American Country Music

During the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West famously interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for "Best Female Video." A year later both performers returned to the VMAs with songs that responded directly to the original incident. In the meantime, the U.S. media and record-buying public had come to interpret the original incident using the stock scripts and characters of what Linda Williams has called “U.S. racial melodrama,” the fact of which both performers seemed aware. In this way, the Swift-West “incident” had come to reflect and mimic larger racial tensions, especially between black men and white women, as they had specifically come to be understood and portrayed during the Obama presidency, which many commentators have hastily and incorrectly identified as a symptom of “post-racialism.” This essay discusses how Kanye West and Taylor Swift reflect on and revise the tropes of racial melodrama, in the latter case to reinforce what Charles Mills calls "the epistemology of ignorance" when it comes to racism in America, and in the former case to challenge it.

This book examines the post-1960s era of popular music in the Anglo-Black Atlantic through the prism of historical theory and methods. By using a series of case studies, this book mobilizes historical theory and methods to underline different expressions of alternative music functioning within a mainstream musical industry. Each chapter highlights a particular theory or method while simultaneously weaving it through a genre of music expressing a notion of alternativity―an explicit positioning of one’s expression outside and counter to the mainstream. Historical Theory and Methods through Popular Music seeks to fill a gap in current scholarship by offering a collection written specifically for the pedagogical and theoretical needs of those interested in the topic.

“This study of ‘insurgent’ modes of popular music in the last third of the 20th century accomplishes quite a feat.  It yokes together a wide swath of sub-genres and styles--including reggae, punk, hip hop, alternative rock and country—through the lens of what the authors are calling “historical theory,” in order to chart a different, more comprehensive pathway through the annals of pop music history.  Shonk and McClure achieve an enviable balance of accessibility and scholarly depth, making this volume ideal for introductory college courses as well as more experienced researchers seeking a quick guide to specialized topics.”

--Pamela Fox, author of Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music; co-author of Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music

Located in Mount Airy, North Carolina, WPAQ Radio aired its first broadcast in February 1948 and has since served its community by broadcasting the music of the region, specializing in old-time and bluegrass. By the late 1940s America had witnessed almost three decades of radio history, and many stations had become well known for their country barn dances. Radio helped to change the “hillbilly” music of the 1920s into mainstream country music, a lucrative industry since the 1940s controlled in large part by record companies and commercial advertisers. The music no longer retained its simple ensemble format, but rather evolved into a style dominated by stars.
However, not all stations welcomed the change in the music so clearly identified with rural America. Since WPAQ’s first broadcast, Ralph Epperson, the station’s sole proprietor, has been using a mass medium to fight mass media in efforts to protect the regional heritage. In this thesis I will seek to explain the apparent anomaly of WPAQ as one of the few radio stations in America that have continued to broadcast old-time and bluegrass music in the face of commercial pressures to air more mainstream music.
Though various articles have documented episodes within the extensive history of WPAQ, this research investigates and presents a more detailed and comprehensive account of the station. This will be achieved by combining documentation with interviews and archives. In addition, I will argue for WPAQ’s importance in 
ethnomusicology and American music as a preserver of one of America’s distinct musical cultures.

This article examines rural North American expressive culture visa -vis country music and language reclamation within minoritarian language contexts. Drawing on my previous ethnographic fieldwork performing and learning Navajo on the Navajo Nation, I explore how rural identities circulate transnationally in and through spoken and sung performances of country "roots" music in my more recent field site of Sardinia, Italy. In both Sardinia and on the Navajo Nation, this musical genre acts as a medium for heritage language reclamation and consequently allows for reconnection to a rural sense of self.

"Investigation of country music from an anthropological and ethnomusicological perspective, utilizing recordings and live performances to put scholarship on country music into conversation with social theory and literature on social class, space/place, and racial identities."
Course Goals:
This course will examine country music's history from the late 1920s to the present to better understand the cultural politics behind a polarizing music genre, which is hated by some and deeply loved by others. The class is writing-and listening-heavy, and includes opportunities to write music reviews and an original song in the style of songs listened to throughout the course. The course will be conducted as a discussion-based class, and is accompanied by optional participation in the " lab " course, the UNM Honky Tonk Ensemble. There is no need to be able to read or write music to take this course.

