country borrowings from rhythm and blues (R&B) in her consideration of country circa 1980; Neal, Country Music, 320–​323. When Neal covers hip hop, she rightly asserts that “[t]‌he relationship between race, ethnicity, and musical genre deserves thorough and reflective investigation” (Country Music, 268). Specialized work on race continues to favor early country, but fresh studies of collaborations between soul and country, discussed later, offer a much-​needed history of a period overlooked by both country scholarship and black music studies. 29. Malone credits African Americans with blues guitar technique: “the most crucial innovations in rural guitar playing came from black musicians who contributed a retinue of finger-​picking styles that have forever intrigued white musicians.” Malone and Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., 24. See also “The Cowboy Image and the Growth of Western Music,” in Malone and Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., 137–​176. Jean A.  Boyd’s work argues for the jazz basis of western swing and against its categorization as country,

Race in Country Music Scholarship    349 citing its repertoire, its use for dancing, and self-​identification of musicians as swing musicians. Her work often includes transcriptions, more in line with jazz scholarship than country. She has published multiple books on the style, but for an overview of her argument, see Jean A. Boyd, “Western Swing: Description and Development,” in The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (Austin: University of Texas, 1998), 6–​32. 30. Williams’s words were first published by the Montgomery Advertiser and cited in Colin Escott, Hank Williams: The Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1994). With little evidence of Tee Tot’s specific impact, Escott credits Tee Tot with the “lazy swing and sock rhythm” and “the blues feel that permeates all but the goofiest of Hank’s songs” (Escott, Hank Williams, 14). 31. Neal is one of the few who comments on the racial implications of mentorship: “The ubiquity of these stories suggests an extremely complicated racial legacy in the genre, namely music that was socially coded as white but was conceived via the tutelage of black blues or street performers”; Neal, Country Music, 60. 32. Matthew W. Hughey, “Cinethetic Racism: White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in ‘Magical Negro’ Films,” Social Problems 56, no. 3 (2009): 550. Hughey’s approach is sociological. For a humanities-​based critique, see Krin Gabbard, Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture (New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 2004), https://​books.google.com/​books?id=OnM-​6EUxJOwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=krin+ gabbard+magical&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjY2ZLZxM3KAhVN6WMKHZKdDv8 Q6AEIKzAA#v=onepage&q&f=false. 33. Aaron A. Fox points out that the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music, the O Brother, Where Art Thou? film and soundtrack, and the PBS “American Roots Music” obscured uneven racial interchange (and exoticized working-​class whites):  “[t]‌o paraphrase Eric Lott, these projects mostly give us the Love, but they leave out the Theft. … Or rather, they attempt to redress an undeniable history of theft and conflict through a nostalgic politics of authenticity”; Aaron A. Fox, “‘Alternative’ to What? O Brother, September 11, and the Politics of Country Music,” in Country Music Goes to War, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 18; American roots Music, directed by Jim Brown (Ginger Group, 2001). Various artists, Anthology of American Folk Music (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1997); O brother, where art thou?, directed by Joel Coen (Touchstone, 2001); Various artists, O brother, where art thou? (Mercury/​Lost Highway, 2000). 34. Erika Brady, “Contested Origins: Arnold Shultz and the Music of Western Kentucky,” in Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix, 101. At one time, bluegrass fans and Travis-​style thumb pickers looked to Shultz as the originator of both styles, bestowing on him a kind of power bordering on the supernatural. The most accessible example of mystification is the body of blues narratives, such as myths surrounding Robert Johnson that highlight sketchy biographical details and troubled spirituality. For a discussion of authenticity claims in blues narratives, see Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (New York: Amistad, 2004); Susan McClary, “Thinking Blues,” in Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 32–​ 62. Rock critics cite intimate knowledge of the blues as evidence of authenticity in southern rock. See Travis D. Stimeling, “‘To Be Polished More Than Extended’: Musicianship, Masculinity, and the Critical Reception of Southern Rock,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 26, no. 1 (2014): 121–​136. The Johnson crossroads myth was parodied in O Brother,

350    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Where Art Thou?, a film whose famous soundtrack implies a racialized narrative of early country music. 35. Neal, Country Music, 9–​10, 59–​60; Malone, Singing Cowboys; Dale Cockrell, “Minstrelsy,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, ed. Paul Kingsbury, Michael McCall, and John Woodruff Rumble (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Nick Tosches was perhaps the first writer on country to highlight minstrelsy, coon songs, and blackface comedy. His is one of the few accounts in the country literature that names minstrelsy as a northern convention. See Nick Tosches, “Cowboys and Niggers,” in Country: The Biggest Music in America (New York: Stein and Day, 1977), 167–​228. The book has been revised and republished as Nick Tosches, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll, rev. ed. (1985; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1996). On minstrelsy’s legacy in bluegrass, see Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1984). 36. Michael T. Bertrand, “Race and Rural Identity,” in The Hayloft Gang:  The Story of the National Barn Dance, ed. Chad Berry (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 130–​152. 37. Pamela Fox, Natural Acts:  Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 26. 38. Fox, Natural Acts, 13. Fox’s book is one of the few intersectional studies of country. Wolfe covers blackface in his chapter on comedy at the Opry, but he does not treat it critically. See Charles K. Wolfe, A Good-​Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1999), 225–​230. Kristine M. McCusker’s book on barn dance targets gender, but her comments on race align with Bertrand’s contention that barn dance radio policed race to protect its product. See Kristine M. McCusker, Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-​tonk Angels: The Women of Barn Dance Radio (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 60, 64–​65. Widely cited in recent barn dance literature is Derek Vaillant, “Sounds of Whiteness: Local Radio, Racial Formation, and Public Culture in Chicago, 1921–​1935,” American Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2002): 24–​66. 39. Neal, Country Music, 468. 40. A comparison of Charles and Pride shows how both were limited in their critique of country’s whiteness. Charles sang country songs not in country style, while Pride did not introduce any new elements from African American styles. See Feder, “ ‘Song of the South.’ ” Adam Gussow’s treatment of “Cowboy Troy” Coleman is one of the few studies that shows how race is constituted through a black country star. See Adam Gussow, “Playing Chicken with the Train: Cowboy Troy’s Hick-​Hop and the Transracial Country West,” in Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix, 234–​262. 41. Charles K. Wolfe, Kentucky Country:  Folk and Country Music of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982). Wolfe’s cowritten biography of DeFord Bailey chronicles the musician’s Opry career and struggle with industry racism. See David C. Morton, with Charles K. Wolfe, DeFord Bailey: A Black Star in Early Country Music (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991). 42. Charles Wolfe, “Rural Black String Band Music,” Black Music Research Journal 10, no. 1 (1990): 32–​35. The few studies of black string band music include Charles K. Wolfe, “Black String Bands: A Few Notes on a Lost Cause,” Old Time Herald 1, no. 1 (1987): 15–​18; R. S. Jamieson, “Gribble, Lusk, and York: Recording a Black Tennessee String Band,” Old Time Herald 2, no. 4 (1990): 27–​31; Huber, “Black Hillbillies”; Stephan Pennington, “Recapturing

Race in Country Music Scholarship    351 the Banjo: The Black Banjo Revival and the Specter of Romantic Nationalism” (unpublished paper, 2010). 43. Cecelia Conway, African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia:  A  Study of Folk Traditions (Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 1995); Karen Linn, That Half-​Barbaric Twang:  The Banjo in American Popular Culture (Urbana–​Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 1994). 44. The articles are too numerous to cite all of them here. See Fred J. Hay, “Black Musicians in Appalachia: An Introduction to Affrilachian Music,” Black Music Research Journal 23, no. 1/​2 (2003): 1–​19. 45. Key recordings were released in the late 1990s: Various artists, Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia (Smithsonian Folkways, 1998); Various artists, From Where I Stand: The Black Experience in Country Music (Warner/​Reprise, 1998). 46. Diane Pecknold, “Introduction:  Country Music and Racial Formation,” in Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix, 11. The book’s direct forebear in detailing musical integration is Christopher A. Waterman’s chapter, “Race Music: Bo Chatmon, ‘Corrine Corrina,’ and the Excluded Middle,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald M. Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 167–​205. Waterman shows that the recording industry overlooked many black musicians in the 1920s and 1930s because their styles fell outside the neat categories that demanded compliance to racial ideals. He details the playing style of Bo Chatmon and traces several versions of one song to track how racial boundaries were maintained. He foreshadows later critiques about ethnic absolutism and neglect of black string styles; Waterman, “Race Music.” For more on black country, see Pamela E. Foster, My Country: The African Diaspora’s Country Music Heritage (Nashville, TN: My Country, 1998); and Pamela E. Foster, My Country, Too: The Other Black Music (Nashville, TN:  Publishers Graphics, 2000). Two other books on country and race were published too recently to be incorporated into my discussion: Erich Nunn, Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015); and Stephanie Shonekan, Soul, Country, and the USA: Race and Identity in American Music Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 47. Roediger’s book was first published in 1991. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness:  Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (1999; repr., New York: Verso, 2007); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New  York:  Vintage Books, 1993); Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1997). For an overview of whiteness studies, see Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” The Journal of American History 89, no. 1 (2002):  154–​173. On whiteness studies in country scholarship, see Geoff Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White?:  Race and the Voice of Nostalgia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 73–​100. 48. Rebecca Ann Thomas, “The Color of Music: Race and the Making of America’s Country Music” (PhD dissertation, University of Missouri, Columbia, 2000). See also Rebecca Thomas, “There’s a Whole Lot O’Color in the ‘White Man’s’ Blues:  Country Music’s Selective Memory and the Challenge of Identity,” The Midwest Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1996): 73–​89; Peter La Chapelle, Proud to Be An Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2007); Feder, “ ‘Song of the South’ ”; Angela Denise Hammond, “Color Me Country: Commercial Country Music and Whiteness” (PhD dissertation, University of Kentucky, 2011). Victor’s

352    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 1927 sessions in Bristol included one African American musician, El Watson. When Columbia came to Johnson City in 1928 and 1929, one African American was recorded, Ellis Williams. On the Klan and pro-​Confederacy records, see Andrew K. Smith and James E. Akenson, “The Civil War in Country Music Tradition,” in Wolfe and Akenson, Country Music Goes to War; Beth A. Messner et al., “The Hardest Hate: A Sociological Analysis of Country Hate Music,” Popular Music and Society 30, no. 4 (2007): 513–​531; and Angela Denise Hammond, “Stand Up for America! Country Music and White Racial Extremism From George C.  Wallace to the Ku Klux Klan,” in Hammond, “Color Me Country,” 164–​224. 49. Aaron A. Fox, Real Country:  Music and Language in Working-​Class  Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 50. Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, 44. On whiteness and country music, see also Aaron A. Fox, “White Trash Alchemies of the Abject Sublime,” in Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, ed. Maiken Derno and Christopher J. Washburne (New York: Routledge, 2004), 39–​61; Neal, “Dancing Around the Subject”; and Nunn, “Country Music and the Souls of White Folk.” Pamela Fox’s book has been discussed but should be cited here as part of whiteness studies in country; Fox, Natural Acts. 51. Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White?.” See also Allen Farmelo, “Another History of Bluegrass: The Segregation of Popular Music in the United States, 1820–​1900,” Popular Music and Society 25, nos. 1–​2 (2001): 179–​203; David Morris, “Hick-​Hop Hooray? ‘Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,’ Musical Genre, and the Misrecognitions of Hybridity,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 28, no. 5 (2011): 466–​488. Mann’s argument echoes Aaron A. Fox’s intertwining narratives of desire and loss in country music; see Fox, “The Jukebox of History.” 52. Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White?,” 74. 53. Part of Mann’s critique is that country operates in the context of global capitalism, a wide perspective that few country projects adopt. Scholarship that comes closest to locating country’s whiteness production in national trends are Charles Hughes, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), and Fox, Real Country; Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music. 54. Pecknold, “Introduction,” 2. 55. “Despite the overdue effort to have a full discussion of whiteness and C&W, his is a circular argument that does not acknowledge people’s true agency, the varied roots of country and western music, or people’s active role in the creation and maintenance of whiteness. The St. Lucian intervention is important to move forward notions of U.S. whiteness and blackness in relation to country and western”; Wever, “Dancing the Habanera Beats,” 224. 56. Barbara Ching, “If Only They Could Read Between the Lines:  Alice Randall and the Integration of Country Music,” in Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix, 264. 57. Farmelo, “Another History of Bluegrass”; Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White?”; Morris, “Hick-​Hop Hooray?” Many of the works I review cite Gilroy, Lipsitz, Roediger, and musicological discourse on race, but few integrate racial theory into their argumentation. Commonly cited works on race in pop music are Ronald Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., Race Music: Black Cultures From Bebop to Hip-​hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Race in Country Music Scholarship    353 58. A survey of book awards in scholarly music societies shows the absence of input from country scholarship at the high levels of the fields of musicology, American music studies, and pop music studies. The AMS (American Musicological Society) has only awarded pop books on blues or jazz; “Otto Kinkeldey Award Winners,” American Musicological Society website, accessed November 15, 2015, http://​www.ams-​net.org/​awards/​kinkeldeywinners.php. None of the AMS “Music in American Culture” winners are books about country; “The Music in American Culture Award Winners,” AMS website, accessed November 18, 2015, http://​www.ams-​net.org/​awards/​MACA_​winners.php. Neither the Society for American Music nor the International Association for the Study of Popular music have awarded work on country or white American folk music; “Irving Lowens Book Award,” Society for American Music website, accessed November 18, 2015, http://​www. american-​music.org/​awards/​LowensBook.php. Miller’s Segregating Sound is the monograph closest to country scholarship to win the IASPM-​US Woody Guthrie Award, and this book is primarily about race; IASPM-​US (International Association for the Study of Popular Music-​US Branch) website, “The Woody Guthrie Award for Outstanding Book on Popular Music,” http://​iaspm-​us.net/​about-​iaspm-​us/​392-​2/​. 59. As I have implied, black country is doubly forgotten because it clashes with the assumptions of country scholarship and studies in African American music. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to critique African American music scholarship, but the field ignores almost all forms of black country.On Jimmie Rodgers, see Nunn, “Country Music and the Souls of White Folk”; Malone and Stricklin, Southern Music/​American Music, 3. 60. Malone reiterates this argument in Bill C. Malone, “‘The Southern Thesis’: Revisited and Reaffirmed,” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (2014): 226–​229. 61. Norm Cohen, “A Few Thoughts on Provocative Points,” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (2014): 235. 62. Malone and Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., xviii. 63. Malone mentions “data” when he says that our attributions of “Anglo” or “Celtic” origins for the music is speculative. Ibid. 19. 64. Outside critiques of country that just assume it to be racist do this, too. 65. David Sanjek, “What’s Syd Got to Do with It? King Records, Henry Glover, and the Complex Achievement of Crossover,” in Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix, 306–​338. See also Hughes, Country Soul. Chronicling the connections between personnel in regional recording studios, Hughes argues that the scene lacked the equal opportunities for black musicians celebrated by other histories of southern soul. At the same time, from the late 1960s onward, “every country star used sounds and musicians that came from soul music” (171). On soul artists’ love of country, see Diane Pecknold, “Travel with Me:  Country Music, Race, and Remembrance,” in Pop:  When the World Falls Apart:  Music in the Shadow of Doubt, ed. Eric Weisbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 185–​ 200; Michael Awkward, “‘The South’s Gonna Do It Again’: Changing Conceptions of the Use of ‘Country’ Music in the Albums of Al Green,” in Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix, 191–​ 203. For arguments on soul’s impact on country, see Diane Pecknold, “Making Country Modern: The Legacy of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music,” in Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix, 82–​99; Charles L. Hughes, “You’re My Soul Song: How Southern Soul Changed Country Music,” in Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix, 283–​305. 66. The adjacent Ohio and Muhlenberg counties are located in the western part of the state, on the border of the western coal field and the Pennyroyal region. This area produced an unusually large number of country instrumentalists: Arnold Shultz, Bill Monroe, Merle

354    Oxford Handbook of Country Music

67.

68.

69.

70.

Travis, Ike Everly, and others. For more on the network of musicians in the area, see Brady, “Contested Origins.” Farmelo’s undercited article on bluegrass historiography makes a similar claim: “That people who often lived, worked, gambled, traded, stole, prayed, danced, and sang together ‘shared and molded a common culture’ is not ironic. That, today, many people think that Southeastern blacks and whites did not share and mold together, but merely hated each other, seems more ironic”; Farmelo, “Another History of Bluegrass,” 186. He cites Christopher Small’s contention that music of the South is perhaps the best place to look for interactions (187). Native American ancestry, as Malone points out (his typical southerner “liked to romanticize himself as part Indian”), made southern white men more southern, not less, without threatening their legal status under Jim Crow. (Malone and Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., 29.) Karl Hagstrom Miller, “Race Records and Old-​time Music: The Creation of Two Marketing Categories in the 1920s,” in Segregating Sound, 187–​214. Malone’s original edition of Country Music, U.S.A. covers Ralph Peer but sees the music that came to be marketed as “hillbilly” as a folk music “discovered” by Peer; Malone, Country Music, U.S.A. (1968). The recording industry segregated because it viewed the South as a static repository of folk cultures instead of a dynamic, industrializing region, and country studies’ focus on traditionalism reinforces this idea. Patrick Huber considers country’s relationship to the South in ­chapter 2 of this book. For debate on Malone’s “southern thesis,” see the special “country music” issue of the Journal of American Folklore. See Thomas A. DuBois and James P. Leary, “From the Editors,” Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (2014): 123–​125. Neal’s work in music theory is a valuable exception. Her articles on country music analysis are too numerous to cite here. Her textbook foregrounds musical details in terms nonmusicians can follow while still challenging students to listen for particular sounds and notice song structure. Nicholas Stoia, “The Common Stock of Schemes in Early Blues and Country Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 35, no. 2 (2013): 194–​234. Gussow, “Playing Chicken with the Train,” 240.

Chapter 17

Gendered  Stag e s Country Music, Authenticity, and the Performance of Gender Kristine M. McCusker

Country music has always hidden the instability of its gender conventions and performances under the guise of authenticity. By claiming the performances to be genuine, traditional, and unchanging in repeated performances, it has fended off some attempts to “trouble,” or expose, the instability of its contingently gendered stages even as those stages and what makes country music genuine and authentic have evolved over time.1 Nowhere is this more true than on that venerable institution of country music, the Grand Ole Opry. Two shows from 1950 and 2016 are good examples of the genre’s gendered stage as well as its evolving authenticity narrative that serves as a pseudo fortress against attempts to trouble those roles. In October 1950, the Prince Albert Tobacco hour featured Red Foley as the Master of Ceremonies; Kay Starr and Tennessee Ernie Ford as the musical guests; and Minnie Pearl as comic relief.2 Broadcast simultaneously over NBC and to a live studio audience, performers both reinforced and questioned evolving gender roles in the postwar South (and America at large) where federal investment in World War II had completed the region’s transition from a rural backwater to industrial powerhouse. In that time of change, the Opry sold its stage and characters like Minnie Pearl as tradition embodied, as representatives of a rural southern past in a modern present. Minnie Pearl’s spinster character foolishly kept a price tag stapled to her straw hat (no urban woman would ever do that); yet her desire for a man, any man, mimicked evolving postwar narratives that claimed the domestically contained nuclear family was the future.3 On that night in October, Minnie said to Ford, “Helooooo [sic] Mr. Tennessee. … You pull up a chair and set down.” Ford responded as a southern gentleman might, “Oh I couldn’t do that, Miss Minnie. There’s no chair for you to sit on.” Minnie replied, “No, but when you set down it’ll make a lap, won’t it?” Both transgressive (in her aggressiveness and supposed spinster unattractiveness) and reinforcing (in her desire for marriage) of gender roles,

356    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Minnie Pearl chased after men in an era when marriage and family were becoming a bulwark against Communism, as the region moved from a world war into a cold one.4 In a second example from January 2016, I watched an Opry show that laid claim to an authentic stage, but did so using its own past, thick southern accents, and haute couture to establish what was genuine and real to an audience of Smart phone users photographing the show. Connie Smith, Larry Gatlin, and Diamond Rio introduced new artists Flatt Lonesome and Aubrie Sellers, who established their Opry bona fides by performing an original song and then a cover from older country favorites (Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens, in these cases). They performed in suits and beautiful dresses or pantsuits for an audience who (like me) lived in the suburbs that ring Nashville. But what was really intriguing was Connie Smith’s patter with Sellers after her performance. “Will you let me tell them [the audience] who your mama is?” Smith asked. When Sellers said yes, Smith announced it was well-​known country singer Lee Ann Womack, causing the audience to gasp audibly.5 As a cultural historian who studies radio, country music, and the on-​and-​off stage gendered relationships that create country music’s various gendered stages, these two snippets allow me to ask quintessentially historical questions about the nature and meaning of those stages. Moreover, I can look at the ways that performers used notions of the real and authentic to both sell the music and hide the profound changes in the nature and meaning of being male and female over time. Minnie Pearl and Aubrie Sellers, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Connie Smith, all performed appropriate stage roles for their time and place in ways that hid gendered stage exploits, whether that stage was in front of an audience, the backstage relationships that made public performances possible, or in the historical literature on country music itself. Country music’s main historical narrative, itself a gendered stage, has been far too wedded to early assumptions of who performed to adequately assess these complicated performances and their links to changing contexts. Thus, I will examine the evolution of the early industry, authenticity narratives, and its gendered performances, and then turn my attention to the ways that historians and other scholars have investigated those performances. I will argue that the historical narrative as well as the industry’s successful use of authenticity claims has limited our ability to understand how gender—​the roles and assumptions assigned to men and women, the fluidity of those roles over time, and the effect on audiences of all races and classes—​works on country music stages. I finish with the consequences of ignoring the interactions between gendered narratives and authenticity claims, and suggest some new areas for exploration. My chapter assumes several historical transitions in early country music that I need to describe first. These historical moments defined some of the core gendered imagery onstage while determining what role men and women played offstage. It also, from the first, linked evolving notions of being genuine and real to gender roles, providing a facsimile of stability. The first recordings are typically attributed to Ralph Peer, Okeh Records A&R (Artist and Repertoire) man, who recorded Mamie Smith and Fiddlin’ John Carson in the early 1920s. We now define them as a blues singer and an early country musician, respectively, but at the time, neither seemed to be the start of a new

Country Music, Authenticity, and Performance of Gender    357 musical and performance genre. In fact, the initial recordings Peer did, described by folklorist Archie Green in 1965 and parsed still further by Barry Mazor in 2015, seem to be a mishmash of sounds and singers rather than a clear distinguishing of two new genres of music. At his first on-​location recording session in Atlanta in June 1923, for example, Peer recorded an array of musicians including Fiddlin’ John Carson; Fannie Goosby, a black woman; Eddy Heywood, “Negro” theater pianist; Warner’s Seven Aces, a college dance band; a Morehouse College Quartet; Kemper Herreld, violinist; Lucille Bogan, a blues singer from Birmingham, Alabama; Charles Fulcher, who had a novelty jazz band; and the Bob White Syncopating Band.6 In other words, Peer recorded a cacophony of sound that had little rhyme or reason to it until, as Karl Hagstrom Miller argued, commercial recording companies like Victor and Okeh segregated the sound into “blues” (read: black) and “old time” (read: white) musics and then sold them to segregated audiences.7 The rigid commercialization of both singers and sounds that segregated black music from Fiddlin’ John Carson’s mimicked an evolving segregation that dominated every day southern life. Musically, however, both sounds originated from the same social context: the urban South with a large migrant population who wished to hear the sounds of a rural homestead where Saturday nights were spent square dancing to fiddle music in an old barn. Authentic musicians therefore were fiddlers and other musicians like Carson who could recreate that image, even though Carson had already migrated to Atlanta.8 At the same time, the initial gendering of the industry began, too, offstage. Onstage, men were instrumentalists, Masters of Ceremonies, and performers; women like Moonshine Kate and Fiddlin’ John’s daughter accompanied men who were typically the stars. In other cases, husbands corralled their wives and children, ensuring their virtue, even though the women—​guitarist Maybelle Carter of the Carter Family, for example—​were the musical innovators in the family. Offstage, men held technical jobs as recording engineers or were managers and A&R men. Reflective of a gender-​ segregated labor system, women were excluded from technical and management jobs, deemed male by the larger society. Later, in the heyday of the barn dance radio craze, women answered fan mail and were spotlighted in fan publications as the office staff, but were, again, reflective of the broader labor system where women were the secretaries and men were in charge.9 The earliest recordings of country music date from 1922 and 1923; but from approximately 1924 to about 1950, radio was the more common way most Americans heard what was initially called “old time music,” “hillbilly music,” or “old time favorites”: the programs came to be called barn dances, evoking a rural past with hay bales and hootenannies and reminding big city migrants of their rural roots. Although consumers could purchase records in the 1920s, the Great Depression shuttered records. Radio waves were free, after all, and neighbors willingly allowed friends and family to listen in. My grandmother, Doris Bertram Owen McCusker, a native Iowan who later migrated to California, remembers purchasing her first radio in the 1930s, using Farm Security Administration (FSA) funds earned by my grandfather. She recalled putting the radio on a window sill in their FSA camp housing so their neighbors could listen in.10 While it

358    Oxford Handbook of Country Music is not clear how listening itself was a gendered activity, listener response, recorded in fan letters sent to stations and stars, was itself uniquely gendered. Men wrote male performers, tending to ask for help getting started in the music business; women wrote in intimate terms, hoping to establish personal relationships with those same stars.11 By 1939, listeners like my grandmother regularly tuned in with their friends to the more than five hundred barn dance radio programs like the Grand Ole Opry that employed thousands of female and male performers, both locally and nationally. Shows tended to follow an evolving industry standard; as Rose Lee Maphis told me, “You had to have some guys, you had to have some girls, and you had to have a comedian” for a barn dance show and, later, country music program to be successful.12 From the beginning, those stages attempted to create gendered binary models, meaning there were men and there were women, cast in country terms as cowboys and cowgirls, southern matriarchs and hillbillies (typically, though not exclusively, gendered as masculine). Sold as a stable cast of characters because of their authentic rural or mountain roots, some, especially comedians, were able to cross those gendered boundaries with ease and impunity—​and for a lot of laughs—​without upsetting these stalwart notions of authenticity. The comedy team Shorty (who was five feet, two inches tall) and Little Eller (who was six foot, four inches tall) performed on the Renfro Valley Barn Dance in Kentucky, and their physical stature–​their respective heights seemed to suggest an equal flip of gender roles–​ undermined the very roles barn dance stages were creating.13 Yet Renfro Valley promised a good time listening to traditional, genuine performances from the mountains where nothing seemed to change; therefore, Shorty and Eller’s comedy stylings were just for fun and not a real challenge. The end of rationing, and the more common appearance of jukeboxes after World War II ended, catalyzed a resurgent record industry, causing the demise of barn dance radio by 1960. World War II had limited the sale of records because the federal government rationed shellac, a waterproofing agent that was also a prime ingredient in making records. The strike against recording companies from 1942 to 1944 because of disputes over royalties required union musicians affiliated with the American Federation of Musicians to boycott recording new music and work exclusively on the radio. Once the strike ended, recorded music once again flourished. But barn dance performers faced more than challenges catalyzed by the strike’s end or the end of rationing. Television and its phenomenal success required radio in general to reinvent itself (the now common dee jay format emerged in this era) while requiring barn dance performers to transition to records as rock and rollers, especially Elvis Presley, who sold records to an increasingly younger demographic. The shift in platform, or how consumers heard the music, also warranted a musical name change from old-​time favorites or hillbilly music to country and western music.14 It was in this transition from barn dance radio to country music that the first histories of the industry were displayed (e.g., at music festivals) or written. The early historical focus on great stars followed the industry’s own narratives, justly aided by industry executives like Carrie Rodgers, wife of Jimmie Rodgers, who helped proclaim her husband as country music’s first superstar. In fact, it was just one of many examples of the industry

Country Music, Authenticity, and Performance of Gender    359 and the history overlapping, reinforcing, and guiding each other. Rodgers based her claims on the biography she wrote entitled My Husband, Jimmie Rodgers (1935).15 Then, in the early 1950s, capitalizing on her notoriety as Rodgers’s widow, she linked her husband’s musical innovation to new country music stars like Hank Snow and Ernest Tubb, whom she claimed as Jimmie’s inheritors. Finally, she helped create the Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Festival in Meridian, Mississippi, where both Snow and Tubb were featured. She (and others) used Jimmie’s recorded material from the late 1920s and early 1930s to make him the paternal originator in country music’s genealogy, from which all other country music descended.16 Plenty of other musicians, notably Fiddlin’ John Carson, the Carter Family, and others, have a claim to that particular paternalism or maternalism; but the yearly Meridian festival was crucial in certifying Jimmie Rodgers as the commercial beginning. Moreover, because his music was only available on records, recordings became the primary method for recreating country music’s past because they were the only available renderings of his performances, even though radio performances seemed to have dominated his early career. It was in this shift from radio to records that the first scholarly studies of country music were written, typically acknowledged to be Archie Green’s “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol” (1965) and Bill C. Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A. (1968).17 This was a new gendered stage where new roles for country music men and women were established and claimed as authentic and traditional. Men were defined as the commercially successful recording stars or successful music innovators; women were the noncommercial support system, confined as they were to the home. Moreover, because the first historians—​ including most notably Charles Wolfe—​were able to conduct oral interviews with old-​time stars in the 1960s and 1970s, these gendered assumptions at times could color how the interviews were conducted and memories recorded. Scholars thus created a unique gendered stage, down to the very primary sources used to construct our histories, that has shaped how we understood the industry and its development.18 Beginning what was a fifty-​year career in which he “worked tirelessly to redefine and invigorate American democracy through his research on the traditions and practices of working people,” Archie Green’s article traced the evolution of the name hillbilly and its usage in the early recording industry when Ralph Peer first recorded that array of musicians and singers. Because he was among the first to write a history of the industry, he was more opened to his sources, reporting a broader image of the early “hillbilly” industry than an exclusive focus on paternal beginnings—​typical of Green’s eclectic personality.19 While his work was an opening salvo in claiming country music as a scholarly topic, it was Bill Malone’s dissertation, published by the American Folklore Society in 1968 and later revised into Country Music, U.S.A. (2nd edition, 1985), that first constructed the now dominant narrative. It included the assumptions of a social historian educated in the 1960s; namely, that men were the main actors of history. In a country music historian’s hands, their masculinity was natural and real because their upbringing in working-​class rural areas ensured a certain authenticity.20 Thus, Malone rooted performances in artist biographies, organized chronologically, to describe that organic musical innovation or commercial success, a standard I have also used in my work. If,

360    Oxford Handbook of Country Music by its very nature, country music came from the authentic, lived experiences of a southern working class, then documenting that working life and its musical innovations was the key to understanding the music and its audiences.21 Commercially successful female performers like Kitty Wells posed certain problems because Wells sold a lot of records. By declaring her the rare exception, she proved the male rule. Malone was primarily tasked with proving that his subject had legitimacy as a field of study. In an era when working-​class, white Southerners were not studied by historians, and musicologists viewed vernacular music as unsophisticated, Malone’s job was to make country music a legitimate field of study, which he has more than done.22 But to legitimate the field, he assumed that primary source material had to be written or recorded, creating stable documents that could not mutate. Records thus became the common source, even though they tended not to be purchased during the Great Depression and were restricted during World War II. This also made Billboard magazine and its recording charts the bible of commercial recording success and an essential source to some scholars.23 Finally, commercial success came to be the foundational definition of who was a country music performer and who was not, defining, too, who was a man and who was a woman on a country music stage. Women’s contributions to country music began to be acknowledged in the midst of the Second Wave Feminist movement in the early 1970s where historians writing about women’s history were the leading theorists, challenging historians to reexamine their texts for the ways women contributed to the past.24 For scholars like English professor William C. Lightfoot, this meant tracking down old radio performers and doing extensive interviews with them, eventually publishing them in the myriad small scholarly journals such as the John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly or Old Time Country that focused on old-​time performers. The oral interviews especially are foundational primary source texts for scholars of gender who wanted to document the performance of gender in the early radio days. For others, like Charles Wolfe, it meant extending the Malone narrative to explain why women were or were not commercially successful in their oral interviews.25 In other words, oral interviews, a key method for country music scholars, were gendered sources that reinforced other gendered assumptions about who was a performer and why that performer was important. Few have done more than Charles Wolfe in tracking down old-​time stars and interviewing them, or collecting and keeping old industry journals like Country Song Roundup. His enormous collection, now in the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, promises to be a major contribution to the study of country music, a contribution that will either equal or (more likely) surpass the John Edwards Memorial Foundation collection that is now part of the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among the most useful documents is the oral interview Wolfe conducted with Millie Good McCluskey, a member, with her sister, Dollie, of the Girls of the Golden West who were successful radio performers on the National Barn Dance (on WLS radio in Chicago) in the 1930s. Conducted in April 1978, the interview with McCluskey and her husband, Bill—​himself a National Barn Dance performer—​is a wonderful look into the golden age of barn dance radio and the

Country Music, Authenticity, and Performance of Gender    361 ways that producers and performers constructed stage personas that idealized certain images of men and women for their audiences. The interview includes Millie’s descriptions of linking her stage performances to the Old West’s authenticity narratives that had been common in vaudeville and silent film. The Girls were real, genuine Westerners (although born and raised in Illinois) because they wore real fringed vests and cowgirl hats and yodeled as if crooning to the cattle on the range or listeners in their radio audience. While the Girls did do some recording, most of their work was on radio, which promised a steady and stable weekly salary in Chicago, a city with a large migrant population eager to hear songs that sounded like home.26 The emphasis on male achievement coupled with feminists’ more general assessment of women’s (lack of) power limited Wolfe as he attempted to account for the Girls’ success. In the interview, he asked Millie, “Do you think your career would have been easier had you not been women?” Millie’s answer was No, we never thought that. We were very fortunate really from the time we started singing, we were never out of a job if we wanted to work, and we never had to look for a job. Dollie took it up on her own, I had already started working as a salesgirl when I was fourteen and then I went with her on my lunch hour for an audition at Camwax in St. Louis. She was more aggressive with it than I was and the harmony just came naturally to me so we started singing together and everything progressed from there.27

Other interviews with major radio stars—​in particular the five interviews with Lulu Belle Wiseman that Lightfoot conducted between 1982 and 1985 and published in 1987 and 1989—​moved beyond the assumption that few women participated in the industry and that those who succeeded needed to act aggressively to make it in an exclusively male world. Wiseman, cast as the southern mountain mother who had migrated to Chicago, was named Radio Queen of 1936, a national radio honor that ranked her above Helen Hunt and other radio luminaries as the nation’s favorite female radio star. Her wide-​ranging and extensive interviews with Lightfoot described how she navigated the barn dance stage and the fraught relationships based on gender and class that ultimately led to real commercial success.28 Wiseman cited, for example, the publication of commercial songbooks, the release of records, and the extra money made from “playing out” (holding concerts) within a days’ drive of the home radio studio that provided her financial security. In other words, the Lightfoot interviews allowed Wiseman to include commercial success as a female trait. Other authors incorporated these documents and some of their underlying narrative into their work, feeding on each other in a manner that reinforced some of these initial gendered assumptions.29 The second edition of Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A. continued the assumption that women were rare, but challenges posed by Lightfoot’s articles and by women’s historians required the narrative to flex and mutate. Moreover, the financial success in the 1970s and 1980s of female recording stars like Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn required country music’s main narrative to account for them because their success “troubled,” or shook the narrative. Where did their commercial success come

362    Oxford Handbook of Country Music from if authentic, real women were confined to the home? Gendered constructions—​ men as commercial, women as not—​simply did not work here. Scholars thus crafted a language that limited women to a domestic sphere, away from the public work that men did, without recognizing that those links with the domestic sphere actually opened up a space for musical, commercially successful women on stages. Women who did venture beyond those confines were cast as feminists who wanted to aggressively reshape and remake the industry for other women, with no influence on men. To account for their rarity, Malone argued (when the first edition did not have similar text) that, Public performances of all kinds were dominated by men, and the physically aggressive skills of fiddling, banjo playing, and the like were felt best confined to male participants, particularly when displayed at such rowdy events as country dances or fiddle contests. Women certainly played banjoes, fiddles, and other instruments at home (and some of them, such as Samantha Bumgarner and Eva Davis, even appeared as instrumentalists on early commercial recordings), but few men were willing to compete against the ladies in any kind of public arena, and the women were encouraged to keep their talents noncompetitive and at home.

Future Coon Creek Girl Lily May Ledford won some of those contests, but the narrative did not allow for that success. Women in this edition of Country Music, U.S.A. were indeed such a special case that its index warranted a heading for women, but there is no twin heading for men, suggesting that men were the history and women were the outliers. The first edition did not have this language nor this index issue.30 Work in the 1990s pulled away country music’s veneer of inherent authenticity to find the industry sold itself as noncommercial, authentic music and made a lot of money doing so. Country music’s claims to authenticity, then, served as a genre marker that allowed its artists and fans to counterpose pop music as its inauthentic other. Authenticity was its own commercial construct that had been wielded in subtle ways, Richard Peterson and Joli Jensen argued, but neither tended to recognize the intrinsic links between authenticity narratives and their potentially stabilizing effect on a gendered (and raced and classed) stage. Richard Peterson’s Creating Country Music (1997) helped shift studies of country music from social history to cultural history, directly challenging the assumption that country music eschewed commercialism. Instead, Peterson argued that the music’s supposed authenticity divided country music into two types: “hard-​core” and “soft-​shell” music. Men (and a few women) sang hard-​core songs about drinking and honky tonkin’ (think George Jones and Buck Owens), while women (and a few men) played at being mothers and wives, becoming the embodiment of soft-​shell music. Certainly, there were outliers who crossed boundaries—​Loretta Lynn as hard-​core; Eddy Arnold as soft-​shell. Peterson’s narrative gendered the terms so that men were associated with one kind of country music and women with another, reinforcing a binary division of male/​female. Because of the tendency to see soft-​shell music as having female, pop music elements to it, some journalists and scholars typically dismissed it in favor of hard-​core singers who sang “real” country music.31

Country Music, Authenticity, and Performance of Gender    363 Joli Jensen’s The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization and Country Music, published a year later, implicitly gendered ideas of country music authenticity as she, too, tore away the image of noncommercial music. Although she agreed with Peterson’s argument that country music authenticity had pop music as its antithesis artifice, Jensen willingly used female performers like Patsy Cline to deconstruct ideas of authenticity, albeit without really examining the links between their femininity and authenticity. Jensen’s book focuses on the Nashville or “Countrypolitan” Sound, the pop-​influenced, violin-​backed, smooth-​voiced country music of the late 1950s and early 1960s that producers Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins developed and that featured stars such as Patsy Cline (who is featured prominently on the book’s cover) and Jim Reeves. In its initial incarnation in the 1950s, the Nashville Sound seemed to veer too much from its country roots toward a pop music that catered to an audience becoming ensconced in new suburbs.32 Thus dismissed initially by scholars, cultural critics, and musicians alike, the Nashville Sound came to be considered by many as a low point in the genre, at least by the 1970s, according to Jensen. But in an ironic twist, what was pop music became country music’s authentic moment in the 1990s when Shania Twain and others threatened to move country music in other directions.33 In another difference from Peterson, Jensen emphasized the ways that Patsy Cline and other women were at the commercial cutting edge for this moment of authentic country music. This also allowed Jensen to argue that, in general, “a presumption of organic origins helps to mark the genre as authentic,” even as those origins led to big business and even bigger profits. Cline’s organic origin proved to be her role, as a protégée of Owen Bradley rooted her authenticity in his role as an architect of the Nashville Sound.34 Moviemakers and pop culture writers created their own gendered stages as they recovered Cline and other female performers in the 1980s. Loretta Lynn was a catalyst for this trend with the publication of her autobiography, Coal Miner’s Daughter, in 1976 and the subsequent 1980 release of its film adaptation (with a stunning performance by Beverly D’Angelo of Cline).35 But Patsy Cline was the main beneficiary with movies such as “Sweet Dreams” (1983) and pop culture books such as Ellis Nassour’s Honky Tonk Angel (1981) and Margaret Jones’s Patsy (1994) popularizing her talent while building an iconic image of her as a tragic country music star who died on the cusp of great fame and fortune.36 That work, problematic though it was because of its lack of scholarly citations, proved a catalyst in the 1990s for the so-​called decade of women, as the title of a 90s television special stated.37 Many assumed that women like Cline and Lynn were feminists who assumed a way for women in country music, rather than key innovators in a changing industry. Cline was particularly known for her aggressiveness and her willingness to thumb her nose at female conventions, allowing these pop culture scholars to cast her as a feminist. I disagree with the characterization that an assertive personality made one a feminist. But Cline was one who pushed the boundaries that encircled her as a woman, without an eye toward collapsing them for other women, and willingly challenged Bradley and others in building her career. Scholars followed these feminist premises, particularly Mary Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, whose work, Finding Her Voice, came out in 1993.38 Bufwack and Oermann

364    Oxford Handbook of Country Music structured their narrative around the Malone premise: women were not really contributors to the early industry because of their lack of commercial success; but then, through careful and painstaking research, the authors identified hundreds of women who performed on country music stages from the first, belying the Malone narrative on every page. Encyclopedic in nature, Bufwack and Oermann asked where the women were but did not ask how stage shows created ideas of femininity and masculinity. Nor did they necessarily link women’s roles to country music’s authenticity narratives. Other scholars, myself included, then asked why women were there. When my own work, Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-​Tonk Angels (begun in 1994 and published in 2008) appeared, my intention was to take this next step, to question how we studied women’s roles and by extension and implication, reform how we understood the industry as a gendered stage in general. These questions required me to move beyond record sales (Patsy Montana had the only claim, precarious at best, to a #1 hit for “I Want To Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” in 1935) and to argue that radio was the more financially viable and secure medium for all country musicians, especially in the 1930s when sales of records plummeted.39 In the 1930s, women’s voices, from the obscure Linda Parker to Radio Queen Lulu Belle Wiseman, helped tame radio technology, which was seen as dangerous and threatening because it transported sound into private, intimate spaces like living rooms. Radio mothers were especially effective in declaring radio therapeutic in an era of unemployment and depression, making the products that sponsored them, for example, Alka Seltzer, seem like therapeutic and not crass commercialism. But as important, I looked at female performers’ relationships with male producers and other offstage personnel to see how behind-​the-​scenes shows were their own gendered stages and the consequences for female performers whose virtue was so intrinsically linked to the show’s success. A gendered double standard seems to have guided them. Management, almost exclusively male, turned a blind eye toward male performer indiscretions with alcohol or with extramarital liaisons, for example; female performers, however, could not smoke in public, could not drink, and their sexuality was ruthlessly controlled, lest that behavior give lie to that virtuous stage.40 I struggled in the earliest years of my research with other scholars’ tendency to use gender interchangeably with women. Men—​as the universal sex—​did not have a gender; only women did, hence the language performers and women performers that tended to reinforce men as the universal sex. That tendency was complicated when Joan Wallach Scott’s innovative article, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” appeared in 1986, requiring scholars, albeit slowly, to rethink how we examined masculinity and femininity over time. Working from a premise that gender was contingent and therefore, evolving, Scott defined gender as the “constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes and gender is a primary way of signifying relationship of power,” which eventually prompted some scholars to rethink the interchangeable use of “gender” and “women.”41 No longer was stage imagery, for example, an absolute, but a gendered performance linked to a precise time and place. But the biography-​by-​biography model that so dominated the country music model had to

Country Music, Authenticity, and Performance of Gender    365 be reworked to understand how stage performances constructed gender roles, married them to authenticity narratives, and rooted them in a specific time. Diane Pecknold and I used Scott’s theories as guiding principles in A Boy Named Sue: Essays in Gender and Country Music (2004). We asked, how was music gendered in relationship to country music and what were the consequences? The contributors argued that gender on country music stages marked the genre boundaries of the industry, and that country music, as a cultural force, helped define—​and then was defined by—​contemporary cultural and historical contexts. While we attempted to move beyond the tendency to assume gender and women were synonymous, there was a relative lack of work on men in 2004, as acting and therefore creating ideas about masculinity. Michael Bertrand’s article on Elvis’s appropriation of black, working-​class male styles and Pecknold’s essay on country music masculinity in the 1950s and 1960s both pointed to ways in which we might consider southern working-​class masculinities in black and white men; but the majority of the collection focused on women and their contributions to early barn dance stages, dance halls, and displays of feminism on country music stages in the 1990s, among others.42 Other scholars such as Pamela Fox and Beth Bailey have used different conceptual terms to unpack women’s performances specifically and at least consider the industry’s authenticity narratives in attempting to stabilize its gender roles. By deconstructing the stage’s studied use of rusticity to push its claims of authenticity, Fox was able to examine how not just gender—​but class and to a lesser extent, race—​worked to promote authentic stages in (for example) country music women’s biographies.43 By focusing on women’s performances, too, she also deconstructed male performances as the normative ones on those stages. Bailey, considering notions of “respectability,” argued that national stardom and commercial success allowed Cline to trump small-​town politics that labeled her as crass and unrespectable (Winchester, Virginia, elites, her hometown, thought this) as she used different standards—​commercial success and national significance—​to make her own claims to being respectable.44 Others have begun to deconstruct masculine roles on stage and have done a better job of linking those masculine roles to the audience that consumes the music. This work has tended to focus on “hard-​core” country music, that Richard Peterson-​inspired term for country music sung in honky tonks by Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, George Jones, and Waylon Jennings and focused on drinking and cheating songs. Barbara Ching’s Wrong’s What I do Best (2001) was the opening salvo in claiming hard country’s cultural role in creating and sustaining specifically working-​class men’s identities as men. Ching argued that hard country was (and is) a relatively marginalized style that valued words sung by an untrained, but lonesome-​sounding voice. As a cultural critic, she parsed those words to discover how working-​class men used them to counter their own “low” position in the nation’s cultural hierarchy. As they lost access to the American dream via good manufacturing jobs that had been outsourced, they still could criticize “uptown people” for dismissing their music, and by extension, them.45 Aaron Fox’s ethnographic work on honky tonk bars around Lockhart, Texas, Real Country (2004), links that music to a heroic masculinity of sorts. Working class men, whose lives had been destabilized by

366    Oxford Handbook of Country Music the outsourcing of blue collar jobs and the demise of union benefits and representation, claimed Haggard and other hard country singers (and the semiprofessional performers who sang their music in local bars) as real men while dismissing middle-​class culture as effeminate and artificial. At the same time, women were pseudo feminists whose increasing economic contribution to the working-​class family still made them long for a past where they could fulfill the role of the nurturing mother.46 Some of the most recent work still participates in the recovery of women who have been erased from gendered scholarly stages, but with a sophistication that links authenticity narratives to the construction and questioning of gender roles. Leigh Edward’s forthcoming work, Dolly Parton and Gender Performance in Country Music, for example, analyzes Dolly’s fake–​real narrative, a merging of her impoverished upbringing in the Tennessee mountains with her campy appearance, famously claimed by her common statement, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” She then tracked the fake–​real narrative as it evolved from television and records in the 1960s to contemporary incarnations of a digital Dolly (e.g., on social media). Parton was purposeful and clear that “Dolly” is a public performance, where “gender roles are artificial in the sense that they are socially constructed, made up of each society’s changing ideas and stereotypes about gender rather than some inherently, supposedly natural gender role.”47 More recent, very exciting work collapses the standard stage binary of male–​female, particularly as scholars begin to assess country music from a LGBTQ lens. Nadine Hubbs’ book Rednecks, Queers, and Country and her articles on Gretchen Wilson and on the homoerotics of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” steer us toward the transgressive quality of some entertainers’ gendered stages as they collapsed the boundaries between men and women, or ignored them altogether. How have these authenticity narratives, Hubbs asked, provided cover for LGBTQ interpretations, for example, on very public stages? Dolly’s own authenticity and the firm foothold that “Jolene” has as a classic country music cheating song allowed Parton to musically warn Jolene away from her man and then, to wax lovingly about her beauty—​a hint at her own attraction to the red-​headed, green-​eyed vixen. It does not hurt that Dolly has been an open and passionate ally to the LGBTQ community, another subtext that makes this interpretation possible.48 It is in this context we might also reconsider Minnie Pearl’s performances on Opry stages as having their own transgressive qualities. Still, the field has had problems breaking free from its own past to move beyond the commercially successful men model and incorporate more fluid ideas of gender and authenticity that push past the male–​female binary. Part of the problem is that the narrative of manliness as the commercial success has made subtle changes, with a new focus on men who earned #1 hits rather than simply being commercially successful. This once again marginalizes women, relegating them to country music’s sidelines. Work like Country Boys and Redneck Women—​which Diane Pecknold and I coedited and released in 2016—​has attempted to move beyond this assumption by including articles that contextualized country music performances in global politics, rooted gendered stage performances in the racial politics of the 1960s and 1970s, or exposed the industry’s

Country Music, Authenticity, and Performance of Gender    367 gendered relationships behind the scenes as female songwriters tried to navigate the industry’s hard and fast rules about women and radio.49 The recent “tomato” controversy points to why we need to continue to trouble narrowly defined gender roles because those roles have real consequences for women and their access to radio play, particularly in this era when “Bro Country,” the popular subgenre of country music that spotlights guys driving big trucks, fishing and hunting, and hitting on pretty girls, dominates radio play (although its popularity is thankfully waning). The tomato controversy emerged when one rather inelegant radio consultant, Keith Hill, told Country Aircheck in May 2015 that a radio station should never play two female musicians back to back. He said, “The lettuce is Luke Bryan, Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are our females.”50 In other words, limit women’s music and focus on the supposed economic prowess of male stars because they will make you more money. It is precisely these assumptions, long rooted in the industry and parsed out in the scholarship, that need to be exposed. Female performers will do this; witness the very funny Maddie and Tae song and video for their “Girl in a Country Song,” which questions bro country’s authenticity because it denies its own past. They sing, “Aww no/​Conway and George Strait/​Never did it this way/​Back in the old days,” because hard country singers George Strait and Conway Twitty did not display rude and crass images of women in their media.51 However, all of country music’s gendered stages, including its scholarly one, must also contribute to challenging the tendency to define success as male centered. There are other kinds of stages, too, that need to be married to gender roles and authenticity narratives. Most recently, scholars have tried to depose the divide between country music, perceived to be white, and soul or blues music, perceived to be black. Although this mix has not accounted for issues of gender—​the main musical actor tends to be a man who exists beyond any accounting of him being a man—​Charles Hughes and Karl Hagstrom Miller have made significant contributions to our understanding of how race, class, and southern music intersected.52 Hughes’s work, for example, moves beyond the white-​centered focus of early country music history to identify a country-​ soul triangle between Memphis, Nashville, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, that allowed a cross-​racial culture of male musicians to share music in back rooms, in recording studios, and on records. Ironically, however, that very culture reinforced the racial divisions between soul music and country music when promoters marketed black and white musics publicly to black or white audiences.53 In Miller’s hands, country music “became white” as it was commercialized in the 1920s. In other words, he described the evolution of a “musical color line” in the 1910s and 1920s that served as the musical version of Jim Crow segregation as producers and others took musicians’ large and fluid musical repertoire and mutated them into the narrow musical categories we now call blues or soul music, exclusively played by black musicians, and country music, played exclusively by white men.54 For both authors, however, the stellar bluesman supplanted the male country music innovator as the key player, and this easy substitution has not caused any substantial evaluation of gender. Matthew Sutton’s work on Charley Pride in Country Boys and Redneck Women, however, does link Pride’s masculine authenticity claims to

368    Oxford Handbook of Country Music his commercial success as a country star to describe how Pride controlled his potential economic “danger” as a black man making it big in a white industry in the post-​Civil Rights era.55 It might seem an unwieldy premise, however, to look for gendered, raced, and classed stages. Perhaps one way to move beyond the limits of the current literature is to examine areas like Macon, Georgia, and Jackson, Tennessee, small southern cities where musicians shared music across gender and racial lines, at least out of the eye of a broader commercial public. In Macon, the Allman Brothers were the recipients of a rich musical heritage bequeathed by Little Richard and Otis Redding, who themselves were the recipients of a musical legacy that included Lucille Hegamin. In Jackson, Big Maybelle and Carl Perkins were near contemporaries, while Sleepy John Estes and Tina Turner were neighbors just up the street in Brownsville.56 The obscure performer, whether female or male, can be a key player here without having to be a financially successful musician. Perhaps no artist better embodies the potential of rooting a musical performance to a specific place than genre-​busting singer Bobbie Gentry (born Roberta Lee Streeter), whose “Ode to Billie Joe” spent four weeks at #1 in August and September, 1967.57 Gentry was born in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, in 1944 (home also to blues slide guitarist Bukka White) and educated in Greenwood on the Mississippi Delta, famed for being the birthplace for the blues.58 “Ode to Billie Joe” tends to be cast as a musical version of William Faulkner’s southern gothic, which emphasizes damaged white Southerners crawling blindly and pathetically through their daily lives, an interpretation that relies on Gentry’s white skin rather than her interracial (at least in terms of territory) upbringing. A better interpretation might emphasize the dailyness of the lyrics, which roots the song in a common Mississippi rural landscape that both black and white Southerners recognized. The song name checks black-​eyed peas, choppin’ (not chopping) cotton, and a second piece of pie as the news of Billie Joe’s suicide is passed around the dinner table alongside the biscuits. Symbolically, this could be a black or white family eating a meal and sharing the day’s news before heading back out to the fields. Gentry’s husky vocal timbre is in fact more reminiscent of blues singer Big Mama Thornton’s, in contrast to Dolly Parton’s clear tones, adding to the interracial nature of the song. Its valuing of a specific place—​Mississippi’s Yazoo River and the Tallahatchie Bridge, which also appeared in the song’s video—​reinforces the links between this interracial persona and a vibrant musical location.59 The commercial success of “Ode to Billie Joe” on multiple charts reflects that deeply interracial performance. It hit #1 on Billboard’s pop charts, but it was also #7 on the R&B charts while reaching #17 on the country charts. As a white woman, Gentry should have been listed only on the country or pop charts, but her crossover success onto the R&B charts, problematic as Billboard is in determining who listens and how, can be an entree to understanding how musicians root their gendered and cross-​racial performances to specific places. I should note multiple black and white performers have covered the song, for example, fellow Mississippian, Tammy Wynette, who recorded the song in 1968.60 The next step will be for scholars to do a deep examination of the region, using

Country Music, Authenticity, and Performance of Gender    369 other documents like census records, oral histories, maps, and other documents to reconstruct how location placed musicians and future musicians within earshot. This does not mean that urban centers like Memphis should be ignored. A  more careful look at urban musical traditions, for example, street performing traditions, or “busking,” that gave street musicians like Memphis Minnie their names and musical starts, should be investigated.61 Theatrical circuits in those same urban areas and the small town alike are also an understudied phenomena that might elicit a more holistic understanding of how musicians made music away from the commercial headlights of Billboard magazine.62 We have begun to move beyond the narrow, gendered conception of country music as white working-​man’s music to examine the links between the genre’s authenticity narratives and its various gendered stages, but country music scholarship’s own inherently gendered narrative has to be fully dislodged and practical infrastructure disrupted (e.g., primary sources) for good work to continue. More recent scholars have shown us how to move beyond that narrative: to cast our work in ways that account for gender as an important mechanism in defining country music performances while posing a wary eye at authenticity narratives attempting to stabilize what is really a contingent medium. Now we must build on that work so that gendered stages and authenticity narratives become standard analyses while still expanding our work to see the links in building other identities like race, sexuality, and global identities.

Notes 1. The word “trouble” comes from Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), vii–​viii. 2. The sponsor for that one hour was Prince Albert Tobacco; therefore, the sponsor titled that segment. 3. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound:  American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 4. Script, Prince Albert Tobacco Hour, October 7, 1950 (Nashville, TN:  Country Music Foundation Library, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum), 9. 5. January 16, 2016, was the date of this show. 6. Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (July–​September, 1965): 208; Barry Mazor, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2015), 51–​57. 7. Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 8. Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp:  The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 43–​102. 9. Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work:  The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana–​Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 1987); Kristine M. McCusker, Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-​Tonk Angels: The Women of Barn Dance Radio (Urbana–​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 132.

370    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 10. Doris Bertram Owen McCusker, “The Story of My Life” (unpublished autobiography in author’s possession). 11. Kristine M. McCusker, “Dear Radio Friend: Listener Mail and the National Barn Dance, 1931-​1941,” American Studies 39, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 173–​195. 12. Oral interview of Rose Lee Maphis by Kristine McCusker, May 19, 1998; March 24, 1999; Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN. 13. Loyal Jones, Country Music Humorists and Comedians (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 206–​208. 14. Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound:  The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 15. Carrie Rodgers, My Husband, Jimmie Rodgers (San Antonio, TX: San Antonio Southern Literary Institute, 1935). 16. Much of this creation is documented in Country Song Roundup, an industry magazine that was active in the 1950s. See, for example, Carrie Rodgers, “My Jimmie,” Country Song Roundup 1, no. 20 (October 1952): 10. 17. Green, “Hillbilly Music,” 204–​228; Bill C. Malone, Country Music U.S.A.:  A  Fifty Year History (Austin: The University of Texas Press for the American Folklore Society, 1968). See also Patrick Huber, “ ‘Turkey in de Straw,’ 1892—​The First Hillbilly Recording? Defining Early Country Music as a Commercial Genre” (paper presented at the International Country Music Conference, Nashville, TN, May 26, 2007; paper in author’s possession). 18. The Wolfe family very generously donated Professor Wolfe’s papers to the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, including the more than 3,200 tapes, reel-​to-​reel recordings, and other interviews he conducted over the course of his scholarship. See “The Charles K.  Wolfe Audio Collection,” http://​popmusic.mtsu.edu/​ WolfeGrammy/​Wolfe.html. 19. Sean Burns, Archie Green:  The Making of a Working-​ Class Hero (Urbana–​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011), xvi. Green’s papers are now at the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 20. Bill C. Malone, Country Music U.S.A., 2nd ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). 21. See McCusker, Lonesome Cowgirls. 22. Richard A. Peterson remembers similar “elitist snobbery” toward the study of country music in the early 1970s at Vanderbilt University when he made the switch from industrial sociology to a very successful career studying country music. See Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1997), x, 6–​7. See also Joli Jensen’s discussion of this in The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization and Country Music (Nashville, TN: The Country Music Foundation Press and the Vanderbilt Press, 1998), 14. 23. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 2nd ed., vii. He mentions that the Country Music Hall of Fame and the John Edwards Memorial Foundation were only just creating archives. 24. For examples of this work, see Carroll Smith-​Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” Signs 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 1–​29; Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Woman’s [sic] Rights and Abolition (1968; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 25. Patrick Huber makes a similar reference to the Malone narrative, although he calls it the Malone thesis. See Huber, “ ‘Turkey in de Straw.’ ” 26. Dollie Good died in 1967.

Country Music, Authenticity, and Performance of Gender    371 27. Oral interview, Milly Good McCluskey to Charles Wolfe, April 20, 1978 (in author’s possession). This is a wonderful interview where Wolfe asked what songs she and her sister wrote, what music they used from others, and what was and was not recorded. 28. William C. Lightfoot, “From Radio Queen to Raleigh: Conversations with Lulu Belle, Pt. 1,” Old Time Country 6, no. 2 (1989): 4–​10; William C. Lightfoot, “From Radio Queen to Raleigh, Pt. 2,” Old Time Country 6, no. 3 (1989): 3–​9; William C. Lightfoot, “Belle of the Barn Dance: Reminiscing with Lulu Belle Wiseman Stamey,” Journal of Country Music 12, no. 1 (1987): 2–​15. 29. For an example of scholarly work that was unable to transcend these early assumptions, see Jeffrey J. Lange, Smile When You Call Me Hillbilly: Country Music’s Struggle for Respectability, 1939-​1954 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). 30. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 2nd ed., 22, 545. 31. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 138, 150–​155. 32. Jensen, Nashville Sound, 4–​5. See also her chapter, “Patsy Cline’s Crossovers: Celebrity, Reputation and Feminine Identify,” in A Boy Named Sue: Essays in Gender and Country Music, ed. Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold (Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 107–​131. 33. Jensen, Nashville Sound, 4–​5. 34. Ibid. 92. 35. Loretta Lynn, with George Vecsey, Coal Miner’s Daughter (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1976). The movie version was directed by Michael Apted. 36. Ellis Nassour, Honky Tonk Angel:  The Intimate Story of Patsy Cline (New  York:  Tower Books, 1981); Margaret Jones, Patsy: The Life and Times of Patsy Cline (New York: Harper-​ Collins, 1994). I  consider this work, especially the Nassour work, problematic because they tend to report gossip and innuendo without documenting the sources of that gossip and innuendo. 37. I refer here to the television special, “Women of Country Music,” which came out in 1993. Directed by Bud Schaetzle, High Five Entertainment, Murphy Center, Murfreesboro, TN. 38. Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, Finding Her Voice: Women in Country Music, 1800–​2000 (New York: Crown Press, 1993). 39. For all of the weight given to Billboard recording charts, there is no way to ascertain what was and was not a country music hit in the 1930s, which gives Montana’s claim—​and that of any other 1930s country music artist—​questionable at best. 40. McCusker, Lonesome Cowgirls. 41. Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–​1075; quote on 1067. 42. McCusker and Pecknold, A Boy Named Sue. See especially Kristine McCusker, “ ‘Bury Me Beneath the Willow’: Linda Parker and Definitions of Tradition on the National Barn Dance, 1932-​1935,” 3–​23; Jocelyn Neal, “Dancing Together: The Rhythms of Gender in the Country Dance Hall,” 132–​154; and Beverly Keel, “Between Riot Grrrl and Quiet Girl: The New Women’s Movement in Country Music,” 155–​177, in McCusker and Pecknold, A Boy Named Sue. 43. Pamela Fox, Natural Acts:  Gender, Race and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 44. Beth Bailey, “Patsy Cline and the Problem of Respectability,” in Sweet Dreams: The World of Patsy Cline, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 67–​85.

372    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 45. Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4, 6. 46. Aaron A. Fox, Real Country:  Music and Language in Working-​Class  Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 23, 250–​254. 47. Leigh Edwards, Dolly Parton and Gender Performance in Country Music (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, forthcoming); Leigh Edwards, “Backwoods Barbie: Dolly Parton’s Gender Performance,” in Country Boys and Redneck Women: New Essays in Gender and Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 189–​210; quote is on 189. 48. Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers and Country Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Hubbs, “Gender Deviance and Class Rebellion in “Redneck Woman,” in Pecknold and McCusker, Country Boys and Redneck Women, 231–​254; Hubbs, “‘Jolene’, Genre, and the Everyday Homoerotics of Country Music: Dolly Parton’s Loving Address of the Other Woman,” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 19 (2015): 71–​76 (see esp. 72). Hubbs points out that there are plenty of other examples of homoerotic intent in country music—​in buddy songs, for instance. 49. Pecknold and McCusker, Country Boys and Redneck Women. The chapters in that book I  refer to are Alex Dent, “ ‘Hey! If I  Should Grab Ya’:  ‘College Country’ and the Ruralization of Urban Brazil,” 26–​43; Åse Ottosson, “Holding on to Country:  Musical Moorings for Desired Masculinities in Aboriginal Australia,” 64–​83; Matthew D. Sutton, “Act Naturally: Charlie Pride, Autobiography, and the ‘Accidental Career,’ ” 44–​63; Diane Pecknold, “Negotiating Gender, Race and Class in Post-​Civil Rights Country Music: How Linda Martell and Jeannie C. Riley Stormed the Plantation,” 146–​165; Travis Stimeling, “Taylor Swift’s ‘Pitch Problem’ and the Place of Adolescent Girls in Country Music,” 84–​ 101; and Chris Wilson, “Gender and the Nashville Songwriter: Three Songs by Victoria Banks,” 102–​125. An example (in Country Boys and Redneck Women) of a scholar who limits her work by examining number-​one hits exclusively is Jocelyn Neal, “Why ‘Ladies Love Country Boys’: Gender, Class and Economics in Contemporary Country Music,” 3–​25. 50. Beverly Keel, “Sexist ‘Tomato’ Barb Launches Food Fight on Music Row,” The Tennessean, May 29, 2015, accessed January 30, 2016, http://​www.tennessean.com/​story/​entertainment/​music/​2015/​05/​27/​sexist-​tomato-​barb-​launches-​food-​fight-​music-​row/​28036657/​. 51. Maddie and Tae, “Girl in a Country Song,” written by Madison Marloe, Taylor Dye, and Aaron Scherz (Republic, 2004). 52. Charles L. Hughes, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Miller, Segregating Sound. See also Diane Pecknold, ed., Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 53. Black performer, writer, and producer Ted Jarrett’s autobiography reinforces Hughes’s thesis with his descriptions of the Nashville music scene in the 1950s and 1960s. See Jarrett, with Ruth White, You Can Make It if You Try: The Ted Jarrett Story of R&B in Nashville (Nashville, TN: Hillsboro Press, 2005). 54. Pecknold, “Introduction,” in Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix, 3; Hughes, Making Music and Making Race. 55. Sutton, “Act Naturally.” 56. I use the term “near” because Perkins was eight years younger than Big Maybelle. His musical upbringing most likely included her music.

Country Music, Authenticity, and Performance of Gender    373 57. Billboard Charts Archive, 1967, accessed June 18, 2016, http://​www.billboard.com/​archive/​ charts/​1967/​hot-​100; Mary A. Bufwack, “Bobbie Gentry,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music, ed. Paul Kingsbury (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 198. 58. Mississippi Blues Trail, Biography for Bukka White, “Bukka White –​Houston,” accessed June 18, 2016, http://​msbluestrail.org/​blues-​trail-​markers/​bukka-​white. 59. “Ode to Billie Joe -​Bobbie Gentry (BBC Live, 1968),” YouTube video, 4:45, uploaded on August 7, 2011, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=HaRacIzZSPo. 60. Mississippi Blues Trail, Biography for Bukka White; Bufwack, “Bobbie Gentry”; “Tammy Wynette -​Ode to Billie Joe,” YouTube video, 4:20, uploaded July 19, 2010, accessed June 27, 2016, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=mwBCB4b4x7Y. 61. Center for Southern Folklore and the Division of Curriculum Development, Memphis City School, “The Heritage of Black Music in Memphis:  A  Teaching Resource Packet” (Memphis, 1986), at the Center for Popular Music; Charlotte Greig, Icons of Black Music: A History of Photographs, 1900-​2000 (San Diego, CA: Thunder Bay Press, 1999), 106–​107. 62. M. Allison Kibler’s book, Rank Ladies:  Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), is a study of vaudeville stages and women, but it does not address issues of race. No comprehensive study of the Theater Owners Booking Association exists; and therefore, any evaluation of the cross-​pollenization between white and black vaudeville can not be currently made. There is some discussion of black vaudeville in Michelle R. Scott, Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga: Bessie Smith and the Emerging Urban South (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

Chapter 18

Sexuali t y i n C ou ntry  Mu si c Pamela Fox *

Popular and music industry discourses, as well as certain academic circles, continue to perpetuate the axiom that country music remains a culturally and politically conservative genre—​especially concerning sexuality. While they are fond of pointing up the music’s longstanding ties to the Republican Party, their argument rests particularly on country’s transhistorical “family values” appeal to its largely working-​class listeners, who are, so the theory goes, ostensibly much more homophobic and generally parochial in their sexual mores than fans of other popular music forms. But it doesn’t take much rooting around in country’s celebrated history to uncover decidedly queer-​friendly songs such as Cowboy Jack Derrick’s “Truck Drivin’ Man” (1948) and Freddy Weller’s “Betty Ann and Shirley Cole” (1973)—​though hardly top forty fare—​eventually followed by Garth Brooks’ “We Shall Be Free” (1992), as well as mainstream hits about infidelity, marital sex, and more recently, hooking up: “Back Street Affair” (Webb Pierce, 1952), “I’d Love to Lay You Down” (Conway Twitty, 1980), “Cruise” (Florida Georgia Line, 2012), to name but a few. And before any of these more modern songs appeared, certain comedy acts on barn dance stages during the 1930s and 1940s performed sexually suggestive routines, particularly blackface and rube performers.1 At the least, then, country music’s engagement with sexuality reveals a far more complicated dynamic. Its texts contain multiple sonic, visual, and sociocultural tensions that cause them to appear priggish or culturally out of step, sexually vulgar, or emphatically real to different audiences depending on their particular temporal moment. In 1977, for instance, at the same time that Billboard reported on country radio listeners’ complaints about “dirty lyrics,” other fans as well as journalists objected to that same playlist’s contrived countrypolitan content and sound. Mainstream country, they countered, had in fact been stripped of its everyday grittiness and sensuality in favor of a generic, high-​gloss sheen.2 We can also fast forward some thirty-​five years to current country music for a fascinating reversal of this trend. The recent “bro-​country” phenomenon (i.e., Florida Georgia Line, Luke Bryan) has provoked cultural commentators’ antipathy for its formulaic and arguably misogynist incorporation of explicit sexual language

376    Oxford Handbook of Country Music and imagery, while millennial and adolescent audiences are embracing the music’s “hotness.”3 In both of these examples, historical context undoubtedly mediates the texts’ representation of sexuality as much as listeners’ reception. Yet as a variety of scholars have emphasized over the past several decades, country has been not only a distinctly classed but also racialized, gendered, and regionalized genre: the music thought to be produced by and for white working-​class (and largely male) Southerners. This chapter proceeds from, extends, and in some ways troubles that assumption as it assesses pertinent scholarly trends and offers a few case studies that suggest new ways to expand the critical terrain. Arguing that past and present textual evocations of sexuality deserve the same intersectional analysis as other facets of country music study, I propose a more nuanced return to this music’s identity politics. We need to examine sexuality’s contributions to country’s more visible modes of address as well as its possibilities for conceptualizing a more fluid and resistant set of identity categories. As Geoff Mann notes in his exploration of country music’s putative whiteness, “an acoustic politics can just as readily reinforce existing cultural-​political identities, even rewrite them, and recruit people to them.” But cultural critics, like everyday fans, can prove equally susceptible to this audience-​based model of “musical interpellation”4—​or simply choose to center on a singular analytic target—​and thus miss potentially generative nodes of connection. This chapter, then, surveys prior critical investigations into country music’s relationship to sexuality by tracking how that category becomes linked to other common identity markers such as gender and race. It probes whether earlier and more recent modes of working-​class white masculinity and femininity in country song texts, for instance, might or might not be constituted in relationship to queerness and/​or blackness. It will subsequently turn to two as of yet largely unexamined principals in this subfield. First is Tanya Tucker, the now-​faded star of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. As a precocious preteen, she gained early notoriety for her sexualized performance style and costuming, bluesy alto, and adult material and later became tabloid fodder as much for her personal transgressions as for her suggestive onstage behavior. Second is the aforementioned bro-​country sensation, not simply for its young male artists’ relentless recycling of explicit (hetero) sexual content but their frequent stylistic vehicle of choice: pseudo hip hop rhythms and rapping. Both will hopefully inspire further thinking about sexuality’s myriad registers within this music’s history and its potential future.

Sex and the “Simple” Country Fan: Sociological Views of Country Music Values, 1970s–​1980s Spurred on by articles in highbrow publications such as Harper’s and The Nation, the entrenched sexual conservatism thesis first gained traction in broadly sociological studies of country music beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the mid-​1980s.

Sexuality in Country Music    377 This body of work catalogues the music’s plethora of normative sexual and political attitudes by focusing almost exclusively on song lyrics. One exemplar is John Buckley’s “Country Music and American Values,” published in 1979 and cited by numerous subsequent scholars. Searching for an approach that can sensitively gauge the relationship between song content and audience values, it proposes that the country text does not so much “reinforce” values as produce “a symbolic world with which audience members may identify.”5 Sexuality emerges as one of eight representative themes that “reflect” listeners’ beliefs by creating scenarios that “they can easily understand.”6 As such, fans appear to endorse a stark division between “satisfactory” marital relationships, where sex plays an “integral but not dominant” role, and “unsatisfactory” ones, where it signals “other interpersonal difficulties.”7 Interestingly, though, Buckley centers on Charlie Rich’s 1973 breakthrough hit “Behind Closed Doors” to make the former claim, suggesting that the song actually minimizes the happily married couple’s sex life by “relegating” it to the chorus. Yet that memorable refrain clearly accentuates what is ostensibly hidden from view, and by teasingly suggesting that “no one knows” what married people do in their bedrooms, the song ironically underscores the sociologist’s overall point: country audiences indeed “understand” sex’s significance in their lives. Although not explicitly referencing specific acts, the lyrics bring everyday marital sex out of the music industry’s closet. In fact, “Behind Closed Doors” was popular with listeners: it swept the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards that year, earning “Best Song” and “Best Single,” and topped Billboard’s “Hot Country Singles” chart. As a counterpoint illustrating discontented relationships, Buckley turns to standard cheating songs but downplays fans’ longstanding attraction to songs of sexual temptation as well as marital pleasure. In both cases, Buckley’s shortsighted analysis stems from a larger methodological issue: his insistence that country lyrics are entirely literal. Compared with other musical genres, country songs evidently have “no allegories and no double-​meanings.”8 That perspective may be traced to his era-​specific training as a sociologist, but it also seems informed by his overall emphasis on the average country listener’s low level of schooling and preference for “universally shared emotions.”9 Subsequent scholars representing a variety of disciplines have successfully put this argument to rest by uncovering country texts’ own intricate wordplay as well as formal tensions among song content and musical arrangement—​all of which the average country fan grasps, seeks out, and appreciates.10 Here, I simply want to highlight one trouble spot in early research on country music’s engagement with sexuality, even in a well-​intentioned study that attempts to complicate theory about textual reproduction and reception. A seemingly elitist view of the country canon and audience, combined with a reliance on data over textual interpretation, limits this writer’s ability to recognize his twin subjects. Ethnomusicologist Edward G. Armstrong most directly rebuts Buckley’s thesis in his 1986 article for The Journal of Sex Research. Although similarly focusing on content of radio-​friendly country songs from the early 1970s through the mid-​1980s, Armstrong attempts to account for the prevailing contradictory stance that country music has a “back-​to-​the family” position on sexuality while also being “ ‘polluted and desecrated’

378    Oxford Handbook of Country Music because of its references to illicit sex.”11 He does so by documenting an astonishing variety of sexual tropes and subtopics in the genre, including masturbation, “nymphomania,” impotency, pornography, prostitution, homosexuality, and “zoophilia.”12 Extramarital sex songs receive special scrutiny, but Armstrong’s analytic model overall discerns “four levels of complexity” that encompass novelty tracks, story and commentary texts, and finally “a sophisticated societal reaction” to sexuality.13 Even the lowest category, the comic song, has the capacity to engage in irony, satire, and all manner of double entendres. And as he notes, “Betty Ann and Shirley Cole” interrogates the homophobic tenor of other contemporary country songs about gay or lesbian life by treating its lesbian lovers with dignity while also mocking the narrative’s heterosexual characters. Songs in the “story” category turn out to offer biting commentary on sexual politics, such as Loretta Lynn’s “The Pill” (1975) and Tanya Tucker’s “No Man’s Land” (a 1974 rape revenge saga), whereas Charlie Pride’s “The Hunger” (1977) tells a more conventional morality tale of a sexually assertive middle-​aged woman whose beauty has been consumed by her cravings.14 Armstrong thus concludes his investigation by chiding commentators who rely on “reductionist” interpretations of this musical genre and its listeners. And textual form, once again absent here, would only expand our sense of the songs’ intricacies.

