Why does country music sound white? Race and the voice of nostalgia

Abstract Since American country music has historical ties to musics of many different regions and racial groups, the answer to the question ‘Why does country music sound white?’ is by no means obvious. This article asks how country became white, and how it stays white. To inquire into why country music sounds white is to wonder what whiteness sounds like, and how it is heard. This article considers the meaning of the sounds of country in the making of a pose of historically ‘innocent’ and ‘besieged’ American whiteness. Focusing on the cultural politics of nostalgia, I argue that in the construction of an idealized past-ness, or ‘used to’, country music not only ‘talks white’, but it is whites who hear it, and whose whiteness is produced and reproduced by what they hear. Keywords: Racecountry musicconservatismnostalgiawhitenessUnited States Acknowledgements This article is far better for the advice of the journal editors and the comments of reviewers. I would also especially like to thank Charles Gallagher and France Winddance Twine for their many efforts, and Joel Wainwright and Aaron Fox for challenging and insightful comments. Notes 1. In his proclamation, Bush echoed Nixon's 1974 speech at the opening of Opryland (the theme park/country music museum associated with the Grand Ole Opry), when the President said that country music ‘talks about family. It talks about religion. And it … makes America a better country’ (quoted in Goddu 1998, p. 48). 2. The connection between country music and the Republican Party has held so persistently that a group of country music industry insiders has recently formed the ‘Music Row Democrats’ in an attempt to combat the power of conservative Republicanism within the industry and among its fan base. See New York Times, 19 August 2006, and http://www.musicrowdemocrats.com. 3. Outside of North America, country music's popularity is less associated with those who self-identify as ‘white’. Country is very popular, for example, in parts of the Caribbean and in Brazil (Fox 2004b; Dent 2005). Aaron Fox and Christine Yano are presently completing an edited volume, Songs Out of Place (forthcoming), which examines these other ‘countries’. 4. Writing about country music, I am unfortunately forced to assume that most readers are, while perhaps not fans themselves, at least familiar with the genre and some of its better-known performers. If not, the recordings of most of the artists I name in the text are relatively easy to find. The internet is particularly helpful in this regard. 5. See John Munro's (2004) review for an excellent overview of the burgeoning historical work on whiteness in North America. 6. ‘With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music is born power and its opposite: subversion. … All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality. It is what links a power center to its subjects, and thus, more generally, it is an attribute of power in all its forms’ (Attali 1985, p. 6). 7. Emphasis in original. 8. In 1961, there were eighty-one radio stations in the US dedicated to country music; 606 stations by 1969, 1,534 in 1980, 2,108 in 1989 and 2,427 in 1994 (Cusic 1998, p. 204). 9. To think about these instruments’ status as ‘traditional’ is part of the problem at hand. 10. ‘Square’ songs are those which follow a ‘steady pattern of uninterrupted four-bar hypermeasures’ (Neal 1998, p. 325); in other words, those that have a regular phrasing based on musical ‘lines’ that are four bars long. This structure (with slight variations) is commonly played in a thirty-two bar format with an AABA rhyming scheme, and can sometimes serve as an important formal limitation on what counts as ‘country’ (Fox 2004a, pp. 218, 242). 11. There are some (e.g. Malone 2002, p. 15) who seem to understand twang as a term of ‘denigration’ for the ‘southern sound’, but it has no such meaning here. Rather, it is the way that the ‘southernness’ of twang became implicit that is of interest. 12. These instruments usually have less ‘sustain’ than rock instruments – a note on a banjo, unlike an electric guitar, will not resonate for long after it is plucked – and thus the ‘wail’ of rock instrumentation is very rare in any variety of country. Although electric guitars and other instruments common in rock music are of course now standard in country music, these are often played alongside ‘traditional’ instruments, or amplified in a manner that purposefully distinguishes the sound from rock music. This is the case, for example, with the distinctive ‘twang’ of the Fender Telecaster, the electric guitar of choice in country music since the 1950s. Indeed, the Telecaster's preferred sound (a result of the guitar in combination with a specific mode of amplification) is now so ‘obviously’ country that one need only pluck a single note to give a phrase a country ‘feel’. In contemporary commercial music, Dwight Yoakam (and his Telecaster) epitomize this vocal and instrumental ‘twang’. 