A Boy Named Sue

Contents

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Foreword: Muddying the Clear Water: The Dubious Transparency of Country Music

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pp. vii-xv

However familiar their destination or the landmarks encountered along the way, some expeditions of the imagination seem to be repeated generation after generation, as if the very itinerary was hardwired into our genetic makeup. Like Orpheus or Ahab, we hunger after our private Eurydices and white whales, betting that the reward at journey’s end will compensate for all the confusion and consternation that came before. In the context of American popular music, one of the most traveled...

Acknowledgments

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pp. xvii-xviii

Even books that seem to be the work of a single author are usually a group effort in one sense or another. That collective effort is, of course, more obvious in the case of an essay collection such as this. We would therefore first like to thank our contributors for their enthusiasm, hard work, and good will as we put the collection together.

Introduction

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pp. xix-xxiii

In February of 1969, Johnny Cash recorded “A Boy Named Sue,” his ode to masculine adventure and fatherly transgression, at a concert for the inmates of San Quentin prison. The song’s dark humor and references to drinking, fighting, and rebellion struck a particular chord with the crowd, who cheered the protagonist’s attempts to murder his father, the man who dared to name him Sue. Of course, the song’s resolution—in which the long-absent father tells his son the shameful name “helped to make you...

Bibliography and Further Reading

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pp. xxiv-

“Bury Me Beneath the Willow”: Linda Parker and Definitions of Tradition on the National Barn Dance, 1932–1935

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pp. 3-23

On WLS Chicago’s National Barn Dance, Linda Parker seemed to be the image of tradition embodied. She was born in Kentucky and, like many in her audience, had migrated to the industrial areas around Chicago. But Linda was special: her knowledge of old Southern ballads from Kentucky and “the plaintive note, so typical of mountain music,” as WLS’s 1934...

“Spade Doesn’t Look Exactly Starved”: Country Music and the Negotiation of Women’s Domesticity in Cold War Los Angeles

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pp. 24-43

Country musicians rarely made the society page, so when the Antelope Valley Press asked to interview Spade and Ella Mae Cooley at the couple’s massive new ranch home in 1960, the couple easily concurred. Newcomers to the Antelope Valley—an area that was quickly becoming the rural