Feminist and Queer Critical Interventions This rather basic recognition of country’s multivalent positions on sexuality appears somewhat sporadically in the next phase of sociological and ethnomusicological studies in the 1990s and early 2000s. Dominated by evolving feminist and queer approaches, this work certainly advances the conversation in terms of gender analysis—​and that is a significant achievement. Yet much turn-​of-​the-​century research in this arena continues to isolate sexuality from other identity categories and concerns. Although feminist critique came somewhat late to country music studies relative to scholarship on other modes of popular music, it made up for lost time with a virtual explosion of historiographic, sociological, and emerging cultural studies-​based approaches. In the early 1990s, such work tended to track song lyrics’ narratives and imagery associated with women, and sexuality entered the analysis in terms of broader gender relations. Karen Saucier Lundy, for example, begins with the assumption that country is “the most conservative and traditional of American music” but asserts that female artists and songwriters had begun to challenge gender stereotypes, particularly concerning “love relationships.”15 While most songs in this category continue to present men in the dominant role of both romantic and sexual partner, others by Reba McEntire and Highway 101 demonstrate that “women are beginning to take the initiative in the sexual relationship and are even expressing an enjoyment” of it.16

Sexuality in Country Music    379 Much of this work, however, still invoked a second-​wave liberal feminist mindset that combatted normative gender roles but neglected to analyze how femininity, masculinity, and sexuality models could be profoundly unstable. Their heterosexual focus tended to preclude challenges to the meaning of “sex” itself. The critical volume A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (2004) marked a turning point by addressing this precise problem. Featuring Johnny Cash’s gender-​bending song in its title, the collection devotes considerable attention to gender’s “remarkably flexible way of making meaning”; and some of its contributors investigate sexuality’s role in that dynamic, especially when focused on the marketing of male and female stars such as Elvis Presley and Charline Arthur.17 Later feminist work on gender and sexuality in country music is highly indebted to this more interdisciplinary, syncretic approach. In contrast, queer scholarship within this time frame tends to treat country music as an inherently hostile territory—​and perhaps understandably so, given media constructions of the industry’s and audience’s right-​wing bent and some of the musical texts’ fulfillment of such conventions. However, it does little to complicate that portrait despite its of-​the-​moment critical theory toolkit. Joanna Kadi, a self-​described “working-​class Arab halfbreed queer” cultural critic, represents one instructive exception to this rule.18 In Thinking Class, Kadi defends country music from charges of being more sexually normative than genres associated with middlebrow or elite classes; in fact, she insists that country “exhibits predominantly left-​wing tendencies, … as defined by working-​class people.”19 Later, she counters the myth that its listeners are more homophobic than those in other demographics, going so far as to argue that “the word queer captures not only my sexual identity, but my class identity as well.”20 Her work begins to illustrate a distinctly intersectional approach largely absent in this era. Instead, most earlier queer inquiries into country music sexuality take one of two tacks: (1) examining a self-​identified heterosexual artist whom LGBTQ audiences have converted into community icons (Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, and Johnny Cash), or (2) championing this genre’s few out stars of the time, principally k.d. lang (and a host of lesser lights on the “gay country” bar circuit). Brett Farmer’s 1994 essay on adulation of Patsy Cline shows the most promise, evincing knowledge of country music history (somewhat rare in this work) and, reminiscent of Kadi, reclaiming some of the music’s lowbrow aspects. It particularly reframes sentimentality—​thought to be emblematic of not only country’s simple-​mindedness but its heterosexist portraits of romance—​ within a psychoanalytic sex/​gender context. Farmer connects gay and lesbian fixation on Cline to her status as a “powerful female pioneer” who flouted “patriarchically circumscribed passive femininity” while churning out hits like “Walkin’ After Midnight” and “Why Can’t He Be You.”21 Although such subversive behavior can be tied to other female country artists (Loretta Lynn, Wanda Jackson, Tanya Tucker), Farmer centers on the uniqueness of Cline’s explosive yet controlled voice, the instrument of female desire resisting containment by normative culture. What Cline represents to queer audiences, then, is an involute embodiment of subversive sexual passion and, more broadly, “gender destabilization” that captures both the “masochism” and “resilience” of LGBTQ life. His essay suggests that the queer subject finds much to identify with in Cline’s music and

380    Oxford Handbook of Country Music performance style, “recognis[ing] in this articulation of emotional pain and struggle a voice s/​he may claim as his/​her own.”22 To make his case, Farmer mainly evades the class valences of country music (beyond its emphasis on emotionality) that many of his colleagues find distasteful. Martha Mockus’s 1994 essay on k.d. lang pulls no such punches, declaring in her opening sentence that she has “never been a fan of country music” due to its “nasal and twangy sounds” as well as its “back-​to-​basic homophobic conservatism that wished the 1960s and 1970s had never happened.”23 Similar to Patsy Cline’s impact on gay and lesbian listeners, lang (who named her early band the “reclines” as a tribute to the star) first provoked the musicologist with her voice’s “wonderful mixture of passion and mischief.” However, Mockus casts this gender queer country singer as an icon of playfulness rather than pathos to nullify country’s low-​class stigma: by employing drag and butch-​femme performance, lang and her fans transform country into pure “camp.” 24 Mockus’s musicological approach potentially enriches the fuller dialogue around this singer’s shifting styles and repertoire, accentuating her songs’ unstable meanings and tensions. lang’s “Big Big Love,” for instance, juxtaposes “conventional musical signs—​standard form, regular harmony, and predictable rhythms—​with a wonderfully mischievous vocal performance,” which in turn produces “a radical and dykish twist in gender signs.”25 The essay also usefully reminds us of the country establishment’s objections to her early androgynous “cowpunk” appearance and her seeming parodic approach to the music but also highlights lang’s own genuine “respect” for country culture.26 Yet Mockus’s exclusive focus on country as camp fails to reflect the performer’s noteworthy reverence for the music. The postscript’s subtitle—​“from country to cuntry”—​has a utopian resonance, for sure, but remains premised on this music’s inherent “backwardness.” One of the few studies of queer country conducted by an established country music scholar during this period treads similar ground as Mockus—​the gay and lesbian bar and dance hall scene—​but focuses on lesser-​known out performers who attract a robust following. Chris Dickinson, editor of the Journal of Country Music at the time of publication (2000), interviewed the founders of the then newly formed Lesbian & Gay Country Music Association (LGCMA) to document their backstories and varied pathways to an unlikely career. Although not promoting itself as “politically militant,” the LGCMA engages in identity politics by serving as “a lifting of the head above the trenches into visibility, a way of embracing country as a music that, despite its backward stereotypes, emotionally cuts across age, race, and sexual preference lines.”27 These singer-​ songwriters tell of local and industry discrimination but also family acceptance. Patrick Haggerty, of the pioneering band Lavender Country, states, “[m]‌y father was hokey, ill-​ kempt, and ill-​mannered. … [b]ut he saw who I was, and he took pride in me.”28 Pamela Brandt, cofounder of the country-​rock lesbian trio The Deadly Nightshade, decries country’s “real bad rap as … politically retro,” pointing out that she rarely experienced bigotry as an out performer in straight country bars.29 Dickinson launches this inquiry with a frank admission of country’s closeted history, but her interviewees’ portraits begin to sketch out a kind of counternarrative grounded

Sexuality in Country Music    381 in country’s universal emotional appeal of “loss, heartbreak, and … love” as well as the “simple act of telling the truth.”30 In echoing Buckley’s earlier emphasis on the genre’s simplicity and commonality, these gay and lesbian performers could be read as seeking a certain comforting brand of LGBTQ identity politics that rejects visible and lasting alterity. At the same time, given their often intimate relationship to the core country audience—​many hailing from similar class and regional communities—​they may be exhibiting Kadi’s brand of “queer”/​class identification or perhaps simply insisting on their own humanity. In the past few years, mainstream country has slowly begun to heed their call. From songs such as Kacey Musgrave’s CMA 2013 Song of the Year “Follow Your Arrow” and Little Big Town’s controversial “Girl Crush” (2014) to the popular ABC series Nashville, whose storyline sympathetically features a closeted Top 40 “hunk” act who comes out at the end of Season 3, and actual B-​list country artists who have recently done the same (Chely Wright and Ty Herndon), the industry seems poised to reverse its outsized heteronormative image.31 As one queer Canadian country music critic cautions, though, “It’s not a question of coming out, it’s a question of queer stories told by queer voices in spaces that might not be queer.”32 More recent scholarship concurs but also demonstrates that queer affects in country music can emerge in the unlikeliest of places or moments. Shania Twain’s navel-​ exposing videos of the mid-​to-​late 1990s, for example, have been cast as “anxiety not only about the new woman in the country music world but also over an incipient revision of masculinity,” David Allan Coe’s (1978) song “Fuck Aneta Briant” [sic] “defends ‘all them faggots’ against the antihomosexual crusader.”33 Current queer musicology thus lends further ballast to critiques of essentialist visibility politics, insisting on musical production as one possible site of nonnormative sexual subjectivity yet recognizing that “the very binary of normative/​non-​normative breaks down under scrutiny,” particularly when this category intersects with other “embodied experiences.”34 Discerning and preserving that balance signals a welcome shift. Nadine Hubbs’s Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (2014) in many ways epitomizes this last approach, analyzing musical taste as a sexualized and racialized class dynamic. Her study models the first extensive effort by a queer musicologist to build on, rather than dismiss or ignore, prior class analyses of country music. Echoing Kadi, it directly contests the construction of country texts and fans as virulently homophobic by tracing the historic alliances between US working-​class and queer communities from the early 1920s to the late 1970s due to their similar Othering by middle-​class culture. Both, Hubbs claims, were considered “deviant” until middle-​to-​upper class  LGBTQ populations became increasingly incorporated into mainstream life beginning in the 1980s, which in turn prompted a reversed cultural script: “respectable” middle-​class citizens supported queer people and culture, while white blue-​collar workers were cast as “America’s perpetual bigot class.”35 Hubbs showcases two particular country songs that refute this predictable charge. She perceptively situates Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” (2004) within the “Virile Female” ad campaign launched by R. J. Reynolds over a decade earlier, whose

382    Oxford Handbook of Country Music market research claimed that young, white, working-​class women enjoyed “ ‘partying’ and cruising’ ” as well as “male identified” entertainment such as car shows and tractor pulls. Although the 1989 campaign fizzled due to a media leak, Hubbs argues that it capitalized on a perennial image of this demographic as “excessively or inappropriately gendered” and reads Wilson’s debut single as a subversive instantiation of its presumptions.36 Drawing on the artist’s life story as a young, backwoods, single mother, the song and video promote iconography that plays up Wilson’s cross-​gendered affect: speeding on her ATV yet “sexy, just as sexy/​As those models on TV.”37 Both texts unapologetically claim the term “redneck,” linking it to “hard” country male stars such as Hank Williams Jr., but significantly extending its association to all the “sisters out there keeping it country.” Hubbs ultimately deems the song “a deft rebranding of denigrated, essentialized white working-​class female subjectivity,” as the singer’s persona “appropriates cultural resources from her class, racial, geographic and vocational peers across the gender line … while reaffirming her heteronormativity.”38 That song’s compromise between working-​class gender instability and sexual convention takes a different kind of twist in the previously mentioned David Allan Coe example. “Fuck Aneta Briant” announces its class “illegitimacy” in its title’s misspellings and expletive but also in its lyrics’ frank familiarity with male prison sex. The same conservative ideology that initially conflated sexual and class abjection achieves another purpose here, voicing a daring liberalism even as Coe employs derogatory terms for gay men within the song and personally distances himself from a queer identity. He certainly plays up the coded linkages between his own class positioning and a stigmatized sexual practice; but unlike Wilson, his persona still clings to normative gender divisions capitalizing on his “excess” masculinity. And unlike the chart-​topping visibility of “Redneck Woman,” “Fuck Aneta Briant” literally occupied the margins as an underground recording. Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music refreshingly approaches its texts’ ambiguities as a virtue, accentuating Hubbs’s call to disown the “twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​ century scripts pathologizing the working class through the queer.”39 Its research and argumentation highlight the fruitfulness of seeking not only class and race but also gender/​sexuality affiliations within country music without dismissing evident grounds of conflict. And in doing so, it exposes this cultural form’s wider range of audience identification rubrics. Hubbs demonstrates that working-​class cultures have always found ways to recognize their own members within dominant spheres, cutting through even while participating in media mystification:  Wilson addresses her seemingly “invisible” classed audience via literal shout-​outs to “the redneck girls like me” and familiar tropes (Wal-​Mart lingerie, a “4 wheel drive tailgate”) that reproduce yet equally repurpose common signifiers of disrespectability. This dynamic can be read as a defiant call to country identity membership that reinforces group borders, but it also allows for gender and sexual “play,” if not outright gay and lesbian identification or branding. Wilson’s version of intersectional identity politics can help us distinguish between the kinds of cross-​class queer affiliation that Brett Farmer explores in gay and lesbian Patsy Cline fandom and the more campy hillbilly “drag” performances that Martha Mockus embraces.

Sexuality in Country Music    383 With Hubbs’s framing, it might also further unravel Coe’s conflicted mélange of classed, queered, and homophobic relations. Internal grounds of recognition inevitably shift, coalesce, re-​form along and over class, gender, race, and sexuality lines even as they also operate with a core roster of signs and sounds that establish, as well as often “police,” community. As sexuality studies in country music moves forward, it would be useful to emerge from our various identitarian trenches to discern even momentary flashes of recognition that foster progressive alliance or affiliation beyond fixed models of group identification.

Tanya and the “Bro”s: Toward a Hybrid Reading of Country Music Sexuality Tanya Tucker The scholarly archive on country’s relationship to sexuality demonstrates that class and gender remain mainstays of the analysis, while interpretation of their interrelated meanings has clearly shifted according to the investments of differing constituencies and generations. All three identity categories (sexuality, class, and gender) periodically intersect and reconsolidate. Race further imbues the dynamic primarily through country music’s presumptive identification with whiteness. But historically, that classed racial identity has been tinged, as it were, with blackness—​particularly within the context of sexuality. As many studies of impoverished white subjectivity have documented, “white trash” or “hillbillies” have been associated with a degraded or “fallen” whiteness: an ambiguous racial identity linked with low embodied racial Otherness.40 Feminist work on the racio-​sexualization of music supplies the final and crucial piece to this analysis: as Maureen Mahon observes, we all must contend with the foundational myth that “black Americans had a special capacity for authentic musical expression and privileged access to emotion, spirituality, and sexuality.”41 As this subfield of country music studies continues to trouble discreet identity categories, it can benefit from examining how sexuality in country texts may also become constituted in relationship to non-​white racialized coding within various class registers.42 I have singled out two test cases for such investigation. The first, Tanya Tucker, may seem more puzzling, especially when compared with today’s bro-​country due to its more obvious appropriation of black musical practices. But while emerging as a sexualized spectacle in a far earlier era and facing harsher scrutiny as a young female in the business, this Texas native of Irish and Cherokee ancestry clearly gravitated toward song material, arrangements, and stage moves rooted in African American blues (though mediated by Elvis Presley’s country/​rockabilly catalogue). And Tucker has received surprisingly scant scholarly attention of any sort, despite the fact that she ranks as one of country’s top-​selling female artists and serves as a precursor to later performers

384    Oxford Handbook of Country Music who have helped destabilize sex and gender norms.43 It is fair to say that Tanya Tucker embodies one kind of female country “Outlaw,” yet what does that term mean when viewed through a purposefully intersectional critical lens? Several examples of her early and later attempts to negotiate sexuality within a rapidly changing music sphere over forty odd years should establish that her “body” of work can prove to be one model object of inquiry for the newest version of country music sexuality studies. Tucker’s role as country’s early and leading bad girl “exhibitionist” is legendary.44 Along with the “Female Elvis,” she has attracted other monikers with provocative connotations, including “the Texas Tornado” (from her preteen performances); “Nashville’s Little Levied Lolita” (courtesy of Playboy magazine when she was twenty years old); and, as she strove to revive her career in the early 1990s, the “Black Velvet Lady” pitching the brand’s Canadian whiskey. Much to her manager father’s chagrin, Hustler ran an ad promoting her steamy album T.N.T. (MCA Records, 1978) by promising “[t]‌his album will make your ears hard.”45 Her numerous one-​night stands and infamous cocaine-​addled affair with Glen Campbell in the early 1980s punctuated celebrity gossip headlines over several decades, overshadowing the music she made and in some cases coloring its reviews, particularly amongst the conservative country press. But this somewhat predictable narrative scarcely begins to reckon with Tucker’s alternately playful and angry exposure of the sex/​gender politics fueling such image construction once she gained tighter control of her career. As a child performer in the early 1970s, Tucker considered herself a “tomboy.”46 When she was interviewed for Rolling Stone in 1974, she thus expressed bemusement about her sudden “sex symbol” status. Chet Flippo’s now iconic article “Tanya: The Teenage Teaser” opens rhapsodically: “Grown men follow her from town to town. Young boys camp outside her door. Fans call her the female Elvis, and Tanya Tucker loves it.”47 Describing Tucker’s “throaty, searing version” of Presley’s “Burnin’ Love,” Flippo plays up her jail-​bait allure, noting that her “face was a study in wide-​eyed childish innocence, but her body had another message … [H]‌er knee drops and pelvic thrusts raised the temperature several degrees around the stage.”48 When he comments on her appeal to both adult and teenage males, she responds ambiguously: “That’s pretty cool. I don’t wanta be a sex symbol-​well, I don’t know. It kinda seems that way, don’t it? … Some people are always gonna take anything you say dirty.”49 As she establishes in her memoir, at that point she still identified more with conventional masculinity rather than femininity but also began enjoying “looking a little sexy”—​matching her evolving persona to the image campaign spurred by Delores Fuller, a former Elvis-​affiliated songwriter who engineered the new risqué costumes and moves.50 From the start, then, during a time when the country at large was contending with women’s increasing embrace of sexual freedom, Tucker clearly attempted to navigate a blur of conflicting messages and anxieties about her own budding desires. While gaining attention for her husky vocals, body-​baring outfits, and story songs steeped in southern gothic trappings—​“Blood Red and Goin’ Down,” “The Man That Turned My Momma On,” and “No Man’s Land”—​she sought validation within the country industry for her authentic southwestern working-​class roots and fidelity to the music’s heralded

Sexuality in Country Music    385 tradition. However, as her sound became more pop-​and country rock-​oriented to expand her fan base in the late 1970s and 1980s and to reflect her own eclectic tastes, she lost the luster brought by her early producer Billy Sherrill and needed to prove her ongoing membership as an insider. Even T.N.T, flaunting a controversial cover depicting Tucker in tight black leather pants with a microphone cord slithered between her legs, featured not only a blistering rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel” but “Texas When I Die”—​an Outlaws-​sounding track that namechecks Willie Nelson. But unlike those male rebels whose illicit forays into sex and drugs only endeared them to progressive critics and fans, Tucker paid for her transgressions. As late as 1991, when she won the CMA Top Female Vocalist award nearly twenty years after her first, a disgusted deejay called her a “tramp.”51 Her evolving performance styles over the years serve as equally significant signs of accommodation and emancipation. When thirteen-​year-​old Tanya sang “Delta Dawn” in one moment captured on video, she wore a relatively demure frock and stood quite still. In the early 1980s, she sang the same hit but strutted the stage in a short, off-​the shoulder dress, frequently standing with her legs wide apart and flirting with the audience.52 She also vamped it up with various duet partners, whether it be sex symbol Tom Jones on “Help Me Make it Through the Night” or country icon George Jones. In 1994, a striking CMA Awards performance with Little Richard captures Tucker in her mid-​thirties and at the peak of her career comeback, fully reveling in her sensuality. Singing “Somethin’ Else,” a rockabilly tune originally recorded in 1959 and their duet on the just-​released compilation album Rhythm, Country & Blues, Tucker tore up the stage in a short black leather dress as Little Richard pounded the piano. “Somethin’ Else” borrows from rhythm and blues—​in this case, a particular drum beat from a prior Little Richard song, “Keep A-​Knockin’ ”—​to recount a teenage boy’s desire for a snazzy, expensive car and an aloof girl “out of his class.” In the hands of these two performers, the car becomes quite the erotic emblem, with Richard moaning, “She’s ridin’ it real good.”53 Their very pairing as well as song choice obviously comments on their similar reputations in the music business: both Tucker and Richard are “somethin’ else,” outside normative parameters. Richard’s queer sexual identity had been the subject of speculation for decades, and his stage presence evoked his early experience as a drag performer.54 Yet this framing arguably suggests something more about Tucker’s coding as a “deviant” (i.e., promiscuous) female in country music, teasing out the racialized as well as classed and gendered dimensions of her movements and voice. As Dana Wiggins reminds us, “an ‘uncontrolled’ body is both a signifier of racial inferiority and a threat to the racial status quo” within the United States.55 She argues that most female country artists in the 1980s, following an era in which white and black performers experimented with collaborative rhythm and blues, attempted to accentuate their whiteness primarily by demonstrating their bodily discipline on stage. Unlike prior performers like June Carter Cash who moved freely, even aggressively, in front of an audience, singers such as Crystal Gayle reigned in gestures and motion to preserve their status as “dignified white southern women.”56 Feminist scholarship on black female stage performance generally helps to underscore this claim. Nicole Fleetwood,

386    Oxford Handbook of Country Music for instance, asserts that “the black female body and the sexual imaginary associated with that body … establishes the boundaries for normative codes of the white female body and femininity.” 57 Jayna Brown amplifies this stance in her study of early twentieth-​century, black female, showgirl performance by demonstrating that some white women also adapted black women’s dance moves to “transgress, in moderation, the sexual mores” of a prior era.58 At various moments and in specific sites, then, white female vocalists and dancers have certainly retained their “right” to conventional femininity through their privileged racial identity and concomitant performance style. But analysis must remain particular rather than generic. And as Wiggins’s examples suggest, class plays a compelling role in this formulation: it is “hillbilly” June whose body eludes containment and glamorous country-​pop icon Gayle who exudes control. Wiggins singles out Tucker as one of the few female country artists during the 1980s to challenge this trend with her “racy” live shows. However, she proceeds to press her case overall in a fraught reading of one such performance: the televised 1981 Hot concert featuring an all-​black choir. Arguing that the Whitney Family’s “prominent movements” in the middle of the concert, backed by an African American band, actually overshadowed Tucker’s provocative stage presence, Wiggins concludes that the visible contrast allowed Tucker to continue her own dancing yet still foreground her whiteness.59 But additional factors suggest that this might be a hasty interpretation. At this juncture, Tucker was already notorious for her “excessive” body and sexual appetite both on and off of the stage, so she would not appear to gain much by either highlighting or deflecting her association with live African American singers and musicians. Additionally, these particular performers embodied religious, rather than worldly, values; if anything, a superficial reading within a conventional country music context would position Tanya as the “dissolute Saturday night” precursor to the requisite “Sunday morning” church experience, her white body more visibly classed through her potent sexuality. Tucker’s explosive collaboration with Little Richard over a decade after the Hot concert indeed flaunts such racialized connections, reviving the 1970s’ country music foray into interracial cultural exchange. Was she thus resisting the industry’s attempts to pathologize, as well as apparently “celebrate,” their shared Othering, exploiting the ostensible salaciousness of that association, or enacting a fluid intermixture of the two? Such texts offer opportunities for deeper, richer readings that accentuate, rather than evade, the imbrications of sexuality, race, gender, and class within the genre. Further examination of Tucker’s corpus can work to flesh out the myriad implications of such blurred lines. She intriguingly shares many of the same qualities of younger female country artists—​some hetero, some lesbian—​who have gained a queer following. Like both Cline and lang, for instance, she possesses a uniquely powerful voice that can project anguish as well as pleasure. Brett Farmer’s observations on Cline might equally apply to Tucker: “able to infuse her songs with strong pathos” while “the sheer magisterial control of her vocal style belies any possible sense of nihilism or helplessness.” Additionally, her unusually low register has “sexually ambiguous, almost androgynous” qualities.60 Although Tucker unquestionably showcases her heterosexual identity in both personal and professional realms, its gendering is another matter. She often states

Sexuality in Country Music    387 that she conducts her life “like a man” does, especially in her romantic/​sexual relationships, and her music can both vocally and narratively affirm that gender crossing.61 And though she may not so obviously challenge gender norms in her dress or in her sexual identity as Andrea Newlyn argues of Wynonna Judd, Tucker similarly drives a Harley (albeit pink) and eludes categorization. Like Judd, she is “too rock for country radio, too country for rock, too upfront in her opinions, too unpredictable, too dangerous”62—​which may have spurred their joint half-​time performance at the 1994 Super Bowl. Perhaps most strikingly, Tucker and Judd share an Elvis obsession that positions both as “decidedly ‘masculine.’ ”63 Their thrusting bodies claim performance space while also affiliating them with lower classed and racialized spheres, straddling “black” and “white” positionalities. However, rather than enacting a self-​consciously camp rendition of Presley as “drag king”—​Wynonna’s “parody of a parody,” according to Newlyn—​Tucker offers a genuine homage that similarly challenges gender, if not racial, constructions.64 I would argue that she ultimately blends within herself both Judds’ stage personas: mother Naomi’s flirtatious engagement with the audience and “hyperfeminine” yet sexy costuming together with her daughter’s snarling bravado. Perhaps Tucker recognized decades earlier than Wynonna that “the venue of the stage—​and the combination of … [such differing gender codes] … —​somehow allow[ed] … a certain deliverance from the efforts of the country music industry … to recontain her sexuality.”65 Now largely an afterthought in the cultural zeitgeist aside from her cameo appearance over a decade ago in Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” video, she deserves recognition of her complex legacy—​and recent approaches within sexuality studies are tailor-​ made to tease that out.

Bro-​Country Already sustaining considerable critical backlash for a variety of musical, thematic, and sociopolitical offenses, bro-​country—​“music by and for the tatted, gym-​toned, party-​ hearty young American white dude”—​may very well exhaust its popularity sooner rather than later.66 Yet its unprecedented graphic language and imagery, strategically overlaid with black musical citation through quasi-​rapping or frequent collaboration with hip hop artists, positions it as a descendant as well as innovator of a broader tradition within this music—​and one enthusiastically embraced by a large swath of today’s coveted youth demographic (including female fans, protests to the contrary). As the latest trend in mainstream country to figure identity by adopting a notably racialized, gendered, and classed approach to sexuality, bro-​country demands critical attention that can not only pry apart these elements but study them in tandem. Though I share many of their misgivings, existing commentaries tends to indulge in a distorted presentation of country music history, wherein older, more established artists are cast as the “mature” antithesis to all things “bro.” Reviewers like Jody Rosen (New York Times) and Ian Crouch (New Yorker) helpfully acknowledge earlier country songs centering on casual or marital sex, yet their carefully selected examples stand in

388    Oxford Handbook of Country Music for a much broader adult “gravitas”: “a masculine ideal” of “stoicism … in the face of hardship” and “devotion … to kitchen-​table truths,”67 or the instantiation of “mature and mutual love.”68 The list conveniently neglects earlier novelty tunes about pornography or songs by women that might (or might not) tell a different story about sex in the country. Both critics exude a whiff of elitist moralism about this latest mode of country sexual permissiveness. The contrast between country music’s past and present here is hardly irrelevant, but their dismissive approach acquires its own kind of “highbro” outlook. Sex apparently needs to signal a long-​term, committed relationship and operate as a metaphor for a higher calling for these publications to endorse this country subgenre. That being said, songs by Florida Georgia Line, Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan, and the like approach their sex narratives with a numbingly predictable set of images and taglines. In addition to using blunt phrases such as “getting laid” or “naked in bed” and comic double entendres that leave nothing to the imagination, they string together stock signifiers for a guy hoping to get lucky: a “big black jacked up truck” on a moonlit dirt road (Bryan, “That’s My Kind of Night”); a “hot,” tanned “girl” sporting “painted on jeans” (Chris Young, “Aw Naw”) who’s always riding “shotgun,” never driving (Cole Swindell, “Chillin’ It”); and the requisite bottle of “good stuff ” stashed in the back (“Chillin’ It”). 69 A fair, if simple, critique can thus be lodged against the music’s derivativeness and, as voiced by Maddie and Tae’s clever send-​up of the bro phenomenon, “Girl in a Country Song,”70 its reduction of female love interests to mere “body parts.”71 Perhaps more startling, though, is bro-​country’s reliance on “black” tropes to heighten the brand’s appeal. With such explicit sexual content, why the need to inject additional traces of embodied excess? Rosen makes a brief but crucial observation about this movement’s subtle shift to an identifiable middle-​class register in much of its iconography—​ as he puts it, a “gentrifying impulse” emblemized by Bryan’s set list that adapts the “scene of the party from the honky-​tonk to the frat house.”72 Numerous songs reference college or temporary trips back home, not so much capturing immersion in small-​town life but reviving prior memories of it. Hip-​hop beats and cadences and guest cameos by rap artists may thus “dirty up” the music and storylines, stirring up associations of blackness with not only sexuality but a cool “badness.” As Fleetwood affirms, the black, male, hip hop body “signifies within and outside of black communities a form of coolness through racialized and masculine difference and a diaphanous ‘outlawness.’ ”73 That linkage may compensate for the lack of gendered working-​class authenticity claimed by the pack’s professed old-​school heroes like Jones and Cash. In 1998, country band Confederate Railroad, whose logo featured the Confederate flag, released the unapologetic “I Hate Rap.” But nearly twenty years later, hip hop infusions into pop country are seen as a generational and hence “natural progression” reflecting multiple cultural and social influences—​“ ‘it’s in their DNA,’ ” crows uberproducer Scott Borchetta.74 And as with recent queer-​identified country tracks, bro-​country’s embrace of hip hop also suggests to some a distinctly political mode of progress; Rosen, for all his objections, lauds the songs’ “cosmopolitan” affect “dragging pop’s most hidebound genre into the Obama era without batting an eye.”75 However,

Sexuality in Country Music    389 this highly selective sampling and cred-​by-​association needs to be considered alongside these texts’ simultaneously classed and gendered inscriptions of sexuality to sort out the greater effects of such cross-​racial “blending.” Bryan’s concert appearances have been known to include brief renditions of earlier rap hits like “Baby Got Back” (Six Mix-​A-​Lot’s ode to black women’s “Big Butts”) and more recent fare such as Tyga’s “Rack City.”76 Hip hop remixes of songs, such as Aldean’s “Dirt Road Anthem” reboot via Ludacris, are more common; but the most notable remains mega-​hit “Cruise.” In the video, African American rapper Nelly not only gets a solo but plays himself as an artist who can “kick up” an already great song—​and not simply through the main duo’s autotuned vocals. Nelly can claim mainstream country credentials via his rather tame collaboration with Tim McGraw in 2004, yet he also lends a raunchy, strip club vibe to “Cruise” due to his infamous 2003 song/​video “Tip Drill.” The remix video version gets particularly interesting when it self-​consciously injects gendered racial politics into its own surface narrative. Racial profiling, for instance, gets a nod when the rapper drives a luxury white convertible alongside Florida Georgia Line’s black truck on some back roads, only to be pursued by a police car; however, any potential threat gets defused when a sexy black female “officer” emerges from the vehicle. In the meantime, Hubbard and Kelley encounter several other black women—​one of whom pops up on screen in sync with the “tanned legs” lyric—​but no cross-​racial dalliances ensue. The black and white female juxtaposition may, as suggested earlier, associatively enhance the white women’s sexual availability while continuing to distinguish their femininity as the singers seek to “absorb” the masculine power of Nelly’s virile presence.77 One last example will have to suffice, from a contemporary male country artist who both epitomizes and defies the bro category: Blake Shelton. Largely due to his stint as a coach on the hugely popular television competition show The Voice but also his (now defunct) marriage to country’s reigning top female performer Miranda Lambert, Shelton has achieved superstar status within popular culture as a whole—​a hyper form of visibility currently eluding other bro artists. Shelton is too old for frat parties and, compared to his younger compatriots, offers an admittedly safe yet certainly wider range of styles and subjects. But he has emerged as a strident defender of the bro phenomenon and in 2013 contributed to it with his No. 1 single “Boys ‘Round Here.” 78 Sonically and visually, the song and video encompass many de rigueur bro components, including hip hop trappings: autotuning (especially on the term “redneck”), rapping/​spoken word, scratching, low-​rider cars, and gold dental grills. The song attempts to delineate white southern male culture, which includes ways to entice girls to “shake that sugar” and euphemizes sex as “gettin’ down with” one of the titular “boys.” 79 On the radio and download versions, you only hear one reference to a popular hip hop dance (the “dougie”) as a counter to this scene’s white rural cultural practices. The video, however, takes an entirely different approach, staging a mock competition between Kentucky’s good old white boys and African American young men sporting dreadlocks and gold chains. The initial story line suggests that black men’s mere presence in this rural space can seem sinister, from the opening scene depicting their bouncing car driving by Shelton’s

390    Oxford Handbook of Country Music similarly rocking truck, to their “scowling” arrival at the party site thronged by Shelton and friends. Yet that’s ultimately a ruse. We eventually learn that the white and black characters are in fact friends who recognize their commonalities, united by region but also gender (and possibly class) identities. The video culminates in a harmonious, “post-​racial” vision (signaled by both groups teaching the other a new dance) that might suggest the kind of border-​crossing affiliation that I’ve been promoting in this chapter. Curiously, though, no black women join this fellowship; and the prominently featured white women who also provide background vocals—​Lambert and her Pistol Annies cohorts—​are exempted from the revelry. Midway through the narrative, they get relocated to an idyllic yet also highly stylized riverbank setting. The text’s heavy-​handed message of cross-​ racial unity thus becomes potentially compromised by this maneuver. Additionally, this denouement makes white and black women’s differing modes of marginalization abundantly clear. The heightened presence of urban black masculinity in Shelton’s video text thus gestures toward a new vision of country alliance yet ultimately settles for the now familiar function of authenticating the desirability of rural white heterosexual men—​ the only mode of sexuality truly at stake in bro-​country music.

Notes * I want to thank my wonderful graduate research assistant, Harry Burson, for helping me jumpstart this research project by compiling an annotated bibliography of existing scholarship and journalism. I also appreciate Samantha Pinto’s incisive feedback on initial drafts. Finally, the English Department at Georgetown University provided crucial summer funding. 1. “Truck Drivin’ Man” (King Records, 1948); “Betty Ann and Shirley Cole” (Columbia Records, 1973); “We Shall Be Free” (Liberty Records, 1992); “Back Street Affair” (Decca, 1952); “I’d Love to Lay You Down” (MCA Records, 1980); “Cruise” (Republic Nashville, 2012). For more on blackface and rube performance, see Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 2009), 17–​62. 2. Claude Hall, “Country Radio Audiences Howling About Dirty Lyrics,” Billboard (April 16, 1977):  3, 79, 86. See Nick Tosches’s rollicking commentary over the years indicting this trend, particularly Country:  The Twisted Roots of Rock’N’Roll (New  York:  Da Capo Press, 1996). 3. See Ian Crouch, “Taking Country Music Back From the Bros,” New Yorker, Culture Desk, accessed July 24, 2014, www.newyorker.com/​culture/​culture-​desk/​clever-​response-​bro-​ country-​songs; Amy McCarthy, “Bro Country’s Sexism is Ruining Country Music,” June 18, 2014, accessed March 4, 2015, www.dallasobserver.com/​music/​bro-​countrys-​sexism-​is-​ ruining-​country-​music-​7070740. “Cruise” can claim the distinction of being the best-​selling digital song to date across all music markets. 4. Geoff Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 80.

Sexuality in Country Music    391 5. John Buckley, “Country Music and American Values,” Popular Music and Society 6, no. 4 (1979): 293. 6. Ibid. 300. 7. Ibid. 294. 8. Ibid. 293. 9. Ibid. 294. 10. See Aaron Fox’s Real Country: Music and Language in Working-​Class Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Barbara Ching’s Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 11. Edward G. Armstrong, “Country Music Sex Songs: An Ethnomusicological Account,” The Journal of Sex Research 22, no. 3 (1986): 370. 12. Ibid. 371. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 373. “The Pill” (MCA, 1975); “No Man’s Land” (Columbia, 1974); “The Hunger” (RCA Victor, 1977). 15. Karen Saucier Lundy, “Women and Country Music,” in America’s Musical Pulse: Popular Music in Twentieth-​Century Society, ed. Kenneth J. Bindas (Westport CT:  Greenwood Press, 1992), 212, 214. Also see Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, Finding Her Voice: Women in Country Music: 1800-​2000 (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 2003); and Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson, eds., The Women of Country Music: A Reader (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003). 16. Lundy, “Women and Country Music,” 215. 17. Kristine C. McCusker and Diane Pecknold, eds., “Introduction,” A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), xx. 18. Joanna Kadi, Thinking Class: Sketches From a Cultural Worker (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1996), 6. 19. Ibid. 102. 20. Ibid. 145. 21. Brett Farmer, “Perverse Inclin(e)ations:  Queers and the Subversive Dynamic of Patsy Cline,” Southern Review 27, no. 2 (June 1994): 212. 22. Ibid. 212, 217. 23. Martha Mockus, “Queer Thoughts on Country Music and k.d. lang,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 257, 260. 24. Ibid. 257, 260. 25. Ibid. 263 (emphasis in original). 26. Mockus, “Queer Thoughts,” 264. 27. Chris Dickinson, “Country Undetectable:  Gay Artists in Country Music,” Journal of Country Music 21, no. 1 (2000):  30. For more on the current iteration of LGCMA, see Hulshof Schmidt, Social Justice for All, Tag Archives: Lesbian and Gay Country Music Association, accessed June 17, 2015, https://​hulshofschmidt.wordpress.com/​tag/​lesbian-​ and-​gay-​country-​music-​association/​. 28. Quoted in Dickinson, “Country Undetectable,” 32. 29. Ibid. 34. 30. Ibid. 39.

392    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 31. Sarah Boesveld, “Gay as an Arrow; This Year, Nashville Started Slowly Planning Country Music’s Coming-​Out Party,” National Post (Ontario), December 29, 2014:  B.8. It’s also worth noting that “Follow Your Arrow” stalled at number 43 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart (Boesveld) and that “Girl Crush” concerns a heterosexual woman fixating on another woman who has stolen her man. 32. Quoted in Boesveld, “Gay as an Arrow.” 33. James Mandrell, “Shania Twain Shakes Up Country Music,” The Journal of Popular Culture 47, no. 5 (2014):  1016; Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 20. 34. Judith Peraino, “The Same, But Different: Sexuality and Musicology, Then and Now,” in Colloquy: Music and Sexuality, ed. Judith Peraino and Suzanne G. Cusick, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 827. 35. Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, 4. 36. Ibid. 121, 122. 37. “Redneck Woman” (Reservoir Media Music, 2004). 38. Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, 129, 128. 39. Ibid. 157. 40. See, for example, Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly:  A  Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and John Hartigan Jr., Odd Tribes: Towards A Cultural Analysis of White People (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 41. Maureen Mahon, “Music, Sexuality, and Power: A Practice Theory Approach,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 846. 42. Several recent excellent studies redress the chronic absence of scholarship on black session musicians and artists over country’s long history. My point here is that sexuality remains underresearched in relationship to both black country performers and musical tropes associated with “blackness.” See Diane Pecknold, ed., Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); and Charles Hughes, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 43. A few crucial exceptions not referenced in this chapter include Bufwack and Oermann, Finding Her Voice, 385–​389, 440–​442; David Sanjek, “Can A  Fujiyama Mama Be the Female Elvis?” in Sexing the Groove:  Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley (New York: Routledge, 1997), 137–​167. 44. The term is Tucker’s. See her memoir, with Patsi Bale Cox, Nickel Dreams:  My Life (New York: Hyperion, 1997), 254. 45. Daniel Cooper, “Tanya Tucker Almost Grown,” in The Country Reader:  Twenty-​Five Years of the Journal of Country Music, ed. Paul Kingsbury (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation & Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 223, 211, 223. For Tucker’s own comment on the ad, see Nickel Dreams, 155. 46. Tucker, Nickel Dreams, 47. 47. Chet Flippo, “Tanya:  the Teenage Teaser,” Rolling Stone 170, September 26, 1974, accessed March 4, 2015, www.rollingstone.com/​music/​features/​tanya-​tucker​the-​teenage-​teaser-​19740926. 48. Flippo, “Tanya.” 49. Quoted in Flippo, “Tanya.” 50. Tucker, Nickel Dreams, 131, 92. 51. Ibid. ix.

Sexuality in Country Music    393 52. Your Music Jukebox—​The ’70s, “Tanya Tucker—​Delta Dawn,” YouTube video, 2:53, uploaded March 30, 2010, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=sO09q5LRmGo; One Media Music, “Tanya Tucker—​Delta Dawn,” YouTube video, 4:24, published January 15, 2015, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=h9k2qlkWzfc. 53. Betahifitoo, “Little Richard—​Tanya Tucker—​‘Somethin’ Else’ 1994,” YouTube video, 3:15, uploaded April 19, 2010, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=WAVfIfGdBY8. 54. See Charles White, The Life and Times of Little Richard:  The Authorized Biography (London:  Omnibus Press, 2003), for documentation of this performer’s gender-​queer identity. 55. Dana C.  Wiggins, “From Countrypolitan to Neotraditional:  Gender, Race, Class, and Region in Female Country Music, 1980-​1989” (dissertation, Georgia State University, 2009), 71. 56. Ibid. 72–​73. 57. Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision:  Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 111. 58. Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls:  Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 169–​170(emphasis added). 59. Wiggins, “From Countrypolitan,” 74–​75. 60. Farmer, “Perverse Inclin(e)ations,” 219. 61. Nickel Dreams is rife with such comments about her various liaisons: writing of her fling with actor Don Johnson, Tucker quips, “[i]‌t didn’t last too long … Things pretty much needed to go his way, and I was always thinking that things ought to be going my way. I can be a little cocky myself, especially around a guy who thinks he’s a gift” (Nickel Dreams, 165). 62. Quoted in Andrea K. Newlyn, “The Power to Change:  Gender Essentialism, Identity Politics, and the Judds,” Popular Music and Society 27, no. 3 (2004): 282. Newlyn cites a Boston Globe article on Wynonna written by Steve Morse. 63. Newlyn, “Power to Change,” 284–​285. 64. I have been unable to find early footage of a young Tanya deliberately mimicking Elvis on stage, but I rely here on journalists’ accounts as well as her own reflections: she recalls his “charisma” and confesses that she similarly wanted to “mesmeriz[e]‌” an audience; Tucker, Nickel Dreams, 140. 65. Newlyn, “Power to Change,” 287. Newlyn is speaking of Wynonna as part of the Judds’ performative duo. 66. Jody Rosen, “Jody Rosen on the Rise of Bro-​Country,” Vulture, August 11, 2013, accessed March 4, 2015, with this article, the current critic-​at-​large for T:  The New  York Times Magazine Blog coined the term “bro-​country.” 67. Rosen, “Jody Rosen.” 68. Crouch, “Taking Country,” 4. 69. Florida Georgia Line’s “Sun Daze” (Republic Nashville, 2014); Jason Aldean’s “Burnin’ It Down” (Broken Bow, 2014); “That’s My Kind of Night” (Capitol Nashville, 2013); “Aw Naw” (RCA Nashville, 2013); “Chillin’ It” (Warner Bros. Nashville, 2013). See Grady Smith’s “Every Truck, Beer, and ‘Girl’ Reference on the Current Country Chart,” which provides a handy list of such references, Entertainment Weekly, posted on October 18, 2013, accessed April 2, 2015, www.ew.com/​article/​2013/​10/​18/​bro-​country-​beer-​trucks-​lyrics. 70. Maddie & Tae, “Girl in a Country Song” (Republic, 2014). Interestingly, this single was produced by Scott Borchetta, who also represents the majority of bro artists. For more on the song’s impact, see Crouch, “Taking Country.”

394    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 71. McCarthy, “Bro Country’s Sexism,” 2. She also points to “a very murky definition of sexual consent in many of these tracks.” 72. Rosen, “Jody Rosen.” 73. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 152. 74. Emily Yahr, “Mixing in Some Hip-​Hop to the 2-​Step,” Washington Post, August 6, 2013, C2. 75. Rosen, “Jody Rosen.” 76. Ibid. 77. I am drawing on Jayna Brown’s use of the term “absorb”: “[t]‌he principle of absorption is … at the heart of … disembodied contact between white Americans and African Americans in the urban dance spaces. … White dancers did not seek to ‘become’ a colored body” but to “absorb its power, and, through eroticized ritual, affirm its servitude” (Brown, Babylon Girls, 174). Also see Florida Georgia Line’s “Get Your Shine On,” which borrows a colloquialism from southern rap to encourage young white women to party. (Rosen originally noted the connection.) The video reprises many of the popular elements of “Cruise”—​hot bikinied girls, this time spring breaking in Cancun—​but links the setting to non-​whiteness through its bizarre incorporation of Mexican lucha libre dwarf wrestlers. 78. In a 2013 television special devoted to his career, Shelton confronted the recent critique by arguing, “Nobody wants to listen to their grandpa’s music. And I don’t care how many of these old farts around Nashville going, ‘My God, that ain’t country!’ Well that’s because you don’t buy records anymore, jackass. The kids do.” Quoted in Grady Smith, “How Country Music Went Crazy: A Comprehensive Timeline of the Genre’s Identity Crisis,” Entertainment Weekly, posted on October 1, 2013, accessed April 2, 2015, www.ew.com/​ article/​2013/​10/​01/​country-​music-​identity-​crisis. 79. “Boys ‘Round Here” (Warner Bros. Nashville, 2013).

Chapter 19

The Sac re d in C ou ntry Mu si c Stephen Shearon

The adjective “sacred” refers to things religious, no matter the thing, no matter the religion. The sacred in country music has been a product of a particular type of Christianity. Its source, for example, is not liturgical; it is not Anglican, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox. Rather, the type of Christianity germane to country music is British-​ American, evangelical, Protestant Christianity as it has existed in North America, but most especially the United States, since the late nineteenth century. In some cases, one also finds the influences of the Temperance Movement, which began in the English-​ speaking or Anglophone world in the 1820s, and Pentecostalism and Christian Fundamentalism, both of which emerged around the turn of the twentieth century. Occasionally that Christianity has been conflated with American nationalism and with particular political movements or parties. And in a few cases—​a very small minority—​ sacred expression in country music is not Christian at all, or even monotheistic, but mystical, supernatural, or animist. The primary vehicle for sacred expression in country music has been, above all, the gospel song. Gospel songs were dispersed throughout the Anglophone world as early as the late nineteenth century. They were so popular that evangelists and missionaries carried them in printed collections to teach and sing in the mission fields. Touring musicians, often from the United States, performed them. And people around the planet heard them on recordings. They gained a place in Christian hymnals and, in some places, entered oral tradition. So many evangelical Christians have sung them regularly that they are, arguably, among the most frequently sung songs in human culture, even today. In this chapter, therefore, I address, first and foremost, gospel song and the evangelical Christian cultures that have produced it. An understanding of gospel song, the theology typically expressed in it, and its history, both within and outside country music, explains the great majority of sacred expression in that genre. If you understand one, you understand the other. After a general discussion of gospel song, I address chronologically its various cultural layers and the gradual adoption of songs from each, or

396    Oxford Handbook of Country Music the creation of songs in the style of each, by country artists. Then, in separate sections, I discuss the conflation of Christianity and nationalism; and, before concluding, I look at two examples of non-​Christian sacred expression in country music. The sacred has been part of country music culture and expression since the very beginning of the genre. During the two weeks Ralph Peer and his associates spent in Bristol, Tennessee, in the summer of 1927, they recorded seventy-​five titles. At least twenty-​nine of those titles contained Christian content, and another six were either semisacred or evinced a Christian worldview. In other words, almost 40% of the music recorded during “The Big Bang of Country Music” was sacred, and an additional 8% suggested a religious understanding of the world.1 One could argue, therefore, that, just as The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers established a stylistic bifurcation that has remained part of country music to this day, the importance of gospel song established at Bristol has kept it near the heart of country music culture ever since. That high percentage of religious product did not remain characteristic of country music. Wayne W. Daniel has speculated that sacred product has comprised only about 10% of the genre.2 Perhaps one reason the percentage of sacred content in 1927 was so much greater than the norm Daniel suggested is that “The Big Bang of Country Music” was not just about country music, a market then in the process of being defined. Those who recorded for Peer that summer included some who later would be marketed as sacred or gospel, not hillbilly or country. Nevertheless, the strong presence of sacred music in the Bristol recordings is clear evidence of a culture (or cultures) deeply imbued with religious feeling. To get a sense of the kind of sacred song recorded in Bristol, consider the case of Alfred G. Karnes (1891–​1958). A resident of Corbin, Kentucky, Karnes was a Baptist minister, evangelist, instrumentalist, and singer, among other things. He presented himself at the 1927 Bristol sessions as a singing evangelist or gospel singer, perhaps emulating such figures as Ira D. Sankey (1840–​1908), Charles McCallon Alexander (1867–​1920), and Homer Rodeheaver (1880–​1955), singing evangelists famous throughout North America at that time.3 On July 29, Thursday of the first week, Karnes recorded six sides, each a gospel song.4 One was “Where We’ll Never Grow Old” (“Never Grow Old”) attributed to James C. Moore (1888–​1962).5 Like Karnes, songwriter Moore was a minister, but of the Missionary Baptist variety, who worked primarily in southern Georgia. He also was a prolific gospel songwriter active in the seven-​shape-​notation gospel singing-​convention culture of that region.6 Like most gospel songs in the early decades of the genre, “Never Grow Old” (1914) probably was conceived and composed in four parts (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) and published first in a collection of such songs. And like the vast majority of gospel songs still, Moore composed it in the major mode. He also employed the slow, compound-​ duple meter of 6/​4, which gives it the feel of either a slow barcarolle or, given its slow tempo and the prominent triple subdivision of the pulse, a waltz, a dance meter much more common in popular song then than now. Moore composed the song in the verse-​ refrain form typical of both British-​American gospel song and European and American

The Sacred in Country Music    397 popular song. The song’s subject—​the promised joys of heaven for the Christian—​has been a common theme in gospel song. As a result of changes in the theology of popular American Christianity over the previous century (see following), the poetry expresses the joy of the Arminian Christian—​certain of his salvation, certain he will be welcomed into heaven, certain that “All our sorrow will end, and our voices will blend,/​With the loved ones who’ve gone on before.” Text repetition—​significantly more than in most British-​American hymns, significantly less than in most African American spirituals—​ is also a characteristic of gospel song, and that is found here, especially in the refrain, which repeats and extends the last line of verse 1.7 In gospel song, as in most popular song, the refrain emphasizes the song’s main message or sentiment. Verse 1    I have heard of a land on the faraway strand, ‘Tis a beautiful home of the soul; Built by Jesus on high, THERE we never shall die, ‘Tis a land where we’ll never grow old. Refrain        Never grow old, never grow old, In a land where we’ll never old; Never grow old, never grow old, In a land where we’ll never old. Verse 2    In that beautiful home where we’ll never more roam, We shall be in the sweet by and by; Happy praise to the King through eternity sing, ‘Tis a land where WE’LL NEVER GROW OLD.8 [refrain] Verse 3    When our work here is done and the life crown is won, And our troubles and trials are o’er; All our sorrow will end, and our voices will blend, With the loved ones who’ve gone on before. [refrain]

A gifted musician, Karnes accompanied himself as he sang, using apparently a Gibson harp guitar.9 Among country music aficionados, he is known for his unique plucked bass lines. Those bass lines, especially in the refrain, suggest the contrapuntal and echo effects so common in four-​voice gospel song refrains; where Karnes supplies them here, they follow Moore’s bass line exactly. As for Karnes’s singing, Thomas Townsend argues that his use of vocal ornamentation and interpretive freedom, along with the accompanying vocal expressivity, set him (and Jimmie Rodgers) apart from and superior to the other artists who recorded at Bristol.10 Karnes’s rhythmic liberality led him to add a characteristic to his performance that is typical of gospel song but not found in Moore’s notated score: the dotted eighth-​sixteenth note pattern and its reverse. Such patterns are a distinctive marker of gospel song, especially when compared to most Anglo-​American hymnody. A dedicated minister and evangelist, Karnes sang in vocal quartets and played multiple instruments of the string-​band variety, in particular fiddle and banjo. The use

398    Oxford Handbook of Country Music of such instruments set him apart from the mainstream evangelical singers of the time, who used reed pump organs or harmoniums (Sankey), pianos (Alexander), and trombones or wind bands (Rodeheaver).11 Karnes’s use of string-​band instruments, used also by many of the other Bristol artists, suggests the practice was either a localized phenomenon or evidence of the inroads made by Pentecostal worship traditions and performance practices. Karnes, in short, used the sort of song—​gospel song—​common in Anglophone evangelical Christianity from the mid-​nineteenth century until, in some cases, the present. It was a genre that was a product of the many developments in American vernacular Christianity and Christian song that are traceable back through, on one hand, Lowell Mason (1792–​1872), and on the other hand, the shape-​notation traditions, to New England psalmody and beyond. Its immediate predecessors, however, left the strongest imprint.

The Theology of Gospel Song The Christianity expressed in country music was developed over the course of the nineteenth century by English-​speaking Protestants intent on converting non-​Christians to the faith (winning souls) or improving the lives of the poor (the Social Gospel) or both. The Christians engaged in these struggles found that the theology of John Calvin (1509–​1564; the Reformed tradition) was not as attractive to potential converts as that of the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius (1560–​1609). The Reformed tradition held that humans are born sinful creatures and the fates of their souls are predestined. In other words, the elect—​those going to heaven—​had already been determined by God at the beginning of time. Therefore, the fate of one’s eternal soul already had been determined, and the Christian had no way of knowing that decision. All he or she could do was be the best Christian possible and hope that he or she was among the elect. Calvinist theology seemed stern to some, compared to Arminian theology, and offered no hope of changing one’s fate. This did not serve well those attempting to bring souls to Christ. The theology that seemed to work best for conversion was that expressed by Arminius, who had rejected the idea of predestination and affirmed the freedom of the human will. This meant that a sinner could choose to be saved and thereby be assured of admission to heaven, placing the fate of one’s eternal soul in one’s own hands and offering hope of salvation. This also made the work of the Christian evangelists both easier and more urgent—​because they did not want potential converts to die before being saved and thus suffer eternal damnation. The conversion experience, then—​repentance, the acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and baptism—​became all important. Among those individuals who preached this salvation gospel most famously in the century before the creation of country music were English-​speaking evangelists such as Charles Grandison Finney (1792–​1875), Dwight L. Moody (1837–​1899), Daniel Webster Whittle (1840–​1901), R. A. Torrey (1856–​1928), Billy Sunday (1862–​1935), Bob Jones Sr. (1883–​1968), and Aimee Semple MacPherson (1890–​1944).12 Many of these evangelists,

The Sacred in Country Music    399 especially Billy Sunday, also preached against the drinking of alcohol and contributed greatly to the success of the Temperance Movement and the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which made the production, transport, and sale (but not the consumption or private possession) of alcohol not merely illegal, but unconstitutional—​a state of affairs that was in force in 1927. Many of the artists who recorded in Bristol, and certainly many of the individuals who purchased or listened to the products produced in Bristol that summer, were steeped in a culture informed by such beliefs or worldviews. The primary vehicle by which they expressed those beliefs and views musically was the gospel song.13

Gospel Songs Gospel songs of the sort recorded in Bristol express, above all, the personal views, feelings, beliefs, and lived experiences of the Christian—​typically the working-​or lower-​ middle-​class evangelical Protestant. The poetry (lyrics) deal with conversion, atonement through Christ, the assurance of salvation, and the joys of heaven. In gospel song, God is seen less as the threatening, fearsome Yahweh of the Old Testament and more as the loving, embracing New Testament Son of God. Grace is free. Heaven is assured. And salvation is yours for the asking—​if you repent. Yet, at the same time, gospel songs were often created within a commercial or industrial context and, at some point, commodified and sold as either print materials, live performances, or recordings. As such, they may bear the traces of contemporary musical taste in addition to popular religious sentiment. Early gospel song was developed most directly from the Sunday school song, which had, in turn, been created or adapted from Anglo-​American hymnody by persons like Lowell Mason and his protégé, William B. Bradbury (1816–​1868).14 As they and others strove to meet the needs of the burgeoning American Sunday school movement, they, like the aforementioned evangelists, realized that Calvinist texts were simply too sober, too stern, for Sunday school students. Those who supplied Sunday school songs, therefore, gradually developed a repertoire that was easier, gentler, and more attractive than earlier Anglo-​American hymnody and that expressed the new and inviting Arminian theology.15 The adjective “gospel” was applied to the songs and hymns of this developing repertoire beginning in the mid-​1870s, during and following Moody and Sankey’s successful evangelistic tour of Britain (1873–​1875).16 Philip Paul (P. P.) Bliss (1838–​ 1876), another prominent American singing evangelist, produced the first publication employing the term: Gospel Songs, published in 1874 by The John Church Company of Cincinnati.17 Shortly thereafter, Church and the Biglow and Main Company of New York began co-​publishing a wildly successful series of collections of such music titled Gospel Hymns, all of which Sankey coedited.18 As a result of Sankey’s work on these publications, as well as his other evangelistic activities, the public came to associate him closely with the repertoire and the term “gospel.” And because he played the harmonium, that instrument became the instrument associated most closely with “gospel singers.”19

400    Oxford Handbook of Country Music The composers of gospel song increasingly adopted the musical styles and characteristics of the sorts of Euro-​American popular song considered appropriate for polite society: in particular, marches, dances, and parlor songs. The practice of borrowing musical styles from secular popular song has continued throughout the genre’s history. In the early twentieth century, for example, characteristics of ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, jazz, spirituals, jubilee songs, blues, and country were heard and felt in gospel-​song performances. Since then, the styles of rock and roll and other popular styles, all the way to hip hop, have been used. Only in the mid-​to late twentieth century was that influence reversed. The characteristics of southern gospel were incorporated into some country and bluegrass (think of the vocal harmonies of bluegrass), and black gospel characteristics were used in rhythm and blues (e.g., Ray Charles) and soul music (e.g., Aretha Franklin and Al Green). The poetry or lyrics of much gospel song is strophic and, like most popular songs of the time, written in verse-​refrain form. A good example of an early verse-​refrain gospel poem is “Pass me not, O gentle Saviour” (1868) by Fanny J. Crosby (1820–​1915), the genre’s premiere poet. Like “Never Grow Old,” both verses and refrain comprise rhyming, scanning quatrains. The refrain, furthermore, not only iterates the poem’s central message, but repeats exactly lines 2 through 4 of verse 1. Crosby beautifully and movingly expresses here the loving, hopeful humility that precedes free grace and salvation—​a part of the conversion process well known to most, if not all, evangelical Protestants: Verse 1    Pass me not, O gentle Saviour, Hear my humble cry; While on others Thou art calling, Do not pass me by. Refrain        Saviour, Saviour, Hear my humble cry; While on others Thou art calling, Do not pass me by. Verse 2    Let me at Thy throne of mercy Find a sweet relief; Kneeling there in deep contrition, Help my unbelief. [refrain] Verse 3    Trusting only in Thy merit, Would I seek Thy face; Heal my wounded, broken spirit, Save me by Thy grace. [refrain] Verse 4    Thou the spring of all my comfort, More than life to me, Whom have I on earth beside Thee? Whom in heav’n but Thee? [refrain]

The Sacred in Country Music    401 Gospel songs also are written in simple strophic form without refrains. An example of a gospel poem of this type is “Have Thine own way, Lord!” (1907), written by Adelaide A. Pollard (1862–​1934) and set to music by George C. Stebbins (1846–​1945).20 Pollard constructed the poem so that each verse begins with a couplet that serves as an internal text refrain (italics). Stebbins, however, chose not to treat it as a separate musical element; it remains part of the verse: Verse 1   Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way! Thou art the potter, I am the clay; Mold me and make me After Thy will, While I am waiting, Yielded and still. Verse 2   Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way! Search me and try me, Master, today! Whiter than snow, Lord, Wash me just now, As in Thy presence Humbly I bow.

Although musical styles have changed considerably since Crosby’s time, the poetic structure of gospel song remains basically unchanged.

Northern and Southern Product Most early gospel songs, especially those published before 1890, were northern urban products. Biglow and Main, the world’s most important publisher of early gospel song, was based in New  York City. The John Church Company was headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. Oliver Ditson & Company, also an important publisher of early gospel song, was located in Boston, Massachusetts. All of them, moreover, had branch offices or subsidiaries in Chicago, Illinois, another important publishing center. And most of the poets, composers, and songwriters whose works they published lived and worked in the northern states.21 It should not surprise, then, that a significant number of the gospel songs recorded in Bristol were northern products. “Are You Washed in the Blood?” (1878; by Elisha A. Hoffmann, recorded by Stoneman’s Dixie Mountaineers) certainly was, as was “To the Work” (1869/​1871; by Fanny Crosby and William Howard Doane, recorded by Karnes), “I Am Resolved” (1896; by Palmer Hartsough and J. H. Fillmore, also recorded by Stoneman’s band), and others. “Never Grow Old,” however, was an obvious exception. First published only thirteen years before the Bristol sessions, it was a southern product. The gospel-​song

402    Oxford Handbook of Country Music culture in the southern states was distinguished from its northern counterpart primarily by its commitment—​devotion, even—​to the use of seven-​shape notation, its extensive network of gospel singing conventions and shape-​notation singing schools, and its publishers’ use of professional touring male quartets to promote the sale of gospel songbooks.22 By 1927, that culture and its industry already were well established and quite active, having been fostered since Reconstruction by companies such as Ruebush-​Kieffer, Anthony J. Showalter, and James D. Vaughan, among many others. At the time of the Bristol sessions, James D. Vaughan was the most successful of those publishers; but only one year prior, in 1926, V. O. Stamps and J. R. Baxter Jr. had decided to establish a partnership that would displace Vaughan in importance: The Stamps-​Baxter Company.23 As the southern publishers and their songwriters increased their output to meet growing demand throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the number of gospel songs of southern provenance used in country music also increased. Moreover, many of those who eventually became significant in the history of country music were products of shape-​notation singing schools—​A. P. Carter and Bill Monroe among them.24 Since the mid-​1970s, the tradition represented in Bristol by James C. Moore and the Alcoa Quartet (recorded on August 2, 1927) has been labeled by the music industry “southern gospel.” In 1927, however, no such term existed. These were simply gospel artists writing and performing gospel songs. 25 They were artists too who almost certainly saw themselves as part of the same culture and industry that produced the works of Crosby, Sankey, Hoffmann, and others in the northern tradition. Consider the case of the gospel song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” The poetry was written by Ada R. Habershon (1861–​1918), with music supplied by Charles H. Gabriel (1856–​1932), one of the most prominent of the northern gospel-​song composers.26 It was included in a 1907 collection titled Alexander’s Gospel Songs No. 2, which was compiled by the famous song leader Charles McCallon Alexander, a native of East Tennessee, and published by the New  York-​based Fleming H.  Revell. Revell was Dwight L.  Moody’s son-​in-​law, and the company had been established to provide Moody (d. 1899) a publication outlet.27 Over two decades later, A. P. Carter (a former shape-​notation singing-​school teacher) reworked the song, titled it “Can the Circle Be Unbroken (Bye and Bye),” recorded it with the Carter Family, and released it in 1935. In 1972, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, in collaboration with “Mother” Maybelle Carter, famously covered the song on their album “Will the Circle be Unbroken” (with no question mark). This album, in which established country artists joined a countercultural California folk-​rock band, was a significant event in the creation of the market known today as Americana. The song has since been covered by many artists from varied performance traditions and, most important, is still part of the country repertoire. Another case is Albert E. Brumley’s “I’ll Fly Away” (1932), one of the most-​recorded songs in history. Unlike Gabriel and Alexander, who were part of the northern tradition, Brumley (1905–​1977) was very much a part of the southern convention-​singing

The Sacred in Country Music    403 and singing-​school culture, both of which employed seven-​shape notation. Brumley wrote the song in 1929 in the standard four parts using shape notation. It was published in the 1932 Hartford Music Company gospel songbook Wonderful Message. As Kevin Kehrberg has documented, the song quickly became known among evangelical Christians outside the convention-​singing culture and was recorded a number of times, by artists both white and black, within ten years of its publication. The recording that really established it as a country music standard, however, was that made by The Chuck Wagon Gang, a radio quartet that broadcast from radio station WBAP in Fort Worth, Texas. Made up of members of a different Carter family, that of D. P. Carter, the group recorded the song with guitar accompaniment straight from the notation, as was their norm, and released it in 1948 on the Columbia label. The song has since been recorded by numerous artists, especially in the country genre. Perhaps most famously, a recording of it by Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch was used in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). In the years since, it has been covered by artists ranging from Ralph Stanley to Kanye West.28 A third case sheds light on the genres of country and bluegrass gospel, which essentially refer to the performance of gospel songs of the sort described previously or the composition of new gospel songs by country or bluegrass artists with the expectation that they will be performed in the relevant style. Although these songs may be conceived differently, they usually are in the mold of the gospel songs already discussed here. For example, perhaps the best known gospel song conceived also as a country song is Hank Williams’s “I Saw the Light.” It fits the pattern of the typical gospel song; but, interestingly, Williams’s song, released in 1948, relies heavily on the melody of Albert E. Brumley’s “He Set Me Free,” which was published in 1939 and is still sung today. In all three cases, the song is written in verse-​refrain form, and the multiple verses and single refrain are rhyming, scanning quatrains. The refrain texts in the second and third cases repeat and amplify the language of the verses, but most especially the final line of the verses: “I’ll Fly Away” in Brumley’s song; “I Saw the Light” in Williams’s. In all three, however, the primary message of the song is iterated in the refrain: “Will the circle be unbroken?,” “I’ll Fly Away,” and “I Saw the Light.” The subjects of each have been common to gospel song since its creation. In both versions of the first (that by Habershon and Gabriel and that by A. P. Carter), the subject is death—​the loss of loved ones—​and the Christian promise of heaven as home, if one has been saved. In “I’ll Fly Away,” the subject is again death and the Christian promise of heaven, but this life is presented as prison and heaven as freedom. And in Williams’s “I Saw the Light,” the subject is the clarity—​the understanding—​that comes with sudden revelation, followed by repentance and the acceptance of God’s grace. The first two almost certainly were conceived for four voices; Williams’s country gospel song, on the other hand, likely was conceived as a solo with guitar accompaniment but with the sound of four-​part gospel singing in mind.

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Gospel Blues and Spirituals A third gospel-​song tradition was added to country music in the 1950s: the gospel-​blues songs of African American Thomas A. Dorsey (1899–​1993). African Americans began contributing to the mainstream of American gospel song with the work of Charles Albert Tindley (1851–​1933). But it was Dorsey who had the greater impact. Primarily a blues musician in the 1920s, Dorsey famously committed himself to Christian music in the 1930s, producing among others two songs that became standards: “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” (1932, recorded 1937) and “Peace in the Valley” (1937).29 White country artists began recording these in the 1950s, adding them to the country repertoire. Red Foley and the Sunshine Boys had a hit with “Peace in the Valley” in 1951; and Little Jimmy Dickens recorded “Take My Hand” in 1954 for an album titled Old Country Church, perhaps a misnomer in this case given that Dorsey was based in Chicago.30 Other country artists covered these songs in the 1950s and 1960s, most famously Jim Reeves, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Elvis Presley.31 In much of the writing about these songs by country music fans, the cultural origins of them often are overlooked, leaving the assumption that they were simply part of country music culture. But these songs were some of the first African American gospel products to be adopted by country artists and to achieve popularity among country audiences. Ford seems to have capitalized on the market for gospel song more than any other artist in country music, certainly in the 1950s. He produced fifty albums on Capitol Records, fully half of which contained sacred product.32 His first LP of sacred songs, Hymns, was released in 1956; virtually all of its twelve songs were northern-​urban gospel songs.33 Because of the album’s great success, Capitol released another in 1957 titled Spirituals, a term suggesting to its 1950s audience that these were songs from the African American tradition. It contains a mixture of African American gospel songs and true spirituals, which were, for the most part, oral-​tradition, strophic Christian songs.34

Songs of the Countercultural Jesus Movement The greatest changes to Christian sacred expression in country music came in the years following the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s. Some in the counterculture, especially in California, found Christianity as understood through a countercultural lens quite attractive and established what came to be known as The Jesus Movement.35 They created new Christian songs for worship and entertainment that were, in many ways, like the gospel songs of earlier years, but with a different aesthetic, a different attitude, and different cultural sympathies. The musical styles they employed eventually were developed into the musical genres known as contemporary Christian and, later, contemporary

The Sacred in Country Music    405 worship music. As these new genres gained in popularity, the tastes of many evangelical Christians in the United States changed. Some began to incorporate these new songs, with their accompanying aesthetic and stylistic differences, into worship, displacing the more-​traditional repertoire of hymns and gospel songs in many churches. Such changes meant that the use of organs, acoustic pianos, and choirs declined, while the use of guitars, drums, and amplification increased.36 The Christian theology expressed in these new songs was even less threatening than the Arminianism of gospel song, which became associated to some extent with Christian Fundamentalism.37 A good example of this new sort of song and expression can be found in Kris Kristofferson’s “Why Me,” released in 1972 on the album Jesus Was a Capricorn. While “Why Me” may seem significantly different to some, that difference is primarily stylistic. Kristofferson still uses verse-​refrain form. He still writes his verses and refrain as rhyming, scanning quatrains. His poetry still consists of a fair amount of repetition, but not of the title; the message of “Why Me” is “Help me, Jesus”—​a message very similar to that of Crosby’s “Pass me not, O gentle Saviour.” Another song type that came from the contemporary Christian background was the ballad. These are basically mainstream popular songs with poetry that, although Christian, are ambiguous enough to be interpreted as secular. “You Light Up My Life,” written and produced by Joe Brooks for a film of the same name, is such a song. As sung by Debby Boone, daughter of singer Pat Boone, it was a huge hit in 1977.38 More “inspirational” than Christian, more pop than country, the song has been covered by a number of country artists and released with the suggestion of being Christian, so that “You” is perceived to refer not to a lover, but to God or Jesus Christ. As with Kristofferson’s “Why Me,” the structural elements of “You Light Up My Life” are very similar to the earliest gospel songs. The primary difference is the absence of an overt Christian message.

The Sacred and Nationalism It is quite common in North American evangelical Christianity for religious sentiment to be conflated with nationalism or, by another name, patriotism. This can certainly be found in Anglo-​American hymnody and gospel song; perhaps no clearer example exists than “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862; poetry by Julia Ward Howe; music by William Steffe).39 Within country music, perhaps the best-​known of such songs is “God Bless the USA,” written, recorded, and made famous by Lee Greenwood. A popular ballad more in the tradition of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” than gospel or country songs, Greenwood’s song became a patriotic staple and was adopted by the political right in the United States, in particular the Republican Party, as a musical anthem. The subject of the song is more a celebration of American nationalism than religious sentiment. But because its title and hook, “God Bless the USA,” occurs at the end of the refrain and at a musical high point, the message the listener perceives is that the USA’s relationship with the Judeo-​Christian God is the source of the nation’s strength.40

406    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Songs that were country in concept, while also being patriotic and Christian, were produced especially by the Louvin Brothers, a brother act consisting of Ira and Charlie Loudermilk (1924–​1965 and 1927–​2011, respectively). The brothers hailed from Henagar, Alabama, up on Sand Mountain—​for some a Mecca of shape-​note singing. With backgrounds in both Sacred Harp and gospel convention singing, the Louvins wrote country gospel songs that, in some cases, express the paranoiac worldview of right-​wing American Christians in the 1950s. Their performance style combined the string-​band sound of bluegrass with the tight vocal harmonies of close gospel part-​singing. One example of the songs they produced in this vein is “If We Forget God.”41 Its language—​ “If we forget God, Satan will rule. If we forget God, our nation is doomed”—​is a clear expression of a viewpoint that has remained characteristic of some on the American right.42

Mysticism, Animism, and the Wind Although sacred expression in country music is overwhelmingly Anglo-​Protestant, one occasionally encounters expression that is neither Christian nor even monotheistic, but mystical, supernatural, or animist. Consider “Midnight in Montgomery” by Alan Jackson and Don Sampson. Recorded by Jackson in 1990 and included on his Don’t Rock the Jukebox album (1991), the central conceit of the song is a supernatural encounter between the narrator, a successful country artist (presumably Jackson himself), and the ghost of Hank Williams, who lived and was buried in Montgomery, Alabama.43 Unlike most sacred and semisacred country songs, it contains no hint of a Christian worldview—​there is no reference to heaven or angels, for example. Markers typically associated with supernatural tales are common. The musical key or mode is strongly minor: the songwriters employ a chord progression that emphasizes the lowered sixth and seventh degrees of the scale (the most common progression is i—​bVII—​bVI—​i); and the minor mediant is a prominent part of the melody. The encounter takes place at midnight, the witching hour, when ghosts, witches, and the like are thought to be active; and the knowledgeable listener understands that the likely location is Hank’s grave site, which is marked by a large memorial. Moreover, the writers pack the song with imagery familiar to anyone who has encountered stories about the supernatural: a “lonely road,” an upturned collar, a “lonesome chill,” “haunting haunted eyes,” “red tail lights,” and “a midnight train.” But most significant is the wind, which seems to be the active agent. When it ceases, Hank’s ghost appears; when it returns, he’s gone. “Was he ever really there?” the narrator asks. Only “when the wind is right.”44 In “Midnight in Montgomery,” Jackson and Sampson place country music and its heritage front and center, sacralizing both it and Hank. Hank’s ghost (he was only twenty-​ nine years old when he died) and the many references to his songs and personal effects (his boots, his suit, the smell of whiskey) evoke country music’s storied past. References to a “Silver Eagle” and “a big New Year’s Eve show” suggest the successful present.45 The

The Sacred in Country Music    407 writers treat country music as something to be approached worshipfully and Hank as akin to a demigod. This is not so unusual in country music culture. The many references in country music literature to Ryman Auditorium (and sometimes the Grand Ole Opry itself) as “The Mother Church of Country Music” function similarly.46 That sense of the sacred was so strong that, when the new Grand Ole Opry House was built in the early 1970s, a six-​foot circle of wood was cut out of the Ryman stage and installed center stage in the new facility. Artists who perform at the Grand Ole Opry still stand where Hank once stood.47 One finds a similar type of sacred expression in John Anderson’s “Seminole Wind.”48 A native of central Florida, Anderson writes in this song about topics native to his home state: the Spanish search for gold and silver; the Everglades; black water; sawgrass; eagles and otters; the Seminole Indians; Lake Okeechobee and the town of Micanopy; alligators and garfish; Cypress trees (in this case, a stump); and Osceola, a Native American freedom fighter of mixed ancestry. Anderson expresses the sacred in this song not in the way of monotheism, but of mystical animism in which all things natural are imbued with a soul or spirit.49 He combines this animism with references to the Seminole Indians, a Native American tribe of predominantly Creek origin forged from multiple tribes through the process of ethnogenesis—​this in response to pressures placed on them by incursions from the Spanish, British, and Americans, as well as other indigenous groups.50 His message is stated most clearly in the second verse in which he describes the effects of draining the Everglades. His topic, in other words, is those things, both human and natural, that are endangered as a result of human activity. Mystical knowledge of these ancient and natural worlds, according to Anderson’s imagery, is carried in the “Seminole wind” blowing across the landscape. That wind also carries a mystical power, apparently, for when Anderson invokes it, as he does in the song’s chorus, spurred on by the ghost of Osceola, he seems to be calling on it to protect the natural world from further degradation and perhaps to reverse it. This experience of the sacred is less like Christianity and more like the sacred as understood by Native Americans, who traditionally have been animist. Traditional Native American culture, for example, understands music and dance as being both secular and sacred. In that sense, everything in traditional Native American culture is sacred; nothing is completely secular.51

Conclusion Anglophone evangelical Protestant Christianity, especially of the American sort, is one of the cornerstones of country music culture. And gospel song, the primary vehicle by which that evangelical Protestantism is expressed musically, has been an integral part of country music since its inception. It almost had to be because when country music was defined as a market and genre, in the second quarter of the twentieth century, gospel song permeated American evangelical Protestantism and had done so since at least the 1890s. Moreover, as country music was changed in the intervening years, evangelical

408    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Protestantism and gospel song were changed with it, all the while remaining near the heart of country music culture. For the most part, those who have participated in country music, whether as artists, industry personnel, or fans, encountered gospel song in their youth. It was part of the core repertoire of the evangelical Protestant communities in which they were raised, constituting a sort of lingua franca, very much like the works of Shakespeare in Anglophone culture once upon a time. These persons, whether in the South, or culturally southern but outside the region, or just sympathetic to southern Anglo-​American culture, often from rural or working-​class backgrounds, attended churches that used gospel songs in their everyday worship. Those churches lay mostly on the conservative side of the Protestant world, being at least partially Fundamentalist or Pentecostal. If and when these persons encountered the well-​known Christian evangelists of their time—​Aimee Semple McPherson, Bob Jones Sr., Billy Graham—​gospel song was part of the repertoire they heard and sang. Often they thought of them as hymns, so old and accepted were they. In some places, these persons’ cultural experiences included gospel songs sung and played from shape notation—​studied in singing schools and sung in periodic singing conventions. For others, especially those from more secular backgrounds, the encounters took place at local jam sessions and performances or at festivals, especially of the bluegrass variety. And for those at some remove from the traditional culture of country music, the encounters took place via mass media by listening to it on the radio or on recordings.52 Thus, the key to understanding the vast majority of sacred expression in country music is to understand the gospel song and the religious developments for which it was the primary musical outlet.