Class Accompanied by optional one-credit performance course, UNM Honky Tonk Ensemble, MUS 231/560 (Monday nights, 7:15-9:45)

American country music has a surprisingly large number of practitioners and fans in Japan, but the subculture around it has received very little attention from ethno-musicologists or historians of Japanese popular culture. This article looks at the origins of the genre—especially cowboy music and rockabilly—in the two decades after the war, and attempts to explain and describe how and why it came to challenge jazz as the leading non-western musical genre for young college age students in the decade before pop music revolutionized popular culture in the mid 1960s. It also discusses possible reasons for the failure of the genre to go beyond its current status as a style of “oldie” for the original fan base, while also exploring its resiliency and continued appeal for the now mostly affluent middle class retirees who have so carefully nurtured and preserved it over half a century.

“TransAmericana” describes a contemporary sociomusical phenomenon of transgender and queerly gendered musicians who have chosen American roots genres including country and folk as their expressive material. This combination of gender and genre may seem unexpected. Roots functions through assertions of authenticity and sincerity, framing itself as a simple and historical music “of the people.” Meanwhile, biased views of transgender people assume deceit, while radical queer voices tend to be heard via genres linked to rebellion or camp. Yet several of these musicians have come to their gender and genre identifications simultaneously, describing a cogenerative relationship. My essay argues that assumptions of normative identity in Americana music make it an attractive and powerful musical space for transgender and queerly gendered artists to play with both the sociomusical identifications around Americana and expectations of “the transgender narrative."

Musicians discussed: Rae Spoon, Joe Stevens/Coyote Grace, Namoli Brennet, Tylan Greenstein/Girlyman, Actor Slash Model

Focusing on the early career of bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, this chapter explores the tensions that emerge between songwriting practice and conventional views of authorship in the commercial music industry. Monroe began his professional performing career in the 1930s amidst a quickly evolving recording industry. During this period, underdeveloped copyright legislation enabled industry executives and artists to secure copyright in ways that did not necessarily reflect the songwriting process. Authorship claims were even murkier in the country music industry where artists regularly recorded, ‘arranged’, and/or asserted ownership of a vast repertoire of ‘traditional’ material. While most of Monroe’s songwriting credits are sound, a number of ambiguous authorship claims have surfaced. In some instances, erroneous credits stem from the politics of ensemble composition. More often, however, it appears he was adopting conventional industry practice and attitudes towards songwriting and ownership. In addition to providing a profile of one of the most celebrated singer-songwriters in bluegrass and country music, this chapter aims to broaden our understanding of the songwriting process and demonstrate how authorship is not only determined by creative practice, but is influenced by the mechanisms of the commercial music industry.

In the early 1930s, the steel guitar, a Hawaiian invention of the late 19th century, was adopted by musicians in an emerging form of dance music known as western swing, a subgenre of country music. The design of the newly amplified instrument and the style of its players underwent continual change as the music of the genre evolved. However, in the 1950s, as the popularity of western swing declined, the steel guitar was completely supplanted by the pedal steel guitar and a new stylistic approach that it enabled. Through transcription and analysis the study offers new perspectives on what have been anecdotal observations surrounding the various stages in development of the steel guitar between 1935 and 1955.

If we go back to the beginning of the first national radio stations, Atlanta was the center of American recording industry. In twenties, it slowly shifts toward Chicago, the home of the blues. Prior to the WWII, the first publishing companies will emerge in Nashville. Acuff-Rose, with the biggest song library will be directly responsible for pushing the recording industry to evolve. (Kosser, 2006)

To understand why Nashville is so important to the music industry, history aside, is to learn about people who work there, recording engineers and producers responsible for the magic. In this paper, I will compare and analyze two different music producers that made a career in Nashville.
The first guy is someone who is a top choice for Mark Knopfler, who could choose to record with anyone, anywhere but he comes to Nashville to record with the local sound engineer. The fact that the same sound engineer is also the first choice of Nashville’s finest such as George Strait says a lot about his abilities.
The other guy is someone who is producing top 40 mainstream tracks and Megadeth at the same time, someone so versatile and capable that a label executive will hold his number on a speed dial. And he works in Nashville too.
No wonder Guitar Town is Mecca for industry’s newcomers.

Yankee Twang: Country and Western Music in New England. By Clifford R. Murphy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 202pp. (hardback). Photos, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-0-252-03867-9 Astonishing though it seems, 2015 is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the "Hillbilly" issue of the Journal of American Folklore, an event that marks the beginning of the scholarly study of country music. In the succeeding half century, an extensive and varied literature has developed. There is now a seemingly constant flow of new books and journal articles on country music emanating from scholars in a wide range of academic disciplines: folklore, ethnomusicology, historical musicology, media studies, gender studies, social and cultural history, Appalachian studies, and literary criticism. In the early days of the field, interested scholars and serious enthusiasts could keep their personal libraries up to date with new works, and their minds abreast of new research and ...

