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C H A P T E R T W O Constructing the Musicalized Performance of Texan Identity Cowboy Lore Music-making in Austin grows out of a long history, a history that struggles to center the meaning of being Texan in the voices and the sung narratives of specific historical individuals representing certain groups. The effects of this history are still felt in the popular memory of those who continue the musicalized performance of identity in Austin's nightclubs and the recording studios. As individual musicians come to terms with the institutional and discursive structures that constrain and enable their performances, they map out a relation to this history—a relation described as a continuance of a powerful tradition or, conversely, as a throwing off of this tradition's burden. In its most elaborated narratives, the popular history of music-making in Austin looks beyond the disruption of tradition at Raul's, back through the cosmic cowboys performing a reconstructed tradition at the Armadillo, back through the psychedelic fires stoked at the Vulcan, back beyond even the self-conscious revival of folksinging at ThreadgilPs, and traces its powerful articulation of performed song and performed identity to the folkloristic construction of the singing cowboy. By the late i88os, cowboy lore, ranging from dime novels to academic folk song collections, was developing into an ongoing process of mythologizing, a discursive construction of legends, tales, myths, and songs that intermingled and produced images of an idealized western male.Throughout the earlypart of the twentieth century, these idealized representations worked their waythrough academic, popular, and commercial expressions, effectively legitimating a variety of Texan cultural practices as the work of real cowboys. Texan populism, Texan democracy , Texan business, and Texan music all drew on the image of the D I S S O N A N T I D E N T I T I E S / 2.O cowboy as an independent entrepreneur, a strong masculine hero freely participating in the creation of Texan society. John Avery Lomax contributed to this process with the first publication of Cowboy Sontjs and other Frontier Ballads in 1910.' He was determined to represent a more authentic cowboy than those depicted in popular culture. The "Collector's Note" for the first edition of Cowboy Songs insisted that, "Still much misunderstood, he is often slandered, nearly always caricatured, both by the press and by the stage. Perhaps these songs, coming direct from the cowboy's experience, giving vent to his careless and his tender emotions, will afford future generations a truer conception of what he really was than is now possessed by those who know him only through highly colored romances" (Lomax 1910, xxvii). Lomax argued that these songs, anchored in the cowboy's experience , were directly expressive of the cowboy's true character. His argument carried the authority of his own experience: Lomax was a Texan who had heard these songs himself as a child. In his autobiography,Adventures of aBallad Hunter, Lomax described his first encounter with the material that would become his life's work: I couldn't have been more than four years old when I first heard a cowboy sing and yodel to his cattle. I was sleeping in my father's two-room house in Texas beside a branch of the old Chisholm Trail—twelve of us sometimes in two rooms. Suddenly a cowboy's singing waked me as I slept on my trundle bed. . . . These sounds come back to me faintly through the years, a foggy maze of recollections; and my heart lept even then to the cries of the cowboy trying to quiet, in the deep darkness and sifting rain, a trail herd of restless cattle.2 By the time of Lomax's autobiography (1947), he had already been acknowledged as one of the foremost ballad and folk song collectors in the United States and was considered to be an authority on the musical culture of the cowboy. As this passagemakesclear,Lomax's professional reputation had been built on a nostalgic celebration of the work culture of a few men who lived and worked near his boyhood home. On the basis of this "foggy maze of recollections," Lomax had constructed a romantic representation of an autonomous, strong, independent, and, sometimes, violent guardian at the edge of civilization, and then spread this representation through the collections of cowboy songs that he produced during the first fifty years of the twentieth century. The edge of civilization guarded by the cowboy—the boundary between...

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