Notes 1. Charles K. Wolfe, “The Legend that Peer Built: Reappraising the Bristol Sessions,” in The Bristol Sessions: Writings About the Big Bang of Country Music, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and Ted Olson (Jefferson, NC:  MacFarland & Company, 2005), 31–​38. Peer and associates came away from the Bristol sessions with seventy-​six sides. “Old Time Corn Shuckin’,” however, a comedy skit, took up two sides; thus, the sessions resulted in seventy-​five titles. In my analysis of the Bristol repertoire, I categorized as semisacred the songs “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow,” “The Newmarket Wreck,” and “Sleep, Baby, Sleep.” The songs “The Storms are on the Ocean,” “Sweet Heaven, When I Die,” and “Miss Liza, Poor Gal” I describe as demonstrating a Christian worldview, based on their references to heaven, an angel, and the like. 2. Wayne W. Daniel, email message to the author, August 26, 2011. 3. Rodeheaver, who worked with Billy Sunday from 1910 to 1930, was known primarily in North America; but Sankey, who worked with Dwight L. Moody from 1871 to ca. 1895, and Charles McCallon Alexander, who toured the world with evangelists R. A. Torrey and John Wilbur Chapman from 1902 to 1918, were famous throughout the Anglophone world. 4. See Wolfe, “Legend that Peer Built,” in Wolfe and Olson, Bristol Sessions, 33–​34; “The Bristol Sessions:  The Cast of Characters” (ibid., 47–​48); Donald Lee Nelson, “The Life

The Sacred in Country Music    409 of Alfred G.  Karnes” (ibid., 119–​129); and Thomas Townsend, “On the Vanguard of Change: Jimmie Rodgers and Alfred G. Karnes in Bristol, 1927,” (ibid., 214–​231). 5. The attribution of “Never Grow Old” to James Cleveland Moore masks a more complicated provenance. The song as created by Moore appears to be based on, or a revision of, “The Beautiful Land,” a gospel song attributed to Mrs. F. A. F. Wood-​White. The music of Mrs. Wood-​White’s song is attributed variously to Dr. A. Beirly (copyright 1896) or J. M. Hagan (copyright 1913 by Jno. T. Benson of Nashville, TN). Moore’s song shares the same meter; the same textual beginning; a similar melody in the verse, especially when the music is attributed to J. M. Hagan; and the same general subject. Most of the poetry of “Never Grow Old,” however, is newly written; and both the poetry and melody of Moore’s chorus are almost completely new. See “God’s Beautiful Somewhere,” Hymnary.org, accessed March 18, 2016, http://​www.hymnary.org/​text/​i_​have_​heard_​of_​a_​land_​on_​a_​far_​away_​ str; and Richard W. Adams, “Never Grow Old—​Moore,” Hymntime.com, March 15, 2015, accessed March 18, 2016, www.hymntime.com/​tch/​htm/​n/​e/​v/​nevergro.htm, for more information. 6. See Richard W. Adams, “James Cleveland Moore, 1888-​1962,” Hymntime.com, December 11, 2015, accessed March 18, 2016, www.hymntime.com/​tch/​bio/​m/​o/​o/​moore_​jc.htm. 7. This is also true of verse 2, as sung by Karnes. 8. Words in capital letters indicate alterations of Moore’s poetry. Moore wrote the fourth line of this verse as “ ‘Tis a land where we never shall die.” 9. How he played it, though, is a matter of some dispute. See relevant discussions in Nelson, “Alfred G. Karnes,” 121; and Townsend, “Vanguard of Change,” 228–​230. 10. Townsend, “Vanguard of Change.” 11. Digitized versions of recordings by these early gospel singers have been appearing on the Internet. One can now hear Ira D. Sankey sing “The Ninety and Nine”: “The Ninety and The Nine by Ira D. Sankey (1898),”Archive.org, accessed March 18, 2016, https://​archive. org/​details/​TheNinetyAndTheNineByIraD.Sankey1898; Charles McCallon Alexander sing various songs: “Charles McCallon Alexander. 1867–​1920: Noted Evangelist, Singer and Composer,” accessed March 18, 2016, http://​www.normanfield.com/​charlesalexander. htm; and Homer Rodeheaver singing “The Unclouded Day”: “Home Rodeheaver—​The Unclouded Day,” Pax41 Music Time Machine, YouTube video, 3:15, uploaded December 23, 2008, accessed March 18, 2016, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=dAgun-​X58kE. 12. Evangelist Billy Graham (b. 1918) has been the main representative of this tradition during the period in which country music has been a distinct genre. 13. General histories of the developments described here include George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture:  The Shaping of Twentieth-​ Century Evangelicalism:  1870-​1925 (Oxford, England:  Oxford University Press, 1980); William G. McLoughlin Jr., Modern Revivalism:  Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New  York:  The Ronald Press Company, 1959); William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-​1977, Chicago History of American Religion (Chicago, IL:  The University of Chicago Press, 1978); and Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, vol. 1, The Irony of It All, 1839-​1919 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1986); vol. 2, The Noise of Conflict, 1919-​1941 (1991), and vol. 3, Under God, Indivisible, 1941-​1960 (1996). 14. Bradbury’s musical settings of “Jesus Loves Me,” a poem by Anna B. Warner (1820–​1915), and “Just As I Am,” a poem by Charlotte Elliott (1789–​1871), are among the best-​known Sunday school songs.

410    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 15. Virginia Ann Cross, “The Development of Sunday School Hymnody in the United States of America, 1816-​1869” (DMA dissertation, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 1985), 566ff. This is perhaps the best scholarly study of Sunday school song. 16. For a description of how the term was coined, see Shearon et  al., “Gospel Music,” in The Grove Dictionary of American Music, ed. Charles Hiroshi Garrett, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); or Ira D. Sankey, My Life and the Story of the Gospel Hymns and of Sacred Songs and Solos (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906). 17. For a digitized version, see archive, “Gospel Songs by P. P. Bliss,” archive.org, accessed March 18, 2016, https://​archive.org/​details/​GospelSongs. 18. The Biglow and Main Company of New  York City was the successor to William B.  Bradbury’s firm. Biglow and Main purchased the Bradbury Company catalog and remained at the same location: 425 Broome Street in Manhattan. The first Biglow and Main gospel collection was Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs (1875), edited by Bliss and Sankey. Thereafter the collections were titled Gospel Hymns (1876, 1878, 1881, 1887, and 1891). The culminating publication was Gospel Hymns Nos. 1 to 6 Complete (1894), which Biglow and Main published in collaboration with The John Church Company. The next year (1895), the two companies published the Excelsior Edition of same; this is the best-​known of the publications mentioned here, having been reissued in a facsimile edition by Da Capo Press in 1972. Sankey’s British publication, Sacred Songs and Solos, first published in 1873, had a separate publication history. It eventually included 1,200 songs and is still in print. Its historical sales likely number over 100 million. 19. Similarly, gospel song became associated with Dwight L. Moody, and many still associate gospel song with him. See Kathryn L. Maxwell, “Sword of the Lord Publishers: American Protestant Fundamentalism and the Importance of Good Music” (master’s thesis, Middle Tennessee State University, 2011). 20. Note that many of the gospel song poets mentioned heretofore were female. Some scholars have noted the increased importance of the feminine voice in gospel song, with its emphases on humility, submission, domesticity, and maternal love, among other traits. See Sandra S.  Sizer (aka Sandra S. Frankiel and Tamar Frankiel), Gospel Hymns and Social Religion: The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-​Century Revivalism (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1978), 85ff., 197–​199. 21. By “northern states” I mean those states that fought for the Union in the American Civil War, especially those in the midwestern and northeastern United States. 22. Publisher James D. Vaughan of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, famously initiated this practice in 1910. See Shearon et al., “Gospel Music.” For more comprehensive treatments, see Douglas Harrison, Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music (Urbana–​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012), especially chap. 3; James R. Goff Jr., Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 62ff.; and Don Cusic, The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel and Christian Music, ed. Hal Leonard (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2002), in particular, chaps. 16, 18, 20, and 26. 23. Goff, Close Harmony, 88. 24. Wayne W.  Daniel and the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “A. P.  Carter (1891-​1960),” Encyclopedia Virginia, accessed June 15, 2016, http://​www.encyclopediavirginia.org/​ Carter_​A_​P_​1891-​1960#start_​entry; Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 2nd rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 324; and more generally, Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers:  Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1993), 26, 29–​30.

The Sacred in Country Music    411 25. Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 103ff. 26. Gabriel, a prolific songwriter, also supplied the music for “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” (1905) and “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” (1913) and worked for many years for Homer Rodeheaver’s publishing company. Habershon, an English hymnist, also was a significant figure. 27. Baker Publishing Group, “About Revell,” “The History of Fleming H. Revell,” accessed June 16, 2016, http://​bakerpublishinggroup.com/​revell/​about-​revell. Revell also published the first book completely devoted to the lives of gospel songwriters: J. H. Hall’s Biography of Gospel Song and Hymn Writers (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1914). Hall, who lived in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and was closely associated with The Ruebush-​Kieffer Company, dedicated the book “To all gospel song and hymn writers [and] to all singers and lovers of gospel song.” 28. Kevin Donald Kehrberg, “ ‘I’ll Fly Away’: The Music and Career of Albert E. Brumley” (PhD dissertation, University of Kentucky, 2010), 173ff. 29. Robert Darden, People Get Ready!:  A  New History of Black Gospel Music (New York: Continuum, 2004), 160–​195; and Shearon et al., “Gospel Music.” 30. Decca 9-​14573 (1951) and Columbia B 2824 (1954), respectively. 31. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 206, 225, 248–​249. 32. “Ford, Tennessee Ernie,” Encyclopedia of Popular Music, 4th ed. Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed June 15, 2016, http://​www.oxfordmusiconline.com/​subscriber/​article/​epm/​9159. 33. Capitol Records T 756 (1956, LP). The contents of Hymns (1956) were “Who At My Door Is Standing,” “Rock of Ages,” “Softly and Tenderly,” “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” “My Task,” “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning,” “The Ninety and Nine,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” “When They Ring the Golden Bells,” “In the Garden,” “Ivory Palaces,” and “Others”; “Hymns (Tennessee Ernie Ford album),” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, last modified September 23, 2014, accessed March 18, 2016, https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Hymns_​ (Tennessee_​Ernie_​Ford_​album). 34. Capitol Records T 818 (1957, LP). The contents of Spirituals (1957) were “Just a Closer Walk with Thee”; “I Want to be Ready”; “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”; “ Stand By Me”; “When God Dips His Love in my Heart”; “Get On Board, Little Children”; “ Noah Found Grace in the Eyes of the Lord”; “Were You There?”; “Peace in the Valley”; “I Know the Lord Laid His Hands on Me”; “Wayfaring Pilgrim”; and “He’ll Understand and Say ‘Well Done.’ ” “Tennessee Ernie Ford—​Spirituals,” Discogs, accessed March 18, 2016, https://​www.discogs.com/​Tennessee-​Ernie-​Ford-​Spirituals/​release/​3050201. 35. A good introduction to this topic is Cusic, Sound of Light, in particular chaps. 24–​25 and part 4. 36. The conflicts caused by these changing values came to be known as the “Worship Wars,” said now to be waning as congregations adapt; Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, “The Waning of the ‘Worship Wars,’” Christianity Today, posted January 6, 2016, accessed June 15, 2016, http://​ www.christianitytoday.com/​gleanings/​2015/​december/​waning-​of-​worship-​wars.html. 37. Maxwell, “Sword of the Lord Publishers.” 38. Cusic, Sound of Light, 242. 39. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and its unique role in American history are explained in John Stauffer’s and Benjamin Soskis’s study of the same: The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

412    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 40. “God Bless the USA,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, last modified December 22, 2016, accessed June 12, 2016, https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​God_​Bless_​the_​USA. 41. Capitol 2852 (recorded September 22, 1953 and realeased September 22, 1954). 42. Charles Wolfe, In Close Harmony: The Story of the Louvin Brothers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996). See also Charlie Louvin’s memoir, with Benjamin Whitmer, Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers (New York: Igniter, 2012). 43. Don’t Rock the Jukebox, Arista 12418. “Midnight in Montgomery” was released in April 1992 as the fourth single from this album. 44. Such scenes are not uncommon in Western music. Der Freischütz, a highly successful German romantic opera by Johann Friedrich Kind (poetry) and Carl Maria von Weber (music), first performed in Berlin in 1821, has a scene at the end of Act II that shares several characteristics with “Midnight in Montgomery.” 45. Silver Eagle is a brand of bus or motor coach, in this case used seemingly as a tour bus. 46. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 75, 369–​ 370. See also Curtis W. Ellison, Country Music Culture:  From Hard Times to Heaven (Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 1995), especially the “Introduction,” xiii–​xxiii; chap.  1:  “Mother Church,” 3–​25; and chap. 4: “Salvation,” 103–​160. 47. Sacralizing influential or esteemed artists is not new. Ludwig van Beethoven, to cite only one of many possible examples, was treated similarly in nineteenth-​century western culture. Hank Williams also has been referenced in other country songs. “The Ride” (1983), by Gary Gentry and J. B. Detterline Jr., which antedates “Midnight in Montgomery” by approximately nine years and is best known via David Allan Coe’s recording (Columbia, 38-​03778, 1983, 45 rpm), also evokes Williams’s ghost. In it, Hank’s ghost, driving “an antique Cadillac,” picks up the hitchhiker-​narrator and drives him from Montgomery to “just south of Nashville.” It is an encounter not only with Hank, but with a sacralized country music. 48. From Anderson’s album, Seminole Wind, BNA Entertainment BNA 07863 61029-​ 2 (1992, CD). 49. “Animism,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, last modified December 30, 2016, accessed June 14, 2016, https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Animism. Together with animist lifeways, the Seminoles practiced shamanism in which specially trained individuals—​ shamans—​interact with the spirit world on behalf of the community; “Shamanism,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, last modified January 2, 2017, accessed June 14, 2016, https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Shamanism. For more substantive information, see Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 50. See William C. Sturtevant and Jessica R. Cattelino, “Florida Seminole and Miccosukee,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 14, Southeast, ed. Raymond D. Fogelson (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2004), 429–​449; John K. Mahon and Brent R. Weisman, “Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Peoples,” in The New History of Florida, ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 183–​206; and James W. Covington, The Seminoles of Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993). 51. For more information, I  suggest beginning with Bruno Nettl et  al., “Native American music,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed June 14, 2016, http://​www.oxfordmusiconline.com/​subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​A2251909. In addition, see several helpful articles in The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 3, The United States and Canada, ed. Ellen Koskoff (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2001);

The Sacred in Country Music    413 Charlotte Heth, “Overview,” 366–​373; Victoria Lindsay Levine, “Southeast,” 466–​471; and Victoria Lindsay Levine and Judith A. Gray, “Musical Interactions,” 480–​490. 52. Introductions to this cultural background can be found in Bill C. Malone, “The Gospel Truth:  Christianity and Country Music,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music:  The Ultimate Guide to the Music, 2nd ed., eds. Paul Kingsbury, Michael McCall, and John W. Rumble, with the assistance of Michael Gray and Jay Orr, 202–​205 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Ted Olson, “‘Your Inner Voice that Comes from God’: Country Singers’ Attitudes toward the Sacred,” in Country Music Annual 2000, eds. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson, 4–​21 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000).

Chapter 20

Goin’ Hillbi l ly Nu ts Fashion Culture and Visual Style in Country Music Caroline Gnagy

On June 17, 1944, two young women stood on the Grand Ole Opry stage for the first time. Ruth Poe, age eighteen, cradled a mandolin purchased from the Sears and Roebuck catalog for $9.99; Ruth’s twenty-​year-​old sister, Nelle Poe, stood next to her with a flat-​top acoustic guitar. Both wore matching red and white striped pinafore dresses and low-​ heeled, peep-​toe pumps with turned-​down bobby socks. After being introduced by Opry founder George D. Hay, the Poe Sisters stepped up to the microphone and laid forth “Southern Moon,” “Time for the Whippoorwill to Sing,” and a crowd favorite, Roy Acuff ’s 1941 hit “Stuck-​up Blues.”1 The Poe Sisters became members of the Grand Ole Opry in the 1940s and performed on the Opry and as part of Ernest Tubb’s traveling tent shows from 1944 to 1946. They provide an interesting example of how modern young women—​albeit from humble beginnings—​navigated the world of country music in the midst of countless societal changes brought about by World War II, through both their visual style and their choice of music. “Stuck-​up Blues” centers around the protagonist’s observation of a “high society” man, essentially calling him out for getting “above his raisin’,” pointing out that the high society man in fact came from the same impoverished background as the protagonist. “Hey, hey, hey, don’t pull that stuff on me,” the song proclaims, stating that “I’m just a country boy, plain as I can be.” In “Stuck-​up Blues,” maintaining pride in one’s homespun, rustic roots is championed, and the man of “high society” is denounced as inauthentic, eschewing his own humble roots.2 The “don’t get above your raisin’ ” point of view was commonplace in country music from its earliest days in the 1920s when, as Malone noted, it “entered the world … with a southern accent and a cluster of preoccupations that reflected its southern working-​ class identity.”3 The familiarity of the family farm, hard work, homespun clothing made by one’s mother or wife, and a sense of rural, southern-​flavored conviviality prevailed in prewar country music—​especially that of barn dance radio and their accompanying stage shows—​and with these preoccupations came an expectation to look the part as

416    Oxford Handbook of Country Music well.4 Commonly—​as in Figure 20.1, the men wore overalls and rustic farm clothing, and the women wore pinafores, long dresses, calico, and gingham. Particularly in the barn dance environment of the 1920s and 1930s, early female stars were seldom allowed to project any significant image of being autonomous, instead reinforcing established ideas of a woman’s “proper place” in society. Regardless of their real-​life story, they were relegated to the roles of sweetheart, wife, daughter, or sentimental or “moral” mother and essentially only allowed to perform and succeed in country music if they maintained this nonthreatening visual image.5 As a musical genre, country music has traversed nearly a century of swiftly changing American culture, out of which has arisen a lively tradition of outstanding historical scholarship on the music, its culture, and the changes resultant from its commercialization and assimilation into mainstream culture. With beginnings as early as the mid-​ 1920s, country music had become a viable commercial genre through the radio and ever-​increasing record sales. By the late 1930s, country music was no longer limited to targeting regional audiences; it had truly solidified itself as an “American” style of music. As Jeffrey Lange discusses in Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly, country music’s “nationalization” developed alongside the “nationalization” of the listeners for whom it was created. World War II then ushered in what Lange defined as the next phase—​the

Figure 20.1  Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys wearing the “mountaineer” or “hillbilly” style of clothing. From Mountain Broadcast and Prairie Recorder (1944).

Fashion Culture and Visual Style in Country Music    417 “modernization” of country music. Changes in general twentieth-​century American consumer culture, commercialism, and mass media necessitated changes in country’s musical style and popular image to maintain relevance in that changing society, lest it lose its commercial appeal.6 Arising out of the changes in music and popular culture before and after World War II, new visual styles adopted by male and female performers challenged earlier expectations of “authenticity” in country music, albeit with different rules to follow, depending on the performer’s gender. Through the clothing worn in promotional photographs, onstage, and on album covers, the men and women of country music were able to negotiate their own public identities as country music performers and further redefine the genre for a changing audience. By the time their Opry performances began in 1944, the Poe Sisters maintained elements of traditional dress, already established for female country music performers, but with some significant modifications that provide fascinating insight into the ways that they chose to visually present themselves. Appearing more as girls than grown—​and, therefore, sexually desirable—​women, in Figure 20.2 the Poes wore homemade versions of the pinafore dresses with bobby socks and, interestingly, high heels. The high heels might be read as a nod to their status as modern-​thinking young women, but the bobby socks—​as Nelle Poe Yandell later suggested—​dispelled any implied sexual connotations by highlighting their “girlhood”:  “I guess he [Opry manager George D. Hay] just liked us ‘cause I guess we were just little farm girls and just tried to be good. In the old days, that’s how you had to be, you know?” However, she also spoke of their apprehension of adopting a fully “womanly” image at the time, even with the changing roles of women during World War II: “Everyone wore the bobby socks in the 1940s. … I don’t know what they would’ve done if they’d ever seen us dressed up [in adult women’s clothing]. Long as you was a little girl, you was all right.”7 The Poe Sisters represent an early example in negotiation of visual image for female country music performers; at the same time, men were also crafting their own negotiations due to the changing times. With a visual image consisting of mostly “hillbilly” attire prior to World War II, after the war, many male country music performers’ overalls were exchanged for western wear—​boots, hat, neckerchief, embellished western shirts and trousers—​influenced in large part from the success of the Hollywood “singing cowboys” such as Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and Roy Rogers. The women, including the Poe Sisters, also began incorporating flamboyant western wear into their visual image, made acceptable by Hollywood “singing cowgirl” Dale Evans, among others.8

Defining Visual Style in Country Music Since its earliest days, what country music “looks like” has changed countless times. In country music, “visual style” is represented through various signifiers, each with its own origin. Most adults—​and even children—​will acknowledge certain tropes when asked what they think a country music performer “looks like”; most frequently, cowboy

Figure 20.2  The Poe Sisters perform on the Grand Ole Opry. Courtesy of the Frist Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.

Fashion Culture and Visual Style in Country Music    419 boots and a cowboy hat are mentioned. Although these are certainly not the only motifs commonly associated with country music’s visual style, they are the most iconic, as evidenced in popular culture, Halloween costumes, art, and even the music itself. They have become ingrained as country music signifiers in the universal American consciousness. This stands true even as country music motifs in recent decades appear to be undergoing changes that redefine the country music norm, with the dirt roads and pickup trucks of “bro country,” and the increasing association of “redneck” culture with country music. Although cowboy boots and hats are almost universally associated with country music, the actual history of country music’s visual style—​similar to that of the music itself—​is decidedly more labyrinthine. Visual style plays a significant role in the perception of what is considered by most to be “country”—​both in music and image—​although scholarly discussions of country music’s overarching visual style, its relationship to the music it represents, and the extent of any country music performer’s participation in the development of his or her own visual image has not been explored in significant depth. Certainly clothing is the most apparent form of visual style, as it relates to individuals and is clearly meant to convey a particular image on the wearer’s part—​whatever that image may be. For country music performers, visual style is most clearly evidenced in the clothing, accessories, hair, and makeup they choose to present in promotional photographs, album covers, and onstage. Yet when we try to interpret the clothing of even one performer when examining these depictions, we find that no single interpretation of country music’s visual style, nor any definitive linear progression, exists. Even the meaning and expression within “western” clothing—​undeniably the dominant visual style of country music, with all its storied past—​has flip-​flopped several times since the first country music performers donned cowboy boots and hat. Numerous historians such as Holly George-​Warren, Bill Malone, and Richard Green have published engrossing studies of western and cowboy clothing and image, as well as its culture within the context of country music. In recent decades, rodeo culture has also played heavily into the visual styles worn by some country music performers, albeit vastly different in appearance from the clothing once created by country music’s most notable “rodeo tailors” such as Nathan Turk, Manuel, or Nudie Cohn.9 Within country music’s historic visual style, both western and non-​western, many factors are at play; for example, ever-​changing expectations and definitions of authenticity, gender conventions, and meaning of its stylistic symbols, or “tie-​ins”—​all of which were influenced by the seismic shift in American societal and lifestyle norms during the twentieth century.10 Furthermore, discussion of the visual impact aspect of an aural tradition is tricky business, at best. Jensen, in her book The Nashville Sound, drew similar conclusions about the stylistic development of country music itself, noting that “generalizations are easy to make about country music styles, tensions and resolutions, but it is maddeningly difficult to document. … Musical styles are not designed to be written about but to be heard.”11 However varied, fashion culture—​ with all its associated gendered conventions and expectations—​has permeated nearly all aspects of mainstream western culture.

420    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Moreover, since the postwar era, fashion culture has effectively defined the visual image of certain musical cultures and genres, as well as various youth subcultures.12 Fashion is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a “popular trend, especially in styles of dress and ornament or manners of behavior.” According to published scholarship on fashion, culture, and identity, the concept of “antifashion” simply represents what is not the current fashion trend reflected in mainstream culture; for example, “outdated” or archaic clothing and ethnic clothing that falls outside of mainstream fashion culture (saris, burkas, etc.). “Counterculture” expression is a derivative alternative to fashion that is defined by its acknowledgment of, but its dissent from, mainstream constraints, sometimes expressing dissent within a fashion context and often expressing dissent with aspects of larger society as a whole. Expression of counterculture fashion might be seen, for example, in the wearer who associates with aspects of musical subcultures such as punk rock, rockabilly, or hip hop.13 The perception and significance of visual style, as expressed through clothing, differs immensely between men and women, a distinction that lies not in country music culture, but within the sphere of mainstream western culture. For many centuries, women in Western society have been strongly encouraged to conform to certain (ever-​ changing) fashion expectations. An obligatory representation of respectability, femininity, and prosperity has historically been expected in the style of female dress, frequently expressed through varying degrees of extravagance.14 In contrast, male styles of dress have been far more restrictive over recent centuries, with few periods of overt extravagance in fashion, resulting in similar clothing styles, decade after decade. The “sameness” of the male dress style, contained in variations of suiting components, shirt and tie, has therefore contributed to fewer societal expectations for males to express themselves through fashion culture. Moreover, conformity is customarily encouraged for males because when viewed by general society, strong visible association to fashion culture by a male calls into question the wearer’s degree of masculinity and thus, adherence to social gender norms. The extent and intensity of personal expression through fashion is so markedly different in men and women that a comprehensive analysis of fashion in country music must be conducted through a gendered “lens,” allowing for better interpretation of male and female stylistic expression first by gender, then according to style. The fashions and personae embraced by individual country music performers vary greatly over time, challenging (and subverting) dominant gender and class conventions on an individual level.

Fashion Culture in Country Music Although ready-​to-​wear clothing, mass production, and the advertising industry in the United States had been actively developing since the advent of the industrial era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all three experienced an exponential increase after World War II. Narrative histories of the United States in the twentieth

Fashion Culture and Visual Style in Country Music    421 century frequently allude to the rise of advertising, mass-​produced goods, and postwar consumerism as a contributor to the development of the “middle class” after the conclusion of World War II. With a decrease in the divisions between American social classes, the expectation arose that the average American female remain staunchly in step with the newly redefined American lifestyle, elsewise be relegated to an undesirable status.15 After the apparel industry became a dominant factor of mainstream culture through its creation of ready-​to-​wear clothing, the privilege of being “fashionable” was no longer limited to wealthier classes in the United States. With the advent of mass production and the proliferation of visual mass communications through Hollywood and, later, television, consumers—​particularly female consumers—​often attempted to adapt their style according to these industries’ highly mutable guidelines concerning what was “in style” and what was not. Perhaps in a long-​dormant response to the perceived unfairness of archaic official (or unofficial) sumptuary laws, war rationing, and other limitations imposed on clothing according to social class, American women who previously possessed no financial means to be “fashionable” eagerly jumped into the fray. The male-​ dominated advertising industry, consumerism, and expectations of the female role as domesticated wife and mother—​particularly after World War II—​stoked the fires of women’s desire to maintain a fashionable image: so thoroughly, in fact, that these expectations have extensively permeated the social consciousness of the majority of women in western culture.16 This consumer-​driven fashion consciousness was gaining steam in women during the mid-​1940s, although they remained conscious of the need to conserve. Nonetheless, young women in western society still felt the desire to dress fashionably, even if within the confines laid forth by war rationing and meager incomes. With their “farm-​girl meets fashionable young woman” image, between 1944 and 1946 the Poe Sisters navigated the established expectations for female country music performers through their dresses and footwear. In their behavior, however, they did not challenge established notions of femininity. They left the Grand Ole Opry in 1946 after two years, citing Ruth Poe’s impending marriage as the impetus. Rather than Nelle Poe pushing on with a solo act, the breakup of the Poe Sisters brought about a retirement for both from the music business. They felt that to do otherwise would break with established expectations within not only country music but also within their (traditional, rural, and southern) family’s dynamic. For those who did continue in the business, changes in the image of country music performers occurred during the postwar culture of the late 1940s and early 1950s, conforming visually to gender conventions of mainstream American culture and dovetailing neatly with their traditional roles in country music. Pamela Fox has stated that the postwar American woman’s primary responsibility was to be an ideal homemaker. Georgia Christgau further notes that “the housewife image … implicitly countered the soaring divorce rate and the upheaval in women’s roles since World War II, when they had joined the workforce in unprecedented numbers, only to find upon the return of veterans that their jobs were no longer secure.”17 Machinery was out, aprons were in,

422    Oxford Handbook of Country Music and what better fit could there be for the long-​held idolatry of country music’s nostalgic home, with its sentimental wives and mothers? Kitty Wells is one of the foremost examples of this confluence, with her status as the first female country music star in the postwar era. Her photographs and album covers generally depicted either pinafore dresses—​in keeping with the “authentic” traditions already established for the women of barn dance radio—​or modest “housewifely” dresses, similar to those that most American women could find in the Main Street storefronts of their own towns. Both Fox and Christgau discuss Wells’s relationship to this image and her frequent acknowledgment that she had always been, first and foremost, a wife and mother and that she did not feel the need to portray anything more glamorous than what she felt she was, even with chart-​topping hits for nearly twenty years—​and for much of that twenty as the only woman in country music to rise to the Billboard top ten. Gentility, humility, and honest living were her trademarks; to hear Wells tell it, no crown was necessary for her long reign as Nashville’s “Queen of Country Music.” Kitty Wells clearly wished for her own visual style to match the simplicity with which she saw herself and her life. And while Wells’s visual image represented the ideals of womanhood in both country music and postwar American society, not all her contemporaries chose to dress as she did for their country music image, particularly if they did not associate closely with the barn dances of earlier decades. Beginning in the late 1940s and spanning until the late 1950s, “full western dress”—​designed by Nudie, Nathan Turk, and others—​ hit its apex. During that time, “western” or “ranch-​wear” trend in mainstream fashion culture ran concurrently with the visual styles in the music, and consequently the western mode of dress had less to do with gender roles in society and more to do with its associations to country music, regardless of the gender of the performer. Both male and female country music performers used various elements of expression within the western clothing spectrum, but generally ornate, flashy, expensive western wear was increasingly deemed “acceptable” for both genders when navigating their country music image.

Hillbillies and Cowboys The popularity, commercialization, and subsequent consumption of country music—​ as documented in studies by Pecknold, Peterson, and others—​loosely parallels that of the fashion industry.18 Both developed and became part of the national consciousness—​ that is, “mainstream” culture, undergoing a marked increase after World War II. Prior to World War II, the separate identifying characteristics of country music fashion were more sharply defined, with their contrivance supported by compelling studies of the “hillbilly” and “cowboy” image in earlier male and female country music performers. These groundbreaking studies show how the two images invoked the performer’s supposed point of origin—​with hillbillies harkening from the eastern states, and cowboys from the western states. These studies also trace the growth of early country music into a commercial, national, twentieth-​century musical genre, exploring the role that

Fashion Culture and Visual Style in Country Music    423 visual image played in its early development. As the genre became less associated with regional, and country music became part of national culture, the sharp divide between the hillbilly look and the cowboy look became less defined, and the cowboy look ended up as the dominant signifier of a country music performer. Richard Peterson, in Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity, suggests a number of expedient questions concerning the hillbilly image: If western and cowboy songs were not popular, why did the singing cowboy outfit, ever more divorced from the garb of a working cowboy, with its increasingly bright colors and growing profusion of piping, silver, and rhinestones, become the standard costume for country-​music performers right across the nation? Why did most hillbilly bands shed their coveralls, gingham dresses, brogan shoes, and straw hats for cowboy clothes, western boots, and Stetson hats?19

In his book Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers, Bill C. Malone discusses how the “singing cowboy” ended up as the dominant visual image associated with country music, suggesting that the more romantic and potently autonomous cowboy was more appealing to Depression-​era audiences who viewed the hillbilly with increasing negativity. Once a signifier of unpretentious “plain folk,” the hillbilly became divorced from this rurally nostalgic meaning, replaced by connotations of backwardness, ignorance, stubbornness, and foolishness. As such, Malone theorizes that many current country music stars wished to dissociate themselves from the hillbilly image and opted instead for the increasingly glamorous western look.20 While some musical acts may have made the switch—​consciously or not—​to replace the hillbilly with the cowboy, their motives for doing so may have been driven less by sociopolitical circumstances than by the simple need to physically stand out on stage. On both a logistical and material level, the highly embellished cowboy outfits worn by male and female country and western performers alike were highly visible on a stage or television screen and presented an imposing, thrilling, and altogether unforgettable experience for the audience, while distinguishing them visually from the burgeoning mainstream culture of pop or jazz music. The scintillant and often unique, custom-​ made, western-​style outfits also represented a zenith of tangible professional success in the eyes of performers and audiences alike. The advent of Hollywood certainly played the biggest role in the style of most clothing, and in particular, it created a frenetic desire for elaborate cowboy style. Gene Autry was one of the foremost proponents of highly embellished western wear, specified here as “Hollywood western.” In her book How the West Was Worn, author Holly George-​ Warren examines Autry’s promotional brochures, showing how, through the feature titled “Gene’s Closet,” his wardrobe was a significant part of his persona: For onstage appearances, he usually wears tight, tapered white pants and a multi-​ colored shirt, elaborately decorated. The shirt may be of gabardine, flannel, of high-​ lustre satin. It may be embroidered with sequins and beads, or hand-​painted, or

424    Oxford Handbook of Country Music appliquéd with contrasting floral design. … [T]‌here are some 150 of these shirts, and are produced by a Philadelphia maker who specializes in rodeo duds.21

Singer, actor, and songwriter Johnny Western also summarized his firsthand experience laying eyes on Autry’s impressive collection: I’ve stood there in Gene’s house and looked at those things with three hundred pairs of boots stating me in the face. Lucchese and several other custom boot companies made his boots out of every kind of exotic leather you ever dreamed of. … His shirts and pants were totally coordinated and made of every type of material from the heavy satins to the gabardines, and the embroidery was just beyond belief and the workmanship was tremendous. If it was not tremendous, Gene wouldn’t put it on.22

George-​Warren also notes that Autry’s wardrobe became more subdued after his military service during World War II, with longtime associate Alex Gordon’s assessment that “he became much more serious than he had been before.” Both in his movies and personal life, Autry began to favor plainer clothing, and by the 1950s, he often wore modern men’s business suits that were styled with western accents. In Figure 20.3, Autry poses in one of his earlier costumes with custom cowboy boots, a Western rodeo-​style shirt, and jodhpurs sporting western-​cut pockets. Autry was not alone in his later predilection for plainer, more “modern”—​yet still identifiably “western”—​fashions. As World War II dominated the news and the public consciousness, a simpler, more subdued clothing style—​heretofore referred to as “western classic”—​emerged for male country music performers. The “western classic” style

Figure 20.3  Well-​known “Hollywood cowboy” Gene Autry poses with his horse, Champion. Courtesy of Kevin Fontenot.

Fashion Culture and Visual Style in Country Music    425 combined the modern men’s business suit with a few western tie-​ins, such as single or double yokes on the shoulders and back of an otherwise modern-​cut suit jacket. Other tie-​ins used are curved pockets (with simple arrow embroidery) on suit jackets and trousers, and piping on cuffs, pockets, or lapels. Usually worn with a cowboy hat and boots—​ and sometimes, a neck scarf—​the “western classic” style became the new norm for many men of country music in the postwar era, even as the “Hollywood western” style remained popular with younger male and female performers in country music. Some of the first country music performers to wear the “western classic” style were Ernest Tubb (see Figure 20.4), Tex Ritter, and Jimmie Davis. Others followed; and although this remained popular for the older stars like Tubb, Ritter, and Davis, the “western classic” look soon morphed again. By the mid-​1950s, the “western classic” look had fully combined with that of the earlier, glitzy, “Hollywood western” style. Country music stars of the 1950s took the distinguished silhouettes of the “western classic” suit and navigated their own visual style by adding elements of the “Hollywood western” style, with all its penchant for embellishment. Hank Williams, Ray Price, Little Jimmy Dickens, and Webb Pierce enlisted the help of rodeo tailor Nudie Cohn and others to create some of the most unique stage costumes in the history of country music. Examples of these outfits are seen in the halls of Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and

Figure  20.4  Ernest Tubb, wearing the “western classic” style of clothing. Courtesy of Kevin Fontenot.

426    Oxford Handbook of Country Music are a testament to the creativity and freedom of 1950s country music stage costumes—​at least for the male performers.

Singing Cowgirls, Country Cuties, and Fashion Icons The theatricality of the “Hollywood western” style appealed to male and female country music performers searching for a way to stand out. Romantic, customizable, fashionable, yet still distinguishable as in accordance with country music’s dominant themes, the “Hollywood western” style made a strong “show-​biz” impression. Soon, western wear became the main identifier for country music performers and, in the 1940s and 1950s, morphed into bona fide “fashion” as western wear and “ranch wear” took mainstream American culture by storm. Goldie Hill, another Billboard top-​ten artist from Texas who emerged shortly after Kitty Wells, discussed the struggle she had with her visual style as a cowgirl—​in keeping with her rural Texas background—​and the later encouragement to portray the more traditional “hillbilly” image: In Texas, there were a lot of Western stores around. … Even people who weren’t singing wore those kind of Western outfits with fringe and leather inlay. My brothers wore the pearl button shirts with jeans. … After I was in Nashville awhile, I didn’t wear Western dresses all the time. The Opry frowned on that, they didn’t like it!23

It is easy to understand Hill’s struggle to navigate her growing stardom and her image in an oppositional direction to current trends of the early to mid-​1950s, as well as her own Texas heritage. While overalls, pinafores, and gingham dresses helped cement the identities of performers as country music artists, they simply could not compete with the immense visual potential and versatility of the cowboy image. One simply has to imagine highly embellished, glamorized versions of the aforementioned overalls, pinafores, and gingham dresses to understand the immediate appeal of the powerful, romantic western costumes for country music performers. In one supporting anecdote, Jonny Whiteside explained the goggle-​eyed appeal of showy, “full western dress” in his biography of Rose Maddox. The Maddox Brothers and Rose, he declared, “needed new finery to match the wild, new music they were playing. And a performer’s look was important. After all, people crowded around the bandstand when Bob Wills played, not only for the music but also to marvel at his handmade boots, which were rumored to have cost two hundred dollars.”24 Of their own outfits, Rose Maddox also referred directly to the visual impact the embellishments were meant to make: “We wanted a certain type, with bell bottom trousers and Eisenhower jackets. At the time, Gene Autry and them [singing cowboys] was the only one who used Turk’s uniforms. Then, we went a little beyond that, got kinda outstanding on it, to where you could really see us!”25 In Figure 20.5, the Maddox Brothers pose in western scarves, satin

Fashion Culture and Visual Style in Country Music    427

Figure  20.5 Promotional photograph of the Maddox Brothers and Rose wearing the “Hollywood western” style of clothing (from the author’s collection).

cowboy shirts, and slacks with western trim—​all highly embellished with heart and flower motifs. Rose stands front and center in a heavily fringed skirt and vest ensemble and a more feminine satin shirt, all embellished with a stylized flower motif to match her brothers’ slacks. As the lone female in the group, Rose Maddox’s visual image was particularly striking and inspirational to many, as she kept pace with—​sometimes even surpassing—​ her brothers, through the comedic antics and frenetic energy of their live shows. One audience member, country and rockabilly singer Wanda Jackson, told of her own life-​ altering decision after seeing the band perform: I remember seeing Rose Maddox and the Maddox Brothers. … I was so young, I was about seven, probably, and I can’t remember exactly what was in my head, but I do remember thinking, “Oh!, I’ve got to do that!” She looked so pretty, she had all this sparkly stuff on, and singing, and they were so energetic. I mean, for those days, it was very unusual, and it just excited me. And I said, “I’ve got to learn to do that,” and so I learned all of her songs, and she was very instrumental in my career, [and] my singing style, because I liked her feistiness.26

Jackson was still a young girl she saw the Maddox Brothers and Rose perform in the late 1940s, but she paid attention to the importance of visual style in a musical career. As her

428    Oxford Handbook of Country Music own singing career began to make strides in the mid-​1950s, she kept this in mind. Like the Poe Sisters, Jackson took charge of her own visual representation at the beginning of her career, even if that representation didn’t cleave as closely as the Poe Sisters’, to the Opry’s expectations of how young, unmarried, female country music performers should appear. Jackson designed the majority of her own stage and promotional costumes, and her mother sewed them into reality. Jackson later described a typical scenario of how her dresses were designed and sewn while navigating specific expectations—​this time, familial—​of femininity with respectability: Well, I was so thrilled about being invited to the Grand Ole Opry. I’d had a country song in the top ten or something. So I designed a special dress, and it had what we call a “sweetheart” neck[line]. And mother and I … when Daddy came in, he’d check the line here [gestures across chest]. And then when he’d leave, mother’d say, “How much you want me to take it down?” And I’d say, “Oh, about an inch.” [laughs].27

The inaugural issue of Rustic Rhythm magazine examined Jackson’s visual style—​both on and off the stage—​in what would become a monthly feature, “Fashions on Parade.” “Wanda Jackson Prefers a Three-​Way Wardrobe,” the headline explained: Wanda’s wearing apparel consists of a three-​way assortment. … the simple skirt and blouse-​type outfits, which the young star loves to wear around the house; fringed and fitted garments for her professional appearances; and shimmery gowns, potent with glamour, for dates and varied socials.28

Two of the “three-​way” looks—​the sweater and skirt “around the house” combos and the glamorous “date night” dresses—​did not involve non-​performance–​related activities, instead highlighting Jackson’s status as a dutiful daughter and an attractive, available, and above all, fashionable young woman. However, with the “fringed and fitted” performance wear looks, Jackson was clearly trying to portray her identity as a country music (and early rockabilly) singer with a fashionable sensibility and a definitively “womanly” silhouette. Two photographs feature form-​fitting sheaths of a modern cut, with rhinestones lining shoulder-​baring or one-​shoulder necklines, and cascaded tiers of six-​inch fringe down the skirt, beginning at Jackson’s hips. Another performance costume shows stronger western tie-​ins, with arrow-​shaped belt loops and curved, fringed pockets and neckline, all with contrasting piping. No cowboy hats, boots, or scarves completed this look; in Figure 20.6, Jackson added only stiletto heels and a wavy, shoulder-​length hairstyle. Even for her first appearance onstage, however, Jackson was not allowed to wear the dress she had designed. She spoke of the painful experience in director Beth Harrington’s documentary film Welcome to the Club: Women of Rockabilly: I was backstage and ready to go on, and I was on Ernest Tubb’s portion. So he came back, and he looked around, and I was the only one there … had my guitar on. He

Figure 20.6  “Fashions on Parade” featuring Wanda Jackson (Rural Rhythm, April 1957).

430    Oxford Handbook of Country Music said, “Are you Wanda Jackson? I said, “Yes, sir.” He said, “Okay, you’re on next.” I said, “Great, I’m ready.” And he looked at me and he said, “Well … honey, you can’t go onstage at the Grand Ole Opry like that!” And I said “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, you can’t show your shoulders. I said, “Well, it’s the only dress I have. He said, “Well, you’ll have to cover it up. He said, “You’ve got about two minutes.” So I had worn, luckily, a pretty decent-​looking leather jacket with the long fringe on the arms. That’s all I could do. I was in tears. Put that old coat on, put my guitar back on, went out there, and tried to sing, but you know, I was trying to cry, and sing, and I was so upset.”29

Even into the 1950s, the visual image of female performers was carefully orchestrated, particularly on the Grand Ole Opry and newer, televised barn dance series such as Tex Ritter’s (1957) Ranch Party series. Even though the silhouette and cut of their pinafore and gingham dresses usually adhered to current fashion standards, the hyperstylized “country cutie” embellishments—​including rickrack, grosgrain ribbon, ruffles, and more—​were contrary to current fashion trends. Through the gendered lens of fashion culture that pervaded at the time, the majority of female country performers whose careers began in the 1950s did not want to look like a “bumpkin”—​but neither did they wish to look like a cowgirl. By this time many female performers bucked against the industry’s established expectation that they would wear old-​fashioned hillbilly clothing and began attempts to redirect their visual image with varying degrees of success. When Patsy Cline broke the mold of country music’s visual and aural expectations of its female performers in the late 1950s, these women used her as inspiration and courage to step out of the petticoats and into something a little more glamorous. In her autobiography, country music star Jan Howard described the first time she saw Patsy Cline sing at the Grand Ole Opry and how her own “country cutie” stage costume—​typical of a female Opry newcomer—​stacked up against Cline’s ensemble: When she walked up on stage in her fringed cowgirl outfit and her white cowboy boots and sang “Walking After Midnight,” I thought, Now that’s show biz. Suddenly I felt frumpy in my gingham dress. It wasn’t what I felt good in, but I’d been told that was what I should wear if I was going to be in country music. I couldn’t wait to take it off.30

In terms of visual style, Cline was something of an anomaly, as she did not originally wish to represent herself as anything other than a country singer. She constantly fought for the opportunity to wear her western clothing at performances and in photos, eventually losing steam on this argument once she reached her career zenith in the early 1960s. According to Jensen and various biographers, Cline firmly believed her personal style expression—​both vocally and visually—​should reflect that she was a country singer. Furthermore, like earlier country stars of the 1940s, Cline felt strongly that “Hollywood western” style clothing—​with leatherwork and fringe—​fully represented her visual style.31 As the Poes, Maddox, and Jackson had done before her, Cline resolutely took

Fashion Culture and Visual Style in Country Music    431 the helm of her own visual representation. Although certainly not the first at crafting her own visual style as a female country music performer, Cline’s ascent into crossover superstardom portended great changes in the visual perception of country music women going forward. Like Jackson, Cline regularly designed her own performance attire, and often had her mother sew her designs into being. Cline wore her own designs frequently, and can be seen wearing her creations in some of her popular photographs.32 Examination of eight of Cline’s designs generates some insights into what appears to be the “missing link” between cutting-​edge fashion culture of the period and the seemingly oppositional representation of femininity in traditional country and western wear. Somehow, Cline seamlessly navigated the paradox of conflicting expectations between fashion and antifashion for females in country music. She attempted to meld the two factions’ oppositional visual demands in every design, acceding in some designs more to the accepted visual conventions of country music and, in others, to current fashion culture. Out of the eight stage costume designs presented, Cline designed no dresses that would be completely acceptable to either faction. First, seven of her eight designs all display a hyperfeminine, body-​hugging silhouette that represented the height of late-​1950s fashion. One dress, however, retains the full “circle” skirt that took over Western culture a decade before with the 1947 unveiling of Christian Dior’s “New Look.”33 Six of the eight dresses have a moderate to low “sweetheart” neckline, which, in varying degrees of modesty, had retained popularity in mainstream fashion culture for at least one to two decades. All of the dresses contain one to two forms of embellishment or tie-​in symbols reflective of Cline’s self-​identification as a musical performer; moreover, a country music performer. Six of the eight dresses contain fringe, a trim strongly identified with cowboy and western wear; of these six, two display horseshoes, two display stars, and three display musical motifs such as a musical bars, treble clefs, and musical notes.34 By most accounts, Cline is considered to have been a singularly unique individual when it came her music, her technical singing, her wit, verve, and forceful personality and physicality. All of these attributes, as well as the visual style she presented—​particularly after her “crossover” to the pop world and, later, her untimely passing—​bestowed an aspirational legacy, if not downright mythology—​for countless female performers (not just country performers) to emulate in subsequent decades. With the designs speaking in her voice, the eight costumes shows that Patsy Cline clearly possessed an indomitable will to steer her course according to her own wishes. As has been documented in many other aspects of her life, in her own visual style, Cline was not the first to design her own stage costumes, but she was the first to successfully thwart the dominant paradigms of both fashion culture and gender roles in traditional country music. With these few dresses, she forced a compromise from fashion and country music, forming a singular visual image that was at once fashionably modern (for the time), showy and sexy, stylistically embellished, and “country” all at the same time. Once she adopted a more straightforward contemporary fashion in her stage costumes by the early 1960s, she set the stage for future female country music performers and the

432    Oxford Handbook of Country Music era of the “country cutie”—​with the exception of parodies such as the television hit variety show Hee Haw—​was over. In the years since, female country music performers have consistently cultivated a more fashionable visual style, one that is less associated with “western” or “hillbilly” than with current designers and trends.

Rodeo Culture in Modern Country Music Since the 1950s, fashion culture has redefined and reinvented itself endlessly. Certainly the “Hollywood western” style, with all the glitz and glamour courtesy of “rodeo tailors” such as Nudie Cohn, Rodeo Ben, and Nathan Turk, is no longer considered a strong presence in mainstream fashion culture of recent decades. With some exceptions, since the 1960s, the majority of stage and promotional costumes for male and female country music performers have observed current fashion trends of the era. For country music performers in the last few decades, however, cowboy boots and hats have consistently acted as the ultimate visual signifiers of country music. Furthermore, the western clothing worn by some of the country music stars since the late 1970s is representative of one of the West’s longest-​held traditions: the rodeo. In examining photographs of working rodeo riders from the 1930s onward, it is clear that “rodeo tailors” like Cohn, Turk, and so on designed their exquisite costumes only for cowboy and rodeo stars for parades, photographs, and performances, and not for the sport itself. The average men and women riders have, over the decades, consistently worn plain, durable clothing: cowboy-​style work boots, plain cotton shirts, denim blue jeans, and—​if it stayed on—​a well-​worn cowboy hat.35 In 1981, Texas native George Strait—​the son of a rancher and an amateur rodeo rider himself—​released his debut album, Strait Country. With simple, honest songs in the tradition of older country music artists, and with his “costume” of plain button-​down cotton shirt, jeans, cowboy work boots, and cowboy hat, Strait was a clean-​cut, groundbreaking reification of early country music’s rural rusticity, nostalgia, and simplicity. While publicizing his album and conducting interviews, Strait made known several ground rules he had made for himself: first, his private life would remain private; second, he would never move to Nashville; and third, he would never take off his cowboy hat, whether or not anyone found it “fashionable.”36 New York music critic Gino Falzarano said this of Strait and his image: In real life, we all know that George really loves the rodeo, and his life on horseback, as a rodeo rider. It’s basically the cowboy as loner that seems to shine through in all of his songs. … He perpetuates the image of the West, and the roadside saloon. There is almost an innocence to the whole lifestyle of the cowboy. And, as opposed to so

Fashion Culture and Visual Style in Country Music    433 many of the singers in Nashville today, George Strait is a real cowboy, not just someone who has put on a cowboy hat and is pretending to be a cowboy.37

The power of George Strait’s visual style, one that dovetailed perfectly with his music, influenced countless male country singers who followed, such as Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson, and later morphed into what are known as the “hat acts” of country music, with recent artists such as Brad Paisley, Kenny Chesney, and more. In the decades since, the country music sounds emanating from beneath the hats have changed somewhat, but the dominant visual style in male country music performers has changed little. Although rodeo culture in country music is mainly represented through the male performers, Reba McEntire represents an example of this in female country music performers. McEntire, the daughter of a championship rodeo rider, grew up completely immersed in the rodeo culture, and rode herself for many years, intersecting with her music career. Similar to Strait, McEntire’s music was traditional compared to her contemporaries; and she, too, was unafraid to wear the simple clothing of the rodeo. However, through the gendered lens of fashion culture, McEntire has historically been much more lenient with her visual style, allowing for not only western and “country cutie” attire, but remaining within the context of current fashion trends and the requisite glamorous stage clothing of most female country stars since the days of Patsy Cline.

Counterculture Fashion in Country Music In the larger sphere of fashion culture, cowboy hats and boots historically represent an alternative expression of personal style, one outside of the norm of current fashion culture. Studies of fashion and identity in mass culture have classified attire-​related stylistic expression into fashion, antifashion, and counterculture, yet these categories do not represent the clothing itself. Rather, they exist to define a form of expression for both the wearer and the beholder; the message and meaning attached therein. In Fashion, Culture, and Identity, Fred Davis asserts that “through clothing people communicate some things about their persons, and at the collective level, this results typically in locating them symbolically in some structured universe of status claims and life-​style attachments.”38 Therefore, the attire itself remains infinitely fluid between those three categories at any given time, and is subject not only to the time in which it is beheld but also the spirit in which is worn. To what end, therefore, can the messages and meaning in fashion and visual style be analyzed within the context of country music? One significant example of counterculture fashion by a country music performer is Johnny Cash’s “man in black” image, developed and perpetuated solely by him in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Epitomizing countercultural expression in the visual style of country music, Cash’s use of black clothing serves as a sound example of how a country

434    Oxford Handbook of Country Music performer can apply visual style within the context of their music. Already possessed of a somber physical appearance and demeanor, since the beginning of his career, Cash’s music frequently contained ambivalent, darker themes of guilt, despair, rebellion, and resignation. He witnessed and wrote of unfairness, violence, and oppression. He felt, and felt deeply; therefore, he developed and embraced the iconic “man in black” image as a response to the overarching sociopolitical climate of the United States. Wearing a “hair shirt” of sorts, the “man in black” represented what Cash perceived as his responsibility to serve as both acknowledgment of, and a voice against, various forms of societal oppression. He forever attached himself to the image he developed; and in 1975, he released “his own story in his own words”: the 1971 song titled “The Man in Black.” Moreover, with this song Cash orchestrated his countercultural expression on a literary level and a visual level, tying it in quite directly with his music. As the “man in black,” Cash dispersed to the world an incontrovertible social message, which Leigh Edwards has described as merging “autobiography, social message, narrative persona, and political critique into a pedagogical message about how listeners should interpret his black clothes.”39 As subgenres of country music have developed—​albeit usually arising out of the “mainstream” in response to whatever dominant establishment currently holds sway in country music—​earlier visual representations and permutations of country music visual signifiers have surfaced, disappeared and resurfaced, mutated then into a different, often countercultural, context—​be it the hillbilly, the cosmopolitan, or the outlaw. As country music and its visual style has come to wholly represent what is “fashion,” in recent decades the Americana, rockabilly, and western swing country music subgenres contain a myriad of stylistic expressions that cling to visual authenticity, employing certain motifs and imagery that, in country music, have already gone through fashion culture’s revolving door. Coming full circle, the music itself—​through song lyrics—​ occasionally makes reference to the music and fashion of earlier country music’s yore. Bringing joy and positivity once more to the long-​maligned appellation of “hillbilly,” for example, the traditionalist musical group BR5-​49 cleverly references the postmodern co-​opting of musical and youth subcultures through fashion in their song, “Little Ramona (Gone Hillbilly Nuts)”: She’s done traded in her Docs [Doc Martens work boots] for kicker boots/​Safety pinned tee shirts for Manuel suits. … She ain’t ashamed of the way she was /​She hears old Hank and she can’t get enough /​Her punk rock records are gathering dust /​ Little Ramona’s gone hillbilly nuts.40

Not only relegated to alt-​country or neo-​traditionalist genres of country music, counterculture expression can be found in even the modern clothing worn by current performers of country music, both male and female. “Redneck culture” has come to a recent zenith in American culture, for example. Elements of modern “redneck” culture’s values are also found in early country music—​an identification with rural rusticity, tradition, family, religion, and southern roots—​along with the added restlessness and ambivalent

Fashion Culture and Visual Style in Country Music    435 feelings toward authority that have been found in the “outlaw” country genre, holding a particular allure for young people today. Visual identifiers of modern “redneck” culture are often employed in music videos and some stage wear—​tie-​ins such as camouflage-​ print fabric, baseball or trucker caps, and overtly Christian symbols such as crosses (especially when used in conjunction with other tie-​ins)—​can associate any wearer with the country music genre. As with many youth subcultures that contain a musical association, identifiably “redneck” clothing is no longer worn only by the performer to communicate an aspect of their identity; rather, it is also worn by the country music fan, so that any beholder can associate them with not only the lifestyle but the music. Identity, as expressed through the fashion and visual style of country music, has undergone an immeasurable amount of change in nearly ten decades. Most significantly, country music’s visual style—​as well, some would argue, as the music itself—​ has become increasingly associated with mainstream fashion culture. It has, in essence, become a fashion statement, as evidenced in the stylistic expression of its current stars. For example, country music star Carrie Underwood is arguably one of country music’s most visible figures, and has been the subject of dozens of mainstream fashion and women’s magazines over the last decade. Although rarely stepping out of the realm of country music as a profession, Underwood has become a bona fide fashion icon in the mainstream; representing, in essence, all that is fashion culture today. Notwithstanding their early struggles as visual signifiers, the ubiquitous cowboy boots and hat still play, and will always play, a role in country music. However in general, the visual style of country music remains fluid, capricious, and paradoxical: as numerous as the identities of its performers.

Notes 1. The Poe Sisters, interview by John Rumble, July 14, 2004, video. Oral History Project, Frist Archives at the Country Music Hall of Fame, Nashville, TN. 2. Rumble interview with the Poe Sisters, 2004. 3. Bill Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 15. 4. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, 22–​23; Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 11; Kristine McCusker, Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-​Tonk Angels: The Women of Barn Dance Radio (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 11–​12. 5. A 2004 essay by scholar Kristine McCusker presents a compelling case study of barn dance radio star Linda Parker (also known as “The Little Sunbonnet Girl”); Kristine McCusker, “Bury Me Beneath the Willow: Linda Parker and Definitions of Tradition on the National Barn Dance, 1932-​1935,” in A Boy Named Sue:  Gender and Country Music, ed. Kristine McCusker and Diane Pecknold (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), 3–​23. 6. Jeffrey J. Lange, Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly:  Country Music’s Struggle for Respectability, 1939-​1954 (Athens: University of Georgia, 2004), 1–​8. 7. Rumble interview with the Poe Sisters, 2004. 8. Holly George-​Warren, How the West Was Worn (New York: Abrams, 2001), 72–​85.

436    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 9. Western designers Nathan Turk, Nudie Cohn, and Manuel glamorized the western image significantly, beginning with the golden era of the Hollywood cowboy, but in general, they did not make clothing for the average rodeo performers. These performers needed inexpensive, hardy clothing to perform, such as denim dungarees and cotton shirts (see George-​Warren, How the West Was Worn). 10. Fashion studies explain “tie-​ins” as items of clothing worn with intent to associate the wearer with a particular aspect of a culture or subculture. For example, “western” tie-​ ins would be a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, or neckwear such as a scarf, bandanna, bolo, or string tie; Ruth Rubinstein, Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 206. 11. Joli Jensen, The Nashville Sound:  Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music. (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press/​Country Music Foundation Press, 1998), 90. 12. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), 17; Rubinstein, Dress Codes, 191–​205. 13. Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 180–​181; Hebdige, Subculture, 73–​89; Rubinstein, Dress Codes, 191–​205. 14. Deirdre Clancy, Costume Since 1945:  Couture, Street Style and Anti-​ fashion (New York: Drama Publishers, 1996), 7, 9; Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity, 175. 15. Angela Partington, “Popular Fashion and Working-​ Class Affluence,” in Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, ed. Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 145–​161. 16. Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity, 175; Partington, “Popular Fashion,” 156–​157. 17. Fox, Natural Acts, 67; Georgia Christgau, “Kitty Wells:  The Queen of Denial,” in Country Boys and Redneck Women, ed. Diane Pecknold and Kristine McCusker (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 219. 18. For more information on the rise of country music and its commercialization, see Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Joli Jensen, Nashville Sound; Lange, Call Me a Hillbilly. 19. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 92. 20. For more on the “hillbilly vs. cowboy” image in country music, see Bill Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993). 21. George-​Warren, How the West Was Worn, 76. 22. Ibid. 77. 23. Ibid. 117. 24. Jonny Whiteside, Ramblin’ Rose:  The Life and Career of Rose Maddox (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), 62. 25. Ibid. 26. Welcome to the Club: the Women of Rockabilly, directed by Beth Harrington (2001; Seattle, WA: m2k Music, 2004), DVD. 27. Welcome to the Club. 28. “Fashions on Parade,” Rustic Rhythm 1, no. 1 (April 1957): 44–​45. 29. Welcome to the Club. 30. Jan Howard, Sunshine and Shadow (New  York:  Richardson and Steirman, 1987), 188 (emphasis in original).

Fashion Culture and Visual Style in Country Music    437 31. Jensen, Nashville Sound, 99; Margaret Jones, Patsy:  The Life and Times of Patsy Cline (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 96. 32. Country Music Foundation and Paul Kingsbury, Patsy Cline:  Crazy for Loving You (Nashville, TN: Country Music Foundation Press, 2012), 38–​39. 33. Clancy, Costume Since 1945, 10–​11; Partington, “Popular Fashion,” 154–​155. 34. Country Music Foundation, Paul Kingsbury, Crazy for Loving You, 38–​39. 35. Examination of historical photographs of working rodeo contestants over the decades can be found in books such as Joel Bernstein’s Wild Ride: The History and Lore of Rodeo (Layton, Utah:  Gibbs Smith, 2007) and Mary Lou LeCompte’s Cowgirls of the Rodeo:  Pioneer Professional Athletes (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 36. Mark Bego, George Strait: The Story of Country’s Living Legend (New York: Kensington Books, 1997), 42. 37. Ibid. 146. 38. Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity, 4. 39. Leigh H. Edwards, Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009), 54. 40. BR5-​49, “Little Ramona (Gone Hillbilly Nuts),” BR5-​49 (Arista Nashville, 1996).

Chapter 21

Whither the T wo - S​ t e p Country Dance Rewrites Its Musical Lineage Jocelyn R. Neal

“Everybody does the Wobble!,” he said, then laughed and headed out to the dance floor. I was talking to a dancer in the Cadillac Ranch, a country bar in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where, at the moment, rapper V.I.C.s (2008) track by the same title was blaring. The dance floor was filled with patrons “wobbling,” a line dance of hip hop origins known for gyrating hips and a very simple pattern of steps.1 This rap song and its choreographed line dance comfortably and unapologetically occupied sonic and floor space amid the trappings of a western-​themed, roadhouse honky tonk designed and decorated to evoke cowboy country. And the dancers, all country fans out for a night of country line dancing, wobbled. Although the inclusion of hip hop music and dancing in the country genre’s nightclub, bar, and dance scene is, in itself, nothing new, the pervasive nature of it in 2016 prompts reflection.2 Indeed, the changes in country dance practice run parallel to changes in country fan culture and in the musical genre itself. This chapter outlines three fundamental shifts in the practices of country dancing from about 2005 to 2015, each of which provides insight into the larger trajectory of country music and fan culture during these years. The first is the disappearance of partner dancing, specifically the iconic two-​step, and its replacement with a menu of hip hop-​styled line dances. This particular trend is in concert with a change in how contemporary country music recognizes and represents its own musical past. The second, and most striking feature, is an increased regionalization of dance styles: what had been a more uniform set of dance practices at a national level has morphed into increasingly distinctive and differentiated regional and local practices. The third is that the remnants of previous styles of country dancing such as two-​stepping have migrated out of the country fan scene and taken up residence in the world of social dance studios and formalized classes completely disconnected from the music’s cultural identity. Collectively, these trends in country dance indicate an increasing tension within the genre between two ever-​present social forces: the assimilation of country into mainstream culture on one hand and the opposing, stark differentiation of

440    Oxford Handbook of Country Music country that projects a divisive otherness in relation to mainstream popular culture on the other.

Past Traditions Ever since the commercial genre of country music coalesced into a recognizable entity in the early twentieth century, dancing has been a way that fans connect to the music.3 Although much of the scholarly writing on country music has downplayed or even ignored the dancing that accompanied it, we know that a number of dance styles co-​ existed with the string band and fiddle music that was common Saturday night entertainment in the southeast during the early twentieth century. The dancing in those regions included square and round dance patterns, along with solo clogging, flat-​ footing, and buck-​and-​wing dancing. Accounts of commercial country music’s emergence from these traditions, both in the form of radio shows (notable for our purposes for their common name of “barn dances”) and in the form of commercial recordings, are all tied to the development of the music largely in dance contexts. In Linthead Stomp, for instance, historian Patrick Huber repeatedly points out that community dances were where musicians met each other, honed their craft, and stayed up all night to provide the service of playing for dancers. The actual dancing eludes depiction in most of these accounts, although Huber adds that banjo player and soon-​to-​be hillbilly star Charlie Poole entertained crowds at his concerts “between musical sets by cracking jokes, clogging, and dancing the buck-​and-​wing.”4 Furthermore, and critical for understanding later generations of country dancing, the settings in which those rural dance styles were cultivated also included more cosmopolitan and urban-​sophisticate dance styles, including the Charleston.5 With the emergence of western swing, largely at the hands of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys and centered in the Southwest in the 1930s, country dancing moved closer to what would crystalize as its iconic form four decades later. Broad regional distinctions were perceptible, the result of different immigrant populations (both recent and long-​established) fostering ethnic and culturally specific dance practices in different locales. Slavic and German immigrants in Texas, for instance, contributed folk styles of dance including the schottische and polka, both of which grafted onto emergent country music culture. Furthermore, the economically-​driven migration patterns within the United States during the 1930s and 1940s gave rise to honky tonks in the Southwest that catered to a displaced population of young people eager for a night’s entertainment of live music, drinking, and—​notably—​dancing. Historian Peter LaChapelle has documented the proliferation of dance halls in Southern California in particular, where the young population who had flocked to the region for war-​industry jobs and urban life could find live music and an open floor at dozens of western swing ballrooms seven nights a week.6 The actual dancing in these venues was notably similar to that in other (non-​country) popular music venues of the swing era: partner dancing, with couples

Country Dance Rewrites Its Musical Lineage    441 in physical contact, dancing in the form of swing and foxtrot steps. And across the Southwest, honky tonks and dance halls became sites for music and dance to develop in tangential and intertwined relationships with each other: musicians played for dancers to dance; dancers kept the dance halls in business so they could hire musicians, who played long gigs there, honing their musicianship and developing repertory.7 Two significant aspects of country dancing from this era shaped practices for decades to come. The first was the distinct regional differences that persisted. Leon McAuliffe, the longtime steel guitar player for Bob Wills’s Texas Playboys, explained: “[West of the Mississippi] we played for dancing. East of the Mississippi they played a show … just for people to sit and listen … , not for dancing.”8 While such a binary categorization oversimplified the situation, the underlying observation has remained valid and has even more purchase in today’s dance environment: country dancing is simply different in different geographic regions, and a general East Coast–​West Coast binary persists. The second aspect of country dancing that has carried a lasting impact is that in many regions where dancing was popular, the styles of dance, footwork patterns, and specific names of different dances were subsumed into a generalized practice known just as generic “dancing.” In other words, country music fans and dancers did not maintain specific vocabulary to describe the various dance patterns and practices. This description held from the Intermountain West all the way to the West Coast. I interviewed several couples who had lived in New Mexico and Colorado and danced extensively in the three decades following World War II. All recounted some version of what longtime social dancer Vicky Winner told me: “Back then, it was just dancing. I guess it’s what we call a two step today, but we just called it ‘dancing.’ ”9 Without distinctive descriptions of different footwork or patterns of movement for different music, “dancing” took on a social role as a fan’s intrinsic, embodied response to music in a public venue. The dancers moved their feet in a repeating rhythmic pattern of “slow-​slow-​quick-​quick” steps, which some chose to describe in the permutation “quick-​quick-​slow-​slow,” for duple-​meter music. Their patterns were slightly different for triple-​meter music. But in each case, the dancing simply emerged as a habitual body movement and a characteristic phenomenology fused together with country music. Two pivotal moments in the history of country dance occurred first with the advent of rock and roll in the 1950s and 1960s, and subsequently with country music’s rise to unprecedented levels of popularity a decade or so later. The first of these sounded the (temporary) death knell for social partner dancing in general (including country dancing), as teenagers took over dance floors with new, freer types of movement that eschewed both the formally prepared rhythmic steps and the essential connection with a partner that characterized their parents’ earlier styles. Rock and roll, from its “twisting” days onward, was music for dancing, but without the structural expectation of couples-​ oriented partner dancing.10 This basic shift in dance practice corresponded to rock music’s connection with a particular segment of the population: prior to World War II, popular music reached multiple generations of fans at the same time, and the modern concept of teenagers as people with leisure time and money with a separate, sexually charged culture that rejected adult participation simply did not yet exist. In the new

442    Oxford Handbook of Country Music musical environment of rock music, as rock musicologist John Covach has explained, rock was “popular music produced specifically for a youth audience,” a new concept in musical genres that separated audiences more starkly by generation.11 In that segmented fan culture, parents no longer transmitted their dance styles directly to youth, nor did they participate in multigenerational dances. This generational stratification, combined with the self-​reflexive and rebellious, antiestablishment characteristics of rock music, led young fans to eschew the partner dancing of their parents. The second pivotal moment, which brought partner dancing back, occurred in the late 1970s as music venues returned to a more central role in community formation, particularly in working-​class communities. With the focus on community formation, music in those venues shifted more to a service role of accompanying social interaction between fans, which often took the form of dancing. Partner dancing became a learned way to enact one’s belonging within a particular community. In short, disco and country music thrived in venues where partner dancing offered a convenient medium of interaction and communication for fans. This resurgence of partner dancing was captured on film—​and thus further amplified—​by the figurehead (and feet) of actor John Travolta. “An urban cowboy doesn’t have to know how to brand or rope or hog-​tie or bulldog … but he does have to know how to dance.”12 This oft-​quoted description of the central role of country dancing for a cowboy comes from Aaron Latham’s (1978) New Journalism piece on the country dance scene in Gilley’s, a cavernous urban dance hall and nightclub in Pasadena, Texas, where a mostly white, working-​class population both urban and suburban cultivated personal identities as cowboys and cowgirls. Latham and James Bridges adapted the article into a screenplay, which became Urban Cowboy, a 1980 film starring Debra Winger and John Travolta. “Do you two-​step?,” are the first words Sissy (played by Winger) says to Bud (Travolta). Although country music was already heading confidently into mainstream popular culture for a large segment of white middle-​ and working-​class Americans as a result of larger economic and nationalist trends, Urban Cowboy catapulted it into a dominant cultural fad. Moviegoers were fascinated by the two-​step dancing depicted in the film. Swept along by the rising tide of country music’s overall popularity, they sought local versions of the venue immortalized in the film where they, too, could try out a two-​step. Dance instructors and purveyors of western wear stepped in to fill the growing demand from fans who wanted to two-​step—​and dress—​just like Travolta’s character “Bud.”. There was no pretense among these new fans that they were investing in the country music’s rich and complicated history or digging deep in to its musical roots. Nor did the music industry assume that the rituals of country fandom such as two-​stepping were native, instinctive, or in any way a natural ability of people who listened to country music. These behaviors were learned—​from readily available books, VHS tapes, and lessons—​and treated like commodities that accessorized the music.13 For the fans who flocked to their local “country discos” (as they were often called) and other country music venues, participation in the country fan scene, including as dancers, was itself simultaneously entertainment and performance art. The irony of that commodified dance environment deserves note: the dancing that was traditionally practiced in that region, which country fans had done for decades as

Country Dance Rewrites Its Musical Lineage    443 such an undistinguished behavior and embodied practiced that it required no specification other than ultrageneric “dancing,” had been transformed into a stylistically marked and marketed fad. Newcomer fans deployed specially acquired wardrobes and took dance lessons so that they could perform the role of “country fan” competently on the dance floor. This transition occurred in part when regional styles were exported through mass media (in this case, a movie) to a broader, national audience where the distinguishing regional characteristics that had given rise to the dance practices in the first place were erased. Line dancing, which migrated from disco musical culture into country in the 1980s, was a ready-​made style of dance for a population that had never quite gotten back into the multigenerational traditions of partner dancing of decades past. Furthermore, it offered choreographers, dance instructors, and venue owners a lucrative business model. For most line dances, there was a one-​to-​one correspondence between the choreography and a song. For each new song that was released, a new dance was choreographed and distributed via magazines, workshops, and videos to dance instructors, who, thereby, always had new material to teach in their weekly classes. The most famous instance of this was the release of Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Achy Breaky Heart” music video, which contained footage of a line dance choreographed by Melanie Greenwood specifically for that song. With instructional videos, step sheets, and the advertising that came from the music video present almost everywhere, the “correct” way to dance to Cyrus’s smash hit was set in stone and available for purchase, coast to coast. Such efforts toward standardization and uniformity of practice helped this business model thrive. With this increased national attention on country dancing and monitoring of fan practices, dance competitions became more common. In 1989, the United Country and Western Dance Council was organized to provide a central set of standardized rules and a governing body for the ever-​growing roster of country dance competitions and weekend events to which fans gravitated. Such efforts meant that, for dancers who wanted to be part of the “scene,” there were now rules specifying “correct” footwork, patterns, rhythms, musical tempi, and styling for what had once been, in the words of the fans, “just dancing.” In the early 1990s, this nationally homogenized version of country dance reached its apex, in tangent with country music’s rise to a dominant position as a middle-​class American musical genre. On April 1, 1991, the Nashville Network (TNN) launched Club Dance at the White Horse Café, a show that purported to present a “real” country nightclub setting where regular folks would dance. Filmed in Knoxville, Tennessee, the show’s tapings became a destination for members of local dance clubs from around the country who would make special trips to be featured as guest dancers. For nearly eight years, the show served as a melting pot and medium of dissemination for country dance styles. With trade magazines, standardized judging at competitions, and nationally televised shows spreading new dances, line dancing and, correspondingly, other forms of country dancing, became increasingly uniform. Throughout the late 1990s, while Shania Twain was reigning over the country radio airwaves, the uniformity of country dance practice remained firmly in place, coast to coast. Individual songs and their accompanying line dances—​such as the wildly popular

444    Oxford Handbook of Country Music dances for Brooks and Dunn’s “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” and Tracy Byrd’s “Watermelon Crawl”—​were performed nightly in almost any establishment that claimed to be a country dance venue. And although slight regional variations in styling persisted, which I have explored elsewhere, the basic steps of these dances were done the same in all venues.14 Even in that era of mass dissemination and standardization of country dances, the music that occupied the soundscape of these venues was not exclusively country. Individual songs from outside country music became fixtures in this scene. Marcia Griffiths’s (1982) disco-​influenced dance track “Electric Boogie” (with the corresponding “Electric Slide” line dance) was one such instance; Clarence Carter’s (1985) soul track “Strokin’ ” was another. In several clubs, DJ Robbie and Chris Anderson’s dance remix of “Last Night” (done by a black artist with no music-​stylistic connections to country whatsoever) was a popular track, to which dancers performed “Chill Factor” (the work of white British choreographer Daniel Whittaker); and a popular remix of early 1980s hit “Let It Whip,” by the black, funk-​styled Dazz Band, allowed the crowd to dance “Cool Whip.” In these instances and other similar ones, the country nightclub environment was simultaneously a primary space for defining country as a fan culture and a space that compromised the borders of country as a musical genre. By the early 2000s, country dancing was, in the public imagination, a combination of line dancing and two-​stepping. Line dancing was the most common practice for the general population of fans, while two-​stepping retained its iconic status as symbolic of country as a genre, a link that had been established in the Urban Cowboy era and reinforced by its continued appearance in music videos and movies. But by this time, country music’s overall popularity was declining in a changing cultural landscape.15 TNN’s Club Dance went off the air in 1999. Country bars coast to coast shuttered their doors. Line dance instructors found other employment. Most of the major country nightclubs and honky tonks where I had danced and done research were closed or would be within a few years. Just what had happened in the next chapter of country dance is the narrative on which this chapter focuses: the retreat of partner dancing accompanying country music rewriting its own past, an increase in regional differentiation within dancing and dance venues, and the migration of specialized country dancing away from its musical genre.