13. Strictly speaking, one cannot equate diphthongization with what I am here calling twang, with its distinctive cultural associations with the US South. Diphthongs – what linguistic anthropologists also call ‘vowel glides’ (Feld et al. 2004, p. 337) – are also features of non-southern anglo-North American regional dialects. In Canada's Maritime provinces, where I was raised, vowel glides of the form that Feld et al. (2004, p. 337) suggest singers use to ‘index their “country”-ness’ (cf. Samuels 2004) are very common. There are, however, important differences in pronunciation (e.g. ‘bed’ is pronounced ‘bee-yed’ in Nova Scotia, ‘bay-yed’ in the stereotypical southern drawl); it is hard to imagine the Maritime accent, in either speech or song, ever being labeled ‘twang’. It is not merely diphthongization that is at issue here, but a way of symbolically mobilizing a suite of vocal and musical features whose nexus I am calling call twang. I want to thank Aaron Fox for helping me with these ideas and the relevant literature. 14. That race is crucial to what the accent communicates is clear from the remarks like Malone's, quoted above, regarding Charley Pride's singing. 15. On the difference between wars of ‘manoeuvre’ and ‘position’ (or ‘siege’), and the ultimately greater political importance of the latter, see Gramsci (1971, pp. 229–43). 16. I say ‘most’ because of the important work of David Samuels (2004) on the refusal of Apache country singers to sing in the stereotypical accent. Samuels argues convincingly that this move is a considered politicization of a racist historical legacy. 17. Emphasis in original. 18. It is of course arguable that country music has made a caricature of both patination and authenticity, since standardization and commodification would seem to rob them of the very qualities that determine their meanings. 19. A full discussion of the form and content of country music lyrics is impossible here, but see Fox (2004a, pp. 214–48) and Brackett (1995, pp. 77–99) for very helpful analyses. 20. Very briefly, the origin story as it is conventionally told (e.g. Malone 1985; Sample 1996, pp. 176–86) begins with poor rural southern whites in the 1920s, who were reached by the first radio broadcasts and recordings by performers like the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers (Ellison 1995). The 1930s, despite economic hardships, was also the decade during which most US households obtained a radio, and promoters of commercial country music, especially in the South and West, took advantage of the medium's wide dissemination. World War II marked the beginning of country's urbanization, and its mass popularization. This is the era of Nashville's Grand Ole Opry's great popularity, and artists like Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell, whose careers began in the immediate post-war era, became household names in the South and well known throughout the US. In the 1950s and 1960s, country/rock derivatives like rockabilly – think Elvis – gained a national and international audience, and country music's smoother ‘Nashville sound’ (à la Patsy Cline) also reached far beyond the region. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed the commercial dominance of so-called ‘hard’ country artists like Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Loretta Lynn. Today, the style of these singer-songwriters is widely associated with the sound of ‘real’ country music, true to the southern, working-class roots of the genre (Sanjek 1998, p. 23–4; Malone 2002, p. 254; Fox 2004a, pp. 103, 150), in contrast to the pop ‘new country’ that has filled commercial country radio since the late 1980s (Haslam 1999, p. 293). 21. Adorno's (2002, p. 375) oft-cited remark that Wagner's music ‘itself speaks the language of Fascism’ is a case in point. 22. In addition, there is a tradition of psychoanalytic writing on music and sound (e.g. Coriat 1945; Noy 1966–7; Rosolato 1974). This is a more disciplinarily specialized effort, the concerns of which overlap somewhat with mine, but with which I do not seriously engage. Founded upon the examination of purportedly universal human psychic propensities, this literature is entirely uninterested in race and cultural politics. 23. Radano's Lying Up a Nation (2003) is an extended and brilliant critique of such claims to ‘originalism’, and one might read Gilroy's Against Race (2000) as a complementary ‘metacritique’ of the very vocabulary through which such claims are made. 24. For an excellent framing of some aspects of cultural studies of music, see Shepherd and Wicke (1997). 25. Althusser's famous account of ‘interpellation’ is presented in ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)’: ‘all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects’ (Althusser 1971, p. 173, emphasis in original). The passages that describe the ‘hail’ that interpellates the subject can be found on pp. 170–6. 