In this interview, we talk with one of the organizers of the conference "Masked and Anonymous: The Many Faces of Bob Dylan", Fabio Fantuzzi, about both the event and his own research into Dylan’s work with his one-time painting teacher, Norman Raeben.

In this ethnography of Navajo (Diné) popular music culture, Kristina M. Jacobsen examines questions of Indigenous identity and performance by focusing on the surprising and vibrant Navajo country music scene. Through multiple first-person accounts, Jacobsen illuminates country music’s connections to the Indigenous politics of language and belonging, examining through the lens of music both the politics of difference and many internal distinctions Diné make among themselves and their fellow Navajo citizens.

As the second largest tribe in the United States, the Navajo have often been portrayed as a singular and monolithic entity. Using her experience as a singer, lap steel player, and Navajo language learner, Jacobsen challenges this notion, showing the ways Navajos distinguish themselves from one another through musical taste, linguistic abilities, geographic location, physical appearance, degree of Navajo or Indian blood, and class affiliations. By linking cultural anthropology to ethnomusicology, linguistic anthropology, and critical Indigenous studies, Jacobsen shows how Navajo poetics and politics offer important insights into the politics of Indigeneity in Native North America, highlighting the complex ways that identities are negotiated in multiple, often contradictory, spheres.

Real Country? Geographic, Cultural and Stylistic Challenges to the Country Music Genre
International Symposium
November 13-14, 2013 - Strasbourg, France

In 2006, an article in the Observer Music Monthly stated, “Country is often seen as the whitest, most segregated of all styles: the redneck soundtrack of the racist South.” First marketed as “old time,” then as “hillbilly music” by northeastern music executives in the 1920s and 1930s country music has been branded with the same stereotypes as its region of origin. Perceived as conventional, vulgar and conservative, it has been charged with wallowing in easy patriotism and mawkish sentimentality, based on a homesickness for a lost agrarian past which at times slips into an unquestioning fondness for pre-Civil War Dixie.
Yet country music is hardly homogeneous. For every mainstream singer there are thousands of alternative bands on the margins, challenging conventions and expectations – if only to make their existence more visible.
The American South’s geographic monopoly on the music has been challenged time and time again by new local scenes, and there are now country music fans and festivals throughout the world. Yet most country music festivals include line dancing, rodeos and barbecue food, which makes such events imports more than variations on an appropriated tradition. Can the globalization of country truly challenge geographical stereotypes, or does it ingrain them a bit deeper into the fabric of the music?
While there is a strong iconoclast tradition in country music, the artists that depart from the norm seem to face considerable backlash from the music’s establishment. Was the outraged reaction to Brad Paisley’s ‘Accidental Racist’ only informed by the naiveté and awkwardness of the song? During a 2003 show in London that has all but saturated debates on the politics on country, Nathalie Maines, the singer for the Dixie Chicks, stated that the group was “ashamed that the President of the United States (was) from Texas.” This constituted a clear departure from the attitude of mainstream singers like Toby Keith, who insisted he was proud to be an American right after 9/11 in ‘Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.’ But the Dixie Chicks were subsequently banned from many country radio stations, heeding the 21% of listeners who according to pollsters didn’t want to hear the band anymore. In this respect, the country music establishment must be distinguished from the audience: since the incident, the Dixie Chicks have become the top selling all-female band and the biggest selling country group in the United States in the history of the Nielsen SoundScan.
As a reaction to Nashville’s politically acceptable standardized stars and records, alt-country and insurgent country have injected dynamism into the genre, and reminded it of its long history of fusing with other musical styles. There once was such a thing as “country funk” (see Light in the Attic Record’s 2012 compilation Country Funk 1969-1975), and Willie Nelson, the iconic Austin outlaw, recorded a reggae album. Many soul and rhythm-and-blues singers covered country songs and were inspired by the genre, as evidenced by Ray Charles’s 1962 Modern Sounds in Country and Western – which also reflects the many African-American contributions to country.
Even under segregation, country was never entirely a white man’s business. The genre has drawn from African-American sounds through gospel and direct contact between white and black musicians. As such, the contribution of black artists cannot be underestimated, from Tee Tot, the black street musician who taught Hank Williams how to play guitar, to Deford Bailey and Charley Pride. Yet today the Black Country Music Association’s main purpose is to help black singers get employment through showcase gigs in an industry that leaves little room for them. Is country as sexist, racist, and homophobic as it is portrayed to be? When Chely Wright came out on the Today Show in 2010, she explained her not talking about her sexual orientation earlier by the fact that it may have hurt her career: “I knew that I needed to hide this to achieve my dreams.” Is the existence of the Lesbian and Gay Country Music Association a proof of visibility or of the necessity for gay country artists to unite against a conservative industry? When New York Times journalist Jon Caramanica defends Brad Paisley and Chely Wright against the Nashville establishment, should we applaud the move, or should we consider such articles as yet another attack on the genre and a perpetuation of stereotypes? Papers on the representations of country music in the media will be welcome.