How I Learned to Dance “What [mattered] was having a space to dance and a Country music band playing danceable music. And when the band started up the music, no one needed any prodding to get out on the floor and dance. In fact, the dancing was almost instinctively intertwined with the spirit of it all.”16 Ralph Giordano closed his in-​depth history of country dancing with that effusive ode to “Country Dancing in the Future,” claiming an “instinctive” expressive ability of country fans to get their feet in place and their bodies in flow

Country Dance Rewrites Its Musical Lineage    445 with the music, a cultural knowledge he saw passed down to future generations in the still-​extant Texas dance halls of folkloric legacy and tourists’ obsession. The act of dancing as a form of “being” for a country music fan can be an appealing notion. From that perspective, a band is the catalyst; the music propels one’s body onto the dance floor to take on its intended form of identity expression, both with the music and with fellow community members—​dance “instinctively intertwined” with music, venue, and self. This idea that dance is nascent cultural knowledge is one that ethnomusicologists, among others, have wrestled with for years. In her exploration of black girls’ handclapping songs and double-​dutch jump rope games, Kyra Gaunt placed herself in that narrative: “Throughout my life, I’ve always had rhythm. I have even imagined I could intuitively figure out earlier styles of black dance that precede my birth just from hearing the music that might have accompanied it. … I experienced the past in what I saw and what I did as a black dancer.”17 In her initial reflection on her black female identity and the projection of that identity through dance, play, and rhythm, Gaunt acknowledged the trope of intuition: we are who we are, so we know how to express that through cultural practices of “gendered musical blackness,” in her case, or “two-​stepping competence,” for a country fan. But Gaunt explains the constructed aspects of that perceived intuition: “That illusion was shattered when my mother told me that she had taught me how to dance.”18 “Believing self and group identity come naturally is part of the customary phenomenology of black musical identity politics,” explains Gaunt.19 Where Gaunt is specifically discussing black musical identity politics, her insights map convincingly onto country identity politics just as the roots of country (under terms such as “hillbilly”) and early blues (then catalogued as “race”) music were inextricably intertwined and interdependent.20 To step into a country nightclub as a country fan is to lay claim to a cultural identity outside the mainstream of American society. Fans dress, speak, drink, and interact in ways that mark them as part of a distinct social category. And to display competence in that performance of self, fans must dance—​they must, as Gaunt did, learn how to dance. In community settings where music crosses generational boundaries and is reinforced by material culture, foodways, and community social practices, the “learning process” for dance happens over a long time span and in family settings where such education can be easily overlooked as education, per se. By the time I was old enough to get into local honky tonks, I just “knew” how to be a country fan in that space, including how to dance. But on reflection, I can account for the education that led to that knowledge: I learned to two-​step from my parents in our home’s kitchen—​I was shown specific footwork, how to move, where to put my hands, how to communicate with a dance partner. I then expanded my repertory of dance moves at teen parties and youth groups where my friend Jenny’s dad showed us some cool cowboy swing moves including “the pretzel.” The acquisition of cultural knowledge and competency was the result of a long, active learning process and the transmission of information across generational lines. The concept of intrinsic cultural dance knowledge comes in part from the unsourced nature of the dances. At a typical local dance lesson, no one carries on discussions of where these dances originated, how they were recorded, preserved, and transmitted, or

446    Oxford Handbook of Country Music who choreographed them. This holds true even for the line dances, where contemporary choreographers were, in fact, responsible for producing the intellectual property that comprises these dances and claiming credit for them in published versions of step sheets. Yet in the transmission of the dances, their authorship becomes anonymous, and students and those transferring cultural knowledge treat the dances as fixed cultural entities reminiscent of how some songs are treated as “folk music,” a cultural art form perceived as simply existing out of time and unsourced, a so-​called natural manifestation of identity. The degree to which this general cultural knowledge is transmitted and received in a set form is quite remarkable. Sometime around 1995, at Rustler’s Roost in Rochester, New  York, I  learned the “Sweetheart Schottische,” a specific choreographed partner dance done to uptempo music, often with an audible Cajun influence, such as Garth Brooks’s “Ain’t Goin’ Down (‘Til the Sun Comes Up).” The dance’s twenty-​six-​beat pattern of footwork is an extremely odd length to fit to music that comes in regular thirty-​ two-​beat phrases. It contains six changes of direction, a combination of scuff steps and hopping steps, walking steps, grapevine steps, and a series of turns and spins for the follower in the dance couple. As with all choreographed partner dances, of which there were more than a dozen in popular circulation in those years, all couples on the dance floor execute the pattern at the same time, moving counterclockwise around the dance floor (in the “line of dance”), giving the impression of a train circling around and around the room: arms, feet, shoulders, and heads in synchronized patterns. The dancers in the bar who showed me the step patterns treated it as static knowledge: this was the “Sweetheart Schottische,” simply existing in the ether of country music in a form that offered no acknowledgement of its source, its choreographer, or its life span within the country fan community. I was intrigued by the dance and set out to explore its cultural footprint. I found it in country bars up and down the East Coast as well as in California, done without any variation in the underlying twenty-​six-​beat pattern, but with small flourishes added by more advanced dancers in all locations. In the franchise country nightclub Denim and Diamonds in Gallatin, Tennessee, I spotted it in 1997 with the same footwork, albeit a smoother glide motion used in the steps. Within just a few seconds of watching, I was able to grab a partner and jump right in, my cultural knowledge transferring from a thousand miles away without a hitch. The dance was performed on Club Dance routinely, with both “regular” cast members and visiting dancers from out of town doing it in perfect unison. Some years later, a Facebook user posted some footage on YouTube of an episode of Club Dance on which he had appeared, doing the “Sweetheart Schottische.” I  wrote to him.21 David Greene, from Johnson City, Tennessee, remembered the episode on which the dance was done but not the date. He recalled, “The club we all danced at was ‘Nashville Sound’ in Johnson City. I had been going there about a month and met [my dance partner] coming off a bad divorce. … She caught me up on all the couple dances like the ‘Sweetheart Schottische.’ ”22 On many occasions, he and fellow dancers drove to Knoxville to be filmed on Club Dance.

Country Dance Rewrites Its Musical Lineage    447 Their rendition of the “Sweetheart Schottische” on the show was unrehearsed, he told me. Everybody just knew the dance. Where had his dance partner learned it? He did not know. The dance showed up in a Hollywood film, The Thing Called Love, in a scene that purported to be a barn dance outside of Nashville, with actors Sandra Bullock and Anthony Clark joining in the “Sweetheart Schottische.”23 I contacted both the choreographer for the film, Claudia Severs (now LaRoe), and a dance captain from the shoot, Liisa Lee. Neither knew the source of the dance. Severs speculated that it was something that the dancers hired for the shoot “just knew”; most of them, she explained, had been recruited from the Santa Monica franchise of Denim and Diamonds to dance in the scene, which was filmed on the Disney ranch in California. How the film’s stars learned it, she said she could not speculate. So what were the origins of this very specific dance, with its own name and detailed figures? The step patterns include figures associated with the folk dance known as the schottische, which originated in the region that is now Germany and the Czech Republic in the 1830s. The dance features combinations of three steps followed by a hop, along with step-​hop-​step-​hop variations, done at a slower tempo than a polka and with a lilt and lift of the feet that matches the stylings of Scottish country dancing. The name schottische is considered by many dance scholars to be derived from this association with Scottish dancing. The schottische migrated to Texas as a folk practice of immigrants, both German and Czech, and took root there as newly native in the early twentieth century. But although there are clear stylistic debts to the folk dance and the appropriation of some schottische steps, the “Sweetheart Schottische” bears the mark of a modern choreographer: the atypical pattern length (twenty-​six beats in this case), the arm positions used, and the specific changes of direction are all characteristics of choreographed partner dances. Every avenue of inquiry I have pursued in regard to this dance has led to the same end: the dance was simply known by those who participated in country dancing in the 1990s and taught to newcomers as they entered the scene as essential knowledge for anyone within the community. It even took on formal instantiation in a textbook for social dance. In 2000, Pearson publishing house released the eighth edition of Dance a While: Handbook for Folk, Square, Contra, and Social Dance, intended for group instruction and presented by one of the biggest firms in higher education publishing. This textbook included the “Sweetheart Schottische.”24 No source or choreographer was listed. In other words, it was accepted and disseminated in this published form as knowledge and intellectual content that simply exists in the sphere of social dancing, authoritatively defined but completely unsourced. The way that this dance has resisted attempts to trace its original source is an important part of how it projects the illusion of being an instinctive expression of innate cultural identity.25

448    Oxford Handbook of Country Music

Two-​Stepping into Oblivion Where did the two-​step go? This staple of country dancing, the signifier of the entire tradition that had gone from being “just dancing” for country folks in the 1960s and 1970s to the symbolic christening of John Travolta as a country dancer in 1980 was the rhythmic and metric foundation of country music for most of the 1980s and 1990s. The music to which it was danced was codified at a tempo of 168–​200 beats per minute (BPM; according to the United Country and Western Dance Council [UCWDC] rules; the American Country Dance Association [ACDA], which is another governing body for country dance competitions, set a narrower band of 180–​190 BPM). In spite of the tempo being defined by those ranges, the “feel” or metric groove of the songs was almost always in cut-​time. Two-​step songs were characterized by the fiddling and twang heard in hits by artists such as George Strait, Tim McGraw, and Randy Travis, where the music’s rhythms, melodies, lyrics, and the dance melded together into a seamless expression of sound, identity, time, and motion, country music into country bodies and bodies around the floor.26 Yet as the country nightclubs that sprang up in the 1990s closed their doors and the popularity of country music receded to a static level about half its Garth Brooks-​era peak, fewer and fewer dancers took to the floor with a two-​ step, and fewer and fewer country fans bothered to learn it in the first place. Odd specters of it have lingered. At the Cadillac Ranch in Fayetteville, site of the aforementioned “Wobble,” in 2015, a few patrons tried a two-​step throughout the evening: for a few songs, two or three men literally pushed their dance partners around the floor in a stutter-​step version of the pattern, stepping out of time to the music while their female partners slipped and slid backwards, trying to keep their feet out from under their partners’ feet. They traveled around the floor, the men’s left arms tense as if steering an unwieldy tractor, feet repeating a pattern at an entirely different pace than the beat of the songs. Although no country bar at any time or place has ever been devoid of so-​called bad dancers, here there was no counterbalancing presence of two-​steppers in time to the music and in sync with their partners. The related traditions of waltz and polka, all of which comprised the standard menu of country partner dancing throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and all of which my parents taught me in our kitchen in the 1970s, were not present at all. In short, in the major urban country nightclubs and honky tonks of 2015, the established practices of country partner dancing had all but disappeared. The explanation, I believe, is found in a fundamental shift in how mainstream commercial country music—​that which is heard on commercial country radio stations as the primary musical output of the music industry casually known as “Nashville”—​has rewritten its own musical history. Country as a genre has always been deeply in debt to its own past, with its audiences demanding accountability to earlier generations of music as a means of authenticating its present. Song lyrics make reference to earlier artists; musical and lyrical quotations generate intertextual references to past country hits.

Country Dance Rewrites Its Musical Lineage    449 Institutions such as the Grand Ole Opry, which has been on the air in some form since 1925, remain revered sites for new artists to both pay dues and establish (historically anchored) credibility. In fact, the entire genre, even from its earliest days of recordings, has been dependent on a nostalgia for yesteryear. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the accepted narrative of country music’s past, as expressed in song lyrics, musical references, stage patter, and artist interviews, traced a historical path back through the classic country in the 1970s that was home to George Jones, Conway Twitty, Kenny Rogers, Loretta Lynn, and Tammy Wynette, inclusive of the Outlaws such as Willie Nelson who were both part of the establishment and quick to claim independence from it. The music of those artists was the music of the Grand Ole Opry in the 1970s, the music of Billboard’s country charts, and the music of the country airwaves. Most significantly, it was dance music, or more specifically, partner dance music. That generation of country music was housed in honky tonks, both long-​established and newly opened, advertising dance floors and music that would keep patrons not only on their feet but also physically and socially connected through partner dancing all night: the Broken Spoke in Austin (opened in 1964), Gilley’s in Pasedena, Texas (opened in 1971 and later the site of the film Urban Cowboy), and the iconic Mr. Lucky’s in Phoenix (opened in 1966). Out in California, an entire musical style known as the Bakersfield Sound, spearheaded by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, was closely linked to partner dancing, which filled the floor at the Blackboard, a honky tonk that had been open since before 1949.27 Thus, the mainstream commercial country music of the 1980s and 1990s, and even early 2000s, came from a lineage that included partner dancing. The two-​stepping and general dance fad that accompanied the 1980s and 1990s was a continuation of earlier dance practices, just as the music linked up with its past. Somewhere prior to the advent of “bro-​country,” the hip hop-​infused, dirt-​roads-​and-​ trucks masculine brand of country that was ubiquitous by about 2013, country music rewrote its own history and steered its lineage back through time down a different musical avenue.28 Bypassing the classic country of Opry stars, the new generation of artists redefined their pedigrees with southern rock, a musical genre closely related to country music that occupied the Southern soundscape of the 1970s with bands such as Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Marshall Tucker Band. The harmonic underpinnings of country music changed, with chord progressions lifted straight from the rock canon. The image of the contemporary country singer changed, with the western wear and cowboy garb abandoned in favor of ball caps and rock tee shirts. And, most notably, the intertextual reference points migrated persuasively to southern rock songs. At the front edge of this shift were songs such as Rodney Atkins’s “These Are My People” (2007). Written by Dave Berg and Rivers Rutherford, the song namechecks three Lynyrd Skynyrd songs: “We were football flunkies, southern rock junkies /​cranking up the stereos /​singing loud and proud to ‘Gimmie Three Steps’ /​‘Simple Man’ and ‘Curtis Loew.’ ” Similarly, the Marshall Tucker Band appears in the lyrics to “Parking Lot Party” (2013), cowritten by Lee Brice, Thomas Rhett Akins Sr., Thomas Rhett Akins Jr., and Luke Laird. And countless other songs followed in those trends.

450    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Beyond the specific adoption of southern rock as a progenitor of contemporary country music, these artists changed the underlying base of the music from classic country to rock in general. Song lyrics about a “rock ‘n’ roll tee shirt” (in “Nothing Like You,” by Dan and Shay) and “Springsteen” (“Springsteen,” by Eric Church) recast country music’s history as built on a foundation of rock, not country, of the past. This change ran deep into the heart of the music, and was fundamentally different than the incorporation of rock into country music that had occurred previously. For instance, twenty years earlier, Garth Brooks made waves in the country scene by crediting his musical formation to Journey, Boston, Styx, Elton John, and Dan Fogelberg. But at the same time, Brooks had kept a country lineage front and center in his representation of his musical roots, publicly and repeatedly declaring George Jones and George Strait as his idols.29 Unlike Brooks’s account, the contemporary shift in historical construction omitted a country line altogether. In its new southern rock-​derived incarnation, contemporary country music circa 2015 had left behind that roster of country idols in exchange for the rockers alone. Correspondingly, it had no investment in partner dancing as a historical practice on which to build because that form of dancing was simply not part of southern rock culture in its heyday. The rock genre in general, but especially southern rock, had been one of the musical forces that split listening audiences apart by generations, thereby effectively quashing much of the social dance practice of partner dancing. This change in historical foundation meant that there was little compulsion for the two-​stepping traditions of country’s past to take root in the new country scene. Two-​step disappeared gradually as new fans simply failed to propagate the practice. Meanwhile, hip hop and soul tracks were added to playlists as part of the assimilation of a more mainstream nightclub culture in an attempt to keep newer generations of line dancers happy who had little or no investment in the specifically country traditions of the past. In keeping with the new guise of country music, music videos stopped incorporating both line dancing and partner dancing, and song lyrics dropped references to two-​steps and waltzes, so neither of those media forms cultivated partner dancing as they had done in the past. Back in 1992, George Strait starred in the feature film Pure Country as a country singer who lost his soul and musical authenticity, then found both while two-​stepping in a honky tonk.30 Contemporary fans held no such expectations that Luke Bryan, for instance, would ever present that narrative, because the ways that Bryan’s fans understood his musical authenticity was not represented by two-​stepping in a honky tonk. In its new guise, mainstream country music took an oddly specific cultural form. As journalist Jody Rosen had defined it, bro-​country was both masculine and white, specifically the music of a white “dude,” a term that carried connotations of age (young) and class (working). Yet its soundscape was fully dependent on borrowed hip hop tropes, from vocal delivery style to duets with rap artists, chord progressions in the form of minor-​mode ostinato, and video elements.31 Hip hop and country were simultaneously separated by stark racial associations and historically fused as marginalized, southern working-​class forms of vernacular expressive culture. The brazen cultural appropriation was unidirectional—​hip hop into country—​and could easily be theorized as part of a decades-​old trend toward popular culture fetishizing black musical styles. This appropriation manifest on the dance floor, where (white) country fans “wobbled” to the pulsating hip hop beat of V.I.C.

Country Dance Rewrites Its Musical Lineage    451 And thus, in an era when hip hop had become the dominant cultural currency in mainstream popular music, country music—​and, by extension, country fan culture—​ was simultaneously markedly distinct from the mainstream and fully embracing of it. Country remained different: a marginalized “other,” but at the same time, country absorbed and reflected back the dominant mainstream hip hop trends. This phenomenon spilled into the nightclubs, which were marked as country spaces (and, largely, still coded racially as white) through décor, signposts, and patrons’ self-​identity, but presented a soundscape that embraced hip hop and other mainstream popular music. I walked into the Dallas Bull, a legendary country nightclub and dance venue in Tampa, Florida, where patrons sported cowboy hats and plaid western-​cut shirts, unfinished wood beams framed the dance floor, and the iconic mechanical bull sat front and center. DJ Biggs’s “Mississippi Bounce”—​hip hop through and through—​was blaring from the speakers, and the dance floor was packed with dancers, many of whom were wearing cowboy boots and western-​styled jeans, “bouncing” to this song’s line dance. Like other party-​friendly hip hop dance tracks such as DJ Casper’s “Cha-​Cha Slide,” the lyrics to “Mississippi Bounce” describe dance steps (e.g., “To the left!”). This dance and others act as prominent reminders that the whole line dance tradition that implanted itself in country music in the late 1980s and early 1990s had a vibrant parallel life in black dance styles, here again manifesting directly in country fan culture. As country music rewrote its musical history to trace a different cultural stream into the 1970s and beyond, partner dancing simply had no native purchase on the new generation of fans. This shift was a radical divorce of country music even from its own musical traditions of the 1990s, when country music and two-​stepping had been tightly linked in the public imagination. In that era, movies that touched on any themes southern, homespun, western, or nostalgic had made use of that dance association. Harry Connick Jr. two-​stepped in Hope Floats; Robert Redford two-​stepped in The Horse Whisperer; both scenes conveyed their characters’ wholesome integrity and country authenticity. One last grab at country dancing appeared in the remake of Footloose in 2011. High school kids, trapped in a town that does not allow dancing, break free one evening and head out of town to find themselves a honky tonk, where they jump into the midst of a country line dance. The footwork is impressive and clearly beyond the level of most amateur dancers. But what is most significant is that in the film, by the end of the song, the exuberance of dancing takes over to the point that the characters stop doing the country line dance entirely and burst into freestyle dance moves. Even in this overchoreographed moment, country dancing is unable to fill the emotional volume of the moment. Pop culture had left it entirely in the dust.32

Back to the Local To claim that two-​stepping specifically, and country dancing in general, has become a relic of the past overstates the state of dancing in the present era. To be sure, there has been a seismic shift in country music, culture, and dance. But the end result is mainly the dissolution of the nationally homogenous dance culture that characterized the 1990s.

452    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Two-​stepping has indeed faded into obscurity in most urban country nightclubs, especially on the East Coast and most notably in Nashville, heart of the commercial country music industry, which lacks any venue for conventional country dancing whatsoever. But a closer look at local country music culture reveals a more nuanced trend toward increasing regionalization. In the absence of unifying cultural forces, country fan culture, especially around the practice of dance, has splintered and returned to a state sharply characterized by local individuality. In other words, it has rewound the clock. Prospector’s Steakhouse and Saloon, in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, boasts on its website that it is the “best country dance club in the whole northeast!” On a lively Friday night in September 2015, their dance floor was packed with a mixed-​age crowd including a large population from the nearby military base. A large projection screen on the wall flashed ads for food, interspersed with reminders to dance in the correct direction and follow dance floor etiquette. The DJ announced not only songs but also the specific line dances that were coming up. Dancers lined up on the floor and waited patiently until the DJ counted them off so that they started the dance at the same moment. And the song rotation flowed through not only two-​step songs but also songs for choreographed partner dances that I had not seen done anywhere in nearly twenty years. The “El Paso,” the “Sidekick,” the “Sweetheart Schottische,” and others were part of the standard repertory in the club. The infrastructure supporting country dancing as a core part of fan culture has been radically reduced in recent years, a natural effect of mainstream country music leaving partner dancing in its wake. As business models have changed and country nightclubs closed, the line dancing and partner dancing that does remain in the local clubs has returned control of the dancing to local agents. Line dances are choreographed locally by the instructors themselves, who cultivate a following for their particular style of dances. Over time, the local repertory of dances evolves differently in each region. It was instantly apparent at Tampa’s Dallas Bull, one of the few large-​scale urban venues that still hosts dance lessons several nights a week, has a different repertory of dances and even step patterns within the dances than other venues. Regional differentiation has always been part of country dance culture, harkening back to the aforementioned observation from Bob Wills’s band member Leon McAuliffe that the differences between dancing west of the Mississippi and not dancing east of it had a major impact on the music. The crucible in which partner dancing was forged in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s was specifically the Intermountain West and the West Coast. Bakersfield’s recognizable musical style was a dance style in its use of pulse and groove, and unsurprisingly forged in a town that boasted as many as eight venues with live bands seven nights a week for a population that made such numbers sound extreme. And even at the points when the standardization of country dancing was at its highest levels, there were regional holdouts of more local practice, especially in the Southwest and the western rodeo circuits, which were famously resistant to line dancing and which had maintained more intergenerational dance practices throughout the lean years. Mr. Lucky’s in Phoenix, Arizona, was one such place. I danced there in 1998, more than thirty years after it had first opened its doors. Band sets were interspersed with live

Country Dance Rewrites Its Musical Lineage    453 bull riding, a phenomenon I also witnessed at Club Rodeo in Oklahoma City a decade later.33 The music was live—​a house band who commanded the stage with 1970s country covers. And the dancing was as close as anything could be to an incarnation of Ralph Giordano’s notion of “instinctive” dancing: two-​stepping without flourishes, solidly in time to the music but without any formal dance training for carriage or posture. Almost everyone in the establishment got up and danced at one time or another during the evening, simply part of the participatory ritual of being present as a country fan. And the dancing at Mr. Lucky’s took place at the same time in history that a few thousand miles away, DJs working at Denim and Diamonds franchises shouted over their microphones, “a-​five, six, seven, eight!” to make sure all the line dancers on the dance floor started stepping at exactly the same time and in the same direction, the heyday of country dance homogeneity. Particularly in the present scene, local anomalies in dance practice are part of the fabric of country music. In the small town of Lexington, North Carolina, for instance, Carolina Danceland boasts that it is “Davidson County[,]‌North Carolina’s biggest and best country dance club.” That slogan, with its slippage of county and state identifiers, is delightful in its humility: Davidson County contains no large metropolitan areas so there is not much competition for the “biggest and best” claim, yet also playfully confident in the way that the county name is placed first so that the phrase “North Carolina’s biggest and best … ” suggests subtly that it is boasting a statewide reputation. The low-​ ceilinged dance venue welcomes live bands every Friday and Saturday night in a tradition reminiscent of the old Texas dance halls of generations past. Patrons, every one of them well past the age of retirement, two-​stepped around the floor and tried a few line dances, while one of the regularly booked local bands, The Bandits, plowed through a set list of 1970s covers: John Conlee, Merle Haggard, Larry Gatlin, Delbert McClinton, Conway Twitty, and a memorable and rousing rendition of the New Riders of the Purple Sage’s “Glendale Train” that had the dancers literally hopping around the floor, doing a sixteen-​step (a choreographed partner dance from the polka family). While places like the Carolina Danceland have existed as long as country music has compelled fans to get up and move, the widespread demise of the larger, dominating country bars in recent years has increased their exposure as representatives of the country dance scene. The patrons in Carolina Danceland were all old enough to have known the set list in its original versions some forty years earlier, and their familiarity and casual approach to the dancing suggested they had been two-​stepping to those same songs for the intervening decades. The floor appeared a portrait of the intertwined, symbiotic relationship between classic country and dance, itself a preserved relic from an earlier era. Carolina Danceland also confirmed the idea that the genre of country dance music has anomalous content that has made its way into the musical genre specifically through dance. Even in this venue that was steeped in tradition (a patron requested Hank Williams’s “You Win Again,” and the band obliged), the DJ spun both “Electric Boogie” and “Cupid Shuffle,” dance-​pop and hip hop, respectively, during the band breaks. The inclusion of those two tracks in such an otherwise traditionally country venue signals their incongruous incorporation into the heart of country dance practice. In other

454    Oxford Handbook of Country Music words, one might argue that those handful of songs have actually become part of the country music genre through fan practice, however incongruous their musical sound and origins might seem. In summary, as the mainstream country music industry shifted further from country’s past, individual venues for country dancing lost the centralized and national infrastructure—​television shows, corporate franchises, professional networks of dance teachers, and so on—​that promoted commonalities in dance styles. Without those market forces at work, dancers retreated to more regionally differentiated expressions of dance, the very place from which country dancing had emerged in the early twentieth century. In many ways, this trend manifests itself as a movement back in time, where individual communities of dancers formed scenes around particular musical styles and eras, with the accompanying dance styles their lingua franca for self-​expression and communication within the space.

California Mix Where did all the two-​steppers go when their clubs went out of business? The answer, in many cases, was into the world of elite social dancing, where the primary expression of cultural identity emerges as “dancer who does country,” rather than “country fan who dances,” inverting the priorities of the reference points. In that social dance environment, country music and its accompanying dances lost their cultural markers, particularly of class and historical identity, and became instead merely a style of physical movement, no different in concept than any of the other dances in which the participants were fluent. Unlike the variety of country venues that still project a connection to country music culture, these dance settings lack any of those cultural markers, yet have become the residential site of two-​stepping. This incongruity of country two-​stepping in a social dance studio was palpable at the Bayou Dance Club in Pinellas Park, Florida, a ballroom dance studio where eager engaged couples stumble through wedding dances and ballroom dance competitors refine their routines. On a Saturday night in early 2016, the club was decorated with small cocktail tables surrounding two dance floors. The club was packed with social dancers who have driven in from the entire region for one of the largest West Coast Swing social dances in Florida.34 There was nothing country about the crowd’s public identity, the décor, the venue, the advertising, or the music, which featured top-​forty pop hits in dance remixes. No one was wearing boots or western-​cut clothing; no one was talking about country singers or country music at all. Then, seemingly out of the blue, the DJ spun Diamond Rio’s (1991) country hit “Norma Jean Riley.” Dancers found partners and merged into the flow of the dance traffic, their expert two-​stepping punctuated with precise spins, straight spines, and bold, rhythmic elaborations on the footwork. Further into the playlist, Brad Paisley’s “Don’t Breathe” (1999) popped up. And so

Country Dance Rewrites Its Musical Lineage    455 the dance continued into the wee hours of the morning, seemingly anomalous country tunes mixed into a decidedly non-​country setting. This particular recipe of top-​forty pop plus a smattering of country songs has earned its own label in the world of social dance: California mix, a term that appears in advertisements for social dances quite regularly. The country dance competition scene has provided an umbrella for country dancers who are dedicated fans of the cultural art but have found themselves displaced from the country nightclubs and venues where they used to dance. In this new dance-​centric setting, country dances such as two-​step have had their country identity essentially stripped away. When John Travolta two-​stepped around Gilley’s in Urban Cowboy, the character he was depicting spoke volumes about his values, background, aspirations, and socioeconomic limitations through his country-​dance identity. But two-​steppers at the Bayou Dance Club depicted years of refined dance training and a passion for partner dancing none of which was linked to a country identity. The dancers most invested in the art of two-​stepping have effectively divested the art form of its historical and cultural values and identities. The UCWDC lists forty-​two sanctioned events on their website for 2016, a full seventeen of which are not in the United States. At these prestigious events, competition costumes are identical in style and embellishment to ballroom dancing gowns, although the men still accessorize their outfits with hats, and specially made dance boots are worn by both men and women. Even the competition structure, which allots several divisions to pro-​am competitors, a division in which students dance with their dance teachers, acknowledges that this dance style resides in an elite social dancing space formally disconnected from any other aspects of country fan culture where dancing was once a primary form of communication and communion between fans and their music. Outside the formal competitions and officially sanctioned events, two-​steppers invested in the art form flock to social dances coast to coast that advertise their musical playlist by the term “California mix,” which refers to a primary emphasis on top-​forty pop music for west coast swing dancing, with a blend of nightclub styles of easy-​listening ballads, 1970s hustle numbers, and country two-​steps punctuated by the rare country waltz. At these dances, two-​stepping thrives in a specialized and elite dance form, rather than a country tradition. Parallels exist between the two-​steps tucked into the social dance scenes and the way that country has become a flavor of the week in formats such as the American Idol reality television singing contest (known for many years for its inclusion of a “country week”), and the parade of non-​country stars crossing into the genre to release country albums.35 In these instances, the idea of art forms as expressions of personal identity are challenged. Whereas country music was once considered an unmediated musical utterance defined by the socioeconomic identity of its performers, in these dance and music settings, it has become one of a menu of styles to be mastered and deployed by consummate artists trained at the hands of dance professionals. And whereas the ability to two-​step was once an essential trait of the cowboy, whose affinity for country music

456    Oxford Handbook of Country Music seemed axiomatic, now the ability to two-​step appears in these particular spaces as nothing more than an essential trait of the cultivated social dancer competent in a long list of dance styles and steps, who may or may not relate to country music as a genre in any other way.

Rewriting History Rewriting musical heritage is no small feat, and in a genre that has relied for decades on the strength of the past and on nostalgia for a real or imagined rural ideal, it is even more radical. No song is more representative of the seismic changes in cultural practice discussed in this essay than Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise,” which opens with the lyrics “She was sippin’ on Southern and singing Marshall Tucker. … ” So goes the depiction of the unnamed “Baby,” the idolized female character in the 2012 smash hit, which saturated the airwaves and scored some 6.33 million digital downloads in just over a year.36 The song took up residence as the ultimate summer country party anthem and held the number-​one slot on Billboard’s “Hot Country Songs” chart for an astounding twenty-​ four weeks straight.37 In its wake, journalist Jody Rosen christened the musical subgenre from which it sprang bro-​country, and Florida Georgia Line became a household name. The symbolic completion of country music’s change in historical lineage came in 2013 when rapper Nelly did a remix of “Cruise” with Florida Georgia Line, which took a song constructed on southern rock’s pedigree (note the lyrical reference to southern rock’s Marshall Tucker), already steeped in a hip hop soundscape, and nudged it over the genre border into mainstream pop status. The racial narrative suggested by this song is a radical one: the southern rock reference establishes place, race, and genre in relation to a very white, 1970s, US South; the song appropriates hip hop stylings in a hit received by its audiences as “country,” which achieved such popularity that a black rapper joined forces with the white country duo to remix the song for an even bigger non-​country audience. Nelly’s presence added a complicating degree of black musical identity. But more critical for our understanding of dance and culture is that Florida Georgia Line’s audience skewed young. “[Bro-​country] infused our format with an 18-​34 audience that we really needed at the time. The non-​hipster millennials needed music to connect with. … [It was] targeted young,” explained Wes Poe, program director for a Kansas City country station.38 His comments representing the thinking of program directors at country stations coast to coast. The explicit youth of country music’s contemporary audience, and the older audience’s correlating lack of interest in contemporary country music, contributed to the radical change in dance practice. The current incarnation of mainstream country music, with its redefined musical heritage, has correspondingly increased its audience’s generational divide. Where there is little musical continuity between parents and youth, there is neither the incentive nor the opportunity to transmit dance knowledge in homes and at family parties that might propagate the seemingly “instinctive” dance practices of past generations. Those

Country Dance Rewrites Its Musical Lineage    457 specific regional locations with venues that still house partner dancing are, for the most part, cultivating a different musical soundscape, one that fosters intergenerational musical identity and remains notably isolated from, and independent of, the general trends coming out of “Nashville.” Are country fans no longer a dancing people? With a rewritten musical pedigree, increasing segmentation from older generations of fans, and the infusion of hip hop bringing country music closer to mainstream popular culture, the answer is clear: the core of the country fan base no longer embodies specifically country dancing as part of their intrinsic expression of identity. Being a country fan no longer involves dancing as a requisite form of interaction within the fan community. I have a nostalgic urge to close this chapter by retreating—​both physically and metaphorically—​to the rare, anomalous, idyllic place where two-​stepping and twangy fiddles hold sway. But such an epilogue would undercut the significance of this shift in country fan culture and leave me wallowing in a time-​warped moment from country music’s past, disconnected from the realities of the music’s current scene. The country dance floor may seem an innocuous place for defining musical pedigree and social identity, merely a rectangle of wood, but as a public stage, the dance floor presents a compelling narrative about how the country audience conceives of its past and frames its present.

Notes 1. “Wobble,” by Victor Sally, Frank Ski, Michael “Mr. Collipark” Crooms, Johnathan Wright “John Boy,” and Pjarro Scott, released by V.I.C., Beast (Warner Bros, 2008). Of note, the verse includes the lyrics, “I could dance homie/​I don’t two step,” explicitly targeting the iconic country dance two-​step as not part of this song’s cultural environment. 2. Some clarification on venue terminology is essential here. Different authors use specific descriptors to distinguish between several types of venues where country music and dancing are found. Many of these differentiations are driven by various authenticity narratives. “Dance hall” refers, in some cases, to the local establishments that populate Texas, community traditions dating back as far as the nineteenth century. For instance, Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, Texas, was built in 1878 and still operates today. Country singer Pat Green published a highly regarded book about ten such dance halls called Pat Green’s Dance Halls & Dreamers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008). Those types of dance halls were often family-​friendly environments (I have seen children taking naps on their blankets under the table while parents two-​step around the floor). Honky tonk, as a term, typically referred to a rougher-​edged establishment that was intended as much for drinking as for dancing. The idea of a country nightclub, patterned after the disco-​era urban and suburban cavernous discotheques, has been used to decry inauthenticity for nightclubs that use a country “theme” but lack investment in the history and tradition of country music, as well as for places that rely primarily on recorded music rather than live bands. This chapter is not focusing on the traditional Texas dance halls, which function outside the mainstream national branding of country music and fandom. Alongside that tradition are the various grange-​style church suppers with dancing and similar local events that are still favorite destinations in many places, which are also not covered in this chapter.

458    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Further complications in terminology arise because many established country venues have markers that indicate more than one of these identities: honky tonk dance floors with top forty and house music in a separate room; spaces that feature recorded music and line dancing most nights but transform into live music stages; and other cases that complicate a taxonomy of venues. I use the terms dance hall, nightclub, and honky tonk to refer to establishments with a central dance floor, where patrons come for socializing, drinking, and dancing, either to live or recorded music, in a setting that is explicitly marked as “country” through décor, advertising themes, self-​branding, and fan reception. 3. Although there are countless musical sources that predate the emergence of country as a genre in the 1920s, including but not limited to popular standards used on the stage, gospel hymns, cowboy songs, blues, traditional ballads, and so forth, Bill C. Malone’s assertion is that country music began in the 1920s when the commercial infrastructure of recording and distribution of the music brought those strands together into a recognizable entity. See Bill C. Malone and Jocelyn R. Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., 3rd rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), chap. 1, esp. 1, 28–​29. 4. Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp:  The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 141. 5. Huber points out that the same contests for string band music and dancing where cloggers would compete also included Charleston contests; Linthead Stomp, 124. 6. See, for instance, one such map published in Peter LaChapelle’s Proud to Be an Okie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 103. 7. Travis Stimeling recounts the significance of Texas honky tonks and dance halls in the development of Texas country music from the 1940s through the 1970s in Cosmic Cowboys (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), see esp. 63–​66. 8. Charles Townsend, San Antonio Rose (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 38. 9. Vicky Winner personal communication with the author, July 2008. 10. Chubby Checker had a hit with “The Twist” (written by Hank Ballard) in 1960, which spawned a dance craze by the same name. 11. John Covach, What’s That Sound (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 4. 12. Aaron Latham, “The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy:  America’s Search for True Grit,” Esquire, September 12, 1978, 24. 13. See, for instance, Shirley Rushing and Patrick McMillan, Kicker Dancin’ Texas Style (Winston-​Salem, NC: Hunter Textbooks, 1988). 14. See, for instance, Jocelyn R. Neal, “Dancing around the Subject: Race in Participatory Fan Culture,” in “Music and Identity,” special issue, ed. Annegret Fauser and Tamara Levitz, Musical Quarterly 89, no. 4 (2006): 555–​579; and Neal, “Dancing Together: The Rhythms of Gender in the Country Dance Hall,” in A Boy Named Sue: Gender, Genre, and the Evolution of Country Music, ed. Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), 132–​154. 15. Country music’s popularity and relative position within all popular music sales is documented at length in Jocelyn R. Neal, Country Music:  A  Cultural and Stylistic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); see esp. chap. 13. 16. Ralph G. Giordano, Country and Western Dance (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010), 143. 17. Kyra D. Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-​Dutch to Hip-​ Hop (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 46.

Country Dance Rewrites Its Musical Lineage    459 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 47. 20. See, for instance, Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Jocelyn R. Neal, The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Legacy in Country Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 21. “Club Dance—​3 Dances Millenium Cowboy,” YouTube video, 8:19, uploaded February 20, 2008, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=ExBEihXOlA0. 22. David Greene, personal correspondence by email, May 16–​17, 2015. 23. The Thing Called Love, starring River Phoenix, Samantha Mathis, Dermot Mulroney, and Sandra Bullock, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, produced by John Davis (Paramount Pictures, 1993). 24. Jane A. Harris, Anne M. Pittman, Marlys S. Waller, and Cathy L. Dark, Dance a While: Handbook for Folk, Square, Contra, and Social Dance (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000). Allyn and Bacon is an imprint of Pearson, which advertises itself as the world’s largest publication company in higher education. The “Sweetheart Schottische” instructions appear on p. 445. 25. Kyra Gaunt commented on the anonymous origins and durability of certain cultural art forms such as the “cup game” in a February 26, 2013, Washington Post article, “ ‘Cups,’ the Newfangled Patty-​cake Game That’s Gone Viral Among Young Girls,” by Robert Samuels, which explored the proliferation of a “cup game,” a rhythmic pattern done with patting and clapping an inverted drinking cup that was making the rounds of middle school cafeterias but is traceable back to at least a music video by Rich Mullins from 1987; https://​www. washingtonpost.com/​lifestyle/​style/​cups-​the-​newfangled-​patty-​cake-​game-​thats-​gone-​ viral-​among-​young-​girls/​2013/​02/​26/​a6f98452-​7232-​11e2-​a050-​b83a7b35c4b5_​story.html. 26. The UCWDC and the ACDA publish the required tempi for music used in dance competitions that are affiliated with their governing organizations. Music theorists will note that although the music for two-​stepping generally matches a simple-​duple metric structure best expressed as cut time, the BPM are given in a simple-​quadruple metric interpretation of the music, hearing four quick beats per bar instead of two slower ones. 27. The exact date is a subject of some dispute because there were multiple locations involved in the Blackboard’s early years. 28. Journalist Jody Rosen coined the term “bro-​country” in 2013 in “Jody Rosen on the Rise of Bro-​Country,” published August 11, 2013 on Vulture, from New York Magazine. He defined it as “music by and of the tatted, gym-​toned, party-​hearty young American white dude.” 29. See, for instance, Bruce Feiler, Dreaming Out Loud: Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, Wade Hayes, and the Changing Face of Nashville (New York: Avon Books, 1998), 108. 30. Pure Country, starring George Strait and Lesley Ann Warren, directed by Christopher Cain, produced by Jerry Weintraub (Warner Bros, 1992). 31. Brad Paisley and LL Cool J garnered significant media attention with their duet “Accidental Racist” (on Wheelhouse; Arista Nashville, 2013), for instance, one of several such cases of country and hip hop collaborations including Nelly’s duet remix of Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise” (on Here’s to the Good Times; Big Loud Mountain/​Republic Nashville, 2012); the remix, produced by Joey Moi and Jason Nevins, was released to iTunes in 2013. 32. Hope Floats, starring Sandra Bullock and Harry Connick, Jr., directed by Forest Whitaker (20th Century Fox, 1998); The Horse Whisperer, starring Robert Redford and Kristin Scott Thomas, directed by Robert Redford (Touchstone Pictures, 1998); Footloose, starring

460    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Kenny Wormald and Julianne Hough, directed by Craig Brewer (Paramount Pictures, 2011). As a side note, Hough released a country album in 2007. 33. The rich connection between country dancing and the rodeo circuit deserves its own in-​ depth coverage; country dance is still a thriving cultural practice in evidence at major rodeo weekends in the Southwest and Intermountain West. 34. West Coast Swing is a style of social dancing typically done to top-​forty and pop music, as well as blues and southern soul. With origins in the 1940s, the dance style has become extremely popular with its own competition circuit. Its styling is generally urban sophisticate. A distinctive version of it is also part of the country, or country and western, dance repertory for competitions and used in some social settings. 35. Steven Tyler from the rock band Aerosmith even tossed his (non-​cowboy) hat into the ring with a country album in 2015. 36. “Cruise,” by Brian Kelley, Tyler Hubbard, Joey Moi, Chase Rice, and Jesse Rice, recorded by Florida George Line, Here’s to the Good Times (Big Loud Mountain/​ Republic Nashville, 2012). 37. Wade Jessen, Nashville, “Florida Georgia Line’s ‘Cruise’ Sets All-​Time Country Sales Record,” Billboard (January 6, 2014), http://​www.billboard.com/​articles/​columns/​the-​615/​ 5862305/​florida-​georgia-​line-​cruise-​sets-​all-​time-​country-​sales-​record. 38. Phillis Stark, “Is Bro Country Over … And What Is Its Lasting Legacy?” Billboard (August 19, 2015), http://​www.billboard.com/​articles/​columns/​country/​6670362/​is-​bro​country-​over-​and-​what-​is-​its-​lasting-​legacy.

Chapter 22

“ These Are My Pe opl e ” The Politics of Country Music Jason Mellard

In a spring 2015 interview with CBS This Morning, Texas Senator Ted Cruz claimed that after 9/​11, he only listened to country music: My music taste changed on 9/​11. I actually intellectually find this very curious, but on 9/​11, I didn’t like how rock music responded, and country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me, and I have to say just at a gut level, I had an emotional reaction that said these are my people.1

This emotional reaction is indeed intellectually curious, but not unexpected given country music’s record of chronicling disaster and heartfelt emotion from Vernon Dalhart’s “Wreck of the Old 97” to Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?” That a politician would invoke that emotional reaction for a public audience, too, falls within the realm of expectations. Country music’s populism has long telegraphed to its audience that “these are my people” through a rhetoric that often splits the world between an “us” and a “them,” a division the genre has alternately parsed between plain folks and city slickers, hard workers and layabouts, the sacred and the profane, Southerners and Northerners, rednecks and hippies, whites and racialized others. Even “country,” the name itself, makes the music a self-​designated metonym for nation and invites an easy slippage between that nation’s contemporary experience and its imagined, pastoral history. Further, the persistent boundary maintenance that prioritizes “real country” suggests that the music itself exists under perpetual threat from external forces that would dilute or demean it, an anxiety that parallels what historian Richard Hofstadter long ago tagged as the “paranoid style in American politics.”2 All of this rhetoric pervades country’s sense of self; and while it does not lend the genre a singular politics, it has made for a long history of intersection with the political world of elections and governance, candidates and campaigns. It only makes sense, in that an art form that so reflexively hails its imagined audience, whose lyrics so effectively communicate

462    Oxford Handbook of Country Music moral economies of right and wrong, puts forth a particular vision of the world it wishes to inhabit. This is not to suggest that the genre’s politics are monolithic, nor are they simple. Even to treat country music as a single agent that has a politics is, of course, an intellectual exercise above all else, imposing pattern on a broad and hybrid field of social relations, artistic activity, and commercial exchange. To the contrary, country’s “politics,” too often conflated with a simplistic strain of conservatism, have ranged from chronicling union strikes or America’s wars abroad to the quotidian struggles of everyday folks. Nor does “the politics of country music” describe a single mode of engaging with the world of elections, campaigns, laws, and social movements. This chapter explores several levels of what we might, with the preceding caveats in mind, frame as country music’s politics. First, at the most literal level, the genre’s intersections with politics come in its lyrical treatment of topical political themes over time. Second, country artists have played prominent roles within electoral campaigns. Politicians have used country music as a mobilizing force in elections, and musicians have themselves parlayed their stature, or attempted to parlay their stature, into political careers. I will treat these levels in an intertwined historical narrative from the beginnings of commercial country recording into the twenty-​first century. Finally, there is the broader issue of the “political” as cultural studies scholars define it, and in this sense country music’s politics go beyond the mere words on the lyric sheet or the endorsements of politicians. At this symbolic level, the field of country signifies a specific moral economy in which its artists and audiences operate, describing the world as they think it should be. The most frequent references to country music’s politics evoke a conservatism deriving from the southern region that gave it birth, as well as country’s Burkean insistence on the value of tradition. More broadly conceived, though, country music’s politics fit the history of an American populism not easily pegged as right or left—​“these are my people”—​and understanding the genre’s role as populist sonics goes far toward explaining something about the American body politic as a whole—​both its optimism and pessimism, its inclusions and exclusions, its prideful exceptionalism and vulnerable self-​doubt. The literature of country music studies has covered the subject of the genre’s politics rather extensively. As is likely the case with most chapters in this book, Bill Malone first mapped the terrain of country’s intersections with politics in the seminal Country Music, U.S.A.3 Most country music scholars since have engaged broadly with what we might consider the music’s political dimensions, but often as a secondary or illustrative theme rather than in studies that specifically focus on the music’s ties to formal, electoral politics.4 The literature on country music’s politics is vast, then, but also dispersed across its historical narratives. Much of this scholarship follows the line that the seemingly simple politics of country music concerning labor, class, race, gender, religion, and region are in fact quite complex, changing over time and with room for disagreements that do not quite match up with the apparent partisan lockstep of the US South. This makes sense. Politics constitutes the field in which people engage in competition over resources, as well as a symbolic mode of defining community. It is also, though, a

The Politics of Country Music    463 storytelling device, a moral fable that orients actors in the world. In this, country music’s narrative focus suits it well to the political sphere. It is a genre of moral lessons and historical reflections, of narrators announcing their place in the world, of writers crafting the kinds of small everyday vignettes that you can imagine politicians using to exemplify policy in stump speeches. “Take Jane Doe, a school teacher I met recently in Sioux Falls, who told me about her challenges day-​to-​day in her underfunded classroom” is not so far off from a certain kind of country song that uses its verses to tell instructive short stories of average people’s struggles, from the Carter Family to Brandy Clark. Presumably since the days of medieval troubadours, music has served as a means of recording the deeds of both valiant leaders and everyday people. In American music, we see this in the corridos of the US–​Mexico border and in the Appalachian survivals of Anglo-​Saxon balladry, but also in the prevalence of disaster songs in country music’s earliest commercial recordings, from Dalhart’s version of “The Death of Floyd Collins” to Charlie Poole’s “White House Blues.”5 In recording events for the community, often with a moral lesson, country music first served to place its audience within a political framework. In such settings, the music’s social aspects also lent it to political ends at the dawn of hillbilly recording in the 1920s. In fiddling contests at Confederate Veterans’ Reunions or Ku Klux Klan gatherings, certain elements of country already served as a soundtrack for the lost cause, for example. The music did not simply engage current events in such settings but also seemed to be caught up in its own historicity, telegraphing a mythic portrait of the American nation that was once whole, joined by a muscular patriotism, a gendered domestic sphere, an ethnoracial homogeneity, and evangelical religion, but on the verge of losing its status in each of these areas. Country artists did not simply act as the southern troubadours of record in American politics, though. The music’s political bent also made its performance useful as a means of mobilizing support for specific political leaders or causes. Further, its artists often sought political careers themselves. Georgia’s Fiddlin’ John Carson, considered among the first hillbilly stars after recording for Ralph Peer in 1923, stumped for a number of politicians. Senator Tom Watson, himself a fiddler, served as one of Carson’s earliest political patrons.6 Watson’s evolution in Georgia politics reveals something of populism’s ideological malleability. Before the turn of the century, Watson drove the insurgent Populist Party’s radical campaign for interracial organizing, arguing that you “are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system that beggars both.”7 This is perhaps the voice of the American populists’ best selves, crafting the “us” and “them” along class lines in the exploitive cotton South. In The Populist Moment, Lawrence Goodwyn describes the 1890s agrarian revolt as “an unsanctioned mass folkway of autonomy” and locates the impetus for American statist reform in the farmers of the South and Midwest, the key early audience for hillbilly records.8 In its evocation of a fair and just world, then, we might see in country music, too, just such an American mass folkway. After the national electoral failures of 1896 and 1900, however, Watson changed his tune, placing himself in the vanguard of the campaign for African American

464    Oxford Handbook of Country Music disfranchisement. That Watson could give voice to both class solidarity and racial exclusion while maintaining his core constituency says much about the workings of populism. It is this broad, raucous, even messy, “-​ism” that perhaps best describes country music’s politics. Country music and American populism have long invoked a hard-​ working, honest citizenry that hopes to be left alone and is only called into the public sphere when threatened from without or, more insidiously, from within. This follows country’s fascination with hearth and home, its concern with displacement and betrayal, and, often, a religious sensibility where everything has its foreordained place. The populist voice also constitutes the move by which country comes to be a metonym for nation, a political sensibility commonly voiced by a fraction of southern whites that positions them as the real Americans claiming the country back from those who have corrupted or subverted it. The Populist movement of the 1890s directed this ire against the concentration of capital in the railroads and other trusts that seemed to hold a predominant amount of power in the Gilded Age. The revolt coincided with the precipitous rise of tenancy arrangements for southern farmers for whom the ownership of productive property in land was a cardinal virtue. It was in part the collapse of this original People’s Party that triggered the Jim Crow electoral laws disfranchising African Americans in the South.9 It would be some decades yet before populist anger saw in the federal government, not the corporation, the threat to the people from the vested interests. The age of hillbilly recording commenced in this political environment. By the 1920s, the earliest hillbilly recording figures played into the decade’s incipient culture wars at a moment when the nation tipped, demographically, from majority rural to majority urban. When Clarence Darrow and Populist icon William Jennings Bryan faced off against one another in the spectacle of the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee, country music played alongside. The Fiddlin’ John Carson who supported Tom Watson also recorded “Little Mary Phagan” about the Leo Frank scandal, in which a Jewish man from Brooklyn was lynched under suspicion of a sexual assault in a cotton mill. Such incidents showed an uneasiness with the modernizing forces of the urban and the industrial and divisions in American life that posed an imagined Anglo-​Saxon South against a polyglot North.10 However, this is by no means the same thing as saying that country music was born in opposition to modernity. Rather, the genre always wrestled with the tensions of historical change, its artists and audiences in the 1920s being those most attracted to the innovations of consumerism, recording technology, and jazz, but hoping to control those developments rather than be controlled by them. The Skillet Lickers are a good example, with Clayton McMichen incorporating jazz into the string band’s ensemble in Georgia, or Charlie Poole doing much the same in North Carolina, or Prince Albert Hunt in Texas. Still, national narratives of the 1920s continue to paint the South with the Scopes trial brush as a region out of sorts with the Jazz Age, indicated by its lukewarm approach to the Catholic Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith in 1928. Some southern states broke from their record of voting exclusively for Democratic candidates in that year, as Herbert Hoover won Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee in the region’s first significant partisan splits from the Democrats since Reconstruction.

The Politics of Country Music    465 The Great Depression and New Deal stemmed the partisan revolt, keeping the solid South intact. Hoover and the Republicans came in for opprobrium for how they handled the economic crisis, and the underdogs of the twenties took their place on center stage in the Roosevelt coalition and the nation’s political narrative. As the Great Depression fostered political engagement in the popular arts, it is no surprise that the artists of the Democratic South went on record in support of Roosevelt. Government spending and public works projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority visibly aided Southerners. The documentary works of the decade foregrounded the plight of southern sharecroppers, white and black, through such texts as Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-​ White’s You Have Seen Their Faces; or, as they streamed into California in the wake of the Dust Bowl, in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Thirties-​era populism also embraced a mannered simplicity and folksiness that aligned with the aesthetics of hillbilly music’s audience. Pro-​Roosevelt songs demonstrated this allegiance, as in the Bill Cox numbers “The Democratic Donkey’s in His Stall Again” and “Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Back Again.” The statism incipient in 1890s populism found mainstream support as the New Deal built infrastructure and attempted to reform southern agriculture. Exceptions to the New Deal line arose in country music, of course, such as the Social Security spoof “When My Old Age Pension Check Comes,” popularized by early Republican adopter Roy Acuff. If many country artists seemed in line with the national politics of the New Deal, though, southern politicians did not always follow their lead. FDR’s Vice-​President John Nance Garner of Texas groused at what he considered to be federal and executive overreach. In Georgia, John Carson moved on from Tom Watson to his most prominent political patron, segregationist Eugene Talmadge.11 Garner and Talmadge both fit a certain stereotype of the midcentury southern politician—​folksy, verbose, and oozing with style but lacking in substance. In a single-​party system such as the solid Democratic South, it is not surprising that personalities trumped issues in political campaigns, and country music served as one folksy edge to set a candidate apart from his fellows. Radio personality turned Texas Governor and Senator Wilbur Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel provides a prime example. After learning from Kansas “goat gland” doctor John Brinkley’s gubernatorial campaigns alongside country artist Roy Faulkner, O’Daniel moved to Fort Worth. As a representative of Light Crust Flour, O’Daniel invented the Light Crust Doughboys. The band’s daily radio shows not only built the flour brand but O’Daniel’s personal one and gave bandmates Bob Wills and Milton Brown a platform to work out the novel sounds of western swing. When Wills and Brown balked at O’Daniel’s controlling ways and left, O’Daniel replaced them. Soon O’Daniel himself struck out on his own to create Hillbilly Flour, promoted by a new hillbilly band. In 1938, he used his radio program to draft himself for a gubernatorial campaign on the platform of the Ten Commandments, proclaiming Jesus Christ his running mate. His popularity throughout the state was unchallenged, as the musical stylings that would become western swing made O’Daniel’s efforts easy enough to sing along and dance to. His tenure proved fairly nondescript, even as he continued his radio broadcasts complete with country bands from the Governor’s Mansion. However, his celebrity status unabated, O’Daniel was

466    Oxford Handbook of Country Music able to parlay the governor’s office into a successful run for the US Senate in 1941, beating a young Lyndon Johnson in a disputed election.12 In Louisiana, singer Jimmie Davis followed in O’Daniel’s footsteps. Davis’s early musical career ran to racier numbers like “Organ Grinder Blues” rather than Pappy O’Daniel’s prudishness. But, after establishing a wider fan base on the strength of such tunes as “You Are My Sunshine,” Davis won terms in the Louisiana statehouse in both 1944 and 1960. Davis’s politics, like O’Daniel’s and Talmadge’s, leaned toward a more reactionary populism and, in his later administration, were explicitly segregationist as the Jim Crow system came under assault. The O’Daniel and Davis models so succeeded in defining a vein of music-​driven southern demagoguery that the Coen Brothers stirred them together in the Americana-​revival film O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000). Their careers also demonstrate the role of mass media in hailing a political audience, of calling a constituency into being. Country music’s barn dance radio format fabricated an intimacy that helped define the genre, calling the country audience together as an audience—​think of Arlie Duff ’s “Y’all Come”—​and encouraging the sense of a unitary interest and feeling, the notion that “these are my people.”13 The politics of the 1930s stood at a particular intersection of mass media and populist mobilization, whether in Fascist Italy, Soviet Russia, or the New Deal United States. In this, country music’s ability to bring audiences to the radio in imagined communities, created through programs such as the National Barn Dance in Chicago and the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, went far toward defining a far-​flung political constituency for country’s brand of populist agrarianism. Though quite different in most ways from O’Daniel and Davis, radio also played a pivotal role in the country career of Woody Guthrie in California.14 Born in Kemah, Oklahoma, in 1912 to a father with a socialist past and named after President Woodrow Wilson, Guthrie’s political bent was perhaps inevitable. Though public memory casts him as a folk artist, Guthrie began as a hillbilly radio star in California during the years of the Okie migration. Together with Lefty Lou on the radio station KFVD, Guthrie performed current hits, traditional numbers, and his own compositions that congealed as a sympathetic soundtrack for the Okie migration, the “refugees” as he termed them, downtrodden and excluded from the West Coast body politic. Breaking the stereotypical hillbilly music mold, Guthrie cooperated with the decade’s Communists, wrote for the Daily Worker, and publicized left-​wing causes such as the Spanish Civil War in song. He also used his music as sanctioned New Deal propaganda in the Columbia River ballads. The wedge between intellectual “folk” and commercial “country” that arose in the wake of the 1940s exemplifies the political forces that operated above the aesthetic level in parsing out genre designations.15 The boundary does not exist in the sound of Guthrie’s songs of the period but rather in his changing relationship with the culture industry, from commercial hillbilly radio in the West to the Popular Front café culture in New York.16 The labor insurgency of the 1930s also provided country music a stage at a moment when “folk” and “hillbilly” musics seemed to be most intertwined, with union figures often adapting popular hillbilly melodies. Ella May Wiggins’s role in the 1935 Gastonia

The Politics of Country Music    467 strike may be the most well-​known example.17 Woody Guthrie’s take on the Spanish Civil War or Wiggins’s engagement with labor organizing in North Carolina point to the strain between the collective and the individual in country music’s politics. On the one hand, the form puts a premium on a past steeped in the communitarian values of the rural and the small town, but it has also developed a long record of celebrating the individualistic or libertarian perspective that mistrusts invocations of the social or communal in political speech. In its concerns with the struggles of everyday life, it makes sense that country artists documented the dislocations of the Depression, even if songs did not always propose specific remedies to its ills. The sidelining of folk music and labor insurgency in country’s mainstream historical narrative has a good deal to do with notions of center and periphery in popular culture, that when we first speak of “country music” we are often referring to the world of the country music industry, Billboard charts, and radio formats rather than country as a historically or musicologically defined entity. In this, the construction of genre is in a sense primarily sociological, about marketing and boundary maintenance, of the sense that music reflects the notion that “these are my people.” But this is perhaps getting ahead of the story. Just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt transformed from Dr. New Deal to Dr. Win the War, so did country music’s political concerns shift from a thirties flirtation with unions and refugees to oppose the Nazis and Japanese in the 1940s, sticking with this more martial footing through the continuing mobilization of the early Cold War. If one core element of country music’s political formation is a sympathy for “the people” it regards as its own, another frequent theme is a bellicosity often directed at others perceived to be a threat to those people. That said, sensitivity to the costs of war has been as continuous a theme in the genre as martial patriotism. Ernest Tubb’s 1946 recording “Rainbow at Midnight,” recounting a soldier’s wistfulness aboard a homebound ship, is a good example. As cultural historian George Lipsitz has written, “Tubb’s song conveyed a promise that the dark and trying present might merely be a prelude to an idyllic romantic future” of domestic life with his partner and children.18 War appears as something of a necessary evil and catches the genre’s ability to project a political optimism for the future rather than simply bemoaning the loss of a receding, superior past. As World War II closed and the Cold War began, country continued in its willingness to engage America’s perceived enemies abroad in a world that the Truman Doctrine divided between the forces of good and evil, with America’s place in that order quite clear.19 As country music production centralized in Nashville in the 1950s, industry leaders projected an image of the genre in keeping with the decade’s aspirational consensus. With demographic suburbanization, country served as a soundtrack for the attendant narratives of class mobility and propriety, promoting the stability of home and the consensus of the Pax Americana. Figures such as Spade Cooley and Patsy Cline allowed country audiences to display class mobility and propriety through consumption while also maintaining traditional country values.20 The country industry’s confident projections from Nashville, of course, were in part bravado at a time of genre instability in the face of Texas honky tonk, Memphis rockabilly, and the claims on country material made

468    Oxford Handbook of Country Music by the East Coast folk revival. Each tested the limits of the nation’s political consensus with regards to race, class, and other left-​wing political concerns. Richard Peterson, among others, has argued that the delineation between “folk” and “country” fields in this period had much to do with the Communist connections of the folk movement and the backlash of McCarthyism.21 The fissures between folk and country in music paralleled those developing between the national Democratic Party and its formerly loyal southern adherents. Strom Thurmond’s independent run for president in 1948 under the states’ rights banner was an early shot across the bow. Roy Acuff ran as a Republican for governor of Tennessee in the same year, but it was still quite early in the region’s partisan realignment. The Democratic hold on the South continued to bank on the identification that “these are my people,” as the Republicans were held responsible for the prior century’s Reconstruction that had overturned the region’s racial order. Just as country music seemed to track the consensus politics of the 1950s, a decade focused on the restoration of stability following depression and world war, it also served as a traditionalist bulwark in the turbulent 1960s. Bill Malone, whose seminal history of the genre itself emerged in 1968, summed up the decade’s country audience in the fact that “many Americans have sought reassurance that the older comfortable and predictable world they once knew is still intact. In the realm of popular culture, country music seemed a safe retreat to many because it suggested ‘bedrock’ American values of solidity, respect for authority, old-​time religion, home-​based virtues, and patriotism.”22 Amidst the decade’s political polarization, as civil rights, Vietnam, and a variety of social movements fractured the midcentury political consensus, country music lamented a nation that had seemed to lose its way. It is no coincidence that Barry Sadler, of “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” though not exactly a country singer, ended up in Nashville, or that the celebratory anti-​antiwar recitation “The Americans (A Canadian’s Opinion)” came to be recorded by industry stalwart Tex Ritter in 1974. This is not to suggest that the music’s relationship to the sixties and Vietnam was sung in a single voice. In the American political debate and cultural conversation of that decade and since, country serves as a marker of presumed simplicity that denies the genre’s capacity for nuance and the complex agency of its artists and audiences. In writing songs based in particular experiences and the war’s psychological aftermath rather than its sloganeering, such writers as Kris Kristofferson and Tom T. Hall offered antiwar songs that spoke to the newer generation, such as “Talkin’ Vietnam Blues” and “Mama Bake a Pie (Daddy Kill a Chicken),” takes on the costs of war that, though dark, shared more than a little with Tubb’s “Rainbow at Midnight.” When it comes to country’s alternate take on the sixties, few embody the ambiguities of country music’s politics as Johnny Cash, whose “Man in Black” persona claimed an empathy with society’s outsiders. Through his television program and alliances with countercultural figures such as Bob Dylan and Neil Young, Cash forged an unstable country music sensibility echoing Guthrie’s. Merle Haggard, too, navigated this tricky middle ground. Few songs have attracted such scrutiny of artist intentionality as Merle Haggard’s 1968 “Okie from Muskogee.” While the song seemed a ready-​made anthem for the silent majority, Haggard’s comments over the years show it to be a complex mix of sympathy for and

The Politics of Country Music    469 satire of those whose sensibilities were confounded by the events of the 1960s. Many point to the follow-​up single “Fightin’ Side of Me” as proof that the original was not satire nor a fluke; but perhaps more than anything else, it was a savvy commercial decision for an artist breaking through to the highest levels of country music success. For Peter La Chapelle, Haggard’s sixties persona completes the symbolic California country arc begun by Guthrie. The history between them helps to “explain the rise of a populist conservative political hegemony in [the] late twentieth century” in which the “producer-​ based and citizenship-​oriented New Deal liberalism that had captured the attention of millions of working-​class voters in the 1930s and 1940s ultimately gave way to a more conservative and less egalitarian property-​based political culture.”23 As the 1960s passed into the 1970s, country music’s populism strangely signified a shared ground between New Left and New Right, joined by a cresting mistrust in public institutions, but the dividing lines of our contemporary culture wars were also already visible. When Nashville songwriters reached for countercultural voices, or the counterculture embraced tradition through country music, both sought to transform the other through the embrace. Such works as Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, the Byrds’s Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and Gram Parsons’s “cosmic American music” attempted to fit the counterculture’s pastoralism to country music’s traditional bent to anchor a nation seeming to spin out of control. In Austin, this symbolic rapprochement between the “rednecks” and the “hippies” took the form of a self-​consciously progressive country music. A generation of artists commingled country’s traditionalism with countercultural experiment in a mutual celebration of regional identity. The politics here, as elsewhere in the 1970s, were by no means straightforward. Austin still stood uneasily in the shadow of political contrarian Lyndon Johnson; and the state Democratic Party, as elsewhere in the South, serve as a battleground between conservatives and liberals. There were some elements of bipartisan agreement, though. At the 1974 Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic, as the stars of the scene joined Michael Murphey onstage for a rendition of his anthemic “Cosmic Cowboy,” the Republican Murphey ended the song with “And Nixon’s the only dope I’d wanna shoot.”24 This came just a month before Nixon’s resignation and weeks after his appearance at the Grand Ole Opry. The progressive country image arose in Texas at a time when the young sought a ceasefire with their parents’ culture but also in the moment of partisan realignment when liberal Democrats in the South began to push the conservatives out of the party and toward building a viable Republican one. As conservative Democrats felt discomfited by the winds of change in the 1960s and 1970s, southern liberals argued that one party rule did not serve the needs of the South, liberal or conservative, black or white. And so, the party of the fathers invited criticism even as the music of the fathers resounded in new ears.25 The progressives, over time, did capture the Democratic parties of the South, but progressive country’s ability to replicate that victory in the country music industry did not follow suit. At the level of national politics, country music’s symbolism made it an attractive accoutrement for conservative campaigns. At the height of his Watergate travails, for example, Richard Nixon turned to country music as a remaining segment of his loyal base. He may have lost the cosmic cowboys by 1974, but he chose this moment

470    Oxford Handbook of Country Music to visit the opening of the new Opryland. He explained his administration’s embrace of country music and those infamous White House performances by Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard. The latter appeared at a night dedicated to Vietnam POWs, and Nixon described to Roy Acuff and the Opryland audience a talk he had with the attending soldiers: And I asked one of them, I said, “You know, that is rather curious that you would find that music the one you like best.” And they said, “Well, you got to understand, we understood it.” They knew it. In other words … it touched them and touched them deeply after that long time away from America. What country music is, is that first it comes from the heart of America, because this is the heart of America, out here in Middle America. Second, it relates to those experiences that mean so much to America. It talks about family, it talks about religion, the faith in God that is so important to our country and particularly to our family life. And as we all know, country music radiates a love of this Nation, a patriotism.26

Nixon’s remarks follow the line that Middle America, his silent majority, was coterminous with “We the People,” and that those who disagree were somehow outside of the charmed circle of the body politic, that love of country and love of country were one and the same. Nixon’s quick conflations marked his approach to country music. When Johnny Cash had visited him in 1972, Nixon requested Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and Guy Drake’s “Welfare Cadillac,” a sign that country formed a monolithic field for Nixon, its artists and sentiments interchangeable. In 1975, Robert Altman’s film Nashville deployed country music as a symbol, too, but to different effect, seeing in the city’s major industry not the straightforward expression of the true American folk but the fragility of the American Dream, the vapidity of the promises that the nation makes to its people. Altman draws on a range of stereotypical country figures of the seventies, from the hypocritical gospel singer played by Lily Tomlin to the countercultural arrivistes such as Jeff Goldblum’s Tricycle Man. Hal Phillip Walker’s political campaign that ties the film together gets at the perception of blithe populism in country’s past, evoking the media-​savvy campaigns of Pappy O’Daniel and Jimmie Davis as much as it prefigured the rootsy appeal of Ross Perot in the 1990s.27 For outside observers such as Altman, country music shares with American politics an insistence on authenticity tempered by an awareness of that construct’s mediation. Altman and other critics often assume, though, that this awareness is something they bring from outside the country field, and that country’s audience suffers from a severe case of false consciousness regarding the American class system. Such a view is desperately short-​sighted, ignoring the elements of the country field that still constituted a “mass folkway of autonomy” whereby the working class could knowingly speak back to the precipitous political economy of the 1970s. And yet, that seventies populism still doubled down on the divisions between “us” and “them,” embracing moral absolutes and Spiro Agnew’s positive polarization amidst

The Politics of Country Music    471 malaise. The “silent majority” called for the return of “law and order,” and Nixon adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan preached a “benign neglect” of divisive racial issues. Nixon’s electoral strategy advanced the ideas of Kevin Phillips from The Emerging Republican Majority and Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg from The Real Majority, where the salient issue of race came to be submerged in the more neutral language of “law and order” and “welfare.”28 Phillips, too, introduced the idea of the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy” to take advantage of conservative white Southerners’ disaffection with the civil rights-​oriented Democrats. In popular music, no genre exemplified these themes so much as country did, its populism put to the service of redefining those outsiders who exploited the hard work of laboring Americans. Hank Williams Jr. became a master of this rhetoric, his “A Country Boy Will Survive” contrasting the rugged individualism of the rural Southerner with the implicitly racialized dangers of crime-​ridden seventies New York. Where southern and western populism in the 1890s drew its lines between corporate parasites and rural producers, the right-​wing populism of the 1970s recast the parasites as a combination of liberal elites and the urban, racialized underclass. These themes finally animated and accelerated the South’s partisan realignment. In 1970, singing cowboy Tex Ritter, who developed political skills as a music industry leader and lobbyist, chose to run for the Senate from Tennessee in this environment as a Republican hoping to unseat Albert Gore Sr. Party leaders initially assured him that he would not be opposed in the primary, but Congressman William Brock jumped in to beat Ritter. Brock in turn defeated Gore to become the third Republican Senator from Tennessee since Reconstruction, but this was not the extent of Ritter’s involvement in politics. Ritter’s son Tom worked with the campaign of family friend and neighbor William Dunn the same year, who would become the first Republican elected governor of Tennessee in half a century.29 Much had changed since Acuff ’s 1948 run on the Republican ticket in the state. Despite the counterculture’s attempted rapprochement with country music and Nixon’s clumsy overtures in the early 1970s, it was a very clean-​cut Democrat who helped usher country music further into the political mainstream. Georgia governor Jimmy Carter was a far cry from the demagoguery of O’Daniel and Davis, of Talmadge and George Wallace. He was a far cry from a demagogue of any type, and it was in part his anticharisma that helped launch him to the White House following the doomed imperial presidencies of Johnson and Nixon. Country music played its role in helping him along; and in tandem, Carter and the country figures who endorsed him worked a kind of political ablution for the white South’s role in American politics in the civil rights years. Indeed, Bill Malone has stated that Jimmy Carter “was the only president who seemed genuinely to love and understand country music.”30 His plainspoken southernness came at a time when the nation seemed to crave simple moralism, and Carter drew the public backing of such New South musical figures as Gregg Allman, Charlie Daniels, and Willie Nelson. All of this occurred during a period when southern fashions themselves rose to the fore, the “southernization” of American life and politics as, on one hand, the region became less associated with (or isolated by) the flagrant racial politics of the 1960s and, on the other, the region’s conservatism and evangelical religion closer