26. Radano's engaging excavation of black music's ‘sonically absent history’ (2003, p. 5) brings the power of this insight to the historical record, revealing its constitutive partiality (in both senses, for the record is both filled with random gaps, and at the same time plays favourites with what it is inclined to hear). 27. The fact that these politics are in no way easily classified as ‘right-wing’ points, in Gramsci's thought, to the political opportunity a cultural phenomenon like country presents for the left, an opportunity it must pursue energetically. 28. The ways in which class operates in and through country music merits an extensive discussion on its own. This is all the more true with the massive expansion of country's ‘core’ audience over the years. My own feeling is that country music's growing appeal outside of its class affinities is due at least in part to the increasing inequality that characterizes the American political economy. According to this (admittedly speculative) explanation, country's nostalgic authenticity, its gritty ‘realness’ – for reasons similar to those I outline in this paper – is all the more appealing both to those whites who have lost or have never obtained status and welfare through this dynamic, and to those who seek to claim some working-classed ‘groundedness’ in their increasingly distant privilege. I think much of the appeal of ‘alt.country’ to educated urban whites like me is a part of this movement. Aside from Fox's work, Peterson (1992) and Hartigan (1999) can certainly help think about these processes. 29. For example, there is an old and well-known joke that asks, ‘How many country singers does it take to change a light-bulb?’ The answer: ‘Two. One to screw in the new light-bulb, and another to sing sadly of the old one.’ 30. ‘A storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress’ (Benjamin 1968, pp. 257–8). 31. It may be worth noting that for Adorno, ‘ideology’ did not have the Althusserian inescapability that it usually connotes in contemporary cultural studies. For him, it was basically false consciousness, a veil that could be lifted – at least in theory. 32. Gramsci (1971, pp. 106–13) discusses ‘passive revolution’, a concept he says is very closely related to ‘war of position’, but differentiated in its historical specificity. 33. Country music is not, and has never been, purely ‘conservative’ in the ‘right-wing’ sense attached to the Bush administration. To take only a current issue as an example, several well-known country artists, like Emmy Lou Harris, Willie Nelson and Haggard himself, have spoken out against the invasion of Iraq (Parvaz 2003), and there is a track record of prisoners’ rights activism among ‘hard’ country artists like Haggard, Johnny Cash and David Allen Coe. Nevertheless, country music is widely perceived to be overwhelmingly conservative, sometimes even reactionary, and current journalism and scholarship on the politics of the industry and its audiences would suggest that this perception is largely correct (Feiler 1996; Parvaz 2003; Rossman 2004; Fox 2004a, 2005), although the ‘conservatism’ in question is again more heterogeneous than its stereotype (DiMaggio, Peterson and Esco 1972; Fox 2004a, p. 324, note 5). 34. Lonestar's 2004 hit song ‘Mr. Mom’ describes a father who is at home because of a lay-off, but, rather than celebrating this upheaval in gender roles, the song expresses an increasing amazement at ‘how women do it’: ‘Honey, you're my hero’. 35. The fact that prior to the late 1960s country music was not associated with working-class living and values (Malone 2002, p. 45), contrary to the common notion that it has always been ‘working-class music’, demonstrates the ‘retroactive’ power of country music's rewriting its own past. 36. Stephanie Coontz's (2000) hilarious term for this family values turn in the US is ‘the way we never were’. 37. ‘What resources can an innovative class set against the formidable complex of trenches and fortification of the dominant class? The spirit of scission, in other words the progressive acquisition of the consciousness of its own historical personality, a spirit of scission that must aim to spread itself from the protagonist class to the classes that are its potential allies – all this requires a complex ideological labour, the first condition of which is an exact knowledge of the field that must be cleared of its element of human “mass”’. (Gramsci 1985, p. 390) 38. As Mladen Dolar (1993, p. 76) has written in his brilliant discussion of Althusser, ‘one becomes a subject by recognizing that one has always been a subject’. Additional informationNotes on contributorsGeoff Mann GEOFF MANN is Assistant Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University