This symposium will aim at debunking the stereotypes of country music to expose the contradictions of the genre. It will include three panels in relation to the opposition between the centers and the margins of country music: the geographical tensions (geographic origins of artists, scenes, but also representations such as the image of the cowboy, of the redneck or of the hillbilly in song lyrics as well as dress styles or imagery), cultural (politics, religion, gender, LGBT issues, ethnicity and class), and stylistic (mixing of musical traditions, commercial strategies, majors vs. indies). Throughout these panels, we will try and define the margins of country music as well as their relation to the center and their role in the definition of the genre itself: do they constitute a real threat to conventions, or can they at best confirm the presence and inflexibility of the rules?

Communication donnée le 8 avril 2021 dans le cadre du séminaire de la branche francophone d'Europe de l'IASPM.

Si la mort de George Floyd a initié en 2020 un examen de conscience au sein de l'industrie musicale américaine, la conduisant à reconsidérer la place des minorités ethniques en son sein, les médias ont surveillé de près les réactions et initiatives d'un genre en particulier : la country music. À une époque où le country-rap réalise des records dans les charts, Nashville continue d'être perçue comme une institution conservatrice et fermée aux artistes non- blanc.he.s. La mort de Charley Pride, une des seules stars afro-américaines à s'être produites au Grand Ole Opry, en décembre, a relancé le débat sur la place de cette minorité en country. Alors que le monde universitaire se penche depuis une vingtaine d'années sur cette question, on voit aujourd'hui apparaître des initiatives de ré-écriture de l'histoire de la country music de la part d'artistes afro-américaines, en mots et en sons. En produisant un contre-récit qui les ré-inscrit dans la lignée du genre, elles se positionnent comme héritières de ce patrimoine sudiste. Cette présentation s'intéressera au rôle des artistes noires comme historiennes de la country-music, notamment Rhiannon Giddens et Rissi Palmer.

Having premiered on ABC in October 2012 to critical acclaim and as the recipient of sixteen award nominations by February 2014, the hit television show Nashville explores the commercial country music industry, albeit from a sensationalized perspective, and the role of individual agency within the city’s cultural hegemony. The television show, already a mass mediated product of expressive culture, presents an image of Nashville’s country music identity, which likewise is the product of what Richard Petersen describes as “fabricated authenticity” (Peterson 1997), creating, in a sense, a mediated image of an already mediated cultural phenomenon, or what I term in this context: “meta-country.”  Based upon my seven years of fieldwork within the Nashville commercial music industry, this paper explores the intercultural exchange between the individual, i.e., actual Nashville artists; the artists’ respective mediated identities and their roles as agents within the commercial country music industry; and television’s portrayal of the industry and the artists as an interconnected network of distinct socio-cultural histories. I explore consistencies and variances among the aforementioned levels of cultural representation and highlight how each informs the others. Such research reinforces the notion of reciprocity in popular culture, specifically how artists, record labels, audiences, and the mass media are co-creators of expressive culture, and emphasizes the process in which each renegotiates its respective identity based upon modes of acceptance and rejection by the others.

In the past three months, we as a class in Music in Culture I at the School of Visual Arts delved into the catalog of songs from a time that made music more a part of people's livelihoods than in the centuries before. Those exceptional songs that take me to unusual places, "Across the Universe" by the Beatles, "Angel from Montgomery" by John Prine, and "Pariah" by Steven Wilson (of Porcupine Tree), are powerful essences when played back. In this recount of the semester, I'll point to the songs we've listened to from the mid-20​ th Century, when classical elements would collide with the contemporary and change the course of musical history. The end result was not very distant from the field hollers and work songs of indentured sharecroppers. The celebrated blues pioneers from the front end of the 20​ th century such as Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Lightnin' Hopkins, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Charlie Patton, brought the new sound from the recreational shacks and juke joints of the Deep South to the big stage in cities across the world. Then, the reception to the emergence of rock 'n' roll music onto the mainstream scene was one of mutual youth rebellion to a long reign of expressive suppression