472    Oxford Handbook of Country Music fit the national mood.31 And the artist Carter singled out as his favorite was Oklahoma’s James Talley. In the hard times of the seventies, Talley attempted to reclaim and extend Guthrie’s Oklahoma populism in a self-​conscious fashion that evoked other forms of 1930s documentary expression.32 The connection with Carter drove some attention to Talley, but he was ultimately unable to make his intellectual extension of Okie-​ness stick in the commercial sphere. Rather, it was the blustery regional identities coming out of Texas that served as ground zero for the commercial successes of the outlaw movement. Artists such as Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson declared their independence from the countrypolitan Nashville sound of the past decade and affected an often surly onstage persona. The outlaw stance had multiple valences in the context of seventies politics. For one, it seemed to be of a piece with the counterculture’s refusal of Puritan moralism and suspicion of concentrated authority. On the other hand, the decade’s embrace of the outlaw antihero fed a larger disdain for the perceived Great Society overreach of liberal expertise and activist energy. While Nelson distanced himself from such themes through benefit concerts for groups such as the Chicano Movement’s United Farm Workers, others like David Allan Coe and Hank Williams Jr. delighted in them, playing into the New Right critique of federal authority. Outlaw was not “political” in the explicit sense, but it definitely followed the trend of questioning authorities of all sorts, the deep suspicion once directed at corporations now often aimed at the Great Society’s statism and its perceived beneficiaries. But the venom cast on “welfare,” on one hand, could also be recast in a laborist defense against capital, apparent in Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” or even C. W. McCall’s “Convoy.” With a soundscape that included the voices of Talley and Coe, country music in the 1970s seemed richest when in this expansive mode, thinking beyond left and right to a more bracing populist tradition.33 In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan trumpeted a patriotic populism that aligned him with the more Manichean sensibilities of both country music and the religious right, forgoing Carter’s attempts at comprehensive nuance. A white, right populism further developed the rhetoric of restive rebellion it wrested from both the counterculture and New Left. Rambo and Dirty Harry rewrote the scripts of the Vietnam War and urban poverty just as Urban Cowboy reclaimed the dance floor from fey, non-​white disco. Reagan himself even amplified the western portion of his image, riding horseback with cowboy hat long before George W. Bush cleared brush in Crawford. These notions carried forward into a new political consensus by the twenty-​first century, as the Republican coalition solidified its hold on American populist voices. Chris Willman’s Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music serves as one of the best books on the subject as a whole, and particularly on country music’s politics during the George W. Bush years. Country’s forays into partisan politics in the new century often conveyed its populist sentiment through a kind of siege mentality in the twinned conflicts of the culture wars and the war on terror, each inviting that division between an “us” and “them.” Country artists, as always, offered a wide array of nuanced portraits of the state of the nation, but market dynamics and audience reception often cast dissenting voices outside the bounds of the country mainstream. Toby Keith and stalwarts such as Hank Williams Jr. for a

The Politics of Country Music    473 time could seem allowed to speak for the genre in a way that the Dixie Chicks and Steve Earle could not. Then again, exceptions abounded. Alan Jackson was the first to take on the subject of 9/​11 on the largest stages when he introduced “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” during the 2001 Country Music Awards. As takes on the tragedy go, Jackson stuck to country’s insistent everydayness and honesty (“don’t know the difference between Iraq and Iran”) rather than its martial tendencies, and offered up country’s strength in summoning pathos in a moment of tragedy. If anything, this was likely the song in Senator Cruz’s mind when making his comments about the genre’s response to the event. “The Americans (A Canadian’s Opinion)” even came in for a revival, rerecorded by Byron MacGregor in response to the 9/​11 attacks. As with the rhetoric of the Bush administration, though, the martial voices began to drown out others, and country music tended to conflate the ensuing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.34 Here, too, “country music’s” responses were by no means monolithic, but media shaped a conversation in which country audiences often seemed to be so. The Dixie Chicks affair demonstrates this above all else. At a concert in London, Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines confessed to the audience that she was ashamed the President hailed from her native state of Texas.35 Though an offhand remark, its publication in the Guardian projected Maines’s sentiments to an audience she had not intended. In the tradition of country artists molding their work to their audience, Maines may have realized that, politically, the London audience were “her people,” in a different sense than “her people” back in Lubbock, and spoke to them accordingly. Beginning with WTDR-​ FM in Alabama, country radio stations began to boycott the Dixie Chicks’ work, which wouldn’t be so surprising if the Chicks had not been one of the most popular acts of the past year. These boycotts came about due to the jittery nature of an industry focused on the bottom line, but they also seem to have been driven by a pool of grass-​roots anger at the betrayal by one’s own. The resulting media firestorm derailed the Chicks’ careers, at least in the short term, and drew lines in the sand that resonated throughout the early twenty-​first century of country music.36 Steve Earle, inheritor of one of outlaw country’s populist variants, ramped up the rhetoric too and tweaked right-​wing media with such songs as “John Lindh’s Blues,” a provocative look at the young American who had been captured with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The song, on the album Jerusalem, was the most provocative tip of an agitprop iceberg whereby Earle assailed the erosion of the American dream and democracy’s betrayal by its political class. Hailing from central Texas and getting his start as country’s answer to working-​class hero Bruce Springsteen, Earle’s troubled addiction history and incarceration served as a partial means of politicization, spurring his keen advocacy for the marginalized and even demonized in US society. Indeed, imprisonment serves as one of the primary vehicles for discussing the political and sympathy for the outsider in country music, from Johnny Cash to Merle Haggard to Freddy Fender. These prison narratives remain somewhat racialized, as country’s affections for the wronged innocent and the rowdy rambler do not always seem to extend to African Americans. Yet, country music’s populist promise is incipient in such gestures. And Earle worked hard to

474    Oxford Handbook of Country Music restore this insurgent populism in the country tradition. “Come back, Woody Guthrie,” he plead in “Christmastime in Washington,” the opening track from 1997’s El Corazón. That the Iraq War took the Dixie Chicks off of country radio and Steve Earle did not fit comfortably on it in the 2000s shows that Toby Keith was closer to the country center. Keith’s songs concerning terrorism and war drew the battle lines quite starkly and packaged them in the cleverly but unfortunately titled album Shock’n Y’all. Figures such as Hank Williams Jr. and Charlie Daniels, whose political positions may have seemed more nuanced in the 1970s, came clearly to the conservative Republican side in the 2000s. Indeed, their frequent onstage remarks concerning Barack Obama show that the issue with the Dixie Chicks was less about a desire to protect the commander-​in-​chief from criticism in a time of war, and more about the party, race, and gender of the commenters and those commented on. The issue was not artists expressing political opinions, then, as fans often claimed with the Dixie Chicks, but the idea that there was a proper, correct political line shared by country artists and audiences. The fault lines that keep country a safely conservative domain are often affected by fracturing off its liberal and left artists and audiences into progressive country, alt-​country, and, most recently, Americana. This last label too, like country itself, is in part a political designation, an attempt to reclaim the nation’s tradition from political opponents with a differing vision of populism’s “us” and “them.” As with the folk–​country divide of the 1950s, here the distinctions of taste are meant to connote divisions of political opinion, with Americana often being writ out of country’s mainstream—​the presumption being that the mainstream country audience was conservative and Republican, and the various “alts-​” of Americana skewed left and Democratic. Successful country artists and tastemakers have pushed back at this assumption with increasing frequency. The 2004 election between John Kerry and George W. Bush brought forth the industry’s Music Row Democrats, for example. In 2008, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill proclaimed their admiration for the policies of Barack Obama. “It’s innate in me to be a blue-​dog Democrat. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but that’s what I am,” McGraw stated in a People interview. “My wife and I will do everything we can to support Obama. I like his ideas, I like his energy, and I like the statement he would make for our country to the world.” McGraw also added that he may well get into politics himself one day, inspired by Bill Clinton, “the best president we ever had.”37 Brad Paisley, despite some lame jokes about Obamacare at the 2013 Country Music Awards, performed at the Obama White House on multiple occasions as a Nashville ambassador. These developments beg the stew of audience, authenticity, and the organic that belie country’s equation of traditional values and conservative politics. From John Carson to Toby Keith, then, country music has sung its politics; and from Tom Watson to George W.  Bush, politicians have utilized country, and country artists have entered the electoral arena. Is there also a larger sense, though, that the genre communicates a politics through sound? Much of the scholarship concerning the intersection between country music and politics speaks to this last point, as a broader conception of cultural politics pervades recent work on the country field. To that extent, this chapter’s subject overlaps with others in this book exploring country music’s relationship to race, region, religion, class, and gender: political subjects one and all. This

The Politics of Country Music    475 is because politics is not simply a matter of parties and policies but of identity, a contest over the rules governing recognition of self and other and often an attempt at forging the solidarity of a like-​minded community through the exclusion of those considered to be “other.” Barry Shank offers a contrasting definition of the political in The Politics of Musical Beauty. He argues that the political in music cannot be reduced to the topical nature of its lyrics, nor the professed political opinions of its artists. Rather, the act of listening to music itself models the ideal experience of political community. Shank regards this as being less about how music expresses the listener’s identity and more about how the experience of listening to music brings to awareness the aesthetic qualities of dissonance and difference that replicate the workings of a complex, successful democracy. While for Shank this is often a matter of the Brechtian discordance that has long drawn academic attention to punk and the musical avant-​garde, there’s something to be said here for country’s works of boundary maintenance through sound, its insistence on real country as the basis of its nationalism. Country’s studied simplicity, its frequent claim that the world consists of easily determined binaries that guide action, has a political cast to it. Or, as Shank puts it, “even here, the musical qualities that distinguish ‘real country’ from its blander competitors can only be identified through these qualities’ capacity to enable members of this social group to recognize each other as real-​country people. These are important examples of music’s political action.”38 So, too, does country’s insistence on tradition serve as a basis for political action, even as generations of scholars have demonstrated that tradition to be a rather rickety social construct. Given country’s southern roots, these acts of sonic inclusion and exclusion also read as a story about American race. Pete Daniel has referred to the explosion of rock and roll out of the convergence of rockabilly and rhythm and blues as music produced by the “last generation of sharecroppers,” and that historical marker carries a good deal of baggage with regards to political economy and race.39 The frisson of these sounds rejoining in the 1950s has to do with the fact that the rules of genre themselves echoed the Jim Crow legislation in the early years of the twentieth century. In Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow, Karl Hagstrom Miller has shown the means by which musical sounds became attached to racialized bodies in the early decades of the recording industry, resulting in the genres of blues and country.40 Auditory evidence to the contrary, country has come to be associated with the sound of whiteness itself, an issue explored elsewhere in this book, and this association has a distinct political cast, both in explicit terms with the history of the civil rights movement and more subtly in the way that country music’s larger political project crafts a political community of “us” and “them,” an American nation with a normative, and unnamed, whiteness at its core. In parsing Fiddlin’ John Carson’s political career in the service of Watson, Talmadge, and the Klan, Patrick Huber invokes Nancy MacLean’s notion of “reactionary populism” that combines a thoroughgoing anti-​elitism with a political agenda that nevertheless subordinates entire groups who are deemed outside the realm of “the people.”41 In other words, country’s explicit take on race has been fairly muted since the 1950s, and its few public pronouncements in fact preach its inclusiveness. However, country’s imagined community remains white.

476    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Country music proclaims its nationalism and regionalism quite loudly, but still the Cuban-​origin, Canadian-​born Ted Cruz can hear himself being hailed to “his people” in it. We might see in this a measure of hypocrisy, pandering, or denial on Cruz’s part, but it also offers to us something of country music’s political promise. In those moments when a country song calls out to “us” as an invitation and not a proscription, country can speak to the most expansive dimensions of the American experiment, its populist, polyglot multitudes, the puzzling but reassuring egalitarianism of a nation in which “We the People” all imagine ourselves as “jes’ folks.” We country music scholars, practitioners, and fans must use such moments to insist that another country, a progressive country, rests within the shell of the genre’s public image. While country’s political past has often been an ornery, even jingoistic, one, continuing exploration of its intersections of race, class, gender, and other forms of identity with the American project help to clarify the virtue of labor and the valorization of the working and middles classes. Where does this leave country music, and country music studies, now? It is incumbent on us to explore the split that such tastes as Americana and top-​forty country indicate, to reconcile the populist with the popular. Populism’s insistence on othering those who are not “my people” militates against the civics of a successful democracy. At its thinnest and weakest, populism rests on the binary thinking that collapses all distinctions to those between good and evil, us and them; but populism also possesses the ability to voice those things we share amidst our differences. Country music is better poised to sound that theme than it might seem, and a focus on its better angels would contribute much to the American political conversation.

Notes 1. CBS This Morning, March 24, 2015. Paige Lavender, “Ted Cruz:  9/​11 Made Me Start Listening to Country Music,” Huffington Post, March 24, 2015, accessed June 5, 2015, http://​ www.huffingtonpost.com/​2015/​03/​24/​ted-​cruz-​country-​music_​n_​6932278.html. 2. Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s, November 1964, accessed May 15, 2015, http://​harpers.org/​archive/​1964/​11/​the-​paranoid-​style-​in-​ american-​politics/​. 3. Bill Malone and Jocelyn Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., 3rd rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). 4. There are exceptions, of course, from both academic and journalistic sources, including Peter La Chapelle, Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); and Chris Willman, Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music (New York: New Press, 2004). 5. And, of course, these latter songs serve more as public memory than a chronicle of current events, as they described a train wreck and an assassination, respectively, that had occurred some years earlier by the time their most famous interpreters took them up. 6. Malone and Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., 18; Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 59, 85, 86. Also see Gene Wiggins, Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy: Fiddlin’ John Carson,

The Politics of Country Music    477 His Real World, and the World of His Songs (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986). 7. Derek Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 254. 8. Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment:  A  Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), xix. 9. Randolph Campbell, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 337–​338; Worth R. Miller, “Building a Progressive Coalition in Texas: The Populist Reform Democrat Rapprochement, 1900-​1907,” Journal of Southern History 52 (May 1986):  172–​173; Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2007), 188–​ 203; Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order:  Black-​ White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 81–​86. 10. Huber, Linthead Stomp, 58–​59; Williamson, Rage for Order, 240–​244. 11. Huber, Linthead Stomp, 85, 86. 12. Bill Crawford, Please Pass the Biscuits, Pappy: Pictures of Governor W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). 13. Chad Berry, The Hayloft Gang:  The Story of the National Barn Dance (Urbana–​ Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 2008); Laurie Jasinski, “Duff, Arlie,” in The Handbook of Texas Music, 2nd ed. (Denton:  Texas State Historical Association, 2012), 180–​181. 14. La Chapelle, Proud to Be an Okie, 48–​58. 15. Richard Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 197–​199. 16. Ed Cray, Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 143–​184; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New  York:  Verso Press, 1994), 269–​274; Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1980), 230–​273. 17. Huber, Linthead Stomp, 196–​200. 18. George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight:  Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana–​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 46. 19. This is a topic covered well in Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson, eds., Country Music Goes to War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008). 20. La Chapelle, Proud to Be an Okie, 113–​158. The intersections of gender, class, and notions of mainstream propriety are also covered extensively in Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 26–​46; Pamela Fox, Natural Acts:  Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); and Warren Hofstra, ed., Sweet Dreams: The World of Patsy Cline (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 21. Peterson, Creating Country Music, 198. 22. Malone and Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., 317. 23. La Chapelle, Proud to Be an Okie, 3. For a discussion of Haggard’s Vietnam Era anthems as a turning point for country music’s approach to the topic of America’s wars abroad, also see David Cantwell, Merle Haggard: The Running Kind (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 1–​10, 164–​175. 24. Yabo Yablonsky, director, Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Celebration (La Paz Productions, 1979).

478    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 25. Travis Stimeling, Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin’s Progressive Country Music Scene (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2011); Jason Mellard, Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013). 26. Richard Nixon, “81 -​Remarks at the Grand Ole Opry House, Nashville Tennessee,” American Presidency Project, March 16, 1974, accessed August 10, 2015, http://​www.presidency.ucsb.edu/​ws/​?pid=4389. 27. Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound:  The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 218–​235. 28. Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY:  Arlington House, 1969); Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, The Real Majority (New York: Coward-​McCann, 1970). 29. Bill O’Neal, Tex Ritter: America’s Most Beloved Cowboy (Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1998), 125–​127. 30. Malone and Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., 373. 31. James Cobb, “From Muskogee to Luckenbach: Country Music and the ‘Southernization’ of America,” The Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 3 (1982): 81–​91. 32. Peter Guralnick, Lost Highway:  Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians (Boston, MA: Back Bay Books, 1999), 248. 33. Outlaw country served as a lightning rod for this range of sentiments; Michael Streissguth, Outlaw: Willie, Waylon, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville (New York: HarperCollins, 2013). The tricky political expanse of the 1970s is also on view in contemporaneous southern rock; see Mike Butler, “‘Luther King Was a Good Ole Boy’: The Southern Rock Movement and White Male Identity in the Post-​Civil Rights South,” Popular Music and Society 23, no. 2 (1999): 41–​62. 34. Peter J. Schmelz, “‘Have You Forgotten?’:  Darryl Worley and the Musical Politics of Operation Iraqi Freedom” in Music in the Post-​9/​11 World, ed. Jonathan Ritter and J. Martin Daughtry (New York: Routledge Press, 2007), 123–​154. 35. Although this is fairly tame in terms of the stage patter that would appear from country artists in the Obama years. Take Hank Williams Jr., who has said on stage, “We have a Muslim president who hates farming, hates the military, hates the U.S., and we hate him!”; Kia Makarechi, “Hank Williams Jr.: Obama Is ‘A Muslim President Who Hates Farming, Hates the U.S., and We Hate Him!,’ ” Huffington Post, August 18, 2012, updated August 20, 2012, accessed July 9, 2015, http://​www.huffingtonpost.com/​2012/​08/​18/​hank-​williams-​jr-​ obama-​is-​muslim-​hate_​n_​1804184.html. 36. Lori Burns and Jada Watson, “Resisting Exile and Asserting Musical Voices: The Dixie Chicks Are Not Ready to ‘Make Nice,’” Popular Music 29, no. 3 (2010): 325–​350. 37. Eileen Finan, Archive:  “The Two Sides of Tim McGraw,” People, posted on September 10, 2008, accessed August 15, 2015, http://​www.people.com/​people/​archive/​article/​ 0,,20221865,00.html. 38. Barry Shank, The Politics of Musical Beauty (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2014), 15. 39. Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 121–​147, 175. 40. Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 41. Huber, Linthead Stomp, 86.

Chapter 23

C ountry Mu si c and Fan Cu lt u re Jonathan R. Wynn

Country Music Audiences Generally, a fan is someone with a “relatively deep, positive emotional conviction about someone or something famous, usually expressed through a recognition of style or creativity.”1 In this way, country music fans share similarities with most other fan cultures. The specific quality to country music fan culture is perhaps in its passionate and strong tie to an imagined homophily between artist and audience and its one-​time prominent role in influencing country music production and promotion. As one of the most popular genres in the United States today, understanding country music fandom is crucial to unlocking the contemporary music landscape. Country music’s success can be measured not just in records sales but also in its ability to create a harmony with its fan culture. Country music fans lend commercial country music its authenticity and credibility whatever its incarnation.2 Although much has been written on the modernization of music recording, publishing, and promotion, one of the biggest successes in the country music industry has been its ability to energize an already enthusiastic fan base. Country fans feel that their musicians are “just like them”; and artists, in turn, seek to nurture just such an impression through song lyrics, onstage banter, newsletters, fan clubs, media interviews, and varied fan interactions. Country musicians are supposed to relate to their fans as “real,” “common folk,” and often working class, and fans, in turn, relate to their stars.3 Class, culture, and personal proximity are paramount, effectively “keying”4 these experiences and interactions. While once there was an influential grass-​roots movement in the community that often collaborated and at times competed with music labels and radio stations,5 country music fan culture is now heavily channeled, nurtured, and supported by more formal organizations, like the Country Music Association (CMA).

480    Oxford Handbook of Country Music A casual observer might hold certain presumptions about country listeners generally: that they are rural, southern, less educated, lower on the socioeconomic scale, and predominantly white.6 This was certainly the case in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.7 A variety of changes expanded country’s audiences. Then there were the smoother choruses and string arrangements of the late 1950s and 1960s that became the countrypolitan, or “Nashville Sound,” which was conceived, in part, as a way to market country to a more middle-​class audience.8 In the 1980s, there was a wave of popularity that industry personnel often refer to as the Urban Cowboy years (after the 1980 Travolta film), wherein country moved to a pop sound, attracting a wider audience with acts like Barbara Mandrell, Kenny Rogers, and even Olivia Newton-​John. At the same time, there were also “new traditionalists” like Randy Travis and George Strait, who returned country to more of a western swing and honky tonk tenor. And then there were the chart-​topping Garth Brooks years in the late 1980s and 1990s (which included Billy Ray Cyrus, Alan Jackson, and Clint Black, among others), which further paved the way for wider popularity. And at present, country is fusing with more rock and roll, and even hip hop (e.g., Big & Rich with Cowboy Troy, Florida-​Georgia Line recording with rapper Nelly), to reach new and younger and even international audiences.9 As a result, contemporary country music audiences are slightly more diverse. There are old timers and new fans, with audiences dispersed across the country. Over the last decade, country music’s US fan base has been skewing younger, and country radio is the second most listened to format in the 18–​34 demographic.10 Audiences do appear to be predominantly white; however, they also have higher than average homeownership rates, make almost $20,000 more than the national average income, and has slightly more female fans than male ones (48% to 52%).11 Other fandoms hold starker gender dynamics, despite some interesting and significant efforts to minimize or neutralize them. Sport, geek, otaku, and gamer subcultures have been crafted as rigidly masculine spaces,12 as the Twilight films and “boy bands” like One Direction exist as the central foci for more feminine subcultural spaces.13 The more balanced cross-​gender interest in country music is perhaps due to decades of high-​ profile female artists (e.g., Cline, Parton, Lynn, Mandrell, Yearwood, Judd, McEntire, Twain, Hill, Swift, Lambert) as compared with rock and hip hop.

Country Fan Culture What has been called “First Wave” fan studies was a reaction to the idea that fans were mindless consumers. Caughey, for example, calls the fan–​musician dynamic an “imaginary” or “artificial” kind of social relation, later concluding that the basis of most fan relationships are “attachments to unmet media figures that are analogous to and in many ways directly parallel to actual social relationships.”14 But after the seminal work of Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers, a second wave of fan studies began to see these enthusiastic consumers as active engagers or “poachers” of popular culture goods.15

Country Music and Fan Culture    481 Later audience studies often debate the “aficionado versus fanatic” dichotomy, between the more coolly rational student of a genre as compared with the more pejorative and assumed obsessive “fan.”16 On the scale of participatory culture, it does seem that country fans are on the lower end. Descriptive survey data indicated that, as compared with fans at other music festivals (i.e., South by Southwest and Newport Folk), festivalgoers at the annual country music festival (i.e., the one-​time “Fan Fair,” now called CMA Fest) were less likely to play an instrument.17 Furthermore, as compared with how some fandom subcultures more actively “play” with their cultural wares, for example, with slashfic or dōjinshi (comics and stories based on existing fictional characters—​legally, derivative work—​often with strong sexual and or transgressive content), country fans do not “poach” or manipulate country music content.18 However, country fans do, indeed, participate heavily in fan culture, perhaps not in ways that fan studies would gauge, primarily because unlike many fan cultures, country music fan culture is predicated on both a real and imagined social tie between artists and consumers. It is safe to say that most country fans derive meaning from their fandom through a strong affinity with their musicians that is based either on a real social tie or the potential of an “actual” social relationship via a strong tradition of artist participation in country’s fan club culture.19 As with some other fandoms, like the Grateful Dead’s “Deadheads,”20 country music has a strong sense of community.21 Traditionally, country fans knew the lives of their musicians, who often exchanged handwritten letters and would often think of them like family.22 Establishing and nurturing fandom is critical for artists in most fields, and in that way, country music fandom is quite typical. How fandom is cultivated in country music, however, is somewhat unique. Rock music has its “guitar gods,” pop music has its “divas” and “idols,” and hip hop DJs and emcees flaunt their wealth and success in a way that often contrasts with their audiences.23 Rock and pop musicians generate cachet from being coolly distant from fans and the music industry. Country artists are expected to be “down to Earth” and “regular folk.” Fans and musicians are seen as a community or, often, as “family.”24 Rather than seeing fans as “others,” country musicians minimize that distance through discursive/​lyrical and interactional practices.25 A study of country music audiences and song lyrics indicates “a suggestive correspondence between the lyrical themes in country music and the life situation experienced by most of its fans.”26 Despite a changing sound—​from honky tonk to countrypolitan to the more rock-​oriented style of contemporary country—​there has always been a “resonance with the traditional values and specific themes” that is embedded in the history and content of the music that maintains a remarkably stable cultural meaning.27 By trafficking in traditional working-​class aesthetics and values, country music performers often give voice to feelings to a working-​class audience that is less likely to speak their feelings.28 “We,” country musicians like to say, “are just like you.” Country music reflects its imagined and real audience. As such, country music fandom is slightly more disassociated with contemporary celebrity star culture.29 Assuredly, fandom increases with popularity, and chart success

482    Oxford Handbook of Country Music and country fandom is perhaps more loyal than other audiences. But up-​and-​coming musicians can find support through enthusiastic fans, and stars who have not charted in years, even decades, will still generate autograph queues and command audiences on the road.30 Fan support, or the promise of it, offers tangible benefits to artists. Industry executives in country music are eager for talent that would be successful in stoking fan activity: while “engaging in other activities such as recording, performing, touring, being interviewed and visiting radio stations, will a performer have the temperament, and be willing and prepared, to offer a smile, a few words and a handshake?”31 And, when interviewing someone who books bands for the annual country music festival, it turns out that having a strong and energetic fan base might incline an executive to book an act on one of the smaller stages.32 The relationship has not always been harmonious, of course. As is the case in other fan cultures, there is often a tension between the enthusiastic consumer culture and what Henry Jenkins calls “The Powers That Be,” which are the various creators and producers of a particular cultural good.33 There have been times when the genre did not appear to reflect the values of its audiences; and, in the absence of much music criticism in the media (as we have today), fans often voiced their concerns over a genre they felt was stepping away from the idea that country music was about and for country folk, through their fan culture.34 Fans in the 1950s, for example, were quite vocal in their distaste for the smoother and more sophisticated tones of the Nashville Sound, but their concerns were over more than just the drift away from working-​class aesthetics: it was also a critique of the consolidation and professionalization of the music industry itself. Last and critically, country fan culture has clearly provided a venue for women to provide key gatekeeper roles in the genre from the start. Even with women like BMI’s Frances Preston and CMA’s Jo Walker held important positions in the industry, many music executives would disparage fan clubs, despite exploiting them, as (mostly) women who were neglecting their families, deriding fan culture as a pastime for lonely women.35 This gendered dynamic is not unlike what Camille Bacon-​Smith found among Star Trek fans in her book, Enterprising Women: a community of oft-​derided science-​fiction fans that were 90% women.36 Loretta Lynn repeatedly said that she recognizes her fans wherever she goes, and that her fan club is mostly working-​class women—​like most club organizers37—​and she wants it that way: “The men have enough things going for ‘em in this life. We women have got to stick together.”38

Fan Clubs: The Informal Strata of Country Music In research on soap opera fandom, Harrington and Bielby concluded that “connecting with other fans and sharing viewing experiences is vital to both the social construction

Country Music and Fan Culture    483 of shared meanings and to the persistence of long-​term viewing patterns” among fans.39 In like fashion, country fan club culture assures inclined fans some chance for communalism and possible contact with artists themselves. For decades, country’s fan culture has operated outside and parallel to its formal recorded and live music industries. Although they often worked toward the same goals—​the success of the musician and country music more generally—​formal and informal fan organizations operate with very different logics. Fan groups consciously viewed their activity as “a response to a popular music industry that did not fit their needs because of its pursuit of profits and its cultural snobbery.”40 If the formal music industry is the wallet of the genre, the fan culture is surely its heart. Specifically, one of the most distinctive aspects to country’s fan culture is its longstanding and vibrant fan club scene. Few outsiders—​or even the more casual country fans—​would even know that these organizations exist. Fan clubs stoke consumerism, bolster loyalty, and affirm a musician’s marketability and authenticity. Fan clubs serve as a volunteer army of informal publicity and promotional staff, even a de facto marketing arm.41 Country music fans are boosters and advocates, often seeking to influence the country music industry, and fan clubs serve as an “alternative gate-​keeping structure that would allow them to combat the power of radio and record executives.”42 Clubs encouraged fans to contact radio stations and television stations on behalf of their favorite artists, at times for artists and fan bases in geographic regions that would otherwise be overlooked by media and the formal music industry. Clubs have been around since the 1930s, with the most famous folks—​those who had film careers, such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers—​having particularly vibrant ones. The Ernest Tubb Fan Club began in the 1940s, had three thousand members in 1947, and continued into the 1990s well after his death.43 Loretta Lynn, whose early career was supported in part by Ernest Tubb, joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1960 and asked one of her fans, Loretta Johnson, to run her fan club after they shared two years of correspondence. Loretta, along with her sisters Kay and Loudilla, became key figures in the national fan club scene. Lynn’s club ran from 1963 to 1996. A volunteer who is a fan of the artist historically and commonly operates these organizations, like Lynn’s group. Today, membership can be free (for Taylor Swift’s fan club) or up to $35 (for Little Big Town’s club). In an interview, a longtime country music reporter explained some of the traditional benefits of joining these groups: The fan club will send an autographed photo, perhaps get a fan club membership card. When an artist comes to their town they can say ‘Hey, I bought tickets, I want to come to the meet and greet.’ They make contact and they get prearranged to go back and meet the artist backstage.44

A key component of the club used to be the newsletter. With today’s social media, artists and fans can “tweet” to each other 24 hours a day, but historically fan clubs and their newsletters served as important intermediaries between artists and their fan45 but also as a way for fans to connect with each other as well.46 Quarterly, the Dollywood Foundation Newsletter, for example, kept members informed on Dolly’s performances,

484    Oxford Handbook of Country Music charity events, and interactions while also providing space for fans to submit questions to Dolly—​and there was even a place for exchanging Dolly-​themed memorabilia. There was also Garth Brooks who, at the height of his fame, had a magazine called The Believer that he would regularly contribute to, and fans would write columns and post pictures. Contrasting with fandom in other genres, country fan clubs are usually engines for philanthropy. Country music reporter Hazel Smith, in an interview in 2007, illustrated this with two examples: Blake Shelton turned 30 this year, his fan club was down here, and because he turned 30 they were teasing him about being an old man, and when he walked in the door they had thousands of black balloons to fall on his head, all of his fans had wore black t-​shirts because he’s old, and they sang Happy Birthday to him, then they gave him a check for $3,000 that they had raised to St. Jude’s Hospital from him.47

“That’s why,” Hazel said, “you got fan clubs.” But she continued with another example: [Then there’s] Gary Allen, who has been through hell and back the last couple of years, terrible thing. He goes and has his fan club thing down at the Factory in Franklin. He gets down there in that crowd, not knowing his dad has cancer. They write us a check out for $4,000 to the American Cancer Society, and he told them, “I know you all don’t know this, but my dad has cancer.”48

Fan clubs were, in a way, victims of their own success. With their rising importance, artists starting hiring professional publicists as employees even as far back as the 1970s, displacing the fan-​fueled volunteerism that had made country’s fandom unique.49 Hee Haw host Buck Owens, for example, roped his fan club into his more formal business enterprise.50 The relationships between artist and fan clubs clearly vary in intensity and formality. Some are only casually connected, whereas other musicians take a more active role in the management of the enterprise. It should be, then, of interest to see the interrelationship between the more formal music industry and its informal organizations.

The Relationship Between the Formal and Informal Components of Country Fan Culture Fandom is not just generated and nurtured by artists and their fans, of course. Country music has vibrant and powerful formal organizations—​from country labels and radio to its trade organization, the CMA—​that serve to maintain and promote audience interest. These organizations are not separate from the informal fan culture but rather shape, and are, in some capacity, shaped by them. This complex and changing relationship between

Country Music and Fan Culture    485 the more formal media and trade organizations and the more informal club culture is another unique aspect to country music’s fandom. In the 1920s, record label executives harbored lukewarm feelings about their “hillbilly music” and appreciated the southern market insofar as it was a money-​making opportunity.51 The decline of jazz and a few country-​tinged hits in the 1940s indicated to the corporate music industry that the market was wider for country music into the 1950s.52 The late 1950s and early 1960s were a critical time in this relationship, as new formal organizations and rituals emerged from both the country music industry and its fan communities. WSM radio initially wanted to host a birthday celebration for the Opry, and this idea developed into an annual meeting for country music radio personalities. The Country Music Disc Jockey Association convention was founded in 1953 as a venue for labels to court DJs with free food and alcohol, featuring performances with musicians designed to convince DJs from across the country to give their artists airplay. These annual conventions, by all accounts, were a wild time for the rowdy group of DJs who enthusiastically embraced Nashville’s nightlife, but soon fans recognized that the convention was a great way to meet stars and get free merchandise as well.53 In 1958, the CMA was founded to convince advertisers and radio stations to play country music. One of the early WSM program managers and key figures in the development of country music, Jack Stapp, gave an early speech regarding the newly chartered CMA, insisting that its major function should be to “educate people behind closed doors” about the appeal of the genre because it could not rely on “the tastes of [its] loyal followers.”54 Managing the relationship between the genre and its fans, therefore, was a key concern. Separate, but parallel, fan clubs were beginning to coordinate and formalize their activities. Blanche “Trina” Trinajstick founded the K-​Bar-​T Country Roundup in 1960 as a way for fans to “connect with their favorite artists’ fan clubs and assisted fan club officers in improving professional standards in their groups.”55 It served as a clearinghouse for ideas and successful strategies of clubs and organizers, and offered features from the variety of club newsletters. A Fan Club Convention was held in 1963, concurrent with the Country Music Disc Jockey Association convention, even though club presidents had been attending the DJ event for decades.56 The fan convention was designed to be a forum for clubs to share ideas, champion their musicians, share their newsletters, and for fans to comingle. Trinajstick’s K-​Bar-​T Country Roundup held an awards banquet as well. At the same time, Loretta Lynn’s fan club was so successful, other musicians asked the Johnson sisters how to start their own clubs. Prompted by Lynn herself, the sisters led them to develop the International Fan Club Organization (IFCO) in 1965. The group was founded to promote musicians and their clubs, advising on logistics and setting standards for the informal organizational arm of the country music world. This was a valuable service at the time because it was often the case that several people would be vying to operate a fan club for an artist, and the IFCO would only recognize clubs that were authorized by the artists themselves. The IFCO would then rank the clubs from “No Participation” to “Gold Star.”

486    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Like the K-​Bar-​T Country Roundup, the IFCO offers a way for different fan clubs to communicate with each other, explains how fan clubs work and how to establish one, and their website lists the addresses or contact information for the various country music fan clubs. For $5, members would receive a registry of clubs.57 In 1968, the IFCO started hosting a dinner and showcase for artists the night before the annual DJ convention. This sort of “kick off ” concert hosted up-​and-​coming acts, often with a few surprise appearances by more established artists. After the 1971 DJ convention, fans finally voiced their concerns at growing sidelining enough for industry professionals to take notice. One person who was knowledgeable of the decision-​making process at the time told me that organizers originally kept marginalizing fans from the DJ Convention, but “it took them about fifteen years to realize ‘Hmm, why are we pushing away the fans? Let’s do something for them!’ You would think it wouldn’t have taken that long, but it did.” Instead of excluding fans, organizers from the CMA, WSM, and the Opry sought to redirect but not diminish their enthusiasm. Local radio and television pioneer and then-​president of WSM Irving Waugh convinced the CMA and the Opry to develop a fan-​centered festival called Fan Fair. The first Fan Fair was held in 1972 at the downtown Nashville Municipal Auditorium, north of Lower Broadway’s hub of honky tonks and the famous Ryman Auditorium. Initially scheduled in April (at a different time than the DJ Convention in October, which was then renamed the “Country Radio Seminar”), Fan Fair was intended to draw fans away from the informal, fan-​organized Fan Club Convention that had shadowed the industry event since 1963. The plan disassociated fan culture from the congress of industry decision makers—​a move deemed initially “illogical” by fans58—​and aimed to provide fans a surfeit of entertainment at a reasonable price. The weekend Fan Fair festival hosted dozens of country stars, and audiences are treated to a stocked lineup and a variety of activities. Although CMA and industry personnel often mention how artists always volunteered their time for the event to keep ticket prices low for the fans, they still admit that labels periodically had to cajole their artists to perform. Five thousand attendees came the first year, and when they moved it from April to June the following year, attendance doubled. By 1982, Fan Fair moved from downtown to the Tennessee State Fairgrounds, 3 miles south. The single location provided for two stages under white and red striped awnings, exhibition spaces, and parking for people who arrived in RVs and camped for the week. Admission included entrance to the Opryland Amusement Park and the old Hall of Fame and two tickets for Texas-​style BBQ fare at the Odessa Chuck Wagon Gang, served by men in big white Stetson hats, kerchiefs, and long white aprons. Fan Fair events were organized around music labels (e.g., Capitol Nashville, Asylum, Arista, Curb, Mercury), but there were also independent artist showcases and sets that mixed up acts—​for example, the Working Man’s Show featuring George Jones, Merle Haggard, and Johnny Paycheck—​and then there were pairings of established and new artists, fiddling contests, and “Honkytonk Finales.” (Central to the experience was the artist booth hall, discussed in the following section.) While the old Fan Club Convention set the terms of the interactions and invited artists to perform, the annual festival has no

Country Music and Fan Culture    487 real space provided for the fan groups. Fan Fair actively “undermined the autonomy of the clubs and cast them as consumers rather than active participants in the industry.”59 Clubs now host breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and parties during but outside of the festival. These events are central to the experience in the minds of the fans, yet peripheral to the festival’s more formal organized activities. Perhaps one index of the formalization of fan/​artist interactions is how the Fan Fair area has been heavily commercialized. Showcases at the annual festival are no longer clearly associated with particular music labels but big names like Crisco, Chevy, Budweiser, Jack Daniel’s, and Country Music Television all hold a presence. The CMA is aggressive in developing partnerships with family-​friendly commercial brands and then ties them to particular activities throughout the festival itself. Country fan culture in this ritual is, therefore, a heavily branded experience. Another measure of the formalization of the relationship was the tighter control over country music’s philanthropic endeavors. The CMA’s Artist Relations Committee noticed that their acts donated to over a hundred charities in and around the festival, and decided to consolidate giving for a more focused impact. (Artists’ fan clubs still work to promote a variety of organizations year round.) The CMA launched a program called “Cause for Celebration” in 2001, which began the era of more organized philanthropic work, collaborating with community organizations each year to benefit charities designated by participating artists. To the disappointment of other local groups, they settled on the Nashville Alliance for Public Education, a nonprofit for music education for the city’s schoolchildren. Renamed “Keep the Music Playing” and partnering with Chevrolet, the program went on to target purchasing student instruments—​eventually providing over 4,000 of them, or about 90% of the instruments in the city’s schools.

Two Country Fandom Interaction Rituals Country music has benefitted from a geographic expansion in fandom and in keeping a recognizable central hub in Nashville. This means that there are different in-​person country fandom experiences that are available to audiences through some characteristic experiences. Although there are many ways that fans interact with country artists (e.g., newsletters, social media, onstage performances, call-​in radio, etc.), there is perhaps no better way to understand country fandom than two forms of interactions: “meet-​and-​ greets” and the interactions in and around the annual CMA festival. Since Emile Durkheim, social scientists have been interested in rituals as group bonding activity. Although Durkheim was particularly interested in how ritualistic activities separate the sacred from the profane,60 country music fan interaction rituals seem to affirm the everyday. Country musicians are clearly seen as superstars to fans, and fans certainly want their artists to be incredibly successful. At the same time, both musicians

488    Oxford Handbook of Country Music and audiences work through at times quite close interpersonal relationships to affirm “realness” and “everydayness” through fan–​artist interactions. These interactions make the larger country music community as “tangible and present,”61 and mutually constructed through artists and fans. In an interview, a country music industry professional told me that today’s country musician cannot really engage in the same amount of face-​to-​face interactions that artists did in the early years of country music and instead have come to rely on meet-​and-​ greets before performances while on tour as one way to nurture those bonds without engaging in handwritten letter correspondence as folks like Loretta Lynn used to do with her fans. He believed that country musicians are doing more of these activities than they used to, and that there is still a strong incentive for fans to participate even if the ties are not as strong. He explains: If you’re a huge fan of whomever, you become a member of their fan club and you get to go to things that everybody else doesn’t get to go to. So, “[H]‌ere’s my favorite, if I pay $20 or whatever it is to join their fan club then I may have to go through a little more rigmarole, but I’ll get closer than the other 34,000 people [in the audience that night].”62

In contrast with the more traditional image of groupies backstage, fawning and hoping for an autograph as if in a scene from Cameron Crowe’s (2000) film Almost Famous, fan clubs can expect and sometimes receive access to many artists on the road. Backstage, musicians like Alan Jackson will have their dressing rooms, but also have a room set up for people in his fan club to get an autograph and picture before the show, and even have a nice conversation. In a 1993 interview with Billboard magazine, from her longstanding position at the International Fan Club Organization alongside her two sisters, Loudilla Johnson noted why these types of interactions require a collaboration between the more informal fan club and the formal team of professionals around a musician: Many of the artists are offering backstage passes, or, in some cases—​like with George Strait—​VIP seating. For those kinds of things you have to have a real good crew and a hands-​on effort between the club president and the people around the artist.63

A journalist who covered many fan club events over the years recalled a backstage event with Wynona Judd when, amidst a lineup of hundreds of fans, the singer chatted and asked a fan why her sister wasn’t with her. Upon hearing that she was sick, Wynona asked for her phone number so that she could give the absent fan a call. The moment crystalized a sentiment for this journalist: That there is a “real one-​on-​one thing. … [Wynona] knew who these people were, it wasn’t just somebody standing in line wanting a photo.”64 In addition to the meet-​and-​greets on tour, artists use the annual festival as a venue for interactions. The entire event was once dubbed “Fan Fair,” but now that is the name

Country Music and Fan Culture    489 for the autograph and artist-​booth venue, located in the basement of the Convention Center because the festival moved back to downtown Nashville. The annual country festival is unlike any other similar event in other genres, primarily due to its focus on creating many different kinds of musician-​and-​fan interactions.65 Ronnie Pugh, one of the better-​known members of the Nashville music community, in part for this biography of Ernest Tubb,66 characterized himself as “one of the few twenty-​year-​olds” at those early festivals. And he described the fan experience as such: [The festival was] down here at the Municipal Auditorium, and of course we were able to do a little of the tourist thing. I’m sure we went to the Ernest Tubb Record Shop. [I saw] two Opry shows that week. The shows, of course, were all sponsored by the record labels, and they were almost around the clock. And the artists had their booths up on the exhibit space [in the Convention Center]. There were times you’d feel kind of crowded in that exhibit area, a lot of fans milling in there.67

Like many fans, Pugh built his vacations around trips to the festival, making it an annual pilgrimage. He told me that, through the variety of interactions at the festival, both onstage and off of it, fans felt very close to the artists: “I know I still have the autograph book that I filled up that week, and I remember very well getting Dolly Parton’s.” The Fan Fair experience was—​and still is, although in a somewhat more muted fashion—​a venue for fan–​musician interactions. These days, doing an autograph session in the Fan Fair, especially for younger artists, is their first step before getting a fan club going. Fan clubs used to run the booths for artists at Fan Fair, and at times, musicians would join members in building them. Music reporter Hazel Smith told me, “When you would see an artist out there with a hammer and a nail, it was really special. It was the camaraderie between the star and their fans.” She also pointed out that, as these booths are now professionally built, it is another indication of how the festival and the industry itself has become more professionalized, and how fan participation in these activities has been somewhat diminished. Not only that, but corporations host such activities. Wrangler sponsors a small stage in the Fan Fair area; and Cracker Barrel, Jack Daniel’s, and Country Music Television have booths that host a string of autograph sessions with lower-​tier musicians and television personalities. Up-​and-​coming artists—​or stars who have perhaps not charted in a few years—​use the Fan Fair venue as a place for stoking or nurturing fan connections. Neal McCoy, for example, spends a great deal of time milling around the Fan Fair area, annually. Acts still demand attention, with festivalgoers lining up for hours for more known acts and even queuing up for musicians they do not know well at all. In conducting fieldwork over several CMA Fests, I met several attendees who would first meet the musician and get a picture with them and then, if they seem personable, would go to check out their music. Interestingly, these days, more famous musicians don’t schedule events in the Fan Fair area at all, in part because of the somewhat overwhelming experience of interacting with a very large group of fans. Instead, many prefer to have more intimate interactions with their fan clubs off-​site or at a proximate venue. These are so popular that attending

490    Oxford Handbook of Country Music might require winning a place via a lottery and being sent to an undisclosed location. For the 2010 CMA Fest, for example, Taylor Swift held a thirteen-​hour event for thousands of her fans in Nashville’s NHL hockey arena. Close interactional moments, through rituals like meet-​and-​greets and at Fan Fair, are the coin of the realm. Just how many actual interactions like these actually occur is unknowable and perhaps inconsequential. What is of note is that these accounts are continually referenced in country fan culture—​by fans, musicians, and the media. Stories like Garth Brooks’ epic twenty-​three-​hour autograph session in 1996 and Swift’s thirteen-​hour fan club event in 2010 gain near mythical levels of elaboration.

Conclusions Cultural sociologist Claudio Benzecry writes of opera fandom that “next to the communion of the souls, there is an active quest for the validation of self-​identity”68 that comes, oftentimes, via a separation with the more media critic-​and industry-​based sources of valorization. For country music, more than other music genres, the fan–​artist dynamic is central, while a more latent tension—​that exists between the formal and informal groups and organizations—​drives much of the nuance below the surface. Despite multimillion dollar superstars, big budget events (e.g., CMA Fest but also the Country Music Awards), heavy corporate sponsorship, and intensive music industry activity, country music’s fandom has remained strong even if fan club culture appears to be waning. This seemingly oppositional culture seamlessly incorporates corporate branding that, as research has shown,69 does not complicate the relationship.

Notes 1. Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 18, 7; Joli Jensen, “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization,” in The Adoring Audience, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (New York: Routledge, 1992), 9–​23; Lincoln Geraghty, “It’s Not All About the Music: Online Fan Communities and Collecting Hard Rock Café Pins,” Transformative Works and Cultures, 16 (2014), accessed January 5, 2016. http://​dx.doi.org/​ 10.3983/​twc.2014.0492. 2. Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, “Changing Highbrow Taste:  From Snob to Omnivore,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 900–​907. 3. Aaron A. Fox, Real Country:  Music and Language in Working-​Class  Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 174. 4. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). 5. Diane Pecknold, “Selling Out or Buying In?:  Alt.Country’s Cultural Politics of Commercialism,” in Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of alt. Country music, ed. Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 28–​50.

Country Music and Fan Culture    491 6. William G. Roy, “‘Race Records’ and ‘Hillbilly Music:’ Institutional Origins of Racial Categories in the American Commercial Recording Industry,” Poetics 32, nos. 3–​ 4 (2004): 271–​278. 7. Craig Havighurst, Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City (Urbana–​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Jeremy Hill, “‘Country Music Is Wherever the Soul of a Country Music Fan Is’: Opryland U.S.A. and the Importance of Home in Country Music,” Southern Cultures 17, no 4 (2011): 92–​111. 8. Joli Jensen, The Nashville Sound:  Authenticity, Commercialization and Country Music (Nashville, TN:  Vanderbilt University Press, 1998); Paul Hemphill, The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). 9. Jon Caramanica, “Country Opens Its Ears,” Arts and Leisure Desk, The New York Times, May 23, 2014. 10. Nielsen Reports, “2014 Nielsen Music U.S. Report,” accessed November 18, 2015, http://​ www.nielsen.com/​ c ontent/​ d am/​ c orporate/​ us/​ e n/​ public%20factsheets/​ S oundscan/​ nielsen-​2014-​year-​end-​music-​report-​us.pdf. 11. Vernell Hackett, “New Statistics About Country Music Fans Revealed at Billboard Country Summit,” Billboard, June 8, 2011. 12. Michael Ian Borer, “Negotiating the Symbols of Gendered Sports Fandom,” Social Psychology Quarterly 72, no. 1 (2009): 1–​4. 13. Tonya Anderson, “Still Kissing Their Posters Goodnight: Female Fandom and the Politics of Popular Music,” Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 9, no. 2 (2012): 239–​264; Erika Christakis, “The Harsh Bigotry of Twilight-​Haters,” Time, November 21, 2011. 14. John L. Caughey, “Artificial Social Relations in Modern America,” American Quarterly 30, no. 1 (1978): 70–​89; John L. Caughey, Imaginary Social Worlds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 40. 15. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers:  Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). 16. Kerry O. Ferris, “Through a Glass, Darkly: The Dynamics of Fan-​Celebrity Encounters,” Symbolic Interaction 24, no. 1 (2001):  25–​ 47; Claudio E. Benzecry, The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 17. Jonathan R. Wynn and Ayse Yetis-​ Bayraktar, “The Sites and Sounds of Placemaking: Branding, Festivalization, and the Contemporary City,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 28, no. 2 (2016): 204–​223. 18. Jungmin Kwon, “Queering Stars: Fan Play and Capital Appropriation in the Age of Digital Media,” The Journal of Fandom Studies 3, no. 1 (2015): 95–​108; Michael Jindra, “Star Trek Fandom as a Religious Phenomenon,” Sociology of Religion 55, no. 1 (1994): 27–​51. 19. Pecknold, “Selling Out or Buying In?,” 28. 20. Rebecca G. Adams and Robert Sardiello, Deadhead Social Science: “You Ain’t Gonna Learn What You Don’t Want to Know” (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2000). 21. Fox, Real Country, 174; Timothy J. Dowd, Kathleen Liddle, and James Nelson, “Music Festivals as Scenes: Examples from Serious Music, Womyn’s Music and Skate Punk,” in Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual, ed. Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004): 149–​167. 22. Jonathan R. Wynn, Music/​City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 23. Adrian C. North, Lucy Desborough, and Line Skarstein, “Musical Preference, Deviance, and Attitudes Towards Music Celebrities,” Personality and Individual Differences 38,

492    Oxford Handbook of Country Music no. 8 (2005):  1903–​ 1914; Charles Fairchild, “Building the Authentic Celebrity:  The “Idol” Phenomenon in the Attention Economy,” Popular Music and Society 30, no. 3 (2007): 355–​375. 24. Wynn, Music/​City, 90–​93. 25. Curtis W. Ellison, Country Music Culture: From Hard Times to Heaven (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 20, 183. 26. Paul J. Dimaggio, Richard A. Peterson, and Jack Esco, “Country Music: Ballad of the Silent Majority,” in The Sounds of Social Change: Studies in Popular Culture, ed. R. Serge Denisoff and Richard A. Peterson (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1972), 50. 27. Bill C. Malone and Jocelyn R. Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., 3rd rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 495. 28. Tex Sample, White Soul: Country Music, the Church and Working Americans (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996). 29. Diane Pecknold, The Selling Sound:  The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 10. 30. Wynn, Music/​City, 99–​102, 108. 31. Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (New York: Routledge, 1999), 127. 32. Jeff Walker, interview with the author, 2006; Wynn, Music/​City, 106–​107. 33. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 243. 34. Fabian Holt, Genre in Popular Music (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 75. 35. Pecknold, “Selling Out or Buying In?,” 207–​209. 36. Camille Bacon-​Smith, Enterprising Women:  Television Fandom and the Creation of the Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). 37. Pecknold, Selling Sound, 130. 38. Loretta Lynn and George Vecsey. Loretta Lynn, Coal Miner’s Daughter (New York: Warner Books, 1977), 115. 39. C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby, Soap Fans:  Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995), 47. 40. Pecknold, “Selling Out or Buying In?,” 43. 41. Richard A. Peterson and Bruce A. Beal, “Discographic Essay-​Alternative Country: Origins, Music, Worldview, Fans, and Taste in Genre Formation,” Popular Music and Society 25, nos. 1–​2 (2001): 233–​249. 42. Pecknold, Selling Sound, 127, 129. 43. Ronnie Pugh, Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubadour (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 359. 44. Alan Mayor, interview with the author, May 2006. 45. Roberta Pearson, “Fandom in the Digital Era,” Popular Communication 8, no. 1 (2010): 84–​95. 46. Tim Wall and Andrew Dubber, “Experimenting with Fandom, Live Music, and the Internet: Applying Insights from Music Fan Culture to New Media Production,” Journal of New Music Research 39, no. 2 (2010): 159–​169. 47. Hazel Smith, interview with the author, May 2006. 48. Ibid. 49. Pecknold, Selling Sound, 210. 50. Mark Fenster, “Buck Owens, Country Music, and the Struggle over Discursive Control,” Popular Music 9, no. 3 (1990): 275–​290, 278.

Country Music and Fan Culture    493 51. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music:  Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 12. 52. Holt, Genre in Popular Music, 65–​69. 53. Pecknold, Selling Sound, 201–​212. 54. Ibid. 135. 55. Travis D. Stimeling, The Country Music Reader (Oxford, England:  Oxford University Press, 2014), 170. 56. Pecknold, Selling Sound, 126, 206. 57. Ellison, Country Music Culture, 183. 58. Pecknold, Selling Sound, 212; Christine Kreyling, The Plan of Nashville: Avenues to a Great City (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005). 59. Pecknold, Selling Sound, 214. 60. Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2005). 61. Negus, Music Genres, 126. 62. Alan Mayor, interview with the author, May 2006. 63. Edward Morris, “Membership Has Its Privileges: Country Fan Clubs Grow in Size, Status,” Billboard, May 8, 1993. 64. Alan Mayor, interview with the author, May 2006. 65. Wynn, Music/​City, 89–​113. 66. Pugh, Ernest Tubb. 67. Ronnie Pugh, interview with the author, May 2006. 68. Benzecry, Opera Fanatic, 5. 69. Wynn and Yetis-​Bayraktar, “Sites and Sounds of Placemaking.”

Chapter 24

What’s Internat i ona l Ab ou t Internat i ona l C ountry  M u si c ? Country Music and National Identity Around the World Nathan D. Gibson

Along with jet travel and telstar, there is something else that has contributed in bringing the people of the entire world closer together. This has been the internationalization of music, especially the simple, sincere, straightforward country and western tunes. … Kenya is no different from New Jersey with respect to music. Neither is South Africa different from Texas in this respect. … Let us not forget the Polish or the Russian farmer, the rancher in Argentina, the cowboy in Australia. The simple folk around the world need country and western music. —​Jim Reeves, 19641

The word “international” has been paired with the genre of “country music” with increasing frequency over the last couple of decades.2 Today, the largest annual academic conference examining country music is the International Country Music Conference (ICMC), founded in the early 1980s and now held in Nashville each year. Its journal is the International Country Music Journal, co-​published by Belmont University and the Mike Curb Family Foundation. The largest bluegrass association in the world is the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA), formed in 1985 in Owensboro, Kentucky, before moving its headquarters to Nashville. Its bimonthly newsletter is International Bluegrass, which contains in every issue a column titled “International Focus.” September 17th is International Country Music Day, a holiday created and promoted by the Country Music Association (CMA) and celebrated annually on the birth date of Hank Williams Sr.3

496    Oxford Handbook of Country Music The “international” in “international country music” is also sometimes inferred through words such as “global” or “world.” The CMA, first organized in 1958 with the intent of anchoring the country music industry in Nashville and promoting it internationally, registered the web domain cmaworld.com in 1999. The CMA website informs viewers today that “Country Music [is]―the sound of Jimmie Rodgers yodeling―Keith Urban blasting out a guitar solo … the showmanship of superstars Reba McEntire, Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley and Taylor Swift. Country Music moves its fans, hits them where they live. Its artists have traveled millions of miles and recorded just as many songs in their quest to articulate the lives and hopes of everyday Americans. The songs make up a tapestry of the American life.”4 What is explicit in statements like these is that country music is an American art form that is representative of the “everyday American working-​class experience.” What is implicit in such statements is that country music is made in the United States and, with the help of a few committed, internationally minded organizations based in Nashville, our purely American art form is being distributed and sold to all corners of the globe. There is little argument that country music today is a global popular music. But does the “international” in these organization’s names indicate more than just the export of an American commodity? Not mentioned on the CMA’s website is the fact that two of the handful of artists the organization chose to be representative of “the tapestry of the American life” are from Australia via New Zealand (Urban) and Canada (Twain). Nor does the website mention any country music played outside of the United States by local musicians, for local audiences, perhaps syncretized with local music traditions and instrumentation, and perhaps alternatively interpreted identity associations with class, gender, race, and politics, distinctly separate from the Nashville-​based country music industry.5 Nevertheless, such music exists. To cover all of those country music scenes, or to determine which musics around the world have been in some way or another influenced by American country music, would be an impossible and never-​ending chore. What about Aboriginal country music scenes in Australia? Or Afrikaans trane trekkers (tear jerkers) in South Africa, the enduring popularity of the Country & Irish genre, Brazil’s música sertaneja, Thai country music (luk thung), or Korean pop stars 2YOON blending K-​pop with the banjo, “western” fashion, and English-​language line dancing calls to name just a few of the possibilities? What could be considered essential and what could be left out as being tangential to something as broadly conceived as international country music? The purpose of this chapter is not to survey all of the different strands of country music that exist throughout the world, nor is it my intent to review all of the current literature available on international country music. Instead, I  aim to join a growing number of scholars over the past fifty years who have challenged the assertion that country music remains a purely American art form.6 To do so, I propose a classification system for understanding the diverse ways people have attempted to make meaning of the “international” part of “international country music,” both explicitly and implicitly. Second, I describe and analyze three distinct examples within this system to widen

Country Music and National Identity Around the World    497 our perspectives of how country music and national identity are inextricably linked in places outside of the United States, with the goal of arriving at a more complex, multicentered understanding of “international country music.”

Defining Country Music Within the United States, what is or is not considered to be country music at any given time is largely defined by those working in the Nashville-​based music industry itself—​ the musicians, songwriters, journalists, radio stations, magazines, producers, trade organizations, publishers, advertisers—​who control what is created, disseminated, and talked about in the mass media. Even so, what is specifically included and excluded in any definition of the genre continually changes to meet the needs and goals of the time as determined by the experts and professional media analysts, those who Nadine Hubbs refers to as “the narrating class.”7 In explaining why these definition changes matter to so many people, Sue Tuohy writes, “genres are contested cultural categories used to make general claims about songs in relation to other generic categories … [which] include its presumed affiliations with groups of people. When we connect a genre to a group of people and to human values, we do more with genre than simply label sounds.”8 These multiple definitions of country music remain hotly contested by fans and scholars today, not because something “sounds” like another style of music but because people associate genres with political and social power and attach particular sets of values to particular groups of individuals. Defining what counts and what does not count as “country music” risks oversimplification, potentially ignores significant political and social ramifications, and is ultimately subjective. As Bill Malone astutely argues, country music defies precise definition.9 And yet, defining the genre remains an important undertaking when trying to develop a foundation on which to order alternative approaches for thinking about international country music. This is the slippery slope of genre—​seeking distinguishing characteristics that help us recognize general similarities and associations between some musical forms and various social groups while still maintaining a degree of difference from others, even as the development of those musical forms and social groups evolve. Definitions of country music in scholarly literature are invariably linked to various markers of identity—​race, class, gender, ethnicity, politics, and place (encompassing the local and the national and everything in between). In recent years, scholars from a wide array of disciplines have challenged many of the previously held assumptions about country music identity, though place—​what is the “country” in country music, and from where does the music come—​has been debated by scholars since Bill Malone’s groundbreaking work, Country Music, U.S.A., and the “southern thesis” he espouses for country music’s origins. According to Malone, country music is a “southern phenomenon, and in the sixty years or more since it was first commercialized it has preserved, to

498    Oxford Handbook of Country Music a remarkable degree, the marks of that origin.”10 It is a theory that has been supported by many scholars including Charles Wolfe who reasons that, like jazz, country music was “a unique American art form” that was a manifestation of southern culture.11 But of course, others disagree. As Ron Cohen demonstrates in his article “Bill Malone, Alan Lomax, and the Origins of Country Music,” Lomax himself was dedicated not to the regional study of southern music, but to the intranational belief that America’s “folk” and “hillbilly” music could just as easily be found in places like Ohio, Michigan, Vermont, Indiana, and beyond.12 This revitalized “American thesis” originally emerged in the first academic study of country music when Archie Green, Ed Kahn, and D. K. Wilgus declared that the John Edward Memorial Foundation (JEMF) would be devoted to “the serious study, public recognition, and preservation of that form of American folk music commonly referred to as country, western, country-​western, hillbilly, bluegrass, mountain, cowboy, old time, and sacred.”13 Evidence of country music’s prominence in upper midwestern locales such as Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, as well as the large range of international influences brought together in such locales, is found in the works of Jim Leary.14 As time went on, more scholars such as Gerald Haslem (California), Patrick Huber (New York), Rich Kienzle (Southwest), Cliff Murphy (New England), and Paul Tyler (Midwest) explored regional studies of country music that challenged the theory of the music’s purely southern origins.15 These studies garnered much-​needed attention for the overlooked regionality in country music’s history within the United States—​distancing the genre from its southern origin myth and reestablishing the music as a national phenomenon. Nevertheless, as these origin debates were happening in academic folklore circles, commercial country music, along with its growing list of accepted subgenres, had gone from being understood not just as an American folk expression, but to becoming an audible, symbolic ambassador of the United States—​blasted over the Armed Forces Network and the Far East Network radio station airwaves from every American military post around the world.

Country Music and Globalization Depending on the lens through which it is viewed, “international country music” can be seen as somewhat of an oxymoron. For many, country music is forever identified with place, and that place is often set in various forms of ruralness, or even a “backwardness”; and as such, country music is still loosely connected to notions of the backwoods, the hillbilly, the hick, the redneck, and other complex identity formations where rural people are seen in opposition to the city slicker, the urbanite, the business professional, the hipster, or the global jetsetter. Through such associations, country music is still very much a sentimental genre that glorifies nostalgia and the “old days,” constantly looking back to the simpler and purer times back in the “country,” a carefully constructed narrative in which worldwide interconnectivity and industrial progress is neither celebrated nor aspired.

Country Music and National Identity Around the World    499 This depiction of country music is reinforced by Aaron Fox’s study Real Country, an ethnography about blue-​collar, working-​class musicians in Lockhart, Texas. Fox sees his informants as “victims of progress” and keepers of a vanishing tradition, one where live country music and “ordinary talk” both help to construct and maintain a working-​class identity while also serving as an escape, or even a solace, from the cultural forces of globalization. According to Fox, “Songs and stories, materialized in the voice and memorized in communal rituals of working-​class cultural solidarity, continue to serve as barriers thrown up to halt the alienating progress of uncertain global postmodernity that appears to disparage manual work, dismiss the obligations of capital to labor, disdain the distinctiveness of place, and disrespect working-​class experience.”16 As a generalization, country music rejects skyscrapers, urban sprawl, global trade agreements, and other representations of modernity in favor of barns, back roads, country churches, and roadside taverns. But beyond considering its function as a coping mechanism for the effects of globalization, international country music also can be viewed just as much a product of those very same globalization processes. As global fan bases grew and local scenes began to develop outside of the American military posts in Europe and Asia, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the idea of country music’s innate “Americanness” was clouded, and the uses and meanings of the phrase “international country music” became pluralized. In some situations, global syncretic forms of country music depended on a specific “American” aesthetic to resonate and have cultural meaning for its audience. In other examples, local influences overshadowed and obscured the music’s inherent “American” qualities and gave birth to a new musical practice (and arguably a new genre or subgenre). At what point then, if ever, did country music, made by musicians throughout the world who found success outside of the United States, stop being considered a copy of an American tradition and start being seen as a local, modern musical innovation? Is the notion of international country music, not to mention the presence of an international country music community, simply a marketing construct for American country music exports, or has American country music become a departure point for viable, local, and sustainable music practices throughout the world?

Country Music and the “International” To ferret out some of these distinctions and the shifting interpretations of the terms “international” and “country music,” I have separated the pairings of the two terms into four different categories.

1. 2. 3. 4.

The International Roots of American Country Music; The International Reach of American Country Music; International Representation in American Country Music; and Country Music Internationally (or, Country Music Outside the United States).

500    Oxford Handbook of Country Music These groupings are neither mutually exclusive nor entirely independent from each other; indeed, there is a great deal of overlap between categories. I also understand the problematic nature of this particular taxonomic endeavor in creating a United States versus the rest of the world bifurcation. While one intended goal of this chapter is to move us away from a US-​centric view of country music, the largest country music market in the world is in the United States, and the concept of an “international country music” emerged as a byproduct of that market. Local country musicians in Argentina, Estonia, Swaziland, or any other location around the world, for example, do not refer to themselves as “international country musicians”; instead, they became examples of such when compared to the US-​dominant global country music industry. In this sense, “international” is merely a diplomatic way of referring to “The Other.” It is also important to note that the term “international” is used in every country around the world. In many instances pertaining to country music, it is used as a way of referring to American country music, though it could just as easily be a reference to country music in any other country. Yet for the reasons stated previously, the concept of “international country music” remains closely associated with the United States; and, for the purposes of this categorical distinction, I am using the term to describe country music beyond the US borders. My hope is that the descriptive categories just listed can be used as a general guideline for understanding the varied ways that people invoke the “international” part of “international country music,” but also that the final category—​Country Music Internationally (or, Country Music Outside the United States)—​can help us move beyond understanding country music as a purely American phenomenon.

The International Roots of American Country Music This first category consists of country music performed or recorded in the United States and that is generally distributed via radio, television, film, subscription services, the Internet, and various recording formats played and sold in the United States. This is the type of music that the casual country music fan may imagine when they first think of the genre (or its multitude of related subgenres)—​songs about trucks, wild parties, God, dirt roads, home, looking to the past and “the good old days,” the working man, drinking and cheating, cheating and drinking, being “country” (or not being “country” enough), as well as the abundant patriotic themes―to name just a few of the most popular tropes. Ironically, American country music cannot be considered a purely “American” concoction of musical styles. Song collecting trips by folklorists including Olive Dame and John Campbell, Cecil Sharp, Jack Thorp, and John Lomax have shown that several of the standard tunes in the early country repertoire (most famously, “Barbara Allen” and “Pretty Polly”) can be traced back to British, Scottish, and Irish roots.17 Riley Puckett yodeled on record in 1924; and country music’s first true star, Jimmie Rodgers, recorded over 100 songs and yodeled on nearly every one. The origins of

Country Music and National Identity Around the World    501 these yodels have been debated elsewhere, but they could have been influenced by Native American yodels; Mexican or Cuban cattle calls and work hollers; or from the Swedish, Dutch, or German immigrants who brought with them to the United States their country’s yodeling traditions—​or even from the traveling Swiss “mountain style” groups like the Rainers in the 1830s or from blackface minstrel performers such as Emmett Miller.18 The 1920s fostered a “Hawaiian craze” across the United States, roughly forty years before its statehood, and it was not long before the exotic-​sounding Hawaiian steel guitar became a lasting part of the country music sound, particularly after the addition of foot pedals and knee levers that could bend the pitch of individual strings.19 Even the most famous country music fashion designers came from abroad. Nudie Cohn was from Russia, and both Nathan Turk and Rodeo Ben were from Poland. Their flashy, rhinestone-​studded western getups seen on the Grand Ole Opry and other country music venues were influenced by the national costumes of Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.20 Yet these international influences on the country music genre are often framed as part of a “melting pot” theory that suggests at some point these influences came together with Mexican rancheras, Cajun music, African American music, Spanish ballads, German ballads, French ballads, Polish polkas, Polynesian guitar stylings, and many more international influences to create this “American” mode of honest and simple expression eventually called country music. Furthering the debate on “when” this actually happened is beyond the scope of this chapter, which, for the sake of brevity and focus, is more concerned with the “where.”21 The music within this first category is very much identified as “American,” largely because it is understood to have coalesced within the borders of the United States, even as it encompasses Americans’ fascination with the exotic Other and country music’s ability to cash in on said curiosity. This trend goes as far back as Chicago’s WLS Barn Dance in the 1920s, which featured modern songs sung in a Swedish accent by Olaf the Swede, and continues through the long string of Billboard top-​five country hit songs incorporating international rhythms, instrumentations, and lyrics about Iwo Jima and Okinawa (Bob Wills, 1945–​1946), a “Filipino Baby” (Cowboy Copas, 1946), a Japanese “Geisha Girl” (Hank Locklin, 1957), Haitian and Cuban women of the “Caribbean” (Mitchell Torok, 1953), a German “Fraulein” (Bobby Helms, 1957), “Hello Vietnam” (Johnny Wright, 1965), “Made In Japan” (Buck Owens, 1972), “Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico” (Jonny Rodriguez, 1973), You’re My Jamaica” (Charley Pride, 1979), “I Got Mexico” (Eddy Raven, 1984), and many more. This category also includes songs in a multiplicity of languages such as the many Cajun country hits by Harry Choates, Rusty & Doug Kershaw, Jimmy C.  Newman, Moon Mullican, and others who move fluidly between French and English; the prevalence of Czech-​language tunes in the repertoire of western swing star Adoph Hofner; as well as the frequent incorporation of Spanish lyrics by Jonny Rodriquez, Freddy Fender, Rick Trevino, and other commercial country musicians demonstrating the complex diversity of American identity and American country music as its similarly diverse, internationally influenced representation.

502    Oxford Handbook of Country Music

The International Reach of American Country Music The second category calls our attention to the far reach of both American musicians and the American recording industry in their attempts to promote and sell country music overseas. According to Tony Russell, between 1921 and 1942, thousands of country music recordings made in the United States were pressed and distributed by both domestic and foreign companies throughout Australia, Britain, Canada, India, Ireland, and South Africa. India alone saw between three and four hundred country music releases during that span.22 Early country music stars Carson Robison and Vernon Dalhart made recordings in England as early as 1931, and the Armed Forces Network radio helped transmit the popularity of country music internationally since it began broadcasting Melody Roundup transcriptions and Grand Ole Opry snippets in the mid-​1940s to wherever the United States had military operations. These radio programs and live performances no doubt helped to popularize the music throughout Europe and Asia. As country music’s popularity grew outside of the United States, some commentators found it ironic that a “lowbrow,” working-​class music would catch on in Europe, which had been exporting its “highbrow” art music to America. But just before his death in 1953, Hank Williams Sr. explained the phenomenon to Rufus Jarman. According to Williams, I call them the “best people,” because they are the ones that the world is made up most of. They’re really the ones who make things tick, wherever they are in this country or in any country. They’re the ones who understand what we’re singing about, and that’s why our kind of music is sweeping the world. … It’s just that there are more people who are like us than there are the educated, cultured kind. There ain’t nothing at all queer about them Europeans liking our kind of singing. It’s liable to teach them more about what everyday Americans are really like than anything else.23

By drawing parallels between American country music and various European folk music traditions, Williams framed country music as an ideal representation of America and a useful tool in fostering cross-​cultural exchange and understanding. By 1958, the CMA was established in Nashville, and among its primary objectives was the promotion of country music internationally. In 1959, the organization’s secretary, Starday Records President Don Pierce, took a trip to England to pitch country music programming to the BBC and to establish new publishing and distributing companies for his label. By November of that year, Pierce had set up distribution companies in Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan, and South Africa; and within five years, that list had expanded to include Australia, France, Holland, Italy, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Spain, and Yugoslavia.24 Pierce was not alone. The late 1950s and early 1960s were the Golden Years for the rapidly developing international country music gold rush. Despite the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and increasing anti-​American protests taking place worldwide, American publishing and record companies were quick to add the word “international” to their

Country Music and National Identity Around the World    503 product—​in this case a sonic, positive representation of the United States—​and countless American country acts jumped at the chance to tour and even record around the world. By 1962, Jim Reeves had toured in Mexico, Canada, various parts of Europe, and (with Chet Atkins and Floyd Cramer) South Africa. Two years later, just before he was tragically killed in a plane crash, Reeves wrote an article for Billboard magazine making his case for country music’s powerful ambassadorial potential. According to Reeves, “A country boy strumming a guitar and singing a story in which an American and a Russian share a common interest will do more to ease tension between the U.S.A. and the USSR than all the threats and counterthreats of the past decade.”25 Other artists joined in. By the early 1960s, Roy Acuff had toured England, France, Australia, and elsewhere on nineteen different occasions. Hank Snow headlined countless international tour packages. George Hamilton IV toured throughout Asia, Australia, Europe, Scandinavia, and the Soviet Union; hosted his own network television show in Canada; and even assumed the nickname of “International Ambassador of Country Music.” Countless other Opry stars were making international tours. Little Jimmy Dickens, George Morgan, Red Sovine, Johnny Cash, Johnny Bond, and the Wilburn Brothers (to name only a few) traveled abroad, though the overwhelming majority of these tours were scheduled as part of USO tour packages, entertaining US troops at military bases around the world and offering troops an audible “slice of home.” Initially these shows were closed to local residents, but by the late 1960s, some of the USO tours began to incorporate civilian performances at clubs and theaters as well. In an effort to further facilitate the cross-​cultural appeal of country music to the local residents, many artists rerecorded their songs in other languages. Cash, Willie Nelson, Bobby Bare, Jim Ed Brown, Lynn Anderson, the Willis Brothers, Leroy Van Dyke, Wanda Jackson, and Skeeter Davis are just a few to record in German.26 Connie Smith recorded in French, appealing to audiences in both France and Canada. Cash also recorded songs in Spanish, while Jackson also made recordings in Dutch and Japanese, and Reeves recorded an entire album in Afrikaans. It is no wonder then that some American country music artists achieved far more fame outside of the United States than within, as evidenced by Slim Whitman’s unparalleled popularity in the UK; Hamilton’s many successes in Canada and Europe; and Jim Reeves’s legacies in Norway, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and parts of Europe. Country music had indeed “gone international.” Some hypothesized that the reason for this success was that country music was so uniquely American that the rest of the world could never capture a similar sound or feeling. Instead, they would have to buy the American “real thing.” In a 1962 interview with The Music Reporter, Pierce observed, “The foreign adaptations are no real threat. They cannot reproduce our US sound over there. … [T]‌hey cannot imitate the picking which comes from the heart without the benefit of written music. The American country song has a directness that gets to them. The language is no major barrier.”27 This belief pits country music in stark contrast to Bruno Nettl’s concept of western art music as a set of techniques that, if practiced diligently, could be learned by anyone. According to Nettl, “It is accepted that anyone, no matter where his original home or what his native culture, given enough talent, hard work, and experience, can learn to perform Western

504    Oxford Handbook of Country Music music.”28 In doing so, the Nashville industry attempted to create and maintain control of the “international” uprising of country music.

International Representation in American Country Music This third category is possibly easiest to understand if we break it down into two subcategories: 1. Artists who downplay their foreign background for U.S. audiences, and 2. Artists who emphasize their cultural difference. Within the former category are many foreign-​born artists who have made significant impacts on the country music scene in the United States including Sweden’s Rednex (1994’s “Cotton Eyed Joe”), Australia’s Keith Urban (New Zealand-​born) and Olivia Newton-​John (England-​born), Switzerland’s Kruger Brothers, and Canada’s Anne Murray, Dave Talbot (founding member of The Grascals), k.d. lang, Terri Clark, and many others. Perhaps no other artist in this category has made more of an impact than the all-​time, best-​selling, female country music artist, Shania Twain. Although her 1993 self-​titled debut album cover played up the Canadian motif (with wolves, fur parkas, and snowy landscapes), that image was quickly shed as she paired up with British rock producer Robert “Mutt” Lange and was rebranded as a sexy, nationally ambiguous, “country girl singer” gone pop. She went on to sell more than seventy-​five million albums and earn nearly every country music award possible, both in the United States and Canada; and in 1999, she became the first non-​US citizen to win the CMA’s coveted Entertainer of the Year Award. By including these artists on this list, I do not imply that they denied or attempted to hide their national identity for financial gain; instead, the inclusion of so many successful foreign-​born artists suggests that the template for successful identity construction within the American country music market is more flexible than at first it appears. And while the financial opportunities available within the world’s largest country music market are a clear motivator for performing or living in the United States, there may also be good reason to minimize that part of their story for American audiences. In their writing on bluegrass and country music, both Mark Miyake and Nadine Hubbs have shown that these genres are repeatedly portrayed in mainstream media as the music that people most often associate with racism, white supremacy, and nationalistic jingoism, essentially becoming an audible version of bigotry and intolerance. Whereas both authors unpack this simplistic view of race and identity construction within the bluegrass and country music communities, Miyake also shows how many audience members in the United States still look pejoratively at Japanese “outsiders” who could never “truly understand” or master American music.29 Researching similar themes within the US bluegrass community, Neil Rosenberg offers his assessment that, “as musicians, international attendees [to the IBMA annual meetings] are often frustrated at the lack

Country Music and National Identity Around the World    505 of respect given their music by the American bluegrass community; they resent being viewed as curiosities. As business people, they feel that too often they are seen not as partners but as conduits to markets.”30 Meanwhile, whereas some artists choose to downplay their foreignness, other performers such as Japanese fiddler Shoji Tabuchi choose to emphasize what makes them unique as a means of setting themselves apart in a competitive market. Tabuchi’s Japanese accent is prevalent on recordings, interviews, and performances, which he emphasizes on his Aunt Susie Records release Rove Retters; and his “otherness” is often central in reviews and praise for his “world-​class dazzle.” As a young violin student in Japan, he fell in love with country music; and while in college, he met a touring Roy Acuff who encouraged him to follow his dream of playing country music in the United States. In 1968, Tabuchi moved to the States with only $500. He joined David Houston’s band and was occasionally Acuff ’s guest on the Grand Ole Opry. In 1980, he moved to Branson, Missouri, where, ten years later, he built his own lavish theater with elaborate Japanese-​themed theatre accoutrements. Tabuchi’s show was considered “the hottest—​ and most expensive—​ticket in town”31 for more than a decade and is today the longest-​ running Branson theatre under a single performer’s name. Within this arc of a story, Tabuchi himself embodies the American Dream—​a fading myth that suggests that with a little hard work and determination, anything is possible to anyone, regardless of circumstances of birth, in the “Land of the Free.” Tabuchi and his cast show how not just America, but specifically country music, made this dream possible through patriotic song and dance routines, brightly sequined American flag costumes, and an epic God-​and-​Country, national anthem-​with-​fireworks grand finale. His success story relies on his international otherness, and his Branson audiences continue to purchase tickets to experience their own slice of the American Dream.

Country Music Internationally (or, Country Music Outside the United States) This last category is perhaps the most useful in understanding how country music and national identity are linked beyond the US’s borders by examining three specific case studies in Australia, Brazil, and Canada. Before examining these case studies, however, it also helps to once again break this concept into two subcategories: 1. Country music that is inspired by or representative of the United States, and 2. Country music that is independent from, or even in opposition to, associations with the United States. In the former subcategory might be country artists from the UK, Canada, Australia, or other English-​speaking nations who are criticized for losing their accent (i.e., their selfhood) while singing a style of country music that emphasizes “Americanized” slang, regional US references, and/​or an American or Southern accent. Despite such

506    Oxford Handbook of Country Music criticisms, Bill Malone argues that it is precisely “because of its presumed southern [The American South] traits” that country music remains popular throughout the world.32 Lee Bidgood’s dissertation on bluegrass music syncretized with local tramping music culture in the Czech Republic, as well as his subsequent film Banjo Romantika, also illustrate the importance that America, as a concept, held for those who protested the communist regime through 1989.33 Another example is the explosion of Japanese bluegrass and country music bands in the late 1950s, many of which were named after American locales (i.e., the Blueridge Mountain Boys, the Blueridge Cabiners, and the Clinch Mountain Boys) and who played urban “western” venues decorated with images of barns, flags of western states, and gunfighters.34 These “western” groups became extremely popular on college campuses and among upper class youth.35 Japanese country music historian Toru Mitsui hypothesizes that the attraction might well have had much to do with the idea of American democracy that was suddenly advocated by the new Japanese authorities; this concept was awkwardly grafted onto the Japanese way of thinking immediately after Japan was defeated in World War II and the United States occupied the country. … To the limited Japanese audience, the white music from the American South was, in concept, simply something fascinating from “America,” a land with richness, expansion, democracy, and possibilities.36

But were all these musics just further examples of imposter or copycat culture? Could it all have stemmed from a romantic, naïve, or nostalgic yearning for “American” authenticity at the expense of ignoring or whitewashing their own cultural heritage—​ the scarier side of globalization that ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl suggests leads to “cultural grey out” or perhaps even the inevitable global music homogenization?37 The latter subcategory—​Country music that is independent from, or even in opposition to, associations with the United States—​is perhaps most useful for exploring this grim outlook because there is a limitless supply of country musicians who never reach the eyes or ears of an audience in the United States, or do so only fleetingly, and yet they have created syncretic forms of country music that remain powerfully tied to a national identity that are neither exclusively, or in some cases even partially, dependent on an association with the United States. Whereas the previous categories and subcategories have presented a rather limited view of country music as a bicycle wheel, with the United States as its hub and spawning countless “international” spokes, this last subcategory can help us see country music in a more multifaceted way—​one in which non-​US-​local country music communities exist throughout the world and can influence each other outside of the US-​dominant country music industrial complex. The following three examples demonstrate just a small fraction of the ways in which country music reaches beyond its definition as “American music.”

Australia During the 1920s, Australia had four different record pressing plants, primarily pressing imported British and American recordings.38 By the late 1920s and early 1930s,

Country Music and National Identity Around the World    507 Australians began recording their own talent, including singer Tex Morton, the “Father of Australian Country Music.” Morton, born Robert Lane in New Zealand, was part of a first generation of hillbilly singers who modeled their careers after Jimmie Rodgers and other American country music artists in fashion, musical style, accent, nicknames (Tex, Slim, Smokey, and Buddy), and lyrical content—​among Morton’s first recordings, made in 1936, were “Texas In the Spring” and “Going Back To Texas.” These songs were made for an audience who associated country music with American cowboy movies; but shortly after these first recordings were made, early Australian country musicians began recording their own compositions with lyrics based on local geography, Australian heroes, and other national topics. While copying musical styles from distant locales was certainly not a new phenomenon, the attempts to localize country music in Australia in the 1930s were innovative. According to Pekka Gronow and Ilpo Saunio, “European songwriters and performers were usually careful to emulate the dress, language, and imagery associated with these styles. Dutch tangos had Spanish titles, and the recordings of Swedish steel guitarists always contained some reference to the South Seas. Australian country music is unique in the way it quickly adopted the imagery of the Australian outback.”39 This emergence of an Australian country music was also unique in that the music was disseminated and learned almost entirely on the strength of American recordings before the music was then molded to encompass local themes. Artists such as Buddy Williams, Smoky Dawson, Slim Dusty, and Morton all began singing songs about Australian places and events, particularly the rural outback; and by the 1940s, a full-​fledged country music industry began to take shape. By the 1960s, Australian country music’s popularity was still on the rise and had taken on a particularly national identity as the voice of the outback, the country, or the bush as well as a voice of working-​class Australians. The treatment of country music as an Australian national music, however, was not universally accepted. After all, how could a genre so clearly associated with the United States be understood as a nationally distinctive musical style representative of Australians? According to Graeme Smith, this has been a constant source of debate among Australians, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, when the US country music industry began to heavily invest in the Australian market, and Australian country musicians developed an oppositional identity to American country music. Smith writes, “The stylistic debt of Australian country to the United States is universally recognized; at dispute is the points at which this becomes a handicap.”40 Although many Australians reject local country music as an inauthentic copy of American culture, Smith points to the established country music industry—​the trade organizations, record labels, radio programs, festivals, and fan clubs—​as the gatekeepers of its national significance. According to Smith, “The continued existence of musical institutions is as important as the resilience of the musical styles of the early bush balladeers in creating the sense of a continuous musical tradition. This in turn underpins country’s claims to national significance.”41 Furthering country music’s attachment to an Australian national identity is its continued emphasis on ballads with Australian lyrical

508    Oxford Handbook of Country Music content and the social, participatory music settings that produce them as well as the immense success and popularity of the genre. Smith estimates that, by 2004, there were more than 3,500 active country performers in Australia, between one and two hundred active social clubs, and several nationally recognized country music icons including Slim Dusty. Dusty, born David Gordon Kirkpatrick (1927–​2003), recorded a wealth of songs about Australia, toured the outback relentlessly, and began singing “bush ballads,” which had previously been associated with nineteenth century nationalist poets Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson. While their poetry was at the center of the 1950s folk revival in Australia, Dusty’s country music interpretations further solidified the connection between country music and Australian identity. Known for his hit record of “A Pub With No Beer,” as well as a repertoire filled with outback-​centered localized tunes, Dusty recorded more than 100 albums and is remembered today as Australia’s most successful and prolific recording artist.

Brazil Country music in Brazil, Latin America’s largest nation in both size and population, provides another fascinating example of how country music interfaces with national identity and music. Known throughout Brazil as música sertaneja (or, music of the sertão region), the music draws its ancestry from música caipira, a rural folk music from south-​ central Brazil, and is characterized today by electronic instruments with keyboards and drums; is performed in concert halls, popular performance venues, and rodeos; and performers often wear blue jeans, large belt buckles, and cowboy hats. The music was originally part of the caipira tradition, but in the 1950s split off on its own. According to Alexander Dent, that split was the result of preservationists clashing with innovationists. The preservationists wanted to protect the traditional instrumentation (usually only a duo with the ten-​string viola and acoustic guitar) and lyrical content of the music, whereas the innovationists (which Dent refers to as mutationists), such as Chitãozinho and Xororó, wanted to combine elements of the music with Mexican rancheras and American country music (and lose the viola). Dent aligns the mutationists’ approach with that of Brazilian artist Oswald de Andrade, who’s 1928 Cannibalist Manifesto argues that Brazilians first inhabitants were “eaters of others because they voraciously consumed cultures” and that Brazilians should continue to embrace this cultural model to help make Brazil more cosmopolitan.42 The result was a music that very much resembled American country music but still maintained its emphasis on brother duets, romantic ballads, emotional expressiveness, songs of lost love, and themes of separation from the country. Chitãozinho and Xororó became a top-​selling act in Brazil in the early 2000s, and their song “Alô” became a number one hit in 2001. Four years later, Breno Silveira directed a biographical film about country musicians Zezé Di Camargo & Luciano, Os Dois Filhos de Francisco, which became the highest grossing Brazilian film.43 Just as they had in Australia, some in Brazil felt that the new música sertaneja was too syrupy, or too Americanized, and that it was “representing cultural imperialism at worst and Brazilian subservience at best.”44 Yet while many of the former associations with brasilidade, or Brazilianness, centered

Country Music and National Identity Around the World    509 around soccer, carnival, samba, and capoeira, Dent argues that this reinvented syncretic country music became associated with national identity through its unique “cultural intimacy” in which “musica sertaneja becomes the single truest and most perfect encapsulation of the Brazilian ‘heart.’ ”45 Country music, Dent notes, became particularly popular at the same time that Brazil’s folk revival was looking to south-​central rural regions, where música caipira originated, with a renewed interest in rural brasilidade (in essence, a search for Brazilian authenticity). Musicá sertaneja capitalized on both its rural and “backward-​looking” associations as well as its broad commercial and cosmopolitan appeal, and this led to the “staggering popularity of Brazilian commercial country music” in the early 2000s.46 That staggering popularity has only continued to grow in recent years, as evidenced by the rise of sertaneja universitária, or “college country,” best typified by Michel Teló’s (2011) hit single “Ai Se Eu Te Pago,” which sold more than 16 million copies and became a number one hit in thirty-​five countries throughout Latin America and Europe.47 Dent’s research challenges country music’s perceived associations with whiteness; with its hick, redneck, and “backward” associations; with its relationship to not just “southern” dialect, but the English language in general; as well as its professed Americanness. In these respects, it is important to note that Dent’s exploration of an international, syncretized country music that challenges these norms is not a singular, isolated case study. Jane Ferguson describes the “American Era” in Thailand as the period between 1958 and 1973, when a massive military buildup for deployment of troops in Vietnam brought roughly 45,000 US military personnel to Thailand, resulting in a massive influx of US popular culture. Country music and honky tonks became exceptionally popular; and local musicians, realizing that playing country music was more lucrative than playing traditional Thai music, began playing luk thung (translated, means “country child”), merging American bluegrass rhythm and instrumentation (sung in the Thai language) as well as cowboy fashion, with northeastern Thai folk instruments and songs (mo lam) as a means of romanticizing the rural region of Northern Thailand. Luk thung has since become one of the most popular musics in Thailand, which Ferguson thus compares to similar musical styles such as Indonesian kroncong and Japanese enka music.48 Jerry Wever’s ethnographic research showing how St. Lucians have syncretized US country and western music with a particular Caribbean resonance with Afro-​St. Lucian folk music and dance to reclaim it as something that is particularly St. Lucian but still maintains its “country and westernness” through storytelling, danceability, working-​ class themes, fiddles, banjos, yodels, and other discernible country music markers, is yet another example.49

Canada A final case study invites us to look northward toward Canada, where the country music industry in many ways parallels that of the United States. Fiddle tunes, jigs and reels from down East, sacred songs, and the sea shanties and folk songs of fishermen and loggers were popular in Canada long before a recording industry took shape.50 But shortly

510    Oxford Handbook of Country Music after the Bristol Sessions and the meteoric rise of Jimmie Rodgers in the United States, Canadian talent scouts began combing the Great White North for similar singing troubadours. Hugh Joseph, a former chemist for the Berliner Gram-​o-​phone Company, became the RCA Victor Company of Canada’s A&R man in the early 1930s and signed to the label many of Canada’s most beloved performers. In 1933, Joseph found the Canadian version of Rodgers in Nova Scotian Wilf Carter, the same year that Jimmie Rodgers passed away. Known as “the Yodeling Cowboy,” Carter became one of the most popular recording artists in Canada during that era.51 Three years later, Joseph signed Hank Snow, another yodeling Nova Scotian troubadour who idolized Jimmie Rodgers, to a contract with RCA that would last forty-​seven years—​among the longest continuous recording contracts in the world. Snow and Carter went on to become two of the most influential country musicians not just in Canada but in the United States and beyond as well. Their reception in the United States was so warm that they both moved there—​ Snow made the permanent move in 1945, and Carter lived in New York for some years in the 1930s and bought property in Florida in the 1940s. By the 1950s, opportunities for fame and fortune through country music were far greater in the lucrative US market, and several more of Canada’s top country music talent—including Orval Prophet, Myrna Lorrie, and Stu Phillips—left Canada for extended stays in the States. Canadian record companies struggled to keep up with their American country music counterparts. Lobbying for Canadians to support their own country music artists so that they would not need to leave, Fred Roy wrote in the 1964 Country Music Who’s Who that “the few [Canadian country music musicians] who do get some measure of recognition through hard work and promotion on their own behalf have no alternative than to follow their precedents, such as Hank Snow and Wilf Carter, to the United States in order to get national recognition. Canadians will then point him out and say proudly: ‘He’s a Canadian!’ ”52 At the same time that its top country music stars were leaving for the States, Canada was being inundated with American touring acts, and radio preference was given to American artists. One attempt to address this trend was the reworking of the Broadcast Act of Canada in 1968, which served to safeguard and promote Canadian content.53 The record market was getting saturated as well with American country music releases leased to Canadian record labels such as Quality, Rodeo, Sparton, and others; and, as they had in Australia and Brazil, many felt that the entire Canadian country music market was becoming too Americanized. This created an atmosphere in which Canadian country musicians not only wanted to be seen as independent from their American counterparts, but as Neil Rosenberg suggests, they “strongly felt a need to articulate a Canadian identity that is oppositional to American identity.”54 Among the most prominent country musicians in Canada to emerge in this political climate was singer-​songwriter Stompin’ Tom Connors. Given the nickname because of his penchant for stomping his left boot on stages, and later plywood boards, while playing guitar, Connors endeared himself to the Canadian masses through charismatic storytelling and more than 50 albums and 300 songs, which, for the most part,

Country Music and National Identity Around the World    511 encompassed Canadian themes—​historical events, characters and heroes, local places, hockey, and much more. In “Ripped Off Winkle,” for instance, he laments the idea that country music is supposed to come from Nashville and states that he would far rather stay in Canada and play for the Canadian National Exhibitionbut even they won’t book Canadian talent. Connors further protested when Canadian radio stations gave preference to American country music artists and told Canadian talent to record in Nashville. He was upset that Canadian recording contracts were seen in the industry as “stepping stones” to contracts with bigger American labels. He was frustrated that the major record companies in Canada were foreign-​owned and that the Juno Awards, Canada’s top musical honor, consistently awarded artists who had left Canada, even some who had become naturalized American citizens. Connors himself won six Juno Awards, including Country Male Vocalist of the Year five years in a row and Country Music Album of the Year in 1974, though he returned them all in 1978 because he felt like the committee routinely honored “turncoat Canadians” who left Canada to make it big in the United States. In a letter to the Juno committee, Connors wrote, “I feel that the Junos should be for people who are living in Canada, whose main base of business operations is in Canada, who are working toward the recognition of Canadian talent in this country and who are trying to further the export of such talent from this country to the world with a view to proudly showing off what this country can contribute to the world market.”55 His protests made him relatively unpopular with many radio stations but further established him as a national hero and country music icon among fans. Connors dedicated himself wholly to assisting Canadian talent in Canada and celebrating his country through patriotic country music, eventually leading to his invitation into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame—​an honor he also declined in 1993 as part of his ongoing protest of Canadian country music organizations continuing to honor artists who left Canada for the larger US market.

Conclusions Today, country music festivals are held all over the world—​Brazil, Sri Lanka, Norway, South Africa, Finland, Czech Republic, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Ukraine, Iran, Japan, and in many, many other places. Any number of examples from any number of other countries could have worked to illustrate the point that major strands of country music exist outside of and are independent from the American country music industry or even associations with the United States in general. In most cases, the music is an artistic rendering of local, lived experiences. In cases like Australia and Brazil, where the music is closely tied to a national identity, the music rose to prominence in coordination with national folklore revivals and the search for an “authentic” national identity. In Canada, the connection between country music and nationalism arose as a localized reaction

512    Oxford Handbook of Country Music against the dominant US market and its proclivities for expansion abroad and control over the foreign markets. Yet most non-​US country musicians don’t aspire to “make it” in the United States, though occasionally that does happen. The Nashville-​based country music industry is not likely to acknowledge these other musical communities any time soon, and as such casual American country music fans continue to be surprised by the chance international “breakthrough.” Even so, awareness of these musics is nothing new to country music scholars and academics.56 Despite the enormity of something as broad as “international country music,” scholars from a wide array of disciplines have been investigating the various aspects of country music highlighted in this chapter for years. In the last two decades alone there have been a substantial number of English-​language publications exploring country music beyond the national borders of the United States.57 While the preceding case studies of “international country music” bear both sonic and visual (and in some cases, social) similarities to country music heard and seen within the United States, other international strains of popular music that incorporate elements of country music—​vocal stylings, song content, instrumentation, in addition to its many social constructs—​are not considered “country music,” either here or in their own locales, and do not have the same global distribution and industry backing afforded to commercial country music artists in the United States. Also left out are the many folk musics cited as influencing American country music but that people see as being outside of the country music lexicon—​Anglo-​American folk songs, early Polynesian string bands, Swiss yodeling, Mexican rancheras, and more. Those musics also deserve to be fitted somewhere into a discussion about international country music. But what then should be included, what musics would still be left out, and when and why would the narrating class choose to make these changes? Shall future discussions of “international country music” include all world musics with bucolic connotations or only those musics that are representative of the “common people,” “working-​man,” or similar identity constructs? Or shall it be restricted to musics that share similar homologies with American country music? Are we talking about American country music that has “gone global,” as in the second of the four categories listed previously, or are we talking about a larger, abstract body of popular music that shares various sonic and/​or social commonalities associated with American country music? The answers are complicated, and there is no definitive right or wrong. While it is clear that American country music has international roots, reach, and representation, as the final category suggests, there are also country music practices in countries other than the United States that, while clearly influenced by exposure to American country music, have taken on their own local and national identities through various means. As those music scenes continue to grow and influence other international music scenes, the idea of country music as a wheel—​with the United States as its hub—​begins to fall apart and is replaced by a world map where the paths to international interconnectedness are rapid and bountiful and will only increase with the advent of new technologies. Granted, there is much more research to be done, but fortunately there is a

Country Music and National Identity Around the World    513 growing body of scholarship dedicated to these questions that will continue to reshape the emergent field of international country music scholarship. I wish to thank Jeff Holdeman and the Global Village Living-​Learning Center at Indiana University for allowing me to develop and teach an interdisciplinary course on Country Music and the World for two semesters, as well as the many curious undergraduates who enrolled. Thanks also go to the 2015 ICMC organizers and attendees who invited me to present this research and helped me to narrow the focus of this chapter. Lastly, I owe a great deal of thanks to my editor, Travis Stimeling, as well as Brandon Barker, David McDonald, Neil Rosenberg, Graeme Smith, Sue Tuohy, and Chris Wilson who read early drafts of this chapter and kindly offered their informed and insightful commentary.

Notes 1. Jim Reeves, “C&W Unifies World’s Musical Heritage,” Billboard, The World of Country Music 1963–​64, 132–​133. 2. An observation first made in a 1998 paper by Neil Rosenberg. Rosenberg hypothesizes that the word “international” is paired with the genre of bluegrass more often than with other genres such as rock, jazz, or blues because other genres are well-​known to exist throughout the world, whereas bluegrass, and by extension country music, is still largely associated with its “original sites and audiences” in the United States. Neil Rosenberg, “What’s International about the International Bluegrass Music Association?” in Popular Music:  Intercultural Interpretations, ed. Toru Mitsui (Kanazawa, Japan: Kanazawa University Graduate Program in Music, 1998), 289–​297. 3. This holiday creation was an update to the original holiday week created by the CMA in 1962, at that time called National Country Music Week, which was first celebrated November 4–​10, 1962. 4. “Country Music Is Our World,” Country Music Association, accessed November 29, 2015, http://​www.cmaworld.com/​membership/​membership-​information/​. For a more nuanced and detailed description of the CMA’s formation and the organization’s mission, see Diane Pecknold, “Masses to Classes:  The Country Music Association and the Development of Country Format Radio, 1958–​1972,” in The Selling Sound:  The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 133–​167. 5. Syncretism is defined by Alan Merriam as “that process through which elements of two or more cultures are blended together; this involves both changes of value and of form”; Alan Merriam, The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 314. For its significance placed on cultural reinterpretation and the new meanings attached to various musical forms during processes of acculturation, as well as its abundant use in ethnomusicological scholarship, I have chosen to use this concept instead of hybridity to discuss the blending of two or more musical cultures; Merriam, Anthropology of Music, 314. 6. See note 57 for an extended list of such authors. 7. Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 2.

514    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 8. Sue Tuohy, “The Social Life of Genre: The Dynamics of Folksong in China,” Asian Music 30, no. 2 (Spring–​Summer 1999): 40. 9. Bill C. Malone and Jocelyn Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., 3rd rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 1. 10. Ibid. 11. Charles K. Wolfe, Tennessee Strings:  The Story of Country Music in Tennessee (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), 1. 12. Ronald D. Cohen, “Bill Malone, Alan Lomax, and the Origins of Country Music,” The Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014): 128–​129. 13. “Back Matter,” The Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (July–​September 1965): 288. 14. James P. Leary, Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music (Oxford, England:  Oxford University Press, 2006); and Leary, Folksongs of Another America:  Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest 1937-​1946 (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2015). 15. Patrick Huber, Cliff Murphy, and Paul Tyler’s works appear in the “Hillbilly Issue” of The Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (2014) in which each contributor challenges the “southern thesis.” Murphy’s recent monograph on country and western music in New England is another important source exploring such regional themes in country music. Clifford R. Murphy, Yankee Twang: Country and Western Music in New England (Urbana–​Champaign:  University of Illinois Press, 2014). Gerald Haslem, Workin’ Man Blues:  Country Music in California (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1999); Huber, “The New York Sound: Citybilly Recording Artists and the Creation of Hillbilly Music, 1924-​1932,” The Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014): 140–​158; Rich Kienzle, Southwest Shuffle (London: Routledge, 2003); Murphy, “The Diesel Cowboy in New England: Source and Symbol of Dick Curless’s ‘A Tombstone Every Mile,’” The Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014): 191–​225; Tyler, “Hillbilly Music Re-​ imagined: Folk and Country Music in the Midwest,” The Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014), 159–​190. 16. Aaron Fox, Real Country:  Music and Language in Working-​Class  Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 320. 17. Jocelyn Neal, Country Music:  A  Cultural and Stylistic History (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2013), 5–​10. 18. Bart Plantenga, Yodel-​Ay-​Ee-​Oooo:  The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World (New York: Routledge, 2004), 185–​240. 19. Kenneth Brandon Barker, “The American Pedal Steel Guitar:  Folkloristic Analyses of Material Culture and Embodiment” (PhD dissertation, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2012). 20. Holly George-​Warren and Michelle Freedman, How the West Was Worn:  A  Complete History of Western Wear (New York: Abrams, 2001), 57. 21. In reference to the “some point” in time, the question of when country music was created is highly debated elsewhere in country music scholarship with dates ranging from the birth of the United States (Oermann 1999) to the production of the earliest commercial hillbilly and old-​time recordings (Kingsbury 1998) to the first recordings of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family (as implicated in the naming of The Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol, Virginia) to the 1950s when the terms “hillbilly” and “folk” were shed in favor of “Country & Western” and later “Country Music.” Robert K. Oermann, A Century of Country: An Illustrated History of Country Music (New York: TV Books, 1999);

Country Music and National Identity Around the World    515 Paul Kingsbury, ed., The Encyclopedia of Country Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 22. Tony Russell, Country Music Records:  A  Discography, 1921-​1942 (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2008), 32. 23. Rufus Jarman, “Country Music Goes To Town (1953),” in The Country Music Reader, ed. Travis D. Stimeling (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 124. 24. Nathan D. Gibson, The Starday Story:  The House That Country Music Built (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 104. 25. Reeves, “C&W Unifies,” 133. 26. This trend in country music follows an earlier trend of American pop stars such as Brenda Lee, Connie Francis, Bobby Vinton, and others who had previously rerecorded their own pop hits in German with great success. 27. Don Pierce and Wesley Rose, “Is the C&W Industry Passing Up Golden Foreign Market?,” The Music Reporter, November 16, 1962, n.p. 28. Bruno Nettl, The Western Impact On World Music:  Change, Adaptation, and Survival (New York City: Schirmer Books, 1985), 114. 29. Mark Miyake, “The Discourse on Race within the Bluegrass Music Community” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2009), 198–​188; Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music. 30. Neil Rosenberg, “What’s International?,” 295. 31. Janet Byron, The Country Music Lover’s Guide to the U.S.A. (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996), 123. 32. Bill Malone, Don’t Get above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), ix. 33. Lee Butler Bidgood, “ ‘America Is all Around Here’: An Ethnography of Bluegrass Music in the Contemporary Czech Republic,” (PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 2011). Bidgood and Shara K. Lange, Banjo Romantika:  American Bluegrass Music and the Czech Imagination, directed by Shara K. Lange (Johnson City, TN: A Light Projects Documentary, 2013), DVD. 34. Miyake, “Discourse on Race,” 177–​190. 35. In this instance, “western” music refers to the usage of the term throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in Japan, when bluegrass and country music in Japan was commonly called “western” music. 36. Toru Mitsui, “The Reception of the Music of American Southern Whites in Japan,” in Transforming Tradition, ed. Neil V. Rosenberg (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 275–​293. 37. Bruno Nettl, “Cultural Grey Out,” in The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-​nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana–​Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 345–​354. 38. Gronow and Saunio, An International History of the Recording Industry, trans. Christopher Moseley (London: Cassell, 1998), 79–​80. 39. Ibid. 80. 40. Graeme Smith, Singing Australian: A History of Folk and Country Music (Melbourne: Pluto Press Australia, 2005), 108. 41. Ibid. 105. 42. Alexander Sebastian Dent, River of Tears:  Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 88–​89.

516    Oxford Handbook of Country Music 43. Alexander Dent, “‘Hey! If I Should Grab Ya’: ‘College Country’ and the Ruralization of Urban Brazil,” in Country Boys and Redneck Women, ed. Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 28–​29. 44. Dent, River of Tears, 17. 45. Ibid. 12. 46. Ibid. 3. 47. Dent, “ ‘Hey! If I Should Grab Ya,’ ” 39. 48. Jane M. Ferguson, “Another Country Is in the Past: Western Cowboys, Lanna Nostalgia, and Bluegrass Aesthetics as Performed by Professional Musicians in Northern Thailand,” American Ethnologist 37, no. 2 (May 2010): 227–​240. 49. Jerry Wever, “Dancing the Habanera Beats (in Country Music): The Creole-​Country Two-​ Step in St. Lucia and Its Diaspora,” in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence In Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2013), 204–​233; Wever, “Dancing the Habanera Beats (in Country Music): Empire Rollover and Postcolonial Creolizations in St. Lucia,” (PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 2011). 50. Fred Roy, “A Pictorial Review of Country Music In Canada From 1922-​1965,” The Country Music Who’s Who 1966 Edition, ed. Thurston Moore (Denver, CO: Heather Publications, 1965), 1–​ 8. Also, Neil Rosenberg, “‘Folk’ and ‘Country’ Music in the Canadian Maritimes: A Regional Model,” Journal of Country Music 5 (1974): 76–​83. 51. Just a couple years after signing with RCA, Carter moved to New York City to host a radio show and was dubbed, “Montana Slim.” Though Carter moved back to Canada shortly thereafter, he retained this alter-​ego for US audiences and commercial releases in the United States. 52. Fred Roy, “The Canadian Scene,” The Country Music Who’s Who 1964 Edition, ed Thurston Moore (Denver, CO: Heather Publications, 1963), 99. 53. The MAPL system is a quota system developed in 1971 to determine what qualifies as Canadian content, or CanCon. The M (music) means that the music is composed entirely by a Canadian. A (artist) means that the music is, or the lyrics are, performed principally by a Canadian. P (performance) means that the musical selection consists of a performance recorded wholly in Canada, or performed and broadcast in Canada. And L (lyrics) means that the lyrics were written by a Canadian. To be considered Canadian content, a musical selection must fulfill at least two of these four conditions. All music releases in Canada that meet at least two of these requirements, including many country music recordings, are then emblazoned with the MAPL logo—​branding said release as “Canadian.” Similar quota systems are also in place in Australia, the European Union, Israel, Jamaica, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, the UK, Venezuela, and other locales, excluding the United States. The 1968 reworking of the Broadcast Act of Canada stipulated that 25% of airplay must be Canadian content, though that percentage has been steadily on the rise. According to Billboard, many Canadian radio stations licensed since 1999 are required to play at least 40% Canadian content. Larry LeBlanc, “Radio Plays Favorites: Canadians with U.S. Success Get More Airplay,” Billboard, April 3, 2004, 55, 70. 54. Rosenberg, “What’s International?,” 295. 55. Stompin’ Tom Connors, Stompin’ Tom and the Connors Tone:  The Legend Continues (Toronto: Penguin Books, 2000), 485. 56. Although opportunities within the US industry to share these stories of country music around the globe are plenty, such as in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Encyclopedia of Country Music, editor Paul Kingsbury acknowledges, “This compendium

Country Music and National Identity Around the World    517 focuses on North American country music, primarily commercial country music of the United States. Although we acknowledge that thriving country music scenes exist outside of the United States, their performers are not treated here.” Kingsbury, “Foreword,” in The Encyclopedia of Country Music, 1998, x. 57. This brief list of International Country Music scholarship includes only dissertations, monographs, chapters, and journal articles from the previous two decades and that are written in English:  Country music in Australia (Martin 2015, Ottosson 2016, Graeme Smith 2005, Walker 2015), Brazil (Dent 2016, 2009, and 2007), Canada (Daniel 1999 and 2003, Hunter 1996, Jackson 1996, Watson 2015), Czech Republic (Bidgood 2012), England (Cohen 2012), Europe (Hartman 2004, Gibson 2014, Rosenberg 1998), Finland (Gibson forthcoming), Japan (Furmanovsky 2008, Mitsui 2001, Miyake 2009), the Netherlands (van Schaijk and Odekerken 2015), Norway (Solli 2006), Saint Lucia (Wever 2011 and 2013), Sweden (Bossius 2016), Thailand (Ferguson 2010, Jirattikorn 2006), as well as important contributions on Native American country music culture (Deuck 2013)  left out of the dominant country music narratives. While these studies represent a growing trend in country music scholarship, it is also worth acknowledging several of the pioneering efforts in this vein addressing country music in Australia (Smith 1994), Austria (Goertzen 1988), Brazil (Reily 1992), Canada (Klymasz 1972, Rosenberg 1991), and New Zealand (Hale 1983)  as well as the many scholars presenting their ongoing international country music research at the annual ICMC held each year in Nashville: Australia (Andrew Smith, Leland Turner), Canada (Linda Daniel), Japan (Mari Nagatomi, Kenichi Yamaguchi), Norway (Stian Vestby), and Sweden (Thomas Bossius), to name just a few of the presenters from the previous two years. Additionally, for more than a decade citations have been given for an edited volume of global country music studies from Duke University Press edited by Aaron Fox and Christine Yano. Discussions of such work may have been in place as early as the 2004 American Anthropological Association annual meeting when Fox chaired a panel on Ethnographies of Global Country:  Country & Western and Blackness, which included panelists Stacey Snider, Alexander S. Dent, Jerry L. Wever, and himself. Related works by Dent and Wever have been published since and cited here; but as of yet, the edited volume, under contract as Songs Out of Place: Country Musics in a Global World, has not been released before my own deadlines for this chapter. Sources: Toby Martin, Yodelling Boundary Riders: Country Music in Australia Since the 1920s (Melbourne: Lyrebird Press, 2015); Åse Ottosson, “Holding On to Country: Musical Moorings for Desired Masculinities in Aboriginal Australia,” in Pecknold and McCusker, Country Boys; Graeme Smith, Singing Australian; Clinton Walker, Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music (Portland, OR:  Verse Chorus Press, 2015); Dent, “ ‘Hey! If I Should Grab Ya’ ”; Dent, River of Tears; Dent, “Country Brothers: Kinship and Chronotope in Brazilian Rural Public Culture,” Anthropological Quarterly 80 no. 2 (Spring 2007): 455–​495; Linda Jean Daniel, “Singing Out! Canadian Women in Country Music” (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1999); Linda Jean Daniel, “If You’re Not in It for Love: Canadian Women in Country Music,” in The Women of Country Music: A Reader, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 161–​185; Bruce Hunter, Country Music Country (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Thistledown Press, 1996); Rick Jackson, Encyclopedia of Canadian Country Music (Kingston, Ontario:  Quarry Press, 1996); Jada Watson, “Country Music’s ‘Hurtin’ Albertan’:  Corb Lund and the Construction of ‘Geo-​Cultural Identity,’ ” (PhD dissertation, Université Laval, 2015); Lee Bidgood, “America Is all Around Here”; Ronald D. Cohen, “Alan

518    Oxford Handbook of Country Music Lomax: An American Ballad Hunter in Great Britain,” in Transatlantic Roots Music: Folk, Blues, and National Identities, ed. Jill Terry and Neil A. Wynn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012); Gary Hartman, “Texas Music in Europe,” Journal of Texas Music History 4, no.1 (2004):  1–​9; Nathan D. Gibson, “International Country Music:  Sound Review,” The Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 504 (Spring 2014):  236–​242; Neil Rosenberg, “What’s International?”; Nathan D. Gibson, “Fin-​A-​Billy: Rock, Resistance, and Rebellion in Finland’s Roots Music Revival,” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, forthcoming 2017); Michael Furmanovsky, “American Country Music in Japan: Lost Piece in the Popular Music History Puzzle,” Popular Music and Society 31, no. 3 (July 2008): 357–​ 372; Toru Mitsui, “Far Western in the Far East: The Historical Development of Country and Western in Post-​War Japan,” Hybridity:  Journal of Cultures Texts and Identities 1, no. 2 (2001): 64–​83; Mark Miyake, “Discourse on Race”; Loes van Schaijk and Marieke Odekerken, High Lonesome Below Sea Level: Faces and Stories of Bluegrass Music in the Netherlands (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Kunst en Denkwerk, 2015); Kristin Solli, “North of Nashville:  Country Music, National Identity, and Class in Norway,” (PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 2006); Jerry Wever, “Empire Rollover”; Wever, “Dancing the Habanera,” 2013; Thomas Bossius, “Keep It Country! Lots of Fiddle and Steel! Negotiations and Re-​Negotiations in the Swedish Country-​Music Scene,” in Made In Sweden: Studies in Popular Music, eds. Alf Björnberg and Thomas Bossius, 91–​102 (London: Routledge, 2016); Jane M. Ferguson, “Another Country”; Amporn Jirattikorn, “Lukthung: Authenticity and Modernity in Thai Country Music,” Asian Music 37, no. 1 (Winter–​Spring 2006): 24–​50; Byron Dueck, Musical Intimacies and Indigenous Imaginaries:  Aboriginal Music and Dance in Public Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Graeme Smith, “Australian Country Music and the Hillbilly Yodel,” Popular Music 13, no. 3 (1994): 297–​ 311; Chris Goertzen, “Popular Music Transfer and Transformation: The Case of American Country Music in Vienna,” Ethnomusicology 32, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 1–​21; Suzel Ana Reily, “Musica Sertaneja and Migrant Identity: The Stylistic Development of a Brazilian Genre,” Popular Music 11, no. 3 (October 1992): 337–​358; Robert B. Klymasz, “‘Sounds You Never Heard Before’: Ukrainian Country Music in Western Canada,” Ethnomusicology 16, no. 3 (September 1972): 372–​380; Neil V. Rosenberg, “Whose Music is Canadian Country?—​ A Precis,” in Ethnomusicology in Canada, ed. Robert Witmer (Toronto, Ontario: Institute for Canadian Music, 1991): 236–​238, Anthony Hale, “A Comparison of Bluegrass Music Diffusion in the United States and New Zealand,” (master’s thesis, Memphis State University, 1983); Aaron Fox and Christine Yano, eds., Songs Out of Place: Country Musics of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

Index

Page numbers followed by f and t indicate figures and tables, respectively. Numbers followed by n indicate notes. Abbate, Carolyn, 174n36 Abbeville Press, 73 ABC, 244, 251, 257–​258, 259n13, 261n55, 381 ABC Barn Dance, 251 Aboriginal music, 52n70, 496 Abrahams, Roger, 28n7 Absorption, 394n77 Academic Music Company, 126 Academy of Country Music (ACM), 108, 115n67 “Accidental Racist” (Paisley and LL Cool J), 459n31 Acculturation, 513n5 ACDA. See American Country Dance Association “Achy Breaky Heart” (Cyrus), 240, 442 ACM. See Academy of Country Music AC (adult contemporary) music, 236, 240 Acoustic guitars, 187 Acuff, Roy, 416f, 465, 468, 470, 505 as “King of Country Music,” 294 performances, 231, 271–​272, 503 recordings, 141, 205 “Stuck-​up Blues,” 415 vocal style, 158 Acuff-​Rose Publishing, 61, 211, 234, 294, 299 Adams, Richard W., 409nn5–​6 Adler, Thomas, 25–​26 Adorno, Theodor, 36, 284, 299 Adult contemporary (AC) music, 236, 240 Advertising, 236, 244, 339 Aeolian (Vocalion) Records, 123–​124 Aerosmith, 460n35 Affrilachian poetry, 338

Afghanistan, 473 AFI Catalog of Feature Films, 264 AFM. See American Federation of Musicians African American contributions, 4, 18, 41, 307, 327, 333–​334, 344–​345, 347n14, 349n35, 501. See also Race and racism; Segregation; specific individuals by name black banjo, 338 black country music, 338, 351n46, 353n59 black folk music, 331 black musical identity politics, 445 black string styles, 351n46 black vaudeville, 373n62 blues, 335, 348n29 cultural, 86, 89–​90 disfranchisement, 463–​464 early recordings, 207–​209 exceptions, 337 gospel products, 400, 404 hillbilly music, 342 marginalization, 330–​331 marginalization of, 340–​341 mentors, 335–​336, 349n31 minstrelsy, 336–​337 musicians, 201n12 old-​time, 120 peripheral influences, 334–​337 prison narratives, 473–​474 singing cowboy films, 270–​271 African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions (Conway), 338 African music, 331 Afrikaans, 496, 503 Agnew, Spiro, 470–​471

520   Index “Ain’t Goin’ Down (‘Til the Sun Comes Up)” (Brooks), 446 Airs and Melodies Peculiar to the Highlands of Scotland and the Isles, Communicated in an Original Pleasing and Familiar Style (Fraser), 126 “Ai Se Eu Te Pago” (Teló), 509 Akeman, David “Stringbean,” 253 Akenson, James E., 351n48, 477n19 Akins, Thomas Rhett, Jr., 449 Akins, Thomas Rhett, Sr., 449 Alabama (band), 142 Alabama Sacred Harp Convention, 160 Alberta, Canada, 4, 95, 99–​100, 102, 104–​107, 109–​110n2 “Alberta Says Hello” (Lund), 101 Albert C. Gannaway Productions, 274 Album oriented rock (AOR), 236 Alcoa Quartet, 402 Alcorn, Susan, 197–​199, 204n57 Aldean, Jason, 243, 298, 388–​389 Alden, Ray, 118, 130 Alexander, Charles McCallon, 396, 398, 402, 408n3, 409n11 Alexander’s Gospel Songs No. 2, 402 Alka Seltzer, 231, 364 Allen, Gary, 484 Allen, Gracie, 269 Allen, Roger, 241 Allen, Rosalie, 272 Allen Brothers, 162, 327, 345n1, 347n10 Allison, Joe, 63, 76n5, 234 Allman, Greg, 471 Allman Brothers, 368 Allyn and Bacon, 459n24 Almost Famous, 488 “Alô” (Chitãozinho and Xororó), 508 Alt-​country, 219 Alternative Country, 88 Althusser, Louis, 340–​341 Altman, Rick, 266–​267, 280n9 Altman, Robert, 277, 470 Americana, 222, 237, 474 American Anthropological Association, 517n57 American Association of Museums, 79n26 American Cancer Society, 484

American Country Dance Association (ACDA), 448, 459n26 American country music, 499–​505. See also Country music American Federation of Musicians (AFM), 210–​211, 358 American Film Institute (AFI), 264 American Folklife Center, 25 American Folklore Society, 359 American folklore studies, 136. See also Folklore studies American Folk Song Festival, 135–​136 American identity, 320 American Idol, 88, 242, 455 American Indians. See Native Americans Americanism, 127 Americanization, 36 American Musicological Society (AMS), 352n58 The American National Song Book, 126 American Organist, 267–​268 American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 (Starr and Waterman), 6 American Quarterly, 10n32 American Recording Company, 270 American Roots Music (PBS), 349n33 “The Americans (A Canadian’s Opinion),” 468, 473 American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), 234 American South, 17–​18, 33, 47n8. See also Southern thesis Americanization of, 36 Deep South, 295 folk music of, 311 modernization of, 286–​291 New South, 208, 295 Old South, 208 Southern Diaspora, 208 southern exceptionalism, 32, 39–​40, 47n3 Southern Strategy (Republican Party), 295, 471 white South, 295 American styles, 181, 416–​417 American thesis, 37, 498 “America’s music,” 215 Amplified guitar, 202n19 AM radio, 238–​239. See also Radio

Index   521 AMS. See American Musicological Society Anderson, Chris, 443 Anderson, John, 282n39, 407 Anderson, Lynn, 503 Anderson, Vernon, 133f “And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar” (Alcorn), 204n57 Andrade, Oswald de, 508 Andrews, Julie, 252 Andrews Sisters, 61, 272 The Andy Griffith Show, 252–​253, 256, 261n47, 321 Andy Nelson’s BBQ (Cockeysville, MD), 91 Anglo-​American folk songs, 512 Anglo-​American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (Wilgus), 22–​23 “Angry man” music, 318 Animism, 406–​407 Anonymous poetry, 15 Anthology of American Folk Music (Smith), 117, 120, 127, 349n33 Antifashion, 420 Antiwar songs, 468 AOR. See Album oriented rock Appalachia, 311, 331, 333, 347n14 black, 338 central, 99 southern, 16–​17 Apple Music, 222 Appropriation, cultural, 365, 450 Apted, Michael, 371n35 Archambault, Tim, 346n4 Archive of American Folk Song, 332 Archive of Folk Culture, 25 Archives of Traditional Music (IU), 67 Arcus, Greil, 127 “Are You Washed in the Blood?” (Hoffmann), 401 Argentina, 500 “Arkansas Traveler,” 41, 254, 260n35, 266 Armed Forces Network, 498, 502 A&R (artist and repertory) men, 19–​20 Arminius, Jacob, 397–​399, 405 Armstrong, Edward G., 377–​378 Armstrong, Louis, 269 Arnold, Eddy, 214, 255, 309, 362 Arnold, Lee, 239

Arthur, Charline, 379 Artifacts, 59 Artist and repertory (A&R) men, 19–​20 Artists, 100. See also Musicians; Singers; Songwriters; individual artists financial compensation, 292 financial success, 361 foreign-​born, 504–​506 Art world, 68 Arty Hill & The Long Gone Daddy, 91 ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers), 234 Asch, Moses, 121 Asheville, North Carolina, 135–​136 Ash Grove club, 252 Asia, 503. See also specific countries Asian Americans, 328–​329 Assembly music, 18 Asylum records, 486 Atkins, Chet, 213–​215, 235, 347n9, 363, 503 Atkins, Rodney, 449 Atlanta, Georgia, 235, 291–​295 Atlanta Journal, 230 Atwater-​Kent radios, 59 Audiences, 307, 345n2, 479–​480 consumer demographics, 285 film, 270 LGBT, 83n91, 86, 379 radio, 239–​241 Aunt Susie Records, 505 Austin, Stephen, 135 Austin, Texas, 112n26, 217, 236–​237, 469 Austin City Limits, 250 Australia, 10n26, 43, 52n70, 53n73, 496, 502–​503, 506–​508, 511, 516n53, 517n57 Austria, 501, 517n57 Authenticity, 14, 220–​221, 286, 298, 310–​315, 355–​373, 417 blues, 349n34 folk, 300 hillbilly, 287–​288 neo-​traditionalist, 321 New Hollywood, 276 old-​time, 177 purity by proxy, 308 southern rock, 349n34 working-​class folk culture, 307–​308

522   Index Authorship, 22 Automation, mechanical, 200n6 Automobiles, 289 Autry, Gene, 61, 211, 254 clothing style, 423–​424, 424f fan club, 483 performances, 231, 270–​271, 312 as singing cowboy, 312, 417, 424f singing style, 162 V-​Discs, 210–​211 Averill, Patrick, 9n7 Awkward, Michael, 353n65 “Aw Naw” (Young), 388 Axton, Hoyt, 275 Ayler, Albert, 198 Aylesworth, John, 252–​254, 256 Babiuk, Andy, 203n38 Baby, the Rain Must Fall, 274 “Baby Got Back” (Six Mix-​A-​Lot), 389 Backstage passes, 488 “Back Street Affair” (Pierce), 375 Bacon, Peter, 174n44 Bacon-​Smith, Camille, 482 Bad boys, 316 Baez, Joan, 296 Bailey, Beth, 365 Bailey, DeFord, 141, 231, 293, 327, 350n41 Baily, John, 179 Baker, Etta, 118 Baker, Sarah, 10n26, 52n70 Bakersfield, California, 112n26, 226n40, 236, 288 Bakersfield Sound, 75, 214, 288, 449 “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” (Flatt and Scruggs), 253 “The Ballad of the Green Berets” (Sadler), 468 Ballads, 332–​334, 348n24, 405, 501 bush, 508 Child, 16 Columbia River, 466 English, 15–​16 French, 501 German, 501 murder, 319 North America, 17 Scottish, 15–​16, 500–​501

Spanish, 501 traditional, 16 vulgar, 16, 18 Ballroom dance, 454–​455 Baltzell, John, 42 The Bandits, 453 Band Perry, 88 Banjo, 18, 149, 209, 224n16, 333, 336, 496 black, 338, 351n45 Banjo on My Knee, 265 Banjo Romantika, 506 “Barbara Allen,” 500 The Barbara Mandrell Show, 249 Barcelata, Lorenzo, 271 Bare, Bobby, 503 Barker, Kenneth Brandon, 201n11 Barn dance(s), 129, 210, 281n29, 336–​337, 440 Barn dance radio, 164, 230–​233, 250, 287–​288, 320, 350, 350n38, 358 on television, 251 WLS National Barn Dance, 20–​21, 78n16, 133f, 143, 231–​233, 501 Barnes, Ken, 239 Barney Google (DeBeck), 320 “Barney McCoy,” 124 Barry, Phillips, 19, 22 “Bartender Blues” (Jones), 162 Barthes, Roland, 146 Bartlett, Ray, 232 Bar X Ranch, 95 Basement Tapes (Dylan), 127 Basie, Count, 61 Batman and Rombin, 255 Battle Ground, Indiana, 136 “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (Howe), 126, 405, 411n39 Baxter, J. R., Jr., 402 Bayard, Samuel P., 22–​23, 135 Baylor University, 5 Bayou Dance Club (Pinellas Park, FL), 454–​455 Bazooka, 254 BBC, 502 B-​bender, 196 Bealle, John, 172n14 Bear Family Records, 5 Beatles, 162

Index   523 Beauchamp, George D., 182, 183f, 202n18 “The Beautiful Land” (Wood-​White), 409n5 Beck, Glenn, 242 Becker, Christine, 282n35 Becker, Howard, 68, 285 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 412n47 “Before He Cheats” (Underwood), 242 Behind Closed Doors (Rich), 217 “Behind Closed Doors” (Rich), 377 Beirly, A., 409n5 Beisswenger, Drew, 135 Belafonte, Harry, 61 The Believer, 484 Bellanta, Melissa, 10n26 Belle, Lulu, 78n16, 259n11 Belmont University, 495 Benjamin, Walter, 259n10, 299 Bennett, Andy, 284 Bennett, Tony, 211, 234 Benny, Jack, 269 Benny Goodman Orchestra, 270 Benson, Jno T., 409n5 Benton, Thomas Hart, 177 Benzecry, Claudio, 490 Berea College, 5 Berg, Dave, 449 Berkeley, California, 135–​136 Berle, Milton, 250 Berliner Gram-​o-​phone Company, 510 Berman, Marshall, 300n3 Bernstein, Joel, 437n35 Berry, Chad, 48n16 Bertrand, Michael T., 213, 225n31, 307, 319, 336–​337, 365 The Best Years of Our Lives, 273 “Betty Ann and Shirley Cole” (Weller), 375, 378 The Beverly Hillbillies, 252–​253, 256, 260n26, 321 Bhabha, Homi, 341 Bidgood, Lee, 52n71, 506 “Big Big Love,” 380 Biggar, George C., 133f Biglow and Main Company, 399, 401, 410n18 Big Maybelle, 368, 372n56 Bigotry, 339 Big & Rich with Cowboy Troy, 480 Bigsby, Paul, 189, 203n38

Bigsby guitars, 190–​191 Bijker, Wiebe E., 200n7, 200n9 Bijsterveld, Karin, 152n10 Billboard, 65, 157, 205, 219, 221, 232, 238, 360, 375, 501 charts, 368–​369, 371n39, 377, 449, 456, 467 “Label Chiefs See Country Growth on Upbeat,”226n53 Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys: An Illustrated Discography (Rosenberg), 69 Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, 344 Billy in the Lowgrounds, 279 “Biograph Girl,” 268 Biography of Gospel Song and Hymn Writers (Hall), 411n27 Biopics, 276 Birmingham School, 284–​285 The Birthplace of Country Music Museum, 514n21 Bisbee, Jasper “Jep,” 42 Bishop, Paul, 161–​162 Bits of Old Time Hits, 266 Bitter Tears (Cash), 236–​237 Black, Clint, 480 Black banjo, 338 Black Banjo Gathering, 338 Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia (Smithsonian Folkways), 351n45 Blackboard (Bakersfield, CA), 449, 459n27 Black country music, 351n46, 353n59. See also African American contributions Blackface, 349n35, 350n38, 375, 390n1, 501 Black folk music, 331 Blackfoot Confederacy, 115n59 Black gospel, 400 Black Music Research Journal, 338 Blackness, 392n42 Black Power movement, 330 Black Rodeo, 86 Blacks, Whites, and Blues (Russell), 327–​328, 337–​338, 345n3 Black Sabbath, 102 Black string styles, 351n46 Black traditions. See African American contributions Black vaudeville, 373n62 Black Velvet, 384

524   Index Black–​white relations, 328–​329. See also Race and racism Black women, 385–​386, 390. See also Women’s contributions Blending, 389 Bley, Paul, 198 Blim, Daniel, 120 Bliss, Philip Paul (P. P.), 399, 410n17 “Blood, Sweat and Water” (Lund), 103 “Blood Red and Goin’ Down” (Tucker), 384 Bloody Sunday, 296 Bloomington, Indiana, 135–​136 Bloopers, 255 Blount, Roy, Jr., 72 “Blue” (Rimes), 241 Bluegrass, 91–​92, 111n25, 293 classic, 137n9 contemporary, 149–​150 early, 338 foreign-​born artists, 504–​505 gospel, 403 international, 495, 515n35 Japanese bands, 506 old-​time, 117–​120, 137n9 origins of, 117–​118, 350n35, 353n67 recording practice, 149–​150, 220 traditional, 137n9 vocal harmonies, 400 Bluegrass: A History (Rosenberg), 89 Bluegrass Film Festival, 279 Bluegrass resonator guitar, 180–​181 Bluegrass scholarship, 24, 349n34 Bluegrass Unlimited, 117–​118 “Bluegrass Week,” 279 Blueridge Cabiners, 506 Blueridge Mountain Boys, 506 Blues, 61, 120, 161, 327–​328, 333–​335, 348n24, 357 authenticity claims, 349n34 gospel, 404 Blues guitar technique, 348n29 “Blue Yodel #4,” 344 BMI. See Broadcast Music, Incorporated B-​movies, 268, 270, 273, 282n39 Bob Pinson Collection, 70 Bob White Syncopating Band, 357 Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, 88, 271, 440 “Steel Guitar Rag,” 186, 187f Boehm, Lisa Krissoff, 139n34

Bogan, Lucille, 357 Boles, Joh B., 36 Bolick, Harry, 135 Bond, Johnny, 503 Boogie woogie, 335 Book awards, 352n58 Boone, Debby, 405 Boone, Pat, 405 Boots, 426 “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” (Brooks and Dunn), 443 Borchetta, Scott, 243, 393n70 Bossius, Thomas, 517n57 Boston (band), 450 Boston, Massachusetts, 135–​136, 235 Botkin, B. A., 66 Bottleneck or slide guitar style, 201n12 Bourdieu, Pierre, 285, 291, 298, 309 Bourgeois domesticity, 310 Bourke-​White, Margaret, 465 Bowen, Jimmy, 239–​240 Bowery Boys, 274 Boy bands, 480 Boycotts, 101, 221, 242, 285, 473 Boyd, Jean A., 34, 98, 202n20, 348n29 “A Boy Named Sue” (Silverstein), 318 A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (Pecknold and McCusker, eds.), 307, 365, 379 “Boys ‘Round Here” (Shelton), 389–​390 BR5-​49, 321, 434 Brackett, David, 160–​161, 276 Bradbury, William B., 399, 409n13, 410n18 Bradbury Company, 410n18 Bradley, Harold, 294 Bradley, Owen, 164, 167, 169, 292, 363 Bradley Studios, 294, 299 Brady, Erika, 50n32, 89, 128, 336 Bramlett, Bonnie, 149, 154n46 Branding, 205, 244 Brandt, Pamela, 380 Branson, Missouri, 505 Brasfield, Rod, 233, 265 Brazil, 4, 43, 52n71, 496, 508–​509, 511, 517n57 Bredesen, Phil, 74 Brennan, Walter, 265 Brenner, Becky, 243 Brewer, Roy, 346n4

Index   525 Brewer’s Collection of Old Familiar Songs, 126 Brice, Lee, 449 Bridges, James, 442 Bridges, Jeff, 279 “Brighten the Corner Where You Are,” 411n26 Brinkley, John, 465 Brislin, Kate, 118, 136 Bristol sessions, 124, 143–​146, 209, 287–​288, 291, 311, 313, 339, 395–​399, 402, 408n1 British Columbia, 105 British folk culture, 329 Britt, Elton, 165 Broadcast Act (Canada), 510, 516n53 Broadcast Music, Incorporated (BMI), 60, 211, 234 Brock, William, 471 Brockman, Polk, 139n40, 208, 292 Bro-​country music, 221–​222, 230, 243, 367, 449–​450 cultural practice, 87–​88, 298, 375–​376, 387–​390, 419 definition of, 459n28 origins, 456, 459n28 Broken Spoke (Austin, TX), 449 Bronner, Simon J., 25, 36–​38, 41, 44–​45, 49n29, 51n66, 68, 89–​91, 139n34 Brooks, Garth, 3, 86, 207, 218–​220, 230, 240–​ 241, 298, 480 “Ain’t Goin’ Down (‘Til the Sun Comes Up),” 446 The Believer, 484 fan interactions, 490 “Friends in Low Places,” 219 musical roots, 450 Ropin’ The Wind, 219 visual style, 433 “We Shall Be Free,” 375 Brooks, Joe, 405 Brooks & Dunn, 344, 443 Brost, Molly, 276 “Brother Brigham, Brother Young” (Lund), 113n45 Brother duets, 162 Brown, J. Carter, 72 Brown, Jayna, 386, 394n77 Brown, Jim Ed, 349n33, 503 Brown, Milton, 98, 465 Browning, Chuck, 242

Brozman, Bob, 202n17 Brumley, Albert E., 402–​403 Bryan, Luke, 222, 229, 243, 298, 367, 375, 388–​389, 450 Bryan, William Jennings, 464 Buckaroo tradition, 105, 114n58 “Buckin’ Horse Rider” (Lund), 101 Buckley, John, 377 “Buck Owens Ranch Show,” 259n15 Buckwild, 321 Buddy songs, 372n48 Budweiser, 487 Buffalo Gun, 274 Bufwack, Mary, 3, 163–​164, 277, 319, 363–​364, 392n43 Bullock, Sandra, 447 Bumgarner, Samantha, 123, 362 Burgess, Ernest W., 300n3 Burlesque, 314, 322 Burnett, Carol, 250 Burnett, T-​Bone, 299 “Burnin’ Love” (Presley), 384 Burns, Bob, 254 Burns, George, 269 Burns, Lori, 4 Burson, Harry, 390n “Bury Me Beneath the Willows,” 232–​233 “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow Tree” (Carter Family), 161, 408n1 Bush, George W., 221, 242, 472–​474 Bush, Jim, 133f Bush, Kristian, 108 Bush ballads, 508 Business Week, 213–​214 Busking, 369 Bussard, Joe, 93n11 Butler, Judith, 369n1 Butler, Mike, 478n33 Buttram, Pat, 254 Byrd, Jerry, 185, 202n23 Byrd, Tracy, 443 Byrds, 162, 196, 469 Cabin Fever (Lund), 103 Cable TV, 278 Cadillac Ranch (Fayetteville, NC), 439, 448 Caipira tradition, 508 Cajun music, 120, 341, 446, 501

526   Index Caldwell, Erskine, 465 Calgary, Alberta (Canada), 111n20 Calgary Stampede, 114n46 California, 440 California mix, 454–​456 Callahan Brothers, 141, 271 Calvin, John, 398 Camp, 380 Campbell, Alan, 92 Campbell, Archie, 253–​255 Campbell, Glen, 74, 217, 249, 279, 384 Campbell, John, 500–​501 Campbell, Olive Dame, 9n7, 16, 333, 500–​501 Camwax, 361 Canada Broadcast Act, 510, 516n53 country music, 43, 49n29, 52n70, 111n20, 502–​504, 509–​512, 516n53, 517n57 Country Music Hall of Fame, 511 Eastern, 17 radio stations, 511, 516n53 Cannibalist Manifesto (Andrade), 508 Canova, Zeke, 272 “Can the Circle Be Unbroken?,” 289 “Can the Circle Be Unbroken (Bye and Bye)” (Carter), 402 Cantrill, James, 96 Cantwell, David, 225n23, 477n23 Capitalism, 320 Capitol Nashville, 242, 486 Capitol Records, 74, 211, 214–​215, 219, 404 Hymns (Ford), 404, 411n33 Spirituals (Ford), 404, 411n34 Capp, Al, 320–​321 Caramanica, Jon, 6 Cardwell, Nancy, 108 “Caribbean” (Torok), 501 Caricatures, 320 Carney, George O., 48nn19–​20, 112n28 Carolina Chocolate Drops, 137, 338 Carolina Danceland (Lexington, NC), 453–​454 Carol’s Western Wear, 85–​86, 90, 92 Carpenter, Karen, 148–​149, 154n46 Carson, Fiddlin’ John, 19, 72, 98, 123, 129, 133f, 139n40, 287–​288, 300, 359 early recordings, 145–​146, 208, 230–​231, 266, 291, 356–​357

Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy: Fiddlin’ John Carson, His Real World, and the World of His Songs (Wiggins), 134 “Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Gonna Crow,” 208 political performances, 463–​465, 474–​475 “There’s a Hard Time A-​Comin’,” 145 vocals, 208–​209 Carson, Johnny, 259n16 Carson, Rosa Lee, 145 Carter, A. P., 161, 289, 335, 402–​403 Carter, Clarence, 443 Carter, Jimmy, 471–​472 Carter, June, 265, 276, 279, 385–​386 Carter, “Mother” Maybelle, 161, 209, 279, 289, 357, 402 Carter, Sara, 161, 209, 279, 289 Carter, Walter, 202n30, 203n36 Carter, Wilf, 102, 510, 516n51 Carter Family, 20, 24, 73, 118, 141, 221, 224n22, 359 Bristol sessions, 209, 311, 313, 402, 408n1 “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow Tree,” 161, 408n1 discovery of, 287–​289 as “First Family,” 318 “My Clinch Mountain Home,” 100 recordings, 205, 207 screen performances, 279 singing style, 160 songs, 463 Cash, J. W., 329 Cash, Johnny, 5, 10n30, 83n91, 100, 102, 213, 249–​250, 268, 279, 289, 296 biopics, 276 Bitter Tears, 236–​237 case study, 316–​319, 322 “Come and Ride This Train,” 317 hard-​core country music, 365 “Hey, Porter,” 317 as icon, 220–​221, 379 “I Walk the Line,” 318–​319 Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music, 279 The Johnny Cash Show, 80n45, 249, 258n2 Johnny Cash Sings the Ballads of the True West, 312

Index   527 “Locomotive Man,” 317 “The Man in Black,” 434 “man in black” image, 297, 433–​434, 468 non-​English recordings, 503 “One Piece at a Time,” 344–​345 “Oney,” 317 prison songs, 318, 473 “Reflections,” 312–​313, 324n31 Ride This Train, 258n3 “Ridin’ on the Cotton Belt,” 317 screen performances, 235, 258n2, 274–​275, 279, 503 signature songs, 318–​319 as songwriter, 317 themes, 309, 316–​317 White House performances, 296–​297, 470 Cash, June Carter, 265, 276, 279, 385–​386 Cash, W. J., 316 Cashbox, 205 Castle Studios, 294 Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour, 237 Catalog sales, 239 Cattelino, Jessica R., 412n50 “Cattle Call,” 214 Cattle calls, 501 “Cause for Celebration” program (CMA), 487 Cauthen, Joyce, 134 CBS, 232, 244, 250, 256 Cedarwood Publishing, 61 Celebrity, 297–​298, 300, 365 Celtic music, 331 Center for Popular Music, 5, 25, 73, 77n5, 360, 370n18 “Cha-​Cha Slide” (DJ Casper), 451 Chanan, MIchael, 154n33 Chaplin, Charlie, 268 Chapman, John Wilbur, 408n3 Chappell, Louis, 127–​128 Charles, Ray, 74–​75, 214, 337, 350n40, 400 The Charleston, 440 Charlotte, North Carolina, 295 Chatham County Line, 149–​150 Chatmon, Bo, 351n46 “Chattahoochee” (Jackson), 219 Cher, 250 Cherry, Hugh, 259n13 Chesney, Kenny, 280, 431

Chevrolet, 487 “Cheyenne,” 267 Chicago, Illinois, 135–​136, 234–​235, 237, 240, 288 Chicano Movement, 472 Chickasaw County, Mississippi, 368 Child, Francis James, 15 Child ballads, 16 Children’s Songs, 126 “Chill Factor” (Whittaker), 443 “Chillin’ It” (Swindell), 388 Chimes (technique), 181 Ching, Barbara, 3, 112n26, 217, 276, 308, 314–​315, 325n33, 340 Wrong’s What I do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture, 365, 391n10, 477n20 “Chinook Wind” (Lund), 103, 107 Chitãozinho and Xororó, 508 Choates, Harry, 501 CHR (contemporary hit radio), 236 Christgau, Georgia, 421–​422 Christian Fundamentalism, 395, 405, 408 Christianity Protestant, 395, 407–​408 Reformed, 398 songs of sacred expression, 404–​405 “Christmastime in Washington” (Earle), 474 Chromatic tuning E9th, 194, 194t, 195–​196, 196t Lydian Chromatic Concept (Russell), 197 The Chuck Wagon Gang, 403 Church, Eric, 243–​244, 450 Church, John, 399, 401 Church suppers, 457n2 Ciesla, Kurt, 102, 104 Cincinnati, Ohio, 212, 343 Cinema. See Film Cinemascope, 278 Cities, 48n19 Citybilly music, 98, 128, 225n23 Civil Rights Movement, 295, 319, 330 Civil Wars, 298 Clapton, Eric, 258n2 Clark, Anthony, 447 Clark, Brandy, 463

528   Index Clark, Guy, 279–​280 Clark, Roy, 252, 254–​255, 259nn16–​17 Clark, Terri, 504 Clark Willson, 126 Classical guitar, 201n12 Class relations, 83n91, 220, 291, 307–​326, 346n9, 497 Class values, 314 “Cleanse Me,” 233 Clear Channel, 241–​242 Cleveland, Thomas F., 172n12 Clifftop, West Virginia, 136 Clinch Mountain Boys, 506 Cline, Patsy, 59, 74, 110n14, 157, 164, 174n33, 309, 363, 386, 467 biopics, 276, 363 commercial success, 365 as crossover icon, 241, 431–​432 as high-​profile artist, 480 personal style, 430–​432 as queer icon, 379–​380, 382–​383 self-​definition, 214, 363, 431 Sweet Dreams: The World of Patsy Cline (Hofstra, ed.), 477n20 “Walkin’ After Midnight,” 379, 430 “Why Can’t He Be You,” 379 Clinton, Bill, 241, 474 Clogging, 458n5 Clothing. See also Fashion embellishments, 430–​431, 435 hat acts, 433 housewife image, 421–​422 performance wear, 428 three-​way wardrobe, 428–​430, 429f tie-​ins, 435, 436n10 Club Dance at the White Horse Café, 442, 444, 446–​447 Club Rodeo (Oklahoma City, OK), 453 CMA. See Country Music Association CMF. See Country Music Foundation CMT. See Country Music Television Coal extraction, 107 Coal Miner’s Daughter (film), 171, 238, 297, 363, 371n35 Coal Miner’s Daughter (Lynn), 363 Coal Miner’s Daughter: A Tribute to Loretta Lynn, 163

“Coal Miner’s Daughter” (Lynn), 100, 108, 169 Coal mining, 99–​100 “Coat of Many Colors” (Parton), 237 Cobb, B. E., 172n15 Cockerham, Fred, 136 Cockeysville, Maryland, 91 Cockrell, Dale, 25 Coe, David Allan, 381–​382, 412n47, 472 Coen, Joel, 349n33 Coen Brothers, 278, 466 Coffey, John, 133f Coffey, Kevin, 202n20 Cogswell, Robert, 9n7 Cohen, Anne, 18, 21–​22 Cohen, John, 117, 121–​123, 136, 137n9, 139n28, 279 Cohen, Norm, 2, 14, 18, 21–​24, 44–​45, 50n32, 51n60, 51n62, 66–​68, 76n5, 89, 96–​97, 128–​129, 133f, 342, 348n27 Cohen, Ronald D. (Ron), 26, 50n32, 83n94, 128, 225n23, 498 Cohn, Nudie, 419, 422, 425, 432, 436n9, 501 “Cold, Cold Heart” (Williams), 160, 211–​212 “The Cold Hard Facts of Life” (Wagoner), 315 Cold War, 467, 503 Coleman, “Cowboy Troy,” 350n40 Collaborations, 459n31, 480. See also specific collaborations remixes, 219, 243, 298, 389, 443, 456, 459n31 “College country” (sertaneja universitária), 509 Colley, John Scott, 258n2, 259n11 Colorado Sunset, 270 Colter, Jessi, 147–​148 Coltman, Bob, 53n73 Columbia Records, 123, 126, 138n23, 207, 211–​212, 234, 240, 345n1, 351n48, 403 Familiar Tunes on Fiddle, Guitar, Banjo, Harmonica and Accordion, 123 first country act, 230–​231 Home (Dixie Chicks), 220–​221 Old Familiar Tunes, 123 Columbia River ballads, 466 Comber, Chris, 133f Combs, Josiah H., 13, 22 Come and Get It, 277 “Come and Ride This Train” (Cash), 317

Index   529 Comedy, 350n38, 358 Comentale, Edward P., 154n32, 289–​291 Come on Over (Twain), 241 Comic songs, 378 Comic strips, 320 Commercial country music, 45–​46, 97, 223n6, 311–​312, 324n28, 362, 436n18, 466 birthplace of, 291–​294 early, 120–​121 folk antecedents, 9n7 origins of, 33, 36–​37, 97–​98, 311, 436n18 prewar, 2, 4, 32–​33, 39–​45, 47n5, 51n65, 118, 120, 127–​128, 136–​138n10, 289, 308 recording, 143, 145, 205–​227, 292, 354n68, 367–​368 Commercials, 244 Commercial sales, 219, 237–​241. See also Earnings Commercial success, 360–​361, 365 Communism, 355–​356, 466 Como, Perry, 252 Computerized editing, 256 Concert films, 279–​280 The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, 40 Confederate Railroad, 388–​389 Confederate States of America, 47n8 Confederate Veterans’ Reunions, 463 Conflict theory, 285 Congregational singing, 18 Conlee, John, 453 Connell, R. W., 325n44 Connick, Harry, Jr., 451 Connors, Stompin’ Tom, 510–​511 Conservatism, 215, 295–​297, 376–​377 Consumer demographics, 285 Consumerism, 308 Contemporary hit radio (CHR), 236 “Convoy” (McCall), 472 Conway, Cecilia, 224n16, 338 Cooking with Country Music Stars, 72–​73 Cooley, Spade, 328–​329, 467 “Cool Whip,” 443 Coon Creek Girls, 232, 279, 362 Coon songs, 349n35 Cooper, Daniel, 75 Cooper, Peter, 6 Copas, Cowboy, 59, 501

“Copperhead Road” (Earle), 142 El Corazón (Earle), 474 The Corb Lund Band, 104 Cornfest, 114n57 Cornfield, Dan, 299 Cosmic American music, 469 “Cosmic Cowboy” (Murphy), 469 Cosmopolitanism, 388–​389. See also Countrypolitan Sound Cotton, Carolina, 270 “Cotton Eyed Joe” (Rednex), 504 Countercultural movement, 226n49, 404–​405 Counterculture expression, 420, 433–​435 Country: A Regional Exploration (Tribe), 333–​334 Country: The Music and the Musicians: Pickers, Slickers, Cheatin’ Hearts & Superstars, 73 “Country. Admit it. You Love it” slogan (CMA), 219–​220 Country Aircheck, 367 Country and Western Jamboree, 170 Country and western music, 38, 124, 205, 514n21 “Country Boy,” 233 Country Boys and Redneck Women: New Essays in Gender and Country Music (Pecknold and McCusker, eds.), 307, 366–​367, 372n49 “A Country Boy Will Survive” (Williams), 471 Country cuties, 430–​433 Country dance, 439–​460, 460n33 Country dance clubs, 452 Country discos, 442 Country gospel, 86 Country hip hop, 345 Country & Irish music, 496 Country music alt-​country, 219 American, 416–​417, 499–​504 “America’s music,” 215 “angry man,” 318 audiences, 307, 345n2, 479–​480 Australian, 506–​508 birthplace of, 514n21

530   Index Country music (Contd.) black, 334–​338, 344, 351n46, 353n59 bro-​country, 87–​88, 221–​222, 230, 243, 298, 367, 375–​376, 387–​390, 419, 449–​450, 456, 459n28 changing face of, 297–​300 characteristics of, 340, 342 citybilly, 98, 128, 225n23 commercialization of ( see commercial country music) cultural practice, 85–​93 definition of, 83n94, 229, 312, 344, 497–​499 early, 126–​127, 338, 348n27 familiar, 126 fan culture of, 480–​482, 484–​490 fashion in, 415–​438 fiddling, 209 gender performance in, 365–​366 as genre, 206–​207 global, 43, 52n71, 496 hard, 163, 313–​314 hard-​core, 100, 152n17, 158, 161, 173n21, 206–​207, 218, 298, 313, 325n33, 362, 365–​366 history of, 55–​83, 229 hometown, 91–​92 hot, 3 international, 495–​518 labels, 205–​206 live, 85 as “low Other,” 309 lyrical conventions, 288 mainstream, 450, 454, 456–​457, 474 microphone, 144–​151 modern, 432–​433 nasal voices, 173n21 neo-​traditional, 239–​240 new country, 218–​220, 240 New Hollywood era, 275–​278 ‘old-​time,’ 117–​140 origins of, 44–​46, 97, 112n28, 291–​294, 329–​334, 359, 458n3, 497–​498, 514n21 outlaw, 88, 206, 216–​218, 226n49, 316, 449, 472, 478n33 outside the US, 500, 505–​511 partner dance music, 449 politics of, 296–​297, 461–​478

popular, 87–​88 postwar, 51n65 prewar, 2, 4, 32–​33, 39–​45, 47n5, 51n65, 118, 120, 127–​128, 136–​138n10, 289, 308 progressive, 217, 236–​237 radio programming, 20, 230 real, 11n35, 92, 220–​221, 223n3, 362, 461 recording, 41, 141–​155, 205 regional, 89–​91 remixes, 219, 243, 298, 389, 456, 459n31 revues, 269–​270 sacred expression in, 395–​413 scenes, 111n20, 112n26 sexuality in, 375–​394 sociology of, 283–​306 soft-​shell, 100, 152n17, 158, 206–​207, 218, 298, 313, 325n33, 362 songs that define, 223n4 Southern identity of, 2–​3, 31–​53 studies of, 1–​11, 14, 25–​27, 40–​46, 88–​90, 327–​354, 359, 462 stylistic development of, 419 subgenres, 86, 106, 210, 434 themes of, 310, 315, 378 traditional forms, 220 trucker, 106 values, 310, 376–​378 visual style in, 415–​438 vocals, 144–​151, 157–​175, 344–​345 white core narrative of, 331–​334 world, 496 Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History (Neal), 333, 337, 458n15 Country Music, U.S.A. (Malone), 5, 33, 35, 39, 41, 72, 89, 97, 157, 260n27, 260n35, 263, 327–​334, 347n12, 353–​354nn67–​68, 359, 361–​362, 462, 468, 497–​498 “Country music” (term), 514n21 “Country Music” (Neal), 333 “Country Music (That’s My Thing)” (McClinton), 223n4 “Country Music and American Values” (Buckley), 377 Country Music Association (CMA), 55–​83, 78n12, 215, 230, 234, 296, 479, 484–​485 Artist Relations Committee, 487 “Cause for Celebration” program, 487

Index   531 “Country. Admit it. You Love it” slogan, 219–​220 distributing companies, 502 Fan Fair, 486–​487 International Country Music Day, 495 “Keep the Music Playing” program, 487 website, 496 Country Music Association (CMA) Awards, 6, 244, 327, 377, 385, 473–​474, 490 Entertainer of the Year, 217, 243, 504 Country Music Association (CMA) Fest, 481, 489–​490 Country Music Disc Jockey Association, 234, 485–​486 Country Music Foundation (CMF), 25, 55–​83, 77n6, 78n12, 80n51, 312 The Encyclopedia of Country Music, 3 Frist Library and Archive, 56 Journal of Country Music (JCM), 2–​3, 9n7, 9n11, 34–​35, 62–​63, 67–​69, 72 Library and Media Center, 5, 56, 60, 62–​64, 66–​67, 70–​7 1, 74 Oral History Collection, 4 The Sources of Country Music (Benton), 177 Country Music Foundation Press (CMF Press), 62–​63, 69–​70, 72–​73 Country Music Foundation Records, 62–​63, 70 Country Music Goes to War (Wolfe and Akenson, eds.), 477n19 Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, 26, 45–​46, 56–​64, 70–​76, 78n12, 264, 312, 370n23, 425–​426, 486 accreditation, 79n26 Artists’ Gallery, 59, 78n16 building, 73–​75, 80n41 Encyclopedia of Country Music, 516–​517n56 “Nashville Salutes Texas!: Country from the Lone Star State” exhibit, 75 “Nashville Skyline: Rocking Back to the Country” exhibit, 75 “Night Train to Nashville” exhibit, 75 rules for election to, 79n27 “Sing Me Back Home” exhibit, 74–​75 “Treasures Untold: Unique Collections from Devoted Fans” exhibit, 75 Country Music Holiday, 274

Country Music Jubilee, 251 Country Music on Broadway, 274 Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–​1942 (Russell), 134–​135, 143 Country Music Sources: A Biblio-​Discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music (Meade), 135 The Country Music Story (Shelton), 65 Country Music Television (CMT), 219, 261n55, 487, 489 Country Music USA (Hoyer), 236 Country Music Who’s Who, 510 Country nightclubs, 443, 457–​458n2 honky tonks, 440–​441, 449, 457–​458n2 line-​dancing clubs, 219 Countrypolitan Sound, 217–​218, 363 Country radio, 20, 229–​247. See also Radio Country Radio Seminar, 238, 486 Country rock, 196 Country Song Roundup, 360, 370n16 Country Strong, 88, 279 County Records, 120 Cousineau, John B., 202n30 Covach, John, 442 Covington, James W., 412n50 Cowboy Copas, 59, 501 Cowboys, 114n58, 422–​426 diesel, 106 singing, 210, 312–​313, 417 Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers (Malone), 264 urban, 206, 218 Cowboy songs, 333 Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (Lomax), 9n7, 267 Cowboy swing, 445 Cowboy Troy, 345, 480 “Cow Cow Boogie,” 272 Cowell, Henry, 199 Cowgirls, singing, 270–​271, 417, 426–​432 Cowley, John Houlston, 133f Cowpunk, 380 Cox, 242 Cox, Bill, 465 Cracker Barrel, 489 Cramer, Floyd, 503 Cramer, Ted, 236

532   Index Crawford, Richard, 124 Crawford, Ruth. See Seeger, Ruth Crawford Crazy Heart, 279 Crazy Water Crystals, 231 Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Peterson), 89, 98, 173n21, 173n31, 203n46, 225n24, 232, 264, 325n33, 339, 351n47, 362, 422–​423 Creed, Kyle, 136 Creighton, Helen, 17 Crespino, Joseph, 32 Cressy, Paul, 285 Crickets, 102 Crisco, 487 Croce, Jim, 236 Cromwell, John, 265 Crooms, Michael “Mr. Collipark,” 457n1 Crooning vocal style, 210–​211, 225n24 Crosby, Bing, 61, 143, 154n33, 225n23, 254 Crosby, Fanny J., 400–​401 Crossover figures, 207, 220, 236, 241, 297–​298, 431–​432. See also individual musicians Crossover music, 236, 240, 242 countrypolitan, 217–​218, 363 pop music hits, 211–​213, 215 Crouch, Ian, 387–​388, 390n3 Crow, Sheryl, 163 Crowe, Cameron, 488 Crowell, Rodney, 279–​280 “Cruise” (Kelley, Hubbard, Moi, Rice, and Rice), 243, 298, 375, 389, 390n3, 456, 459n31, 460n36 Crumb, George, 199 Cruz, Ted, 461, 473, 476 “Cry, Cry Darling” (Wells), 167 Cuban music, 501 Cultural absorption, 394n77 Cultural appropriation, 365, 450 Cultural blending, 513n5 Cultural capital, 314 Cultural differences, 504–​505 Cultural dislocation, 310 Cultural exchange values, 309 Cultural geography, 90–​91 Cultural grey out, 506 Cultural imperialism, 43, 499 Cultural production, 285

Cultural values, 311 Culture African American, 86 counterculture, 420, 433–​435 country music as cultural practice, 85–​93 deterritorialized, 38 fan, 480–​482, 484–​488 fashion, 415–​438 folk, 307–​308, 311–​315 geo-​cultural identity construction, 95–​115 mass, 285, 311, 315 popular, 286 postmodern, 298 rationalized industry, 299 redneck, 419, 434–​435 rodeo, 432–​433, 437n35 Cumulus Media, 242 Cup game, 459n25 “Cupid Shuffle,” 453 Curb records, 486 Curless, Dick, 91 Cusic, Don, 208, 219, 410n20, 411n35 Cusick, Suzanne, 158 Cyrus, Billy Ray, 240, 442, 480 Czech immigrants, 447 Czech-​language tunes, 501 Czechoslovakia, 501 Czech Republic, 43, 52n71, 506, 511, 517n57 Da Capo Press, 410n18 Da Costa Wolz’s Southern Broadcasters, 120 Daily Worker, 466 Dalhart, Vernon, 22, 41, 146, 208–​209, 267, 461, 463, 502 Dallas, 238 Dallas Bull (Tampa, FL), 451–​452 Dance, 210, 439–​460 ballroom, 454–​455 barn, 129, 210, 281n29, 336–​337, 440 California mix, 454–​456 the Charleston, 440 country, 439–​460, 460n33 cowboy swing, 445 instinctive, 453 learning how to dance, 444–​447 line, 219, 439, 442–​444, 450–​452, 496 local, 451–​454

Index   533 partner, 441–​442, 446, 449–​450, 452–​453 past traditions, 440–​444 regional differentiation of, 451–​454 sixteen-​step, 453 social, 454–​455, 460n34 two-​step, 442, 444–​445, 448–​453, 455–​456 urban, 394n77 West Coast Swing, 460n34 Western swing, 440–​441 Dance a While: Handbook for Folk, Square, Contra, and Social Dance (Pearson), 447 Dance clubs, 219, 442, 452–​453 Dance competitions, 458n5 Dance halls, 169, 440–​441, 457–​458n2 Dance-​pop, 453–​454 Dandridge, Dorothy, 272 D’Angelo, Beverly, 363 Daniel, Linda Jean, 52n70, 517n57 Daniel, Pete, 475 Daniel, Wayne W., 34, 72, 130, 134, 230, 396 Daniell, George, 230–​231 Daniels, Charlie, 345, 471, 474 Danny Paisley and the Southern Grass, 91–​92 Darrow, Clarence, 464 Darter, D. P., 403 David Peterson & 1946, 150 “David’s Lamentation,” 160 Davidson, Cathy N., 323n5 Davidson County, North Carolina, 453 Davion, Gabriel, 201n14 Davis, Blair, 282n39 Davis, Eva, 123, 362 Davis, Fred, 433 Davis, Jimmie, 425, 466, 470–​471 Davis, Miles, 173n22, 199 Davis, Russell, Jr., 34–​36, 99 Davis, Skeeter, 235, 503 Davis, Stephen, 130 Dawidoff, Nicholas, 3, 48n16, 98–​99 DAWs. See Digital Audio Workstations Dawson, Smoky, 507 Day, J. W., 21 Day, Jimmy, 192 Day, Timothy, 153n24 Dazz Band, 443 Deadheads, 481 The Deadly Nightshade, 380

Dean, Jimmy, 255 “A Dear John Letter” (Shepard and Husky), 147 “The Death of Floyd Collins,” 463 DeBeck, Billy, 320 Decca Records, 60, 76n5, 80n54, 167, 169, 205, 211 Dee jay formats, 358 Deep listening, 198 “Delia’s Gone,” 319 Delmore, Alton, 69 Delmore Brothers, 162 The Delmores, 231 “Delta Dawn,” 385 Demagoguery, 465–​466, 470 “The Democratic Donkey’s in His Stall Again” (Cox), 465 Democratic Party, 464, 468–​469, 471 Demographics, 285 Denim and Diamonds, 446–​447, 453 Denisoff, R. Serge, 2–​3 Denny, Bill, 61–​62 Denny, Jim, 61 Dent, Alexander Sebastian (Alex), 4, 52n71, 372n49, 508–​509, 517n57 Denver, John, 217–​218 Depression, 34, 162, 210, 465 Derek and the Dominos, 258n2 Der Freischütz, 412n44 Derrick, Cowboy Jack, 375 Desegregation, 319 Design for a Hawaiian Guitar (US Patent Des. 110, 178) (Fuller), 183f–​184f Deterritorialized culture, 38 Detroit, Michigan, 288, 299 Detterline, J. B., Jr., 412n47 The Devil’s Box, 129–​130, 131f, 134 Devolutionary theory, 68–​69 DeZurik Sisters, 143 Dickens, Hazel, 118, 134 Dickens, Little Jimmy, 233, 404, 425, 503 Dickinson, Chris, 77n6, 83n91, 380–​381 Diesel cowboys, 106 “Different Drums” (Reeves), 143–​144 Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs), 144 Dillard, Doug, 252–​253 Dillards, 252–​253

534   Index Dilworth, Billy, 235 DiMaggio, Paul, 9n13, 285 Dinner Bell R.F.D. (Radio Farmers Democracy), 231 Dior, Christian, 431 Dire Straits, 197 “Dirt Road Anthem” (Aldean), 299, 389 Dirty Harry, 472 Dirty lyrics, 375 Disc Jockey Festival, 234 Disc jockeys (DJs), 233–​237 Country Music Disc Jockey Association convention, 485 dee jay formats, 358 Disco, 239, 348n28 Disco halls, 442 Discrimination, 339, 342–​343. See also Race and racism; Segregation Disney, 77n6 Ditson, Oliver, 401 Diversity, 215–​216, 270–​271, 332, 338 The Division of Labor in Society (Durkheim), 288–​289 Dixie. See American South Dixie Chicks, 88, 220, 473 boycott of, 101, 221, 242, 285, 473–​474 Home, 220–​221 Shut Up and Sing, 276 A Dixie Mother, 267 Dixon, Howard, 39 Dixon, Paul, 259n13 Dixon Brothers, 98 DJ Biggs, 451 DJ Casper, 451 DJ Groovie Boy, 232 DJ Robbie, 443 DJs. See Disc jockeys Doane, William Howard, 401 Dobro, 180–​182 Dockwray, Ruth, 145 Documentaries, 278–​280, 282n48 Doe, Jane, 463 Doerr, Clyde C., 202n30 Os Dois Filhos de Francisco, 508 Dolan, Emily, 179 Dolly Parton and Gender Performance in Country Music (Edward), 366

Dollywood Foundation Newsletter, 483–​484 Domesticity, 308, 310 Domestic violence, 319 “Don’t Be Cruel,” 213 “Don’t Breathe” (Paisley), 454 “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind)” (Lynn), 169–​171 “Don’t Fence Me In” (Porter and Fletcher), 210, 224–​225n23 Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’ (Malone), 330 “Don’t get above your raisin’ ” point of view, 330, 415 Don’t Rock the Jukebox (Jackson), 406 Dopyera, John, 182, 202n18 Dorsey, Thomas A., 404 Dorson, Richard, 1, 25, 66–​67 Double standards, 364 Douglas, Susan J., 281n29 Douglass, Charley, 256 Down on Phoney Farm, 267 Drag performances, 382–​383 Drake, Guy, 297, 470 Drifting Cowboys, 157, 290 Driftwood, Jimmy, 279 Dualisms, 310 Dubbing, 270 DuBois, Thomas A., 354n68 DuBois, W. E. B., 284, 300n3 Dudley, Dave, 106 Dueck, Byron, 4, 52n70 Duff, Arlie, 466 The Duhks, 137 The Dukes of Hazzard, 253 Duke University Press, 517n57 Dumont network, 259n11 Dunford, Uncle Eck, 124 Dungan, Mike, 242, 244 Dunham, Alanson “Mellie,” 42 Dunn, Bob, 182 Dunn, Ronnie, 344 Dunn, William, 471 Durkheim, Emile, 284–​285, 288–​289, 300n3, 487 Dustbowl migrations, 288 Dust-​to-​Digital, 5 Dusty, Slim, 507–​508 Dutch immigrants, 501

Index   535 Dutch-​language recordings, 503 DVD, 279–​280 Dylan, Bob, 75, 279, 296, 468 Basement Tapes, 127 Nashville Skyline, 469 E. A. K. Hackett, 126 Eagles, 88, 238 Earle, Gene, 23–​24 Earle, Steve, 142, 279–​280, 473–​474 Earl Fuller’s Original New York Jazz Orchestra, 230 “Earl’s Breakdown” (Scruggs), 203n40 Earl Scruggs: The Bluegrass Legend: Family & Friends, 279 Earnings, 235, 292, 361. See also Sales East Tennessee State University, 5 Ebsen, Buddy, 265 Echo, 154n41 Eddy Arnold Time, 260–​261n40 Edison, Thomas Alva, 18–​19 Edison Male Quartet, 41 Edison Records, 41, 72 Editing, computerized, 256 Education, popular, 70–​76 Edwards, John, 23–​24 Edwards, Leigh H., 10n30, 258n2, 323n5, 324n30, 366, 434 Edwards, Penny, 270 Edwards, Stoney, 327 EECO (Electronic Engineering Company of California) editing, 256 Egerton, John, 49n27 1980s, 376–​378, 480 Eisenhower jackets, 426 El Corazón (Earle), 474 Electraharp (Gibson), 188, 203n36 Electrical recordings, 146, 154n34. See also Recording(s) Electrical Stringed Musical Instrument (United States Patent 2, 089, 171) (Beauchamp), 182, 183f Electric bass, tic-​tac, 177 “Electric Boogie” (Griffith), 443, 453 Electric guitar, 177, 202n19 tunings, 185–​186, 186t “Electric Slide” line dance, 443

Electronic Engineering Company of California (EECO) editing, 256 Elektra Records, 252 “E” lever, 195, 195f Eliott, Charlotte, 260n32 Elitism, 365, 370n22 Elliott, Charlotte, 409n13 Ellison, Curtis W., 3, 412n46 “El Paso,” 452 Elviry, 271 The Emerging Republican Majority (Phillips), 471 Emery, Ralph, 235–​236, 239 Eminem, 243 Emmons, Buddy, 191–​192, 194–​195, 203nn43–​45 E9th tuning, 194, 194t Guitar Tone Changing Device (US Patent 3, 447, 413) (Lashley and Emmons), 192, 193f “Half a Mind” (Tubb) pedal steel intro, 191–​192, 192f “The Healing Hands of Time” (Price) pedal steel intro, 195, 195f “Sweet Dreams” (Young) pedal steel intro, 191, 191f “You Took Her Off My Hands” (Price) pedal steel solo, 192, 194f Emmons pedal steel (the “push-​pull”), 194–​195 Emmy, 256 Empire, 258 The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, 3, 35, 278–​ 279, 516–​517n56 Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 47n13 England, 15–​16, 502–​503, 517n57 English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (Campbell and Sharp), 9n7 E9th pedal steel guitar, 189–​197 “chromatic” tuning, 194, 194t, 195–​196, 196t Buddy Emmons’s tuning and setup, 194t Nashville tuning, 192, 194t Enterprising Women (Bacon-​Smith), 482 Entertainer of the Year Award (CMA), 217 Épinette des Vosges, 201n14 Epiphone, 187–​188, 191, 202n30 Escapism, 317, 322 Escott, Colin, 282n38

536   Index Estes, Sleepy John, 368 Estonia, 500 Ethnic absolutism, 347n10, 351n46 Ethnic identity, 329–​330 Europe, 503, 509, 516n53, 517n57 European immigrants, 43 Evangelical Protestants, 399, 407–​408 Evangelical singers, 396, 398 Evangel of Song: A Collection of New and Familiar Gospel Songs (Hall-​Mack), 126 Evans, Dale, 417 Evans, David, 201n12 Everly, Ike, 353n66 Everly Brothers, 162 Every Which Way But Loose, 277 Exceptionalism, southern, 32, 39–​40, 47n3 Exhibitionism, 384 Exoticization, 349n33 Extended mixes, 219 Extramarital sex, 377–​378 Facebook, 244, 446–​447 A Face in the Crowd, 265, 274 Factionalism, 61 Fakelore, 1, 66 Falzarano, Gino, 432–​433 Familiar music, 126–​127 Familiar Songs of the Gospel: Songs That We Know and Love to Sing (E. A. K. Hackett), 126 Familiar Tunes on Fiddle, Guitar, Banjo, Harmonica and Accordion (Columbia Records), 123 “Family Reunion” (Lund), 113n45 Family values, 308–​309, 375, 377–​378 “Famous in a Small Town,” 299 Fan Club Convention, 485–​486 Fan clubs, 482–​485, 488 Fan Fair, 481, 486–​490 Fan mail, 357 Fan publications, 357 Fans, 312, 376–​378, 442, 480–​482, 484–​490, 499 Fan studies, 480–​481 Far East Network, 498 Farmelo, Allen, 353n67 Farmer, Brett, 379–​380, 382, 386

Farmer Alfalfa Sees New York, 267 Farm Security Administration (FSA), 357–​358 Farquharson, Charlie, 254 Fashion, 415–​438 counterculture, 420, 433–​435 country cuties, 430–​433 definition of, 420 designers or tailors, 419, 422, 425, 432, 501 embellishments, 430–​431, 435 for female performers, 417, 430–​431 hat acts, 433 hillbilly style, 415–​416, 416f, 417 Hollywood western style, 423–​427, 427f, 430–​431 icons, 426–​432, 435 male dress styles, 420, 424–​426 mountaineer style, 415–​416, 416f tie-​ins, 435, 436n10 Western classic style, 424–​425, 425f Western wear, 417, 419, 422, 432, 436n10, 496 Fashion industry, 422–​423 “Fashions on Parade” (Rustic Rhythm), 428–​430 Fasola folk, 17–​18 Fasola hymnody, 17 Faulkner, Roy, 465 Faulkner, William, 368 Favoritism, 61 Feathering, 173n26 Feder, J. Lester, 339, 347n11 Feiler, Bruce, 240–​241, 294, 459n29 Feller, Bruce, 226n56 Female artists. See Women Femininity, 166, 313–​314, 363, 431 stereotypes, 320–​321, 325n44 Feminism, 174n33, 378–​383 Fender, Freddy, 473, 501 Fender, Leo, 191 Fender Telecaster, 177, 191 Ferber, Edna, 277 Ferguson, Jane M., 52n71, 509 Ferguson, Robert H., 43 Ferris, William, 201n12 “The Fertile Crescent of Country Music” (Peterson and Davis), 34–​35 Festivals. See Music festivals

Index   537 Festival style, 136 The Feud and the Turkey, 266 Fiddle and string bands, 44–​45 Fiddle music and contests, 91–​92, 135–​136, 139n49, 209, 333, 463 “Fiddling” (Columbia), 123 Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy: Fiddlin’ John Carson, His Real World, and the World of His Songs (Wiggins), 134 Field recordings, 117–​118 Fields, W. C., 269 Fife, Alta, 17 Fife, Austin E., 17 “Fightin’ Side of Me” (Haggard), 215, 296, 469 Filene, Benjamin, 311 “Filipino Baby” (Cowboy Copas), 501 Fillmore, J. H., 401 Film, 263–​282 documentaries, 278–​280, 282n48 Hollywood films, 312 New Hollywood era, 275–​278 promotional films, 219 silent, 266–​268, 280n10 Film studies, 263 Financial compensation, 235, 292 Financial success, 361 Finding Her Voice (Bufwack and Oermann), 363–​364 Finland, 15, 511, 517n57 Finney, Charles Grandison, 398 Fischer, Claude, 299 Fischer, Lucy, 281n16 Fisher, Daniel, 10n26, 52n70 Fisher, Freddie, 272–​273 “Fisher’s Hornpipe,” 266 “Fist City” (Lynn), 169, 171, 175n54 Flanders, Helen Hartness, 17, 19 Flatt, Lester, 149 Flatt and Scruggs, 149, 155n52, 253 Fleck, Béla, 279 Fleetwood, Nicole, 385–​386, 388 Fleischhauer, Carl, 111n25 Fletcher, Robert, 224n23 “F” lever, 195, 195f “Flint Hill Special” (Scruggs), 203n40 Flippo, Chet, 72, 384 Florida, 464

Florida Georgia Line, 222, 243, 298, 375, 388, 390n3, 394n77, 456, 459n31, 460n36, 480 “Fly Around My Pretty Little Pink,” 88 Flying Burrito Brothers, 196 FM radio, 236, 239–​240. See also Radio Fogelberg, Dan, 450 Foggy Mountain Boys, 149 Foghorn Stringband, 137 Foley, Red, 158, 231–​233, 251–​252, 296, 314, 355–​356, 404 “Folk” (term), 514n21 Folk ballads, 333. See also Ballads Folk culture, 307–​308, 311–​315, 329 Folklore, 13–​29, 287 fakelore, 1, 66 poplore, 80n49 Folklore and Folk Music Archivist, 67 Folklore and Mythology Group (UCLA), 23 Folklore studies, 2, 21–​22, 25–​27, 136, 329 Folklorism, 329–​331, 340–​341, 346n9, 347n10, 348n28 Folklorists, 21–​22, 56, 207, 287 Folk music, 21–​22, 41, 86–​87, 120–​121, 128, 311, 348n27, 466, 512 American, 16 American South, 311 Anglo-​American folksongs, 22–​23, 512 Appalachian, 311 black, 331 commercial relations, 324n28 fasola folk, 17–​18 folksong collections, 9n7, 19–​20 left-​wing associations, 296 nineteenth-​century, 14–​17 revival of, 122, 296–​297 tunes for moving pictures, 267 white core narrative of, 331–​334 Folk music festivals, 135–​136 Folk music studies, 25 Folk poetry, 310 Folk Songs of Another America (Leary), 89 Folkways Records, 120–​121 “Follow Your Arrow” (Musgrave), 381, 392n31 Footloose, 451 Ford, Bill, 238–​239

538   Index Ford, Tennessee Ernie, 273, 355–​356, 404 Hymns, 404, 411n33 Spirituals, 404, 411n34 Foreign adaptations, 503–​506 Foreign-​born artists, 504–​505 Foreign-​language rerecordings, 503, 515n26 Forman, Murray, 101, 115n60 Format radio, 141–​142, 230 Fornatale, Peter, 259n9 40 Acre Feud, 274 Fossil fuel energy industry, 99–​100, 103 Foster, Pamela E., 351n46 Foster, Stephen, 124, 182, 265 Fowler, Wally, 233 FOX, 257, 261n54 Fox, Aaron A., 4, 11n35, 111n16, 144, 223n3, 346n4, 349n33, 352nn50–​51, 517n57 Real Country: Music and Language in Working-​Class Culture, 90, 339, 352n53, 365–​366, 391n10, 499 Fox, Pamela, 175n48, 220, 223nn1–​2, 320, 365, 390n1, 421–​422 Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music, 100, 337, 350n38, 352n50, 477n20 France, 501–​503 Francis, Connie, 515n26 Frank, Leo, 230, 464 Frankfurt School, 36, 284–​285, 299 Frankiel, Sandra S., 410n20 Frankiel, Tamar, 410n20 Franklin, Aretha, 400 Franklin, Paul, 197–​198, 198f “Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Back Again” (Cox), 465 “Franklin” pedal, 198 Fraser, Captain S., 126 “Fraulein” (Helms), 501 “Freakin’ It” (Smith), 115n60 Freddie Fisher & His Schnickelfritz Band, 272–​273 Fredriksson, Kristine, 260n29 Freeman, Antony P., 188 Freeman, Dave, 133f The Freight Hoppers, 118, 136 French ballads, 501 French-​language recordings, 503

French-​language tunes, 501 “Friends in Low Places” (Brooks), 219 Friskics-​Warren, Bill, 225n23 Frist Library and Archive, 56 Frith, Simon, 153n24 Frizzell, Lefty, 274 From Here to Eternity, 273 From Where I Stand: The Black Experience in Country Music (Warner/​Reprise), 76, 351n45 Frosh, Stephen, 109 Fruit Jar Drinkers, 20 Fryer, Paul, 48n19 FSA. See Farm Security Administration F-​style mandolin, 177 “Fuck Aneta Briant” (Coe), 381–​382 “Fuck This Town” (Fulks), 88 Fulcher, Charles, 357 Fulks, Robbie, 88 Fuller, Delores, 384 Fuller, Earl, 230 Fuller, Walter L., 183f–​184f Functionalism, 285 Fundamentalism, Christian, 395, 405, 408 Future directions, 42–​45 Fuzzy Mountain String Band, 136 Gabbard, Krin, 349n32 Gable, Dorothy, 59 Gabler, Neal, 77n6 Gabor, Zsa Zsa, 274 Gabriel, Charles H., 402–​403, 411n26 Galante, Joe, 239, 242 Galax, Virginia, 136 Gannaway, Albert C., 274 Gans, Herbert, 285 Garcia, Jerry, 196 Garland, Judy, 61 The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, 412n51 Garner, John Nance, 465 Garrett, Charles Hiroshi, 39 Gastonia strike, 466–​467 “Gathering Flowers for the Master’s Bouquet,” 170 Gatlin, Larry, 356, 453 Gaunt, Kyra, 445, 459n25

Index   539 Gay country music, 379 Gayle, Crystal, 158, 220, 385–​386 The Gay Ranchero, 271 “Geisha Girl” (Locklin), 501 “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis” (Scott), 364 Gender norms, 169, 307, 313–​314, 323n5, 325n33, 357, 359, 361–​362, 364, 366. See also Women’s contributions “A Boy Named Sue” (Silverstein), 318 A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (Pecknold and McCusker, eds.), 379 parody of, 322 questioning, 317 stereotypes, 320–​321 Gender performance, 355–​373 Gender signs, 380 General Foods, 232 Generation X, 244 Gennett Records, 120 Gentry, Bobbie, 368 Gentry, Gary, 412n47 Geo-​cultural identity, 95–​115 Geography, 50n39, 90–​91, 97–​101 George Daniell’s Hill Billies, 230–​231 George-​Warren, Holly, 224n23, 280n6, 419, 423–​424 German ballads, 501 German immigrants, 440, 447, 501 German-​language recordings, 503, 515n26 Germany, 15, 502, 511 Gerould, G. H. (Gordon Hall), 16 Gerrard, Alice, 134 “Get On Board, Little Children,” 411n34 “Get Your Shrine On” (Florida Georgia Line), 394n77 Giant, 277 Gibson, Nathan D. (Nate), 52n71, 111n20 Gibson, Nathan W., 93n11 Gibson Electraharp, 188 Gibson instruments catalogues, 69 guitars, 191, 203n36 Giddens, Anthony, 300n2 Gid Tanner & the Skillet Lickers, 24, 208 Gifford, Paul, 52n66

Gilley’s (Pasadena, TX), 442, 449 Gilliland, Henry, 19, 41 Gilroy, Paul, 284, 341, 347n10, 352n57 Ginell, Cary, 202n20 Ginger Group, 349n33 Ginnell, Cary, 98 Giordano, Ralph, 445, 453 “Girl Crush” (Little Big Town), 244, 381, 392n31 Girl groups, 166. See also Women’s contributions “Girl in a Country Song” (Maddie & Tae), 243, 367, 388, 393n70 Girl singers. See Women’s contributions “Girls’ Night Out: Superstar Women of Country” (ACM), 108, 115n67 Girls of the Golden West, 360–​361 Glaser, Tompall, 216–​217 Glazer, Tom, 265 Glenbow Museum (Calgary, Canada), 103 Glen Burnie, Maryland, 85 Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, 249 “Glendale Train” (New Riders of the Purple Sage), 453 Global country music, 43, 52n71, 496 Globalization, 498–​499 Global Village Living-​Learning Center (IU), 513 “Gloom, Despair, and Agony,” 254 Glotfelty, Cheryll, 96 Glover, Henry, 343 “God Bless the USA” (Greenwood), 405, 412n40 Goebel, “Lonesome” George, 273–​274 Goertzen, Chris, 139n49 Goff, James R., Jr., 410n20 “Going Back To Texas” (Morton), 507 Goldblum, Jeff, 470 Golden, Billy, 41 Golden Years, 502–​503 Goldsmith, Thomas, 111n25 Gomer Pyle, 252 “Gone Country” (Jackson), 219 “Good Hearted Woman,” 86 Goodman, Benny, 270 A Good Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (Wolfe), 89 “Goodnight Irene,” 296

540   Index “The Good Old Time Waltzes (Numbers 1–​ 5), ” 124 Goodwyn, Lawrence, 463 Goo-​Goo Cluster, 293 Goosby, Fannie, 357 Gorcey, Leo, 274 Gordon, Alex, 424 Gordon, Bonnie, 174n36 Gordon, Robert Winslow, 22 Gore, Albert, Sr., 471 Gospel blues, 404 Gospel hymns, 333. See also Hymns Gospel Hymns (Biglow and Main), 399, 410n18 Gospel Hymns Nos. 1 to 6 Complete (Biglow and Main), 410n18 Gospel music, 86, 120, 126, 333, 401–​403 Gospel singers, 399 Gospel song, 395, 397–​403 Gospel Songs (Bliss), 399 “Gossip Girls,” 254 Gottuvadayam, 201n14 Gould, Jack, 260n26 Gowan, Marcus, 67–​68 Graham, Alison, 280n3 Graham, Billy, 408, 409n12 Gramsci, Antonio, 284, 309 “Granada,” 271 The Grand Ole Opry, 13, 449, 466, 483, 486 birthday celebration, 485 comedy elements, 350n38 expectations for female country music performers, 426, 428–​430 film version, 271–​272 instructions to musicians, 27 Poe Sisters at, 415, 417, 418f, 421 radio show, 21, 141, 149, 210, 229–​233, 271, 292–​294, 299–​300, 320, 327, 355 Tabuchi at, 505 television show, 251, 259n14 theatrical screenings, 280 Grand Ole Opry House, 294, 297, 407 Grange-​style church suppers, 457n2 Grant MacEwan Community College, 110n4 Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), 465 The Grascals, 504 Grateful Dead, 481 Gray, Judith A., 413n51

Gray, Michael, 75, 77n6 Gray, Otto, 269 Grazian, David, 285 Great Britain, 16, 502, 516n53 “Great man” theory, 142–​143, 151n8 Great Migration, 288 Great Society, 472 The Great Train Robbery, 266 Green, Al, 400 Green, Archie, 2, 23–​24, 44, 53n76, 59, 65, 71, 77n6, 80n49, 128–​129, 139n40, 280n7, 357, 370n19, 498 “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” 129, 359 Only A Miner, 89 Green, Ben, 213 Green, Douglas B., 67–​68, 203n38, 270, 280n6 Green, Lloyd, 195 Green, Pat, 457n2 Green, Richard, 419 Green Acres, 252 Greene, David, 446–​447 Greene, Doyle, 260n38 Greenville, Alabama, 290 Greenway, John, 24, 128 Greenwich Village, 296–​297 Greenwood, Lee, 405 Greenwood, Melanie, 442 Greenwood, Mississippi, 368 Gregory, James N., 34, 48n16, 208 Griffith, Andy, 252–​253, 265 Griffith, Marcia, 443 Gronow, Pekka, 507 The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 6 Grub Street, 16 Gruene Hall (New Braunfels, TX), 457n2 Gruhn, George, 202n30 Grundy, Pamela, 231 The Guardian, 473 Guitar acoustic, 187 amplified, 202n19 blues, 348n29 bottleneck or slide, 201n12 classical, 201n12 electric, 177, 202n19 Hawaiian, 43

Index   541 pedal steel, 177–​204 resonator, 180–​182, 202n17 slide, 201n12 Spanish, 182 steel, 180–​182, 202n20 steel-​string, 201n12 “Guitar Rag” (Weaver), 202n25 Guitar Tone Changing Device (US Patent 3, 447, 413) (Lashley and Emmons), 192, 193f Guizar, Tito, 271 Gully Jumpers, 20 Gumprecht, Blake, 99 Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (Robbins), 114n50 Gunning, Tom, 269 Guns ’N Roses, 219 Gussow, Adam, 271, 350n40 Guthrie, Woody, 5, 170, 279, 332, 466–​467 Habershon, Ada R., 402–​403, 411n26 Hagan, J. M., 409n5 Haggard, Merle, 90, 96, 199, 236, 288, 314, 365, 449, 453 Fan Fair performances, 486–​487 “Fightin’ Side of Me,” 215, 296, 469 “Okie from Muskogee,” 215, 236, 296, 468–​470 performances, 235, 254–​255, 274, 470, 486–​487 prison narrative, 473 recordings, 207, 214–​215, 220–​221 themes, 103, 316–​317 Vietnam Era anthems, 468–​470, 477n23 White House performances, 470 Haggerty, Patrick, 380 Hair in My Eyes like a Highland Steer (Lund), 95, 104 “Half a Mind” (Tubb), 191–​192 Hall, David, 257 Hall, Huntz, 274 Hall, J. H., 411n27 Hall, Patty, 24 Hall, Stuart, 284, 310 Hall, Tom T., 468 Hall-​Mack, 126 Hall of Fame and Museum. See Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

Halpert, Herbert, 127–​128 Hamilton, George IV, 274–​275, 503 The Hamilton, 155n51 “Hamilton Live: Chatham County Line,” 155n51 Hamm, Charles, 173n26 Hammond, Angela Denise, 339, 351n48 Hancock, Butch, 99, 103 Hand, Wayland D., 23, 128 Hanover, Virginia, 139n49 Hanson, Brad, 26 Hard-​core country music, 100, 152n17, 158, 161, 206–​207, 218, 298, 313, 325n33, 362 gender performance in, 365–​366 nasal voices, 173n21 Hard country, 163, 313–​314 Harkins, Anthony, 24, 261n46, 280n3, 320, 392n40 Harleys, 387 Harlin, J. D., 188–​189 Harlin Brothers Multi-​kord, 188–​189 Harmon, Arthur, 187 Harmony, 343–​345 Harper, Redd, 272 Harper’s, 376–​377 “Harper Valley PTA,” 235 Harrington, Beth, 279, 428–​429 Harris, Emmylou, 74 Harrison, Douglas, 410n20 Harrison, Gary, 135 Harron, Don, 254 Hartford Music Company, 403 Hartsough, Palmer, 401 Harvey, Graham, 412n49 Haslam, Gerald W., 34, 226n40, 498 Hat acts, 433 Hatcher, Jessamyn, 323n5 “Have Thine own way, Lord!” (Pollard), 401 “Have You Never Been Mellow” (Newton-​John), 237 Hawaiian guitar, 43, 180–​182, 183f–​184f, 185 Hawaiian music, 181, 501 Hawaiian musicians, 201n12, 328–​329 Hawkins, Hawkshaw, 59 Hay, Fred J., 350n44 Hay, George D., 13, 20, 231, 293, 415, 417 Hayes, Wade, 240

542   Index Hays, Will, 208 “The Healing Hands of Time” (Price), 195, 195f “Heartbreak Hotel,” 213, 385 Heartworn Highways, 279–​280 Hebdige, Dick, 260n38, 284, 290 Hee Haw, 249–​258, 260n35, 261n48, 261n54 Hegamin, Lucille, 368 Hegemony, 309 Heidegger, Martin, 179 Heidemann, Kate, 175n54 “Hello Vietnam” (Wright), 501 “He’ll Understand and Say ‘Well Done,’ ” 411n34 Helms, Bobby, 501 Helms, Don, 190 “Help Me Make It Through the Night” (Kristofferson), 236, 385 Helton, Lon, 240 Henagar, Albama, 406 Henry Holt, 126 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 14–​15 Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, 321 “Here You Come Again” (Parton), 218, 237 Herndon, Ty, 381 Herreld, Kemper, 357 “He Set Me Free” (Brumley), 403 “Hey, Good Lookin’ ” (Williams), 88, 161 “Hey, Porter” (Cash), 317 Heywood, Eddy, 357 Hickerson, Joseph, 25 Hick-​hop, 298 Hickploitation, 321 Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music (Pecknold, ed.), 338, 392n42 High Five Entertainment, 371n37 High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music (Tichi), 331, 334 The High Lonesome Sound, 279 Hight, Jewly, 6 Highway, 101, 378 The Highway channel, 244 Highwoods String Band, 136 Hill, Arty, 91 Hill, Faith, 148, 158, 257, 275, 474, 480 Hill, Goldie, 166, 426

Hill, Keith, 229, 367 Hill, Matthew, 202n19 Hill and Range Soncs, Inc., 61 Hillbillies, 383 Hillbillies in a Haunted House, 274 “Hillbilly” (term), 24, 230–​231, 319, 359, 514n21 “Hillbilly Bone” (Shelton), 321 Hillbilly Flour, 465 “Hillbilly Issue” (JAF), 1, 24, 31–​32 Hillbillyland (Williamson), 263 Hillbilly music, 57, 311, 342 authentic, 287–​288 black or integrated, 342 citybilly, 98, 128, 225n23 definition of, 40 on film, 266, 272–​273 integration with R&B, 319 live country radio, 230–​233 nasal twang of, 26, 158 old-​time, 119, 122, 128 origins of, 98, 319–​322, 331–​334, 354n68 political associations, 296 recordings, 21–​22, 143, 205, 207–​211, 216 rockabilly, 165, 206, 212–​213, 309, 319 singers outside the US, 507 southern, 31, 39–​41, 45, 47n5 stereotypes, 320–​322 stigma, 291 “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol” (Green), 129, 359 Hillbilly music studies, 1 Hillbilly style, 415–​416, 416f, 417 Himes, Geoffrey, 139n50 Himpele, Jeff, 201n11 Hindley, Geoffrey, 200n6 Hip hop, 345, 348n28, 450–​451, 453–​454, 480 Hip hop turntable, 201n10 Hippies, 469 “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” 411n26 Hispanics, 345n2 History 1930s, 466 1970s, 376–​378, 470–​471 1980s, 376–​378, 480 boom years, 273–​275 of country music, 41, 55–​83, 229, 319–​322, 448–​449

Index   543 of country music studies, 1–​11, 14, 25–​27 of E9th pedal steel guitar, 189–​197 of folklore studies, 21–​22, 25–​27 of hillbilly music, 319–​322 millennial developments, 278–​280 of Nashville Sound, 448–​449 New Hollywood era, 275–​278 past traditions, 440–​444 practice of, 76 revisions, 232, 337–​340, 456–​457 of steel guitar, 180–​182 white core narrative of, 331–​334 Hitt, Harold, 61, 64 Hoa, James, 201n14 Hoedown bands, 20 Hoeptner, Fred G., 23–​24, 47n6 Hoffmann, Elisha A., 401 Hofner, Adoph, 501 Hofstadter, Richard, 461 Hofstra, Warren, 477n20 Holdeman, Jeff, 513 Holiday Inn, 253 Holland. See The Netherlands Holley, Debbie, 226n57 Hollow Rock String Band, 136 Holly, Buddy, 102 Hollywood, 265, 268, 274–​278, 312 “Hollywood western” style, 423–​427, 427f, 430–​431 Holm-​Hudson, Kevin J., 154n46 Holy Modal Rounders, 127 Home (Dixie Chicks), 220–​221 Homer & Jethro, 232 Hometown country music, 91–​92 Hometown Jamboree, 251 Homoeroticism, 366, 372n48 Homosexuality, 378. See also Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Honeysuckle Rose, 277 Honky tonk, 91–​92, 98, 308–​309, 337 development of, 210 on radio, 232 recordings, 147, 212, 216 women’s, 175n48 Honky Tonk Angel: The Intimate Story of Patsy Cline (Nassour), 363, 371n36 Honky-​tonk angels, 167, 175n48, 316

Honkytonk Finales, 486–​487 “Honky Tonkin’,” 290 Honky tonks, 440–​441, 449, 457–​458n2 “Honky-​Tonk Waltz” (Wells), 167 Hoo-​Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos (Johnson), 270–​271 Hootenanny Hoot, 274 Hoover, Herbert, 464 Hope Floats, 451 Horning, Susan Schmidt, 153n28 Horowitz, Drew, 239 The Horse Flies, 136 Horsemanship, 86 The Horse Whisperer, 451 Horton, Johnny, 273 Hot (Tucker), 386 Hot country music, 3 “Hot Country Songs” (Billboard), 456 Hot Rize, 150, 155n52 Hough, Julianne, 460n32 House Un-​American Activities Committee (HUAAC) (US), 296 Housewife image, 421–​422 Houston, David, 505 Houston, Texas, 236 Howard, Jan, 430 “How ‘Bout You” (Church), 244 “How Do I Live” (Warren), 241 Howe, Elias, 124 Howe, Julia Ward, 405 Howe, Steve, 196 How the Hippies Ruin’t Hillbilly Music (Wishnevsky), 127 How the West Was Worn (George-​Warren), 423–​424 How to Write a Banjo Concerto (Fleck), 279 Hoyer, Mike, 236 Hubbard, Tyler, 460n36 Hubbs, Nadine, 223n3, 314, 325n38, 339, 346n9, 366, 372n48, 381–​382, 504 Huber, Alison, 10n26, 52n70 Huber, Patrick J., 2, 50n32, 89, 110n13, 111n20, 128, 138n25, 154n32, 209, 280n7, 289, 345n1, 350n42, 354n68, 370n17, 370n25, 475, 498, 514n15 Linthead Stomp, 98, 440, 458n5 Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), 109–​110n2

544   Index Hughes, Charles L., 152n13, 226n45, 343, 352n53, 353n65, 367 Hughes, Thomas P., 200n7 Hughey, Matthew W., 349n32 Hulan, Richard H., 172n14 Hummel, 201n14 Humor, 350n38, 358 Hungary, 501 “The Hunger” (Pride), 378 Hunt, Helen, 361 Hunt, Prince Albert, 464 Hunt, Sam, 244 “Hurtin’ Albertan” (Lund and Hus), 95–​96, 104–​107, 114n56 The Hurtin’ Albertans, 102, 104 Hurvitz, Nathan, 68 Hus, Tim, 95–​96, 104–​107, 114n56 Huskies and Husqvarnas (Hus), 114n56 Husky, Ferlin, 147 Hustler, 384 Hutchison, Frank, 39, 132f–​133f Huyssen, Andreas, 313 Hymns, 17–​18, 126, 158, 233, 333 Hymns (Ford), 404, 411n33 Hyperwhite, 339 “I Ain’t Going Honky-​Tonk Anymore” (Tubb), 167 “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow,” 243 “I Am Resolved” (Hartsough and Fillmore), 401 IASPM. See International Association for the Study of Popular Music IBMA. See International Bluegrass Music Association Ichigenkin, 201n14 ICMC. See International Country Music Conference Icons, 379 “Idaho,” 267 Identity, 320, 435 ethnic, 329–​330 geo-​cultural, 95–​115 national, 495–​518 racial, 347n10 Southern, 2–​3, 31–​53 Identity politics, 329–​330, 346n9

“I’d Love to Lay You Down” (Twitty), 375 IFCO. See International Fan Club Organization “If We Forget God” (Louvin Brothers), 406 “I Got Mexico” (Raven), 501 “I Hate Rap” (Confederate Railroad), 388–​389 “I Knew You Were Trouble” (Swift), 243 “I Know the Lord Laid His Hands on Me,” 411n34 I’ll Be Me, 279 “I’ll Fly Away” (Brumley), 402–​403 I Love Lucy, 273 Imagery, 384 “I’m a Honky-​Tonk Girl” (Lynn), 166–​170, 237 “I’m No Stranger to the Rain” (Whitley), 142 “I’m Not Lisa” (Colter), 147–​148 Imperialism, cultural, 43, 499 Impotence, 378 India, 502 Indiana University (IU), 14, 24–​26, 43, 67, 513 “Indian Love Call,” 232 Individualism, 317 Industrialization, 288, 291–​292 The Ink Spots, 61 Innovation, 178–​180, 338, 348n24, 357, 508 Instrumentalists, 353n66, 357 Instrumental music, 17–​18 Instruments, 177–​204 Intellectuals, 62–​70, 309, 322 Intermountain West, 17 International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), 352–​353n58 International Bluegrass, 495 International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA), 279, 495 International Bluegrass Music Museum, 26 International country music, 495–​518, 516n53, 517n57 International Country Music Conference (ICMC), 9n7, 27, 495, 513, 517n57 International Country Music Day, 495 International Country Music Journal, 495 International Fan Club Organization (IFCO), 485–​486 Interpellation, 340 In the Country of Country (Dawidoff), 98–​99 “In the Garden,” 411n33

Index   545 “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)” (Parton), 100 “In the Pines,” 26 Invention, 178–​180 Iran, 511 Iraq War, 474 Ireland, 15, 496, 502 “I Ride an Old Paint,” 324n31 Irish music, 496 Isaacs, Bud, 189–​190 “Slowly” (Pierce) pedal steel intro, 190, 190f, 195 tuning and pedal setup, 190, 190t “I Saw the Light” (Williams), 290, 403 Isbell, Jason, 243 Israel, 516n53 Italy, 502 iTunes, 459n31 “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-​Tonk Angels” (Wells), 166, 309 IU. See Indiana University Ivey, Bill, 25–​26, 42, 51n65, 55, 58–​59, 66–​7 1, 76n5, 80n51, 81n62 Ivins family, 114n46 “Ivory Palaces,” 411n33 “I Walk the Line” (Cash), 318–​319 “I Want To Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” (Montana), 164–​165, 364 “I Want to be Ready,” 411n34 Iwarsson, Jenny, 172n12 “I Was Country (When Country Wasn’t Cool)” (Mandrell), 223n4 “I Will Always Love You,” 237 Iwo Jima, 501 J. D. Crowe and the New South, 137n9 Jabbour, Alan, 25, 133f Jack Daniel’s, 487, 489 The Jackie Gleason Show, 259n17 Jackson, Alan, 219, 406–​407, 433, 461, 473, 480, 488 Jackson, David, 195 Jackson, George Pullen, 18, 329 Jackson, Harold “Shot,” 191, 194–​195 Jackson, Michael, 219 Jackson, Tennessee, 368 Jackson, Wanda, 379, 427–​430, 429f, 503

JAF. See Journal of American Folklore Jamaica, 516n53 Jamboree, 272–​273 James, Joe S., 159 James, Sonny, 254 Jameson, Jennifer Joy, 25 Japan, 43, 52n71, 502, 506, 511–​512, 515n35, 517n57 Japanese bands, 506 Japanese-​language recordings, 503 Jarman, Rufus, 502 Jarman-​Ivens, Freya, 154n46 Jarosz, Sarah, 137 Jarrell, Ben, 120 Jarrell, Charlie, 120 Jarrell, Tommy, 120, 136 Jarrett, Michael, 51n65, 151n7 Jarrett, Ted, 372n53 Jason and Pharis Romero, 137 Jazz, 16–​17, 333, 348n29 Jazz Age, 337, 464 The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (Boyd), 34 The Jazz Singer, 269 Jazz studies, 341 JCM. See Journal of Country Music Jeffries, Herb, 270 JEMF. See John Edwards Memorial Foundation Jenkins, Henry, 480–​482 Jennings, Waylon, 163, 216–​217, 253, 268, 275, 279, 316, 365, 472 Jensen, Joli, 51n65, 89, 93n11, 112n26, 175n48, 212, 214, 308, 371n32 The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization and Country Music, 235, 363, 370n22, 419 Jensen, Lynn, 114n46 Jenter Exhibits, Inc., 59–​60 Jerusalem (Earle), 473 “Jesus Loves Me” (Warner), 409n13 The Jesus movement, 404–​405 Jesus was a Capricorn (Kristofferson), 405 Jews, 341 Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler (Porterfield), 89, 134

546   Index Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Festival, 359 The Jimmy Dean Show, 255, 261n41 Jingoism, 504 Jirattikorn, Amporn, 52n71 Joe Miller’s Jests, 254 John, Elton, 450 The John Church Company, 399, 401, 410n18 John Edwards Memorial Foundation (JEMF), 1, 23–​24, 63–​64, 77n6, 80n49, 89, 370n23, 498 John Edwards Memorial Foundation Collection, 76n5, 360 John Edwards Memorial Foundation (JEMF) Newsletter, 23, 129 John Edwards Memorial Foundation Quarterly (JEMFQ), 1, 9n8, 23, 68, 89, 129, 134, 139n42, 360 “John Lindh’s Blues” (Earle), 473 Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music, 279 The Johnny Cash Show, 80n45, 249–​250, 258n2 Johnny Cash Sings the Ballads of the True West, 312–​313 “Johnny Rodriguez” (Malone), 346n4 Johns, Glyn, 151n7 Johnson, Don, 393n61 Johnson, Guy, 127–​128 Johnson, Jamie, 298 Johnson, Kay, 483 Johnson, Loretta, 483 Johnson, Loudilla, 483, 488 Johnson, Lyndon, 466, 469, 471 Johnson, Michael K., 270 Johnson, Robert, 336, 349n34 Johnson, Samuel, 254 John Wilfahrt’s Concertina Orchstra, 42 “Jolene” (Parton), 237, 366 Jolson, Al, 269 The Jonathan Winters Show, 252, 255 Jones, Bob, Sr., 398, 408 Jones, George, 314, 362, 365, 385, 449–​450 Fan Fair performances, 486–​487 performances, 232, 254, 274, 486–​487 recordings, 213, 225n30 vocal style, 162, 169, 173n27 Jones, Louis Marshall “Grandpa,” 253–​254, 256, 260n27

Jones, Loyal, 129 Jones, Margaret, 363, 371n36 Jones, Tom, 385 Jordanaires, 171 Joseph, Hugh, 510 “Joshua” (Parton), 237 “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” 233 Journal of American Folklore (JAF), 9n7, 9n14, 10n32, 21–​23, 26 “Country Music” issue, 37, 41, 50n32, 90–​91, 354n68 “Hillbilly Issue,” 1, 24, 31–​32, 89, 91, 128–​129, 327–​328, 514n15 Record Reviews, 23 Journal of American History, 10n32 Journal of Country Music (JCM), 2–​3, 9n7, 9n11, 34–​35, 62–​63, 67–​69, 72, 380 The Journal of Sex Research, 377–​378 The Journal of the American Musicological Society, 10n32 Journey, 450 Joyful Songs: A Collection of Familiar Hymns for Gospel Work (Clark Willson), 126 Joyner, Charles Winston, 47n9 Jubilee, U.S.A., 251 Judd, Naomi, 387 Judd, Wynonna, 387, 393n61, 480, 488 The Judds, 115n67, 239 Jug bands, 343 Jukeboxes, 210, 272, 358 Jumbo Jimmy’s Crab Shack, 91–​92 Juno Awards, 511 “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” 411n34 “Just As I Am” (Elliott), 409n13 Kadi, Joanna, 379 Kahn, Ed, 1–​2, 14, 23–​24, 55, 63, 89, 129, 139n32, 139n40, 498 Kansas City, 288 Kapp, Dave, 60–​61 Kapp, Jack, 60 Karnes, Alfred G., 146, 396–​398, 401 Karpeles, Maud, 135, 333 Kassabian, Anahid, 143 Kate, Moonshine, 111n20, 357 Kate Smith Show, 275 Katz, Mark, 142, 144, 201n10

Index   547 Kaufman brothers, 187 Kazan, Elia, 265, 274 K-​Bar-​T Country Roundup, 485 KCKN-​Kansas City, 236 KDKA, 20 Keach, James, 279 Keaton, Buster, 267 “Keep A-​Knockin’ ” (Richard), 385 “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life,” 126 “Keep the Music Playing” program (CMA), 487 Kehrberg, Kevin, 403 Keillor, Elaine, 346n4 Keith, Toby, 242, 318, 472–​474 Kekuku, Joseph, 181, 201n13, 201n15 Kelley, Brian, 460n36 Kelly, John M. H., 346n4 Kelly, Richard, 261n47 Kennedy, Joyce Bourne, 40 Kennedy, Michael, 40 KENR, 236 Kentucky, 23, 118 Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky (Wolfe), 34, 134, 338 Kenya, 43 Kerry, John, 474 Kershaw, Doug, 501 Kershaw, Rusty, 501 Keyes, Saundra, 68 KFVD, 466 Kibler, M. Allison, 373n62 Kienzle, Rich, 203n38, 498 Kimmel, John J., 41 Kimmel, Michael, 318, 325n44 Kincaid, Bradley, 22, 57, 77n8, 231–​232, 260n27 Kind, Johann Friedrich, 412n44 King, B. B., 268 King, E. J., 159 King, Pee Wee, 251 King Records, 212, 338, 343 Kingsbury, Paul, 516–​517n56 The Kingston Trio, 121 Kirkpatrick, David Gordon, 508 Kitsch, 321 Kittredge, George Lyman, 15 Klan records, 339, 351n48 Klymasz, Robert B., 43, 49n29

Knee levers, 195–​196, 196t, 204n49 KOKE-​FM, 237 Koken, Walt, 135 Kolchin, Peter, 351n47 Korean War, 147 KORN, 254 K-​pop, 496 KRAK, 234 Krauss, Alison, 220, 403 Krims, Adam, 112n32 Kristofferson, Kris, 236, 275, 405, 468 Kruger Brothers, 504 Kruse, Kevin, 295 KSAY, 234 Ku Klux Klan, 339, 351n48, 463, 475 KWKH, 232 Kyriakoudes, Louis, 293 Labels, 205–​206 Labor migrations, 288, 310 Labor unions, 466–​467 Lacasse, Serge, 145, 154n40 La Chapelle, Peter, 34, 214–​215, 339, 440, 469, 476n4 Lady Antebellum, 88 Laine, Frankie, 273 Lair, John, 20–​21, 57, 232–​233, 320 Laird, Luke, 449 Laird, Tracey E. W., 258n4, 259n9, 282n36 Lambert, Miranda, 115n67, 163, 171, 221–​222, 243–​244, 389–​390, 480 Lane, Robert, 507 lang, k.d., 379–​380, 504 Lange, Jeffrey J., 272, 371n29, 416 Lange, Robert “Mutt,” 220, 504 Langford, John, 290–​291 Lansing, George L., 124 Lap steel guitar, 185–​186, 186t, 187–​188 LaRoe, Claudia, 447 Lashley, Ronald T., 193f, 194–​195 Lassiter, Matthew D., 32, 295 “Last Night,” 443 “Last Rose of Summer,” 124 Latham, Aaron, 442 Latin America, 346n4, 509 Latin Americans, 328–​329 Latin music, 271, 328–​329

548   Index Latinos, 86, 89–​90, 345n2 Laugh-​In. See Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-​In Lavender Country, 380 Law, John, 200n9 Lawson, Henry, 508 Leary, James P. (Jim), 43, 49–​50n29, 89–​91, 138n22, 354n68, 498 LeCompte, Mary Lou, 437n35 Ledbetter, Huddie “Leadbelly,” 296 Ledford, Lily May, 233, 362 Lee, Brenda, 165–​166, 309, 515n26 Lee, Ernie, 259n11 Lee, Liisa, 447 Lee, Mary, 270 Lefford, M. Nyssim, 152n9 Lefty Lou, 466 Lennon, John, 162 Lennox, Annie, 174n44 Leppert, Richard, 160, 164, 308 Lesbian audiences, 83n91 Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT), 86, 366, 379 Lesbian & Gay Country Music Association (LGCMA), 380, 391n27 “Let It Whip,” 443 “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning,” 411n33 Levine, Lawrence, 259n20 Levine, Victoria Lindsay, 413n51 Lewis, George H., 36, 49n29, 310, 316, 325n53, 346n4 Lewis, Luke, 241 LGCMA. See Lesbian & Gay Country Music Association Liberalism, 469 Library of Congress American Folklife Center, 25 Archive of American Folk Song, 332 Archive of Folk Culture, 25 Moving Image Section, 264 Library of Congress Recordings, 117, 132f–​133f Liebestraum (Liszt), 182 Light Crust Doughboys, 465 Light Crust Flour, 465 Lightfoot, William C., 360–​361 Li’l Abner (Capp), 320–​321 Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, 64

Lindh, John, 473 Line dancing, 219, 442–​444, 450–​452, 496 “Electric Slide,” 443 the Wobble, 439 Linn, Karen, 338 Linthead Stomp (Huber), 98, 440, 458n5 Lipsitz, George, 160, 308, 325n33, 341, 352n57, 467 Listenership. See Audiences Listening, deep, 198 Literature. See Research Little Big Town, 244, 381, 483 “Little Liza Jane” (Whistling Rufus), 19 “Little Mary Phagan,” 464 “Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane” (Hays), 208 “Little Ramona (Gone Hillbilly Nuts)” (BR5-​49), 434 Little Richard, 368, 385–​386 “Little Rosewood Casket” (Dalhart), 146 Live music, 85 Live radio, 229–​233 LL Cool J, 459n31 Local dance, 451–​454 Lockhart, Texas, 339, 365–​366 Locklin, Hank, 501 “Locomotive Man” (Cash), 317 Loetz, Jack, 76n5 Lomax, Alan, 66, 80n54, 117–​118, 127–​128, 160, 225n23, 279, 498 Lomax, John A., 9n7, 19, 135, 267, 312, 500–​501 London, England, 473 Lonesome, Flat, 356 Lonesome Cowboy, 274 Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-​Tonk Angels (McCusker), 364 “Long Gone to Saskatchewan” (Lund), 107 Long Steel Rail (Cohen), 89 “Long Time Gone” (Scott), 220–​221, 242 Lornell, Kip, 130 Lorrie, Myrna, 510 Los Angeles, California, 214–​215, 251, 299 Lost Boy (Molsky), 118 Lost Highway, 278, 349n33 Lott, Eric, 349n33 Loudermilk, Charlie, 406 Loudermilk, Ira, 406

Index   549 Louisiana Hayride, 232 Louisville, Kentucky, 338, 343 Louvin, Charles, 412n42 Louvin Brothers, 70, 162, 406 Love, romantic, 317, 319 “Love is Like a Butterfly” (Parton), 237 “Lovesick Blues” (Williams), 161 “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” 126 Loving You, 274 Lovullo, Sam, 254–​255, 259n15, 260n32, 261n47 Lubbock, Texas, 99, 101, 112n31 Luciano, 508 Ludacris, 389 Luk thung (Thai country music), 496, 509 Lund, Clark, 114n46 Lund, Corby “Corb” Clark Marinus, 95–​96, 101–​103, 107–​109, 110nn4–​5, 113n34, 114n50 “Alberta Says Hello,” 101 “Blood, Sweat and Water,” 103 “Brother Brigham, Brother Young,” 113n45 “Buckin’ Horse Rider,” 101 Cabin Fever, 103 “Chinook Wind,” 103, 107 The Corb Lund Band, 104 “Family Reunion,” 113n45 Hair in My Eyes like a Highland Steer, 95, 104 “Hurtin’ Albertan” (Lund and Hus), 95–​96, 104–​107, 114n56 “Long Gone to Saskatchewan,” 107 “No Roads Here,” 101, 113n45 “Roughest Neck Around,” 101, 107 “September,” 101 “S Lazy H,” 109 “Steer Rider’s Blues,” 101 “Talkin’ Veterinarian Blues,” 101 Things That Can’t Be Undone, 109 “This is My Prairie,” 101, 103, 107 “Truck Got Stuck,” 113n45 “The Truck Got Stuck,” 101, 107 “The Truth Comes Out,” 103 “We Used to Ride ‘Em,” 101 Lund, D. C., 114n46 Lund, John, 239 Lund, Patty, 114n46 Lundy, Karen Saucier, 378 Lunsford, Bascom Lamar, 77n8

Lydian Chromatic Concept (Russell), 197 Lynn, Loretta, 96, 100, 115n67, 163–​164, 169, 174n33, 252, 314, 325n33, 362, 379, 449, 480 biopics, 276 Coal Miner’s Daughter (book), 363 Coal Miner’s Daughter (film), 171, 238, 363 Coal Miner’s Daughter: A Tribute to Loretta Lynn, 163 “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” 100, 108, 169 “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind),” 169–​171 fan interactions, 482–​483, 485, 488 financial success, 361 “Fist City,” 169, 171, 175n54 “I’m a Honky-​Tonk Girl,” 167–​170, 237 performances, 235, 254, 265 “The Pill,” 169, 171, 237, 378 themes, 103 vocal style, 163, 166–​171, 173n31 “X-​Rated,” 169 “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” 171 “You’re Lookin’ At Country,” 223n4 Lynyrd Skynyrd, 88, 449 Lyrics, 331, 434, 448–​449, 451 conventions, 288 dirty, 375 gospel, 399–​400 queer-​friendly, 375 MacEwan University, 110n4 MacGregor, Byron, 473 Machismo, 317 MacLean, Nancy, 475 Macon, Georgia, 368 Macon, Uncle Dave, 118, 123, 141, 231, 271 MacPherson, Aimee Semple, 398 Maddie & Tae, 243, 367, 388, 393n70 Maddox, Rose, 169–​170, 232, 426–​427, 427f The Maddox Brothers and Rose, 169–​170, 426–​427, 427f “Made In Japan” (Owens), 501 Madge of the Mountains, 266 Maffei, Dominick A., 202n30 Mahon, John K., 412n50 Mahon, Maureen, 174n44, 383 Maine, 49n29 Mainer’s Mountaineers, 78n16

550   Index Maines, Natalie, 101, 171, 174n44, 221, 242, 473 Mainstream country music, 450, 454, 456–​457, 474 “Make the World Go Away,” 214 Male dress style, 420 Malone, Ann, 346n4 Malone, Bill C., 1, 26, 37, 40, 46, 50n32, 68, 72, 128, 141, 219, 224n13, 224n22, 232, 288, 307, 310, 313, 317–​318, 342, 346n4, 353n59, 353n63, 359–​360, 413n51, 419, 471, 506 on Patsy Cline, 110n14 Country Music, U.S.A., 6, 33, 35, 39, 41, 72, 89, 97, 157, 260n27, 260n35, 263, 327–​334, 347n12, 348n29, 353–​354nn67–​68, 359, 361–​362, 458n3, 462, 468, 497–​498 definition of country music, 497–​498 Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, 330 “Johnny Rodriguez,” 346n4 migration thesis, 37, 288, 310 and Presley, 225n32 Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music, 264, 324n28, 348n27, 410n24, 423, 436n20 “The South and Country Music,” 35 Southern Music/​American Music, 33, 35, 334 Southern thesis, 9n14, 33–​42, 47n4, 47n9, 47n13, 97, 128–​129, 354n68, 370n25, 497–​498 “Mama Bake a Pie (Daddy Kill a Chicken)” (Kristofferson and Hall), 468 “Mammy’s little baby loves ‘Shortnin’ Bread’,” 233 Managerial class, 346n9 Mandolin, F-​style, 177 Mandrell, Barbara, 223n4, 239, 249, 480 Mangum, A. J., 107 “The Man in Black” (Cash), 434 Manitoba, 52n70 Mann, Geoff, 340, 351n47, 352n53, 376 “The Man That Turned My Momma On” (Tucker), 384 Manuel (designer), 419, 436n9 Manuel, Jeffrey T., 329 Maphis, Rose Lee, 358 MAPL system, 516n53 Marcus, George, 38

Marginalization of African Americans, 330–​331, 340–​341 of country music, 219 of white women, 390 of women, 221–​222, 314, 390 “Maria Elena” (Barcelata and Russell), 271 Marital sex, 387–​388 Marketing and promotion, 219, 311, 339, 347n11, 358–​359, 379 Marone, Hank, 124 Marsden, George M., 409n13 Marshall, Howard Wight, 25–​26, 67, 81n62 Marshall Tucker Band, 449 Martell, Linda, 216 Martin, Dean, 252 Martin, Toby, 10n26, 52n70 Martin instrument catalogue, 69 Marty, Martin E., 409n13 Marx, Karl, 284 Maryland, 86 Masculinity, 316–​319, 341, 381, 387 Mason, Lowell, 398–​399 “Massa’s in the Cold Ground,” 267 Mass culture, 285, 311, 315 Mass Culture, 21 Massey, Howard, 151n7 Mass marketing, 347n11 Mass media, 122, 312 Masturbation, 378 Maternalism, 359 Mather, Olivia, 161, 173n22 Mathur, Saloni, 79n35 Maxwell, Kathryn L., 410n19 Maybelle, Big, 368, 372n56 Maynard, Ken, 270 Mazor, Barry, 19–​20, 44, 53n76, 110n13, 129, 138n25, 139n40, 209, 224n13, 224n21, 357 MCA. See Music Corporation of America MCA Records, 384 McAuliffe, Leon, 185–​186, 202n25, 441, 452 McBride, Martina, 115n67, 171 McBrien, William, 224n23 McCain, John, 242 McCall, C. W., 472 McCann, Gordon, 135 McCarn, Dave, 98 McCarthy, Amy, 390n3

Index   551 McCarthy, Joe, 296 McCarthyism, 468 McCartney, Paul, 162 McClary, Susan, 161, 349n34 McClinton, Delbert, 453 McClinton, O. B., 216, 223n4 McCluskey, Bill, 360 McCluskey, Dollie, 360–​361 McCluskey, Millie Good, 360–​361 McCormick, Mack, 133f McCoy, Neal, 489 McCoy, Paul, 25 McCrea, Joel, 265 McCuen, Brad, 77n5 McCulloh, Judith (Judy), 25–​26, 133f, 134 McCusker, Doris Bertram Owen, 357–​358 McCusker, Kristine, 26, 111n20, 164, 232–​233, 320, 350n38, 435n5 A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (Pecknold and McCusker, eds.), 307, 365 Country Boys and Redneck Women: New Essays in Gender and Country Music (Pecknold and McCusker, eds.), 307, 366–​367, 372n49 Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-​Tonk Angels, 364 McEntire, Reba, 115n67, 142, 171, 239, 241, 275, 378, 431, 480 McGee, Kirk, 141 McGee, Sam, 141 McGraw, Tim, 243, 280, 389, 448, 474 McKenzie, Roderick D., 300n3 McLoughlin, William G., Jr., 409n13 McLuhan, Marshall, 251, 259n8 McMichen, Clayton, 132f–​133f, 464 McMillan, Patrick, 458n13 McNally, Shane, 300 McNeil, Alex, 259n13 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 408 McQueen, Steve, 274 Mcrobie, Angela, 284 Meade, Douglas, 4, 135 Meade, Gus, 135 Meade, Guthrie, 4, 143 Mechanical reproduction, 299 Mechanical solidarity, 289

Media, 346n9 mass, 122, 312 new, 21–​22 Medicine Line, 115n59 Medicine shows, 333 Meeker, David, 264 “Melancholy Day,” 160 Melody Roundup, 502 Melting pot theory, 501 Memphis, Tennessee, 212–​213, 286, 299, 367, 369 Mentors, 335–​336, 349n31 Mercury Records, 211–​212, 220, 225n30, 241, 349n33, 486 Meridian, Mississippi, 359 Merle Haggard: The Running Kind (Cantwell), 477n23 Merman, Ethel, 166 Merriam, Alan, 513n5 “Merry Go ‘Round” (Musgrave), 244 Message music, 236 Messiaen, Olivier, 199, 204n57 Messner, Beth A., 351n48 Methodist Publishing House, 126 Meunich, Jeanne (Genevieve Elizabeth), 21, 233, 320 Mexican music, 346n4, 501, 508, 512 Mexico, 271, 503, 516n53 MGM, 275, 282n38 Michaels, Randy, 238 Michigan, 498 Microphones, 143–​151, 163 Middle Tennessee State University, 5, 25, 77n5, 360, 370n18 Middleton, Richard, 151n8 “Midnight in Montgomery” (Jackson and Sampson), 406–​407, 412n43 Midwestern Hayride, 251 Migrations, 34, 37, 288, 310, 466 Migration thesis, 37, 288, 310 Mike Curb Family Foundation, 495 Military performances, 282n34, 503 Military radio, 498, 502 Millard, Andre, 153n28 Millennial developments, 278–​280 Miller, 89, 343 Miller, Emmett, 501

552   Index Miller, Jim Wayne, 14 Miller, Joe, 254 Miller, Karl Hagstrom, 3, 39, 209, 224n13, 287, 346n9, 357, 367 Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow, 330–​331, 353n58, 459n20, 475 Miller, Kiri, 172n14 Miller, Mitch, 211–​212, 234 Miller, Roger, 235 Miller, Timothy D., 201n14 Milliner, Clare, 135 Mills, Joshua E., 259n9 Mining, 99–​100 Minnesota, 498 Minorities, 331 Minstrel shows, 208, 501 Minstrel songs, 128–​129, 208, 333, 336–​337, 339, 349–​350n35 Minstrel troupes, 124 Misogyny, 375–​376 Missionary Baptists, 396 “Mississippi Bounce” (DJ Biggs), 451 “Miss Liza, Poor Gal,” 408n1 Mitsui, Tōru, 52n71, 506 Miyake, Mark, 504 Mockus, Martha, 380, 382–​383 Modern arrangements, 324n31 Modern country music, 432–​433 Modernity, 283–​286 Modernization, 235, 286–​291, 320, 416–​417 Modern sounds, 324n31 Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (Charles), 74, 214, 337 Moi, Joey, 459n31, 460n36 “Molly and Tenbrooks,” 338 Molsky, Bruce, 118, 136 Monarch Banjo Method (Lansing), 124 Monday Night Football, 257 Mongrel music, 213 Monkees, 255 Monogram Pictures, 271 Monroe, Bill, 118, 141, 231, 279, 293, 344, 353n66, 402 Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys: An Illustrated Discography (Rosenberg), 69 as “Father of Bluegrass,” 149

innovations, 348n24 mentors, 335–​336 performances, 274 Monroe, Charlie, 118 Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, 69, 149 Montague Drive-​In (Nashville, TN), 275 Montana, Patsy, 78n16, 164–​165, 231, 270, 364 Monterrey Pop Festival, 80n49 Montgomery Ward, 18 Moody, Clyde, 78n16, 399 Moody, Dwight L., 398, 402, 408n3, 410n19 Mooney, Ralph, 192, 199 Moonshine Kate, 111n20, 357 Moore, Allan, 142, 145 Moore, Bob, 102 Moore, James Cleveland, 396–​397, 402, 409n5, 409n8 Moore, John, 188 Moorefield, Virgil, 142 MOR (aka “adult contemporary”) music, 236 Morality, 252 Morehouse College Quartet, 357 Morgan, George, 503 Mormons, 113n45 Mornings with Storme Warren (SiriusXM), 244 Morris, Edward, 77n6, 238 Morris, William, 16 Morrisey, Larry, 25 Morrison, Toni, 339, 351n47 Morse, Steve, 393n61 Morton, David L., Jr., 153n28, 154n33 Morton, Tex, 507 “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” (Rich), 236 The Mountain Boys (Webb), 320 Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, 135–​136 Mountaineer Jamboree: Country Music in West Virginia (Tribe), 34, 134 “Mountaineer” or “hillbilly” style, 415–​416, 416f Mountain songs, 320 “Move It on Over” (Williams), 161 Moving images. See Film The Moving Picture World, 266–​267 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 471 Mr. Lucky’s (Phoenix, AZ), 449, 452–​453 Mt. Airy, North Carolina, 136

Index   553 Muhlenberg, Kentucky, 343, 353n66 “Mule Train,” 233 Mullen, Delmar E., 193f, 195 Mullican, Moon, 501 Mullins, Rich, 459n25 Multi-​kord (Harlin Brothers), 188–​189 Murder ballads, 319 Murphy, Clifford R. (Cliff), 25, 36–​37, 50n29, 50n32, 128, 498, 514n15 Murphy, Michael, 469 Murray, Anne, 504 Muscle Shoals, Alabama, 367 Muse, Marty, 201n11 Museology, 72 Musgrave, Kacey, 222, 244, 300, 381 Music. See also Country music; Folk music; Hillbilly music American styles, 416–​417, 469 assembly, 18 citybilly, 98, 128, 225n23 cosmic, 469 country and western, 38, 124, 205, 514n21 country radio, 229–​247 familiar, 126–​127 fashion and visual style in, 415–​438 Hawaiian, 181 hot country, 3 instrumental, 17–​18 message, 236 old-​time, 57, 117, 138n22 politics of, 461–​478 popular, 151n8, 284 racialized, 347n10 rap, 299, 388–​389 recording, 141–​155 roots, 6, 278 sacred, 17–​18, 86, 395–​413 sexuality in, 375–​394 singing voice in, 157–​175 sociology of, 283–​306 southern rural, 40 urban contemporary, 236 Western, 412n44, 503–​504, 515n35 Western swing, 98, 202n20, 210, 348n29, 440–​441 Música caipira, 508–​509 The Musical Brownies, 132f–​133f

Musical interpellation, 376 Música sertaneja, 496, 508–​509 Music Corporation of America (MCA), 76n5, 236, 384 Music festivals, 119, 135–​136, 139n49, 359, 511–​512 Musicians, 100. See also Singers; individual musicians financial compensation, 235, 292 financial success, 361 foreign-​born artists, 504–​505 Music in American Life series, 26, 134 Musicology, 142, 150–​151 The Music Reporter, 503 Music technology, 179, 299 Music videos, 219 Mutationists, 508 My Big Redneck Vacation, 321 “My Clinch Mountain Home” (Carter Family), 100 My Husband, Jimmie Rodgers (Rodgers), 359 “My Little Ballerina” (the Players), 197–​198, 198f “My Old Kentucky Home,” 126, 266 MySpace, 243 Mysticism, 406–​407 “My Task,” 411n33 My Tennessee Mountain Home (Parton), 101 “My Wedding Ring” (Shepard), 167 Nagatomi, Mari, 517n57 Napier, Simon A., 133f Narrating class, 346n9, 497 Narváez, Peter, 36, 49n29, 52n67 Nasal twang, 26, 157–​158, 309, 340 Nasal voices, 158 NASCAR, 257 Nashawaty, Chris, 282n39 Nashville (film), 277, 470 Nashville (series), 88, 244, 257–​258, 261n55, 381 Nashville, Tennessee, 112n26, 234, 240, 291–​295, 299 East Nashville, 300 as Hillbilly Music Capital of the World, 293 as Music City USA, 45–​46, 212, 275, 284, 286, 292–​294, 299, 367 Music Row, 212, 292, 294, 300

554   Index Nashville Alliance for Public Education, 487 Nashville Cats, 76 The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman’s Masterpiece (Stuart), 277 Nashville E9th tuning, 192, 194t Nashville Municipal Auditorium, 486 The Nashville Network (TNN), 236, 257, 442, 444 Nashville Now, 236 Nashville Rebel, 275 “Nashville Salutes Texas!: Country from the Lone Star State” exhibit, 75 Nashville Scene, 73 Nashville Skyline (Dylan), 469 “Nashville Skyline: Rocking Back to the Country” exhibit, 75 Nashville Sound, 57, 74–​75, 206, 213–​214, 293, 309, 363, 480 fan distaste for, 482 history of, 448–​449 The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization and Country Music (Jensen), 235, 363, 370n22, 419 Nashville Sound club (Johnson City, TN), 446–​447 Nashville Star, 244 Nassour, Ellis, 72, 363, 371n36 The Nation, 376–​377 National Association of Broadcasters, 234 National Barn Dance, 78n16, 133f, 143, 231–​233, 251, 270, 274, 293, 320, 336–​337, 360, 466 National Country Music Week, 513n3 National Folk, 135–​136 National Football League (NFL), 257 National Gallery of Art, 72 Nationalism, 395, 405–​406, 475–​476, 504, 511–​512 National Life and Accident Insurance Company, 231, 292–​294 National Single Microphone Championship, 150 National stardom, 365 National-​Valco, 187–​188, 202n30 Native Americans, 318, 328–​329, 346n4, 353n67, 407, 501, 517n57

Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (Fox), 100, 337, 350n38, 352n50, 477n20 NBC, 141, 231–​232, 250, 259n13, 355–​356 Neal, Jocelyn R., 4, 148, 158, 174n33, 211, 220, 224n22, 226n57, 331–​332, 346n4, 348n28, 349n31, 352n50, 354n69, 372n49, 458n14, 459n20 Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History, 333, 337, 458n15 “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” 126 Nebraska, 17 Negro music, 121 Negus, Keith, 238, 240 Neithammer, Nancy Dols, 138n11 Nelly, 243, 298, 389, 456, 459n31, 480 Nelson, Don, 239 Nelson, Donald Lee, 408n4 Nelson, Willie, 102, 236, 289, 385, 471 benefit concerts, 469, 472 breakout recordings, 297 non-​English recordings, 503 outlaw country, 88, 216–​217, 226n49, 316, 449, 472 performances, 275 Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic, 469 Neoconservatives, 295–​297 Neo-​traditionalism, 102–​103, 106, 218, 239–​ 240, 242, 321 The Netherlands, 501–​503, 517n57 Nettl, Bruno, 5, 412n51, 503–​504, 506 Nettles, Jennifer, 108, 115n67 Networked radio, 230, 244 “Never Grow Old” (“Where We’ll Never Grow Old”) (Moore), 396–​397, 401–​402, 409n5, 409n8 Nevins, Jason, 459n31 New and Improved Stringed Musical Instrument (Wilber), 187 New country, 218–​220, 240 New Deal, 117, 465–​466, 469 The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 47n13 New England, 37, 49n29, 91, 128 Newfoundland, 49n29 Newgrass, 137n9

Index   555 New Grove, 333 New Hollywood, 275–​278 New Journalism, 442 New Left, 469 The New Lost City Ramblers, 2, 89, 117, 119–​ 121, 127, 129, 136–​137, 279 Song Book, 121–​122 Songs of the Depression, 139n28 Newlyn, Andrea, 387 Newman, Jimmy C., 501 “The Newmarket Wreck,” 408n1 New media, 21–​22 New Mexico, 346n4 Newport Folk Festival, 296, 481 New Riders of the Purple Sage, 453 New Right, 215, 469 New River Ranch, 92 New River Records, 92 New South, 208, 295 Newsreel reports, 268 Newton-​John, Olivia, 217–​218, 220, 226n51, 236–​237, 480, 504 New Tradition, 240 New Traditionalism, 278, 480 New York City, New York, 135–​136, 214, 234, 241, 288, 299 The New York Dramatic Mirror, 267 New Yorker, 387–​388 New York State, 49n29 New York Times, 6, 43, 70, 239, 256–​257, 260n26, 387–​388 New Zealand, 502, 516n53, 517n57 NFL. See National Football League Nickel Dreams (Tucker), 393n61 Nielsen ratings, 252 Nielson Soundscan, 297–​298 Nigenkin, 201n14 Nigeria, 516n53 Nightclubs, 443, 457–​458n2 honky tonks, 440–​441, 449, 457–​458n2 line-​dancing clubs, 219 The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia, 277 Night Train to Nashville, 76 “Night Train to Nashville” exhibit, 75 9/​11 attacks, 473 9 to 5 (film), 276

“9 to 5” (Parton), 218, 238 1989 (Swift), 243 “The Ninety and Nine,” 409n11, 411n33 Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, 402 Nixon, Richard, 215, 295–​297, 469–​471 “Noah Found Grace in the Eyes of the Lord,” 411n34 “No Man’s Land” (Tucker), 378, 384 Non-​English rerecordings, 503, 515n26 “Norma Jean Riley” (Diamond Rio), 454 “No Roads Here” (Lund), 101, 113n45 “No Roads here” exhibit, 103 Norris, Land, 123 North American thesis, 17, 37 North Carolina, 464 Norway, 503, 511, 517n57 Nostalgia, 109, 124, 259n20, 308, 310, 315, 317, 340 “Nothing Like You” (Dan and Shay), 450 Nova Scotia, 510 Nunn, Erich, 83n91, 307, 346n4, 351n46, 352n50 Nusbaum, Philip, 9n7 Nye, David, 200n9 Nymphomania, 378 O. Brewer, 126 Oak Publications, 196 Oak Ridge Boys, 142 Oak Ridge Quartet, 233 Obama, Barack, 474 Obamacare, 474 Oberlin College, 24 O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 220, 243, 278–​279, 349n33, 403, 466 O’Daniel, Wilbur Lee “Pappy,” 465–​466, 470–​471 The Odd Couple, 259n16 “O Death,” 243 Odessa Chuck Wagon Gang, 486 “Ode to Billie Joe” (Gentry), 368 Oermann, Robert, 3, 163–​164, 319, 363–​364, 392n43 Ogasapian, John, 139n49 “Oh, Suzannah!,” 88 Ohio, Kentucky, 343, 353n66 Ojanen, Mikko, 152n9

556   Index Okeh Records, 19, 123, 133f, 138n23, 138n25, 207–​208, 230–​231, 266, 356–​357 “Okie from Muskogee” (Haggard), 215, 236, 296–​297, 468–​470 Okie migration, 34, 466 Okinawa, 501 Oklahoma, 34–​35, 98, 210 Olaf the Swede, 501 “Old Black Joe,” 126 Old Country Church, 404 Old Crow Medicine Show, 137 Old Familiar Tunes (Columbia Records), 123 “Old Familiar Tunes of the Sunny South,” 266–​267 “Old Folks at Home,” 126 “Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Gonna Crow” (Carson), 208 “Old Joe Clark,” 271 “Old Kentucky Home,” 267 “The Old Oaken Bucket,” 126 “The Old Rugged Cross,” 411n33 Old South, 208 “Old Time Corn Shuckin’,” 408n1 Old Time Country, 360 The Old-​Time Herald, 134, 345n3 “Old Time Jig,” 124 “Old Time Jig (or, Hank Marone),” 124 Old-​time music, 41, 57, 117–​140, 137n9, 138n22, 177, 208–​209, 357 Old-​Time Music Makers of New York State (Bronner), 37–​38, 89, 130–​134, 132f–​133f, 345n3 Old Time Songs (S. C. Wells and Co.), 124, 125f Old-​Time String Band Song Book, 121–​122 Old-​time style groups, 118 Old Time Tune Records (Okeh Records), 123 Old way of singing, 159 “Ole Timey” sound, 293 Oliver Ditson & Company, 401 Oliveros, Pauline, 198 Olson, Ted, 413n51 Omi, Michael, 341 One Direction, 480 “One Piece at a Time” (Cash), 344–​345 “Oney” (Cash), 317 Only A Miner (Green), 89 Opera, 166, 174n36, 174n42

Opryland, 294, 469–​470, 486 Oral History Collection (Country Music Foundation), 4 Oral interviews, 360, 371n27 Oral tradition, 15 Orbison, Roy, 258n2 Orchestral strings, 177 “Organ Grinder Blues,” 466 Organic intellectuals, 309, 322 Orr, Douglas M. (Doug), 112n25, 347n14 Orr, Jay, 25 Ortega, Teresa, 83n91 O Sacrum Convivium (Messaien), 204n57 Osceola, 407 Os Dois Filhos de Francisco, 508 Osmonds, 250 Otherness, 296, 383, 386, 439–​440, 500, 505 “Others,” 411n33 Otto Gray and His Oklahoma Cowboys, 269 Ottosson, Åse, 10n26, 372n49 Oudshoorn, Nelly, 200n9 Our Familiar Songs and Those Who Made Them (Henry Holt), 126 Our Hospitality, 267–​268 Outlaw country, 88, 206, 216–​218, 226n49, 316, 449, 472, 478n33 Overton, Gary, 229 Owens, Buck, 74, 214, 288, 356, 362, 449 fan club, 484 “Made In Japan,” 501 performances, 235–​236, 252, 259n15, 259n17 Owsley, Frank L., 329 Ozark, 118 Ozark Jubilee, 251, 259n14 Page, Dorothy, 270 Page, Jimmy, 196 Page, Patti, 211, 220 Paisley, Brad, 431, 454, 459n31, 474 Paisley, Danny, 91–​92 Paley, Tom, 117, 121 Pandora, 244 Park, Robert, 300n3 Parker, Linda, 21, 232–​233, 320, 364, 435n5 “Parking Lot Party” (Brice, Akins, Akins, and Laird), 449 Parody, 322

Index   557 Parsons, Gram, 161, 469 Parsons and Pool’s Original Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Tennessee Jubilee Singers, 124 Partner dance, 441–​442, 446, 449–​450, 452–​453. See also Dance Parton, Dolly, 96, 100, 108, 164, 174n33, 221, 237 “Coat of Many Colors,” 237 crossover hits, 218, 297 Dolly Parton and Gender Performance in Country Music (Edward), 366 Dollywood Foundation Newsletter, 483–​484 fan interactions, 489 financial success, 361 “Here You Come Again,” 218, 237 “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad),” 100 “I Will Always Love You,” 237 “Jolene,” 237, 366 “Joshua,” 237 “Love is Like a Butterfly,” 237 My Tennessee Mountain Home, 101 “9 to 5,” 218, 238 performances, 235, 239, 251, 275 public personae, 314, 320–​322, 366, 379, 480 recordings, 218 “Tennessee Mountain Girl,” 218 themes, 103 “Pass me not, O gentle Saviour” (Crosby), 400 Paternalism, 359 Paterson, Banjo, 508 Patriarchy, 308–​309 Patriotism, 297, 405, 468 Patsy: The Life and Times of Patsy Cline (Jones), 363, 371n36 Patterson, Timothy, 68 Patterson, William, 123 Paycheck, Johnny, 472, 486–​487 Payday, 277, 279 “Pay Me Alimony” (Maddox), 169 Payne, Rufus “Tee-​Tot,” 290, 335–​336, 348–​349n30 PBS, 349n33 Peabody College for Teachers, 67 “Peace in the Valley” (Dorsey), 404, 411n34 Pearl, Minnie, 233, 253, 355–​356, 366 Pearson, 447, 459n24

Pecknold, Diane, 4, 26, 51n65, 83n91, 89, 93n11, 112n26, 206, 211, 213, 215, 220, 223n6, 225n39, 307, 312, 340–​341, 353n65, 372n49, 422, 513n4 A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (Pecknold and McCusker, eds.), 307, 365 Country Boys and Redneck Women: New Essays in Gender and Country Music (Pecknold and McCusker, eds.), 307, 366–​367, 372n49 Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music (Pecknold, ed.), 338, 392n42 The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry, 234, 436n18 Pedal steel guitar, 177–​178, 197–​200 “all-​pull” models, 195 “And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar” (Alcorn), 204n57 double-​neck, 189–​190 “E” lever, 195, 195f Emmons (“push-​pull”), 194–​195 E9th, 189–​197 “F” lever, 195, 195f “Franklin” pedal, 198 “Half a Mind” (Tubb) intro by Buddy Emmons, 191–​192, 192f “The Healing Hands of Time” (Price) intro by Buddy Emmons, 195, 195f multi-​neck, 188 “My Little Ballerina” (the Players) solo by Paul Franklin, 197–​198, 198f prehistory of, 183f–​184f, 185–​189 single-​neck, 195–​196 “Slowly” (Pierce) intro by Bud Isaacs, 190, 190f, 195 “Sweet Dreams” (Young) intro by Buddy Emmons, 191, 191f tunings, 192, 194, 194t, 195–​196, 196t, 202n24 “You Took Her Off My Hands” (Price) solo by Buddy Emmons, 192, 194f Pedal Steel Guitar (Winston and Keith), 196 Peer, Ralph, 19–​20, 123, 129, 139n40, 207–​209, 271, 343, 354n68, 356–​357 Bristol sessions, 124, 143–​146, 209, 287–​288, 291, 311, 313, 339, 395–​399, 402, 408n1

558   Index Pennington, Stephan, 350n42 Pennyroyal region, 353n66 Pentecostalism, 395, 408 People’s music, 93n9 People’s Party, 464 Peppiatt, Frank, 252–​253 Performance(s), 292, 294. See also individual performers or programs by name blackface, 390n1 black female, 385–​386 drag, 382–​383 first recordings, 154n34, 356–​357 gender, 355–​373 international touring, 503 live shows, 85, 229–​233, 386 military, 282n34, 503 radio ( see Radio) rube, 390n1 screen ( see Film) stage, 290, 385–​386, 478n35 television ( see Television (TV)) Performance wear, 428 Perkins, Carl, 213, 368, 372n56 Personality radio, 230, 233–​237 Peterson, David, 150 Peterson, Richard A. “Pete,” 2–​3, 9n13, 11n34, 34–​36, 44, 53n76, 67–​68, 99–​100, 122, 139n40, 152n17, 206–​209, 229, 285–​294, 310, 313, 365, 370n22, 468 Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity, 89, 98, 173n21, 173n31, 203n46, 225n24, 232, 264, 325n33, 339, 351n47, 362, 422–​423 “The Fertile Crescent of Country Music” (Peterson and Davis), 34–​35 Petticoat Junction, 252 “Pfft, You Were Gone” (Reichner), 254 Phasing, 154n40 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 135–​136 “Philadelphia Lawyer” (Guthrie), 170 Philco Battery Radio, 141 Philippines, 516n53 Phillips, Kevin, 471 Phillips, Sam, 319 Phillips, Stacy, 135 Phillips, Stu, 510 Phonograph, 18–​21

Piano, 177 Piazzolla, Astor, 199 Pickford, Mary, 268 Pickin’ on Peachtree: A History of Country Music in Atlanta, Georgia (Daniel), 34, 134 Piedmont South, 2, 289 Pierce, Don, 502–​503 Pierce, Webb, 232, 235, 274, 425 “Back Street Affair,” 375 “Slowly,” 189–​190, 190f, 195 “The Pill” (Lynn), 169, 171, 237, 378 Pinch, Trevor J., 152n10, 200n7, 200n9 Pinched throat style, 157–​158 Pinson, Bob, 68, 70, 93n11, 133f Pinto, Samantha, 390n Pistol Annies, 244, 390 Pittman, Bob, 237–​238 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 20, 237 Place-​based songs, 108. See also Geography Playboy magazine, 384 The Players, 197–​198, 198f “Playing Chicken with the Train” (Gussow), 271 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Morrison), 339 “Play Something Country” (Brooks & Dunn), 344 Plough, 235 Plymouth Vermont Old-​Time Dance Orchestra, 42 Poco, 196 Poe, Nelly, 415, 421 Poe, Ruth, 415, 421 Poe Sisters, 415, 417, 418f, 421 Poetry, 15, 310 Poland, 501 Political (concept), 475 Politicians, 465 Politics, 129, 296, 365, 461–​478 conservative, 215 identity, 329–​330, 346n9 neoconservative, 295–​297 populist, 136 of signification, 310 The Politics of Musical Beauty (Shank), 475 Polka, 440, 501

Index   559 Pollard, Adelaide A., 401 Polynesian guitar, 501 Polynesian string bands, 512 Poole, Charlie, 98, 208, 440, 463–​464 Pop (popular) culture, 208, 286, 309–​310 Poplore, 80n49 Pop (popular) music, 87–​88, 151n8, 174n44, 207, 284 crossovers, 211–​213, 215 recordings, 219 soft-​shell, 325n33 Pop music studies, 4–​5, 341 Popular Culture association, 9n12 Popular education, 70–​76 Popularization, 80n54 Populism, 136, 462–​464, 466, 469–​475 The Populist Moment, 463 Populist Movement, 317, 464 Populist Party, 463 Porcello, Thomas, 153n21 Pornography, 378 Port Deposit, Maryland, 91–​92 Porter, Cole, 210, 224n23 Porter, Edwin S., 266 Porterfield, Nolan, 68–​69, 89, 129, 134, 139n42 Portland, Oregon, 135–​136 Portugal, 43 Possum Hunters, 20 Postcolonialism, 341 Postmodernism, 255, 260n38, 298 Post-​racial relations, 390 Potter, David M., 47n9 Potter, John, 158 Poulliot, Les, 64 Pound, Louise, 17 Powell, Dirk, 137 Power imbalances, 310 Powers, Ann, 6 Premodernity, 308 Presley, Elvis, 309, 319, 365, 393n64, 404 “Burnin’ Love,” 384 marketing, 379 performances, 232, 273–​274, 358 recordings, 207, 212–​213, 218, 225n32 Preston, Frances, 60, 482 “Pretty Polly,” 500

“the pretzel,” 445 Prewar film, 268–​273 Prewar music, 2, 4, 32–​33, 39–​45, 47n5, 51n65, 118, 120, 127–​128, 136–​138n10, 289, 308 Price, Ray, 199, 425 “The Healing Hands of Time,” 195, 195f “You Took Her Off My Hands,” 192, 194f Price, Robert E., 226n40 Pride, Charley, 215–​216, 327, 337, 339, 350n40, 367–​368 “The Hunger,” 378 “You’re My Jamaica,” 501 Prince Albert Tobacco, 355, 369n2 Print origins, 22 “The Prisoner’s Song” (Dalhart), 208–​209, 267 Prison narratives, 473 Prison songs, 318 Proceedings of the 1890 Phonograph Convention, 69 Program directors, 238 Progressive country, 217, 236–​237 Progressives, 295–​296 Promotion, 339, 358–​359 Promotional films, 219 Propaganda, 466 Prophet, Orval, 510 Propular Front, 466 Prospector’s Steakhouse and Saloon (Mount Laurel, NJ), 452 Prostitution, 378 Protestants, 17, 395, 399, 407–​408 Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California (La Chapelle), 34, 339, 476n4 Pruett, David, 4 Pruett, Jeanne, 236 Psalm singing, 172n14 Publicists, 484. See also Marketing and promotion Publishing, 292 “A Pub With No Beer” (Dusty), 508 Puckett, Riley, 78n16, 123, 165, 230–​231, 500 Pugh, Ronnie, 14, 68, 77n6, 98, 203n45, 223n1, 272, 489 Pure Country, 279, 450

560   Index Purity folk, 311 by proxy, 308 “Push-​pull” (Emmons pedal steel), 194–​195 Quadruple Musician’s Omnibus (Howe), 124 Quaint musicians, 123 Quality records, 510 Queer-​friendly songs, 375 Queerness, 83n91, 223n3 Queer scholarship, 378–​383 Quonset Hut, 294 Quota systems, 516n53 Race and racism, 3–​4, 220, 287, 295–​297, 319, 321, 504. See also Segregation in country music scholarship, 327–​354, 353n64 in politics, 471 post-​racial relations, 390 prison narratives, 473–​474 in recording industry, 367–​368 revisions, 232, 337–​340 white core narrative of country music, 331–​334 Race records, 123–​124, 207–​209, 307, 327 Race theory, 341 Racial identity, 347n10 Racial integration, 340–​345 Racialized music, 347n10 Racial profiling, 389 “Rack City” (Tyga), 389 Radano, Ronald, 352n57 Radio, 141, 210–​211, 292, 294, 312, 357–​358, 465, 511 barn dance, 164, 230–​233, 250, 287–​288, 320, 350, 350n38, 358 contemporary hit (CHR), 236 country, 20, 229–​247 formats, 229–​230, 237–​241 influence of, 18–​21, 466 listenership, 239–​241 live, 229–​233 military, 498, 502 networked, 230, 244 personality, 230, 233–​237 playlists, 238, 244

program directors, 238 sales, 237–​241 in South, 18 technology of, 294 women’s voices on, 364 Radio Digest, 230 Radio programming, 281n29 Radio Queen, 361 Radio & Records (R&R), 238–​241 The Rage, 155n52 Ragtime, 16–​17 Raiders of Old California, 274 “Rainbow at Midnight” (Tubb), 467–​468 Rainer Family, 165, 501 Ramblers, 316–​317, 325n53 Rambling, 327 Rambo, 472 Ramone, Phil, 151n7 Ramsey, Guthrie P., Jr., 352n57 Rancheras, 501, 508, 512 Ranch Party series, 430 Ranch-​wear, 422 Ranch wear, 426 Randall, Alice, 327, 340 Randolph, Robert, 197, 204n51 Randolph, Vance, 135 Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Kibler), 373n62 Rap music, 299, 388–​389 Rathbone, Basil, 274 Rattray, Bill, 133f Raven, Eddy, 501 Rayburn, Jim, 174n44 RCA Victor Company, 70, 212–​213, 217, 239, 510 Reactionary populism, 475 Reagan, Ronald, 238, 296, 472–​473 Reagan Democrats, 296 Real country, 11n35, 92, 220–​221, 223n3, 362, 461 Real Country: Music and Language in Working-​ Class Culture (Fox), 90, 339, 352n53, 365–​366, 391n10, 499 Reality TV, 88, 321 The Real Majority (Scammon and Wattenberg), 471 the reclines, 380

Index   561 Reconstruction, 468 Recorded voice, 144–​151 Recording(s), 141–​155, 264 Bristol sessions, 124, 143–​146, 209, 287–​288, 291, 311, 313, 339, 395–​399, 402, 408n1 commercial, 292 first, 154n34, 356–​357 non-​English rerecordings, 503, 515n26 V-​Discs, 210 Recording industry, 75–​76, 143, 145, 205–​227 sales reports, 219 segregation in, 354n68, 367–​368 “Recordings of Contemporary Musicians” (Seeger), 118 Record producers, 142, 151n7 Record production, 142 Red (Swift), 243 “Red” (Swift), 243 Redding, Otis, 368 Red Foley and the Sunshine Boys, 404 Redford, Robert, 451 Redneck Island, 321 Rednecks (stereotype), 314, 321, 419, 434–​435, 469 Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (Hubbs), 339, 366, 381–​382 Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music (Willman), 472, 476n4 “Redneck Woman” (Wilson), 242, 314, 325n38, 381–​382, 387 Rednex, 504 Reductionism, 378 Reed, Jerry, 275, 344–​345 Reed, Ola Belle, 92 Reeves, Jim, 59, 309, 313, 325n33, 363, 404, 495 “Different Drums,” 143–​144 international legacy, 503 performances, 232, 503 “Reflections” (Cash), 312–​313, 324n31 Reformed tradition, 398 Refugees, 466 Regional country music, 89–​91 Regional dance, 451–​454 Regionalism, 109, 476 Regional revisionists, 36, 49n29 Reichner, Bix, 254 Reish, Greg, 25

“Reissues by Older Roots Musicians” (Seeger), 118 Religion, 317, 457n2 Religious music, 395–​413 Remixes, 219, 243, 298, 389, 443, 456, 459n31 Reneau, George, 123 Renfro Valley Barn Dance, 232, 358 Renn, Ernie, 203nn44–​45 Republican Party, 375, 405, 468, 471 Southern Strategy, 295, 471 Republic Pictures, 270–​273 Research American folklore studies, 136 bluegrass, 24 country music studies, 1–​11, 14, 25–​27, 40–​ 42, 88–​90, 327–​354, 462, 517n57 documentation of women’s contributions, 3 fan studies, 480–​481 film studies, 263 folklore studies, 2, 21–​22, 25–​27, 136, 329 folk music studies, 25 future directions, 42–​45 hillbilly music studies, 1 international country music scholarship, 517n57 jazz studies, 341 pop music studies, 4–​5, 341 queer scholarship, 378–​383 sound studies, 142–​143, 152n10 whiteness studies, 339–​340, 351n47, 352n50 Resonator guitar, 180–​182, 202n17 Respectability, 365 “Reuben, Reuben,” 266 Revell, Fleming H., 402, 411n27 Reverberation, 154n41 Revision historical, 232, 337–​340, 456–​457 of masculinity, 381 regional, 36, 49n29 Revivalism, 121–​122, 126, 135–​136, 225n23, 296–​297 Revival Praises (Methodist Publishing House), 126 Revues, 269–​270 Rey, Alvino, 188 R. J. Reynolds, 381–​382 Rhinestone, 277

562   Index Rhythm, Country & Blues (Tucker and Little Richard), 385 Rhythm and blues (R&B), 319, 335, 348n28, 400 Rice, Chase, 460n36 Rice, Jesse, 460n36 Rich, Charlie, 217–​218, 226n51, 236, 377 Richardson, Thomas Grant, 26 Riddle, Lesley, 335 “The Ride” (Gentry and Detterline), 412n47 Ride This Train (Cash), 258n3 Riding West, 272 “Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico” (Jonny Rodriguez), 501 “Ridin’ on the Cotton Belt” (Cash), 317 Right populism, 472–​473 Rights and royalties, 20, 222–​223, 254 Riley, Jeannie C., 235 Rimes, Le Ann, 241 Rinzler, Ralph, 117–​118 Rio, Diamond, 356, 454 “Ripped Off Winkle,” (Connors), 511 Ritchie, Balis, 19 Ritchie, Fiona, 347n14 Ritchie, Jean, 19 Ritchie, Riona, 112n25 Ritter, Tex, 59, 235, 271, 312, 417, 425, 430, 468, 471 Ritter, Tom, 471 Ritz Brothers, 272 The Road to Nashville, 274 Robbins, Marty, 102, 114n50, 235, 274, 328–​329 Roberts, A. C. “Eck,” 41 Roberts, Roderick J., 32, 36–​37, 47n4, 68 Roberts, Warren, 25 Robertson, Eck, 19, 129 Robinson, Dave, 257 Robison, Carson, 41, 146, 502 Rockabilly, 165, 206, 212–​213, 309, 319 Rock and roll, 213, 236, 442, 475 country rock, 196 southern rock, 349n34, 478n33 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 70 “Rock of Ages,” 411n33 Rockwell, Joti, 4, 155n49 Rodeheaver, Homer, 396, 398, 408n3, 409n11, 411n26

Rodeo, 114n46, 419, 432–​433, 437n35, 460n33 Rodeo Ben, 432, 501 Rodeo Records, 510 Rodger, Gillian, 174n44 Rodgers, Carrie, 358–​359, 370n16 Rodgers, Jimmie N., 3, 63, 69–​70, 73, 86, 165, 224n22, 313, 316, 353n59, 500–​501 Bristol sessions, 287–​288, 311 death of, 270 discovery of, 288–​289 innovations, 348n24 Irishness, 346n4 Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler (Porterfield), 134 mentors, 335–​336 promotional films, 219 recordings, 205–​206, 209–​210 as the “Singing Brakeman,” 100, 289 The Singing Brakeman, 269 vocal style, 397 Rodriguez, Jonny, 501 Roediger, David R., 339, 341, 351n46, 352n57 Rogers, Kenny, 158, 239, 325n33, 449, 480 Rogers, Roy, 210, 271, 312, 417, 483 Rogers, Tim B., 52n70 Rolling Stone, 163, 384 Rolling Stones, 291 Roman, Lulu, 253 Romanticization, 320, 346n5 Romantic Nationalism, 14, 28n7 Romero, Jason, 137 Romero, Pharis, 137 Ronstadt, Linda, 258n2 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR), 465, 467 Roots music, 6, 278 Ropin’ The Wind (Brooks), 219 Rorrer, Kinney, 130, 133f Rose, Fred, 211–​212, 234, 294 Rose, Wesley, 62, 64 Rosen, Jody, 221–​222, 243, 387–​388, 450, 456, 459n28 Rosenberg, Neil V., 24–​25, 36, 49n29, 68–​69, 89–​91, 111–​112n25, 117–​118, 504–​505, 510, 513n2 Rosenzweig, Roy, 76, 78n20 Rosner, Ben, 60 Rottman, Gordon L., 260n33

Index   563 “Roughest Neck Around” (Lund), 101, 107 Rounder Records, 137n8–​137n9 Round Peak style, 136 Rove Retters, 505 Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-​In, 252, 255 Rowlf the Dog, 255, 261n41 Roy, Fred, 510 Roy, William G., 347n10 Royalties, 222 Rube performers, 375, 390n1 Rucker, Darius, 216, 327, 337 Ruebush-​Kieffer, 402 The Ruebush-​Kieffer Company, 411n27 Rufus, Whistling, 19 Rumble, John, 66, 68, 71, 74, 77n6, 82n90 Rupert’s Land, 109–​110n2 Rural music, 40, 158, 311 Rushing, Shirley, 458n13 Russell, Bob, 271, 343 Russell, George, 197 Russell, Leon, 149, 154n46 Russell, Tony, 4, 44, 52n66, 53n76, 93n11, 130–​ 134, 133f, 134, 502 Blacks, Whites, and Blues, 327–​328, 337–​338, 345n3 Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–​1942, 134–​135, 143 Russia, 503, 516n53 Rusted, Brian, 38–​39, 43 Rusticity, 320 Rustic Rhythm magazine, 428–​430, 429f Rustler’s Roost (Rochester, NY), 446 Rusty & Doug Kershaw, 501 Rutherford, Rivers, 449 Ruymar, Lorene, 201n13 Ryman Auditorium, 21, 231, 250, 294, 299–​300, 407 S. C. Wells and Company, 124, 125f Sacks, Howard L., 51–​52n66 Sacramento, California, 234 Sacred expression, 395–​413 The Sacred Harp (White and King), 159 Sacred Harp singing, 18, 120 Sacred music, 17–​18, 86, 395–​398 Sacred Songs and Solos, 410n18 Sacred steel tradition, 197

Sadie Hawkins Day, 321 Sadler, Barry, 468 “Sad Singing and Slow Riding” (Shepard), 169 Salad issues, 229, 367 Salamon, Ed, 237 Sales, 219, 237–​241. See also Earnings “Sallie Gooden” (Robertson and Gilliland), 41 Sallis, James, 204n52 Sally, Victor, 457n1 Samples, Junior, 253 Sampson, Don, 406–​407 Sandburg, Carl, 312 Sanderson, David, 51n66 Sand Mountain, 406 San Francisco, California, 135–​136, 234 Sanjek, David, 225n29, 325n33, 343 Sankey, Ira D., 396, 398–​399, 408n3, 409n11, 410n15 Sara and Maybelle, 279 Satellite broadcasting, 244 Satherley, “Uncle” Art, 20, 57, 61 “A Satisfied Mind” (Wagoner), 315 Saturday Evening Post, 57 Saunio, Ilpo, 507 “Saving country music” blog, 223n5 “Say Big Boy” (Wells), 167 Scammon, Richard, 471 Scandinavia, 502–​503 Scarborough, Dorothy, 135 Scarritt College, 67 Schaetzle, Bud, 371n37 Scheitholt, 201n14 Schlappi, Elizabeth, 272 Schmidt, Hulshof, 391n27 Schmidt, Patricia, 145 Scholarship. See Research Schottische, 440, 447 Schrutt, Norm, 240 Schulberg, Budd, 265 Schwab, John, 137–​138n10 Schwarz, Tracy, 117–​118 Scott, Darrell, 220–​221 Scott, Joan Wallach, 364 Scott, Michelle R., 373n62 Scott, Pjarro, 457n1 Scott, Walter, 15, 124 Scottdale Boys, 133f

564   Index Scottish ballads, 15–​16, 500–​501 Scragg, Daisy Mae, 320–​321 Scruggs, Earl, 149, 203n40, 279 Sears, 231 Sears and Roebuck, 19, 415 Seattle, Washington, 239–​240 Second Fiddle to a Steel Guitar, 274–​275 Second Wave Feminist movement, 360 Seeds, Virginia, 281n29 Seeger, Charles, 66, 117, 127–​128 Seeger, Mike, 117–​118, 120–​121, 123, 134, 136 Seeger, Pete, 80n54, 258n2, 279, 296 Seeger, Ruth Crawford, 117 Seemann, Charlie, 25 Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Miller), 330–​331, 353n58, 475 Segregation, 287, 295–​297, 342–​343, 466. See also Race and racism desegregation, 295, 319 in recording industry, 123–​124, 207–​209, 307, 327, 347n11, 354n68, 357, 367–​368 Sellers, aubrie, 356 The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Pecknold), 234, 436n18 Selma, Alabama, 296 Seminole Indians, 407, 412n49 “Seminole Wind” (Anderson), 407 “September” (Lund), 101 Sertaneja universitária “college country,” 509 Setters, Jilson “the Blind Fiddler of Lost Hope Holler,” 21 Settlement-​school movement, 16–​17 1970s, 376–​378, 470–​471 Severs, Claudia, 447 Sex symbols, 384 Sexuality, 223n3, 339, 375–​394 Shank, Barry, 112n26, 475 Shapiro, Henry D., 346n5 Sharp, Cal, 204n52 Sharp, Cecil J., 9n7, 16–​19, 135, 333, 500–​501 Shearin, Hubert G., 22 Sheldon, Ruth, 69 Shelton, Blake, 88, 229, 321, 367, 389–​390, 394n78, 484 Shelton, Robert, 65 Shelton Brothers, 141

Shepard, Jean, 147, 166–​167, 169–​170 Shepherd, Ashton, 223n4 Sheppard, Mike, 241 Sherrill, Billy, 217–​218, 385 Shiloh cough syrup, 124 Sho-​Bud Guitar Company, 191, 194–​195 Shock’n Y’all (Keith), 474 Shonekan, Stephanie, 351n46 Shore, Dinah, 252 Short films (shorts), 268 Shorty and Little Eller, 358 Showalter, Anthony J., 402 Showboat, 277 Shriner, Herb, 254 Shultz, Arnold, 335–​336, 338, 349n34, 353n66 Shut Up and Sing, 276 “Sidekick,” 452 Siemens, Grant, 102, 104 Signification, 310 Silent film, 266–​268 Silent Film Sound & Music Archive, 280n10 Silent majority, 295–​297 Silveira, Breno, 508 Silver Dollar City, 150 Silver Eagle, 412n45 Silverman, Fred, 256 Silverstein, Shel, 318 Simmel, Georg, 284, 300n3 Simpson, Kim, 236, 246n23 Sinatra, Frank, 143, 154n33 Sincerity, 314 Sing, Neighbor, Sing, 272 Singers, 174n36. See also individual singers by name evangelical, 396, 398 gospel, 399 outside the US, 507 singing cowboys, 210, 268, 270–​271, 290, 312–​313, 417 singing cowgirls, 270–​271, 417, 426–​432 Singing, 157–​175. See also Vocals congregational, 18 gospel, 395 rural hymn, 158 The Singing Brakeman, 269 Singing cowboy films, 268, 270–​271, 290 Singing cowboys, 210, 312–​313, 417, 424f

Index   565 Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Malone), 264, 324n28, 348n27, 410n24, 423, 436n20 Singing cowgirls, 270–​271, 417, 426–​432 Singing evangelists, 396, 398 Singing schools, 172n14 Single-​mic technique, 149–​150 Singleton, Shelby, 235 “Sing Me Back Home” exhibit, 74–​75 Sinn, Clarence E. “The Cue Music Man,” 267 SiriusXM, 244 Sir Mix-​A-​Lot, 389 Sixteen-​step dancing, 453 1960s, 166, 296, 312, 321, 468 Sizer, Sandra S., 410n20 Skaggs, Ricky, 239 Skeggs, Beverley, 309 Ski, Frank, 457n1 The Skillet Lickers, 24, 88, 123, 208, 464 Skinker, Chris, 25 Slavic immigrants, 440 “S Lazy H” (Lund), 109 “Sleep, Baby, Sleep,” 408n1 Slide guitar style, 201n12 Slobin, Mark, 14 “Slowly” (Pierce), 189–​190, 190f, 195 Small, Christopher, 353n67 The Smalls, 102, 110n4 “Small Town USA,” 299 Smeck, Roy, 182 Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly (Lange), 416 Smith, Al, 464 Smith, Andrew, 52n70, 53n73, 351n48, 517n57 Smith, Carl, 274 Smith, Connie, 274, 356, 503 Smith, Grady, 393n69 Smith, Graeme, 10n26, 52n70, 53n73, 507–​508 Smith, Harry, 89, 120, 123, 127–​128 Smith, Hazel, 484, 489 Smith, Kate, 275 Smith, L. Mayne, 24–​25, 117–​118 Smith, Lynn “Chirps,” 118 Smith, Mamie, 356 Smith, Richard D., 112n25 Smith, Sammi, 236

Smith, Will, 115n60 Smithsonian Folkways, 118, 349n33, 351n45 Smokey and the Bandit, 277 Smoky Mountain Boys, 416f Snider, Stacey, 517n57 Snow, Hank, 213, 225n32, 274–​275, 359, 503, 510 Snuffy Smith (DeBeck), 320 Soccer moms, 220 Sociability, 87 Social dance, 454–​456, 460n34. See also Dance Social Gospel, 398 Society for American Music, 352n58 Sociology, 2–​3, 283–​306, 349n32, 376–​378 “Softly and Tenderly,” 411n33 Soft-​shell country music, 100, 152n17, 158, 206–​ 207, 218, 298, 313, 325n33, 362 Solomon, Thomas, 96 “Somethin’ Else,” 385 Songcatchers, 28n16, 57, 207 Song publishing, 292 Songs, 463. See also specific songs antiwar songs, 468 comic, 378 gospel hymns, 333 gospel songs, 395, 399–​403 hymns, 17–​18, 126, 158, 233, 333 The Jesus movement, 404–​405 northern products, 401–​403 queer-​friendly, 375 southern products, 401–​403 that define “country,” 223n4 transcribing, 15 Songs of the Depression (The New Lost City Ramblers), 139n28 Songs of the Sunny South, Containing all Familiar Plantation and Minstrel Songs (Academic Music Company), 126 A Song That Will Linger (Rounder), 118 Songwriter, 277 Songwriters, 212, 224–​225n23, 224n23, 308–​ 310, 317. See also individual songwriters by name Songwriting, 292. See also Lyrics Sonny and Cher, 250 Sony Music, 229 Soskis, Benjamin, 411n39 Soul, 236, 348n28, 353n65, 367, 400

566   Index Soundies, 272 Soundscan (Nielson), 219, 297–​298 Sound studies, 142–​143, 152n10 The Sources of Country Music (Benton), 177 South Africa, 43, 496, 502–​503, 511, 516n53 “The South and Country Music” (Malone), 35 South by Southwest Festival, 481 Southern Culture on the Skids, 321 Southern Diaspora, 208. See also American South The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of White and Black Southerners Transformed America (Gregory), 34 Southern exceptionalism, 32, 39–​40, 47n3 Southern Folklife Collection (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), 5, 9n8, 76n5, 360, 370n19 Southern Folklore, 14 Southern Grass, 91–​92 Southernization, 36 “Southern Moon,” 415 Southern Music/​American Music (Malone), 33, 35, 334 “Southern Records” (Aeolian-​Vocalion), 124 “Southern Records” (Columbia), 123 Southern Strategy (Republican Party), 295, 471 Southern thesis, 9n14, 32–​45, 47n4, 47n9, 47n13, 97, 128–​129, 354n68, 370n25 critiques of, 35–​39, 67–​68, 514n15 Sovine, Red, 215, 503 Spain, 466–​467, 502, 511 Spangler, J. D., 240 Spanish ballads, 501 Spanish Civil War, 466–​467 Spanish guitar, 182, 201n12 Spanish-​language recordings, 503 Spartanburg, South Carolina, 235 Sparton records, 510 Specht, Joe, 130 Special effects, 278 Spencer, Scott B., 28n16 Spirituality, 349n34 Spirituals, 404 Spirituals (Ford), 404, 411n34 Spivak, Gayatri, 341 Sponsorships, 231, 236, 489–​490 Spotify, 222, 244

Spottswood, Dick, 4, 135 Springsteen, Bruce, 473 “Springsteen” (Church), 450 Springtime in Texas, 271 Sri Lanka, 503, 511 St. Jude’s Hospital, 484 St. Lucia, 340, 352n55, 509, 517n57 Stage patter, 474, 478n35 Stage performance(s), 385–​386, 488. See also individual performers or programs by name Staging, vocal, 145 Staging Tradition (Willliams), 26 Staiger, Janet, 260n26 Stalinism, 296 Stamps, V. O., 402 The Stamps-​Baxter Company, 18, 402 Standard Candy Company, 293 “Stand By Me,” 411n34 “Stand By Your Man” (Wynette), 236 Stanfield, Peter, 270, 280n6 Stang, Arnold, 274 Stanley, Carter, 118 Stanley, Ralph, 64, 118, 137n9, 278, 403 Stanley, Roba, 123, 160, 230–​231 Stanley Brothers, 149 Stanwyck, Barbara, 265 Stapleton, Chris, 6, 222, 244, 298 Stapp, Jack, 235, 485 Starday Records, 212, 225n30, 502 Stardom, 297–​298, 300, 365 Starr, Kay, 355–​356 Starr, Larry, 6 Starrett, Charles, 272 Stars of the Grand Ole Opry, 274 Star Trek, 482 Statism, 472 Stauffer, John, 411n39 Steamboat Bill, Jr., 267 Stebbins, George C., 401 Stecher, Jody, 118, 136 Steel, David Warren, 172n14 Steel guitar, 201n12, 202n20 electric lap, 185–​186, 186t Hawaiian, 185 pedal, 177–​204 “Steel Guitar Rag” (Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys), 186, 187f

Index   567 “Steel Guitar Rag” (McAuliffe), 185–​186 Steel-​string guitar, 201n12 Steely Dan, 197 “Steer Rider’s Blues” (Lund), 101 Steffe, William, 405 Steinbeck, John, 465 Stereotypes, 313–​314, 320–​322, 325n44 Sterne, Jonathan, 143 Sterrit, David, 282n39 “Sticks Nix Hick Pix” (Variety), 268 Stigma, 291 Stilwell, Robyn, 165–​166 Stimeling, Travis D., 99–​100, 112n26, 153n27, 163, 173n29, 226n49, 259n16, 281n29, 349n34, 372n49, 458n7 Stoia, Nicolas, 4, 344–​345 Stone, R. E., Jr., 172n12 Stone, Robert L., 204n51 Stoneman, Ernest V., 61, 124 Stoneman’s Dixie Mountaineers, 401 “The Storms are on the Ocean,” 408n1 Storytelling, 463 Strachwitz, Chris, 133f Strait, George, 218, 239, 241, 243, 279, 367, 432–​433, 448, 450, 480, 488 Strait Country, 432 The Stranger at Hickory Nut Gap, 266 Strass, Laurie, 166 Strauss, Neil, 70 “Strawberry Roan,” 102 Streaming, 222 Streeter, Roberta Lee, 368 “The Streets of Laredo,” 324n31 Stricklin, David, 346n4 String band music, 118, 338, 343, 458n5 String bands, 18, 44–​45, 512 Stringed Musical Instrument (US Patent 1, 741, 453) (Dopyera), 202n18 Stringed Musical Instrument (US Patent 1, 808, 756) (Beauchamp), 202n18 Strings, orchestral, 177 “Strokin’ ” (Carter), 443 Strummer, Joe, 290–​291 Stuart, Jan, 277 Stuart, Marty, 321 Stuart, Uncle “Am,” 123 “Stuck-​up Blues” (Acuff), 415 Sturtevant, William C., 412n50

Style visual, 415–​438 vocal, 210–​211 Styx, 450 Suburbs, 299–​300, 308–​309 Success, commercial, 360–​361 Suisman, David, 152n10 Sullivan, Ed, 250 Sunday, Billy, 397–​399, 408n3 Sunday school song, 409n13, 410n14 Sundberg, Johan, 159, 172n12 Sun Records, 212 Sunshine Boys, 404 Sun Studios, 319 “Superstar” (Russell and Bramlett), 149, 154n46 Surry County, North Carolina, 136 Survey folklorism, 329–​331, 348n28 Sutton, Allan, 154n34 Sutton, Matthew D., 367–​368, 372n49 Swaziland, 500 Sweden, 43, 511, 517n57 Swedish immigrants, 501 Sweet Dreams (film), 363 Sweet Dreams: The World of Patsy Cline (Hofstra, ed.), 477n20 “Sweet Dreams” (Young), 191, 191f Sweetheart of the Rodeo (Byrds), 469 “Sweetheart Schottische,” 446–​447, 452 “Sweet Heaven, When I Die,” 408n1 “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” 411n33 Swift, Taylor, 298, 300 fan interactions, 480, 483, 490 “I Knew You Were Trouble,” 243 1989, 243 radio priorities, 230, 242–​244 and recording industry, 205–​206, 222–​223 Red, 243 “Red,” 243 “Tim McGraw,” 243 “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” 243 Swindell, Cole, 388 Swing dance cowboy, 445 West Coast Swing, 454–​455, 460n34 Swing music, 189 Western, 98, 202n20, 210, 348n29, 440–​441

568   Index Swiss immigrants, 501 Swiss yodeling, 512 Syncretism, 513n5 Szwed, John, 27n5 Taber, Alberta (Canada), 102, 104, 114n55, 114n57 Tabuchi, Shoji, 505 Taft, Michael, 49n29 Tailgating, 382 Tailors, 419, 422, 425, 432, 501 Takach, Geo, 107 Take Me Back to Oklahoma (Monogram), 271 “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” (Dorsey), 404, 411n34 “Take This Job and Shove It” (Paycheck), 472 “Taking the Class Out of Country” (Bufwack), 277 Talbot, Dave, 504 Tales of Hoffman (Offenbach), 182 Taliban, 473 The Talking Machine World, 123 “Talkin’ Veterinarian Blues” (Lund), 101 “Talkin’ Vietnam Blues” (Kristofferson and Hall), 468 Talk radio, 239 Tallahatchie Bridge, 368 Talley, James, 472 Talmadge, Eugene, 465–​466, 471, 475 Tanner, Gid, 24, 123, 208 “Tanya: The Teenage Teaser” (Flippo), 384 Tarlton, Jimmie, 39 Taylor, Cecil, 199 Taylor-​Christian Hat Company, 146 Taylor’s Kentucky Boys, 327 Technology, 144, 162, 286, 299, 320 computerized editing, 256 E9th pedal steel guitar, 189–​197 industrialization, 288, 291–​292 mechanical automation, 200n6 mechanical reproduction, 299 microphone, 143–​151, 163 music, 179 “The Question Concerning Technology” (Heidegger), 179 radio, 294 Teer, John, 150

Tejano music, 328–​329, 341 Telecaster guitars, 191 Telecommunications Act (US), 241–​242 Television (TV), 88, 235–​238, 244, 249–​261, 274–​275, 278–​280, 321, 358. See also specific networks Teló, Michel, 509 Temperance Movement, 395, 399 “Tender Years” (Jones), 162 Tennessee, 118, 471 Tennessee Jubilee Singers, 124 “Tennessee Mountain Girl” (Parton), 218 Tennessee Strings: The Story of Country Music in Tennessee (Wolfe), 34, 134 Tennessee Three, 102, 250 Tennessee Valley Authority, 465 Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddlers’ Association, 129–​130, 131f “Tennessee Waltz” (Page), 211, 220 Terminology, 205–​206 Terrorism, 473–​474 Terry, Paul, 267 Terry, Ruth, 270 Texas, 34–​35, 98, 210, 212, 464 country dance, 440 “Nashville Salutes Texas!: Country from the Lone Star State” exhibit, 75 “Texas In the Spring” (Morton), 507 The Texas Playboys, 271, 441 “Texas When I Die,” 385 Textual Poachers (Jenkins), 480–​481 Thai country music (luk thung), 496, 509 Thailand, 43, 52n71, 509, 517n57 Thall, Willie, 259n13 That Half-​Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture (Linn), 338 “That’s My Kind of Night” (Bryan), 388 Theater Owners Booking Association, 373n62 Theatrical screenings, 279–​280 Thede, Marion, 135 Thelen, David, 78n20 Theology, 398–​399 “There’s a Hard Time A-​Comin’ ” (Carson), 145 “These Are My People” (Berg and Rutherford), 449 The Thing Called Love, 447 Things That Can’t Be Undone (Lund), 109 Thinking Class (Kadi), 379

Index   569 1930s, 466 “This is My Prairie” (Lund), 101, 103, 107 “This Kiss” (Hill), 148 Thomas, Jean, 21 Thomas, Rebecca A., 339 Thomas, Tony, 224n16 Thompson, Ernest, 123 Thompson, Hank, 167, 279, 309 Thompson, Sally, 51n66 Thornton, Willie Mae ‘Big Mama,’ 174n44, 368 Thorp, Jack, 500–​501 Three-​way looks, 428 Three-​way wardrobe, 428–​430, 429f Thumb picking, 336, 349n34 Thurmond, Strom, 468 Tichi, Cecelia, 3, 331, 334, 346n9 Tic-​tac electric bass, 177 Tie-​ins, 435, 436n10 Timberlake, Justin, 244 Time magazine, 260n35 “Time for the Whippoorwill to Sing,” 415 “Tim McGraw” (Swift), 243 Tindley, Charles Albert, 404 Tin Pan Alley, 16, 22, 128–​129, 210 “Tip Drill” (Nelly), 389 Titanic, 135 Titon, Jeff Todd, 122, 135 TNN. See The Nashville Network T.N.T. (Tucker), 384–​385 To Hear Your Banjo Play, 279 Tomato controversy, 229, 367 Tom Emerson’s Hillbillies, 272 Tomlin, Lily, 470 Tone Control and Tuning Apparatus for a Stringed Instrument (US Patent 4, 077, 296) (Mullen), 193f, 195 The Tonight Show, 259n16 “Toot, Toot Tootsie, Goodbye,” 269 Top 40, 236 Torcasso, Rick, 240 Torn, Rip, 279 Torok, Mitchell, 501 Torrey, R. A., 398, 408n3 Tosches, Nick, 72, 349–​350n35, 390n2 “To the Work” (Crosby and Doane), 401 Touchstone, 349n33 Tourism, 45–​46, 72, 314, 321 Townsend, Charles R., 98, 271

Townsend, Thomas, 409n4 Trade organizations, 244 Traditional ballads, 16 Traditional bluegrass, 137n9 Traditionalism, 469, 480 Traditional music, 41 Traditions, white, 332 The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, 266 Trains, 289 Trane trekkers (tear jerkers), 496 Transcribing songs, 15 Transgression, 366 Travis, Merle, 273–​274, 335, 353n66 Travis, Randy, 142, 218, 239, 448, 480 Travolta, John, 239, 442, 448, 455 “Treasures Untold: Unique Collections from Devoted Fans” exhibit, 75 “Treat Me Kind” (Wells), 167 Tree Publishing, 235 Trevino, Rick, 501 Tribe, Ivan M., 34, 130, 134, 331, 333–​334 Tricksters, 316 Tricycle Man, 470 Trinajstick, Blanche “Trina,” 485 Triplex (National-​Valco), 187–​188, 202n30 Troutman, John W., 43, 201nn12–​13 Troy, Cowboy, 345, 480 Truck drivers, 106, 236 “Truck Drivin’ Man” (Derrick), 86, 375 Trucker music, 106, 236 “The Truck Got Stuck” (Lund), 101, 107, 113n45 Trucks, 382 True vine, 117, 119–​120, 136 True West magazine, 312 “The Truth Comes Out” (Lund), 103 Truth Is Stranger Than Publicity (Delmore), 69 Tubb, Ernest, 61, 98, 141, 192, 199, 203n45, 223n2, 308, 359, 425f, 483 clothing style, 425 fan interactions, 489 “Half a Mind,” 191–​192 “I Ain’t Going Honky-​Tonk Anymore,” 167 performances, 272–​273 “Rainbow at Midnight,” 467–​468 recordings, 205, 210–​211, 216 traveling tent shows, 415

570   Index Tucker, Ken, 260n35 Tucker, Marshall, 449, 456 Tucker, Tanya, 376, 379, 383–​387, 393n64 “Blood Red and Goin’ Down,” 384 Hot, 386 “The Man That Turned My Momma On,” 384 “No Man’s Land,” 378, 384 Rhythm, Country & Blues (Tucker and Little Richard), 385 T.N.T., 384–​385 Tuning, 202n24, 203n40 chromatic, 194, 194t, 195–​196, 196t, 197 Tone Control and Tuning Apparatus for a Stringed Instrument (US Patent 4, 077, 296) (Mullen), 193f, 195 Tuohy, Sue, 497 Turk, Nathan, 419, 422, 426, 432, 436n9, 501 “Turkey in the Straw,” 266–​267, 370n17 Turnbull, Gillian, 99–​100 Turner, Leland, 517n57 Turner, Tina, 368 Twain, Shania, 3, 220–​221, 230, 241, 363, 381, 443, 480, 496, 504 Twang, nasal, 26, 157–​158, 309, 340 Tweedy Brothers, 231 Twentieth Century Fox, 265 Twilight, 480 “Twin Beams” (Alcorn), 199 Twist and Shout Records, 155n52 Twitter, 483 Twitty, Conway, 236, 254, 367, 375, 449, 453 2YOON, 496 Two-​stepping, 442, 444–​445, 448–​453, 455–​456 “Two Whoops and a Holler” (Shepard), 169 Tyga, 389 Tyler, Paul L., 36, 42, 50n29, 50n32, 128, 139n34, 498, 514n15 Tyler, Steven, 460n35 Tyson, Ian, 103 Tyson, Timothy, 207 UCLA. See University of California, Los Angeles UCWDC. See United Country and Western Dance Council

UIP. See University of Illinois Press Ukraine, 511 Umphlett, Wiley Lee, 260n38 Underwood, Carrie, 115n67, 242, 257, 435 Union Grove, 136 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 503. See also Russia Unions, 466–​467 United Country and Western Dance Council (UCWDC), 442, 448, 455, 459n26 United Farm Workers, 472 United Kingdom, 16, 502, 516n53 United States. See also American South country music, 499–​505 folk music, 16 House Un-​American Activities Committee (HUAAC), 296 Midwest, 50n29 recording industry, 145 southernization of, 36 Telecommunications Act, 241 United States Army, 115n59 United States Constitution, 399 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 14, 23–​25, 128 Folklore and Mythology program, 23, 128 Folklore Program, 24 John Edwards Memorial Foundation (JEMF), 23–​24, 63 University of California at Berkeley, 25 University of Chicago, 284–​285 University of Illinois Press (UIP), 26, 134 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 25 John Edwards Memorial Foundation Collection, 76n5, 360 Southern Folklife Collection, 5, 9n8, 76n5, 360, 370n19 University of North Carolina Press, 26 University of Pennsylvania, 24–​25 University of Tennessee Press, 26 University of Texas, 25 University Press of Mississippi, 26 Up! (Twain), 220 Urban, Keith, 88, 229, 367, 496, 504 Urban country songwriters, 224–​225n23 Urban Cowboy (film), 238–​239, 276–​279, 297, 442–​444, 449, 455, 472, 480

Index   571 Urban cowboys, 206, 218, 442 Urban dance, 394n77 Urban Folk Revival, 296–​297 Urbanism, 285 Urbanization, 288, 291, 320 Urban music, 121, 236, 298 citybilly music, 98, 128, 225n23 Urban sociology, 283 USO tours, 503 Utley, Francis Lee, 22 The Vagabonds, 231 Vaillant, Derek, 350n38 Valentino, Rudolph, 268 Valgardson, Brady, 102, 104, 114n55 Vallee, Rudy, 272 Values, 310, 376–​378 class values, 314 cultural exchange, 309 family values, 308–​309, 375, 377–​378 Vanderbilt University, 67, 286, 294, 370n22 Van Doren, Mamie, 274 Van Dyke, Leroy, 503 Van Dyke, Willard, 279 Van Zandt, Townes, 279–​280 Varichord (Epiphone), 187–​188, 202n30 Variety, 268 Vaudeville, 233, 333, 373n62 James D. Vaughan, 18, 401–​402, 410n20 Vaughan Quartet, 119 V-​Discs, 210 Venezuela, 516n53 Verbeek, Peter-​Paul, 200n4 Verma, Neil, 259n9 Vermont, 17 Vernacular music, regional, 90–​91 Veru, Peter T., 202n17 Vestby, Stian, 517n57 V.I.C., 439, 450, 457n1 Victor Records, 19, 41, 146, 287–​288, 338, 357 Bristol sessions, 124, 143–​146, 209, 287–​288, 291, 311, 313, 339, 395–​399, 402, 408n1 first electrical recordings, 154n34 “The Prisoner’s Song” (Dalhart), 208–​209 Video, music, 219 Vietnam War, 468–​470, 477n23, 509 Village Barn, 250

Vincent, Rhonda, 155n52 Vinton, Bobby, 515n26 Violence, domestic, 319 Violins, 178 Virginia Breakdowners, 123 Virginia Possum Tamers, 88, 118 “Virile Female” ad campaign, 381–​382 Visual style, 415–​438 Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology (Potter), 158 Vocals, 144, 344–​345. See also Singing crooning style, 210–​211 nasal, 158 nasal twang, 26, 157–​158, 309, 340 pinched throat style, 157–​158 recorded, 144–​151 singing, 157–​175 staging, 145 types of, 174n42 The Voice, 88, 389–​390 Volk, Andy, 202n23 Volkwein Bros., Inc., 266 Vulgar ballads, 16, 18 The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Roediger), 339, 351n47 Wagoner, Porter, 237, 251, 314–​315 Wakely, Jimmy, 271 Wald, Elijah, 349n34 Walker, Charlie, 77n5 Walker, Cindy, 265, 272 Walker, Clay J. D., 151n3 Walker, Frank X., 20, 68, 123, 207, 338 Walker, Hal Phillip, 470 Walker, Jo, 58, 64–​65, 78n16, 482 “Walkin’ After Midnight” (Cline), 379, 430 Walk the Line, 279 Wallace, George, 215, 295–​296, 339, 471 Wallis, Hal, 274 Wallis, Mike, 130, 131f Wal-​Mart, 219, 382 Walser, Robert, 173n22 Wanted! The Outlaws, 217 War Memorial Auditorum, 272 Warner, Anna B., 409n13 Warner/​Reprise, 351n45

572   Index Warner’s Seven Aces, 357 Warren, Diane, 241 Warren, Storme, 244 Warren, Thomas D., 64 Wartime films, 268–​273 Washburn, Abigail, 137 Watergate, 297 Waterman, Christopher A., 6, 351n46 “Watermelon Crawl” (Byrd), 443 Waters, Muddy, 345 Watson, Jada, 4 Watson, Tom, 463–​464, 474–​475 Wattenberg, Ben, 471 Waugh, Irving, 486 WAVE-​TV, 251 “Wayfaring Pilgrim,” 411n34 Wayne, John, 270 WBAP, 403 WBUC, 141–​142 WCOP, 235 “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” (Swift), 243 Weaver, Doodles, 274 Weaver, Sylvester, 202n25, 348n27 Weaver Brothers and Elviry, 271 The Weavers, 121, 296 Webb, Paul, 320 Weber, Carl Maria von, 412n44 Weber, Max, 284, 300n3 WEEP, 237 Weisbard, Eric, 141, 151n2, 218, 245n3 Weisman, Brent R., 412n50 Wel, Stephanie Vander, 4, 144, 172n11, 270 Welch, Gillian, 403 Welcome to the Club: Women of Rockabilly, 428–​429 “Welfare Cadillac” (Drake), 297, 470 Weller, Freddy, 375, 378 Wells, Kitty, 166–​167, 175n51, 221, 360, 422 “Cry, Cry Darling,” 167 “Honky-​Tonk Waltz,” 167 “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-​Tonk Angels,” 166, 309 performances, 232, 274 “Say Big Boy,” 167 “Treat Me Kind,” 167

vocal style, 159–​160, 164, 167, 175n48, 309 “You’re Not Easy To Forget,” 167 Wells, Paul F., 24–​25, 49n29, 51n66, 73, 91 Wells, S. C., 124 WENO, 235 “Were You There?,” 411n34 “We Shall Be Free” (Brooks), 375 West, Kanye, 403 West, Wesley “Speedy,” 168, 189, 199, 203n38 West Coast Swing, 454–​455, 460n34 Western, Johnny, 424 Western Electric, 146 Western Kentucky State College, 23, 128 Western Kentucky University, 23, 25, 128 Western music, 412n44, 503–​504, 515n35 Western swing, 98, 202n20, 210, 348n29, 440–​441 Western wear, 417, 419, 432, 496 “full western dress,” 422 Hollywood western style, 423–​427, 427f, 430–​431 tie-​ins, 435, 436n10 Western classic style, 424–​425, 425f West Texas, 99 West Texas Waltzes and Dust-​blown Tractor Tunes (Hancock), 99 “We Used to Ride ‘Em” (Lund), 101 Wever, Jerry, 340, 346n4, 509 Wever, Jerry L., 517n57 “When God Dips His Love in my Heart,” 411n34 “When My Old Age Pension Check Comes,” 465 “When They Ring the Golden Bells,” 411n33 “When You’re Hot You’re Hot” (Reed), 344–​345 “Where Country Grows” (Shepherd), 223n4 Where’d You Come From, Where’d You Go? (Rounder), 118 “Where We’ll Never Grow Old” (“Never Grow Old”) (Moore), 396–​397, 401–​402, 409n5, 409n8 “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)?” (Jackson), 461, 473 Whisnant, David E., 18, 77n5, 346n5 Whistling Rufus, 19

Index   573 White, B. F., 159, 172n15 White, Bob, 357 White, Bukka, 368 White, Martha, 155n52 White, Raymond E., 280n6 White audiences, 345n2 White–​black relations, 328–​329. See also Race and racism White Flower, Martha, 293 “White House Blues” (Poole), 463 White House performances, 296–​297, 470, 474 Whiteman, Paul, 231 White narrative, 331–​334 Whiteness studies, 339–​340, 351n47, 352n50 White populism, 472–​473 Whiteside, Johnny, 426–​427 White South, 295. See also American South White supremacy, 504 White Top (Virginia) Folk Festival, 17, 135–​136 White trash (stereotype), 314, 321–​322, 383 “White Trash” (Southern Culture on the Skids), 321 White women, 390. See also Women’s contributions Whitley, Keith, 142, 150 Whitman, Slim, 232, 503 Whitmer, Benjamin, 412n42 Whitmore, Stanford, 282n38 Whitney Family, 386 Whittaker, Daniel, 443 Whitten, Sarah, 227n65 Whitter, Henry, 19, 123, 266 Whittle, Daniel Webster, 398 WHN radio, 237, 239, 241 “Who At My Door Is Standing,” 411n33 Whyatt, Bert, 133f “Why Can’t He Be You” (Cline), 379 “Why Does Country Music Sound White?: Race and the Voice of Nostalgia” (Mann), 340 “Why Me” (Kristofferson), 405 Wiggins, Dana C., 276, 385–​386 Wiggins, Ella May, 466–​467 Wiggins, Gene, 134, 154n32 Wilber, Edwin David, 187 Wilburn Brothers, 503

“Wild Side of Life” (Thompson), 167, 309 Wile, Rob, 227n65 Wilfahrt, John, 42 Wilgus, D. K., 2, 22–​25, 31, 47n6, 56, 68, 128–​129, 342, 498 Williams, Audrey, 275, 279 Williams, Bill, 65 Williams, Buddy, 507 Williams, Don, 72 Williams, Ellis, 351n48 Williams, Hank, Jr., 221, 242, 257, 274–​275, 279, 472–​474, 478n35 “A Country Boy Will Survive,” 471 vocal style, 158, 325n33, 382 Williams, Hank, Sr., 63, 70, 75, 294 biography, 290 biopics, 282n38 clothing style, 425 “Cold, Cold Heart,” 160, 212 “Hey, Good Lookin’,” 161 innovations, 190, 348n24 on international American country music, 502 “I Saw the Light,” 403 “Lovesick Blues,” 161 as “Luke the Drifter,” 308, 316 mentors, 335–​336, 348–​349n30 “Move It on Over,” 161 radio performances, 232–​233 recordings, 207 repertoire, 290 song references to, 412n47 as songwriter, 212, 308–​310 stage persona, 290 as symbol, 220–​221 television appearances, 275 vocal style, 157, 159–​161, 163, 309 “You Win Again,” 453 Williams, Michael Ann, 21, 281n29 Williams, Raymond, 308 Williamson, J. W., 263, 266–​267 Willie Nelson & Family, 88 Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic, 469 Willis Brothers, 503 Willliams, Michael Ann, 26

574   Index Willman, Chris, 242, 472, 476n4 Wills, Bob, 69, 98, 210, 271, 426, 465, 501 Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, 88, 186, 187f, 271, 440 mentors, 335–​336 “Steel Guitar Rag” (Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys), 186, 187f “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” (Habershon), 402–​403 “Will the Circle be Unbroken” (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band), 402 Wilson, Chris, 372n49 Wilson, Dave, 150 Wilson, Gretchen, 242, 314, 325n38, 366, 381–​382, 387 Wilson, Pamela, 113n41 Winant, Howard, 341 Winchester, Virginia, 365 Wind, 407 The Winding Stream, 279 Winger, Debra, 442 Winner, Vicky, 441 Wirth, Louis, 300n3 Wisconsin, 498 Wise, Timothy, 165 Wiseman, Lulu Belle, 361, 364 Wiseman, Scotty, 78n16 Wishnevsky, Stephen, 127 With Fiddle and Well-​Rosined Bow: A History of Old-​Time Fiddling in Alabama (Cauthen), 134 WJJD, 235 WJRZ, 234 WKKW, 141–​142 WKTU, 241 WKY, 259n15 WLAC, 255 WLS Chicago, 133f, 231, 274, 293, 320, 360 National Barn Dance, 20–​21, 78n16, 133f, 143, 231–​233, 501 WLW-​TV, 259n11 WMAQ, 237–​238 WNBQ-​TV, 259n11 “Wobble,” (Sally, Ski, Crooms, Wright , and Scott), 457n1 The Wobble, 439, 450 Wolfe, Charles K., 34, 44, 53n76, 68–​69, 111–​112n25, 129–​130, 208, 231, 271, 343,

350n38, 350nn41–​42, 359–​361, 370n18, 371n27, 408n4, 498 Country Music Goes to War (Wolfe and Akenson, eds.), 477n19 A Good Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry, 89 Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky, 134, 338 Tennessee Strings: The Story of Country Music in Tennessee, 134 Womack, Lee Ann, 356 “Women of Country Music” (High Five Entertainment), 371n37 Women’s contributions, 52n70, 111n20, 174n33, 221, 242. See also individual women by name audiences, 239, 241, 270 backlash against, 243 black female stage performance, 385–​386 country cuties, 430–​433 documentation of, 3 early recordings, 209 expectations for female performers, 243, 417, 420–​422, 426, 428–​431, 433 femininity, 166, 313–​314, 363, 431 femininity stereotypes, 320–​321, 325n44 feminism, 174n33, 378–​383 gatekeeper roles, 482 girl groups, 166 “Girls’ Night Out: Superstar Women of Country” (ACM), 108, 115n67 in gospel song, 410n20 high-​profile artists, 480 honky tonk angels, 167, 316 housewife image, 421–​422 images associated with female artists, 224n22, 417, 428–​430 lesbian audiences, 83n91 marginalization, 221–​222, 390 misogyny, 375–​376 radio, 229, 231, 233, 364 ramblers, 317, 325n53 screen singing, 270–​271 singers, 174n36 singing cowgirls, 270–​271, 417, 426–​432 soccer moms, 220 tomato controversy, 229, 367

Index   575 voice types, 174n42 women’s honky tonk, 175n48 Wonderful Message (Hartford Music Company), 403 Woodlieff, Norman, 68 Wood-​White, Mrs. F. A. F., 409n5 Woody Guthrie Award for Outstanding Book on Popular Music (IASPM-​US), 353n58 Wooley, Sheb, 274 Working class, 111n16, 307–​308, 315, 339, 346n9 Working Man’s Show, 486 Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California (Haslam), 34 World country music, 496 World War II, 273, 358 Worship Wars, 411n36 WPLP, 235 Wrangler, 489 “Wreck of the Old97” (Dalhart), 461 Wright, Chely, 381 Wright, Johnathan “John Boy,” 457n1 Wright, Johnny, 501 Wrong’s What I do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (Ching), 365, 391n10, 477n20 WSB, 230–​231, 292, 294 WSIX, 240 WSM, 141, 210, 229–​235, 240, 292–​294, 485–​486 Artists Service, 61 Disc Jockey Festival, 234 Grand Ole Opry. See Grand Ole Opry WSUN, 240 WTDR, 242, 473 W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings, 277 Wynette, Tammy, 236, 254, 314, 368–​369, 449 WYNY, 241

Yandell, Nelly Poe, 417 “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” 182 Yankee Twang: Country and Western Music in New England (Murphy), 37, 90–​91 Yano, Christine, 517n57 Yates, Mike, 130 Yazoo River, 368 Yearwood, Trisha, 480 Yoakam, Dwight, 239, 321, 356 Yodeling, 165, 232, 500–​501, 510, 512 Yokum, Abner, 321 “You Ain’t Woman Enough” (Lynn), 171 “You Are My Sunshine,” 271, 466 “You Belong to My Heart,” 271 “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim” (Croce), 236 You Have Seen Their Faces (Caldwell and Bourke-​White), 465 “You Light Up My Life” (Brooks), 405 Young, Brigham, 113n45 Young, Chris, 388 Young, Faron, 191, 191f Young, Kyle, 70, 75–​76 Young, Neil, 468 The Young Fogies (Rounder), 118 Your Cheatin’ Heart, 275, 279 “You’re Gonna Change (Or I’m Gonna Leave),” 233 “You’re Lookin’ At Country” (Lynn), 223n4 “You’re My Jamaica” (Pride), 501 “You’re Not Easy To Forget” (Wells), 167 “You’re Still the One” (Twain), 241 “You Took Her Off My Hands” (Price), 192, 194f YouTube, 222, 233, 244, 258n2, 259n16, 260–​261nn40–​41, 446–​447 “You Win Again” (Williams), 453 Yugoslavia, 502

XERF, 141 Xororó, 508 “X-​Rated” (Lynn), 169

Za, Albin J. III, 152n9 Zak, Albin, 148–​149 Zappia, Marco, 256 Zeppelin, Led, 291 Zezé Di Camargo & Luciano, 508 Zithers, 201n14 Zoophilia, 378

Yahr, Emily, 261n55 “Y’all Come,” 466 Yamaguchi, Kenichi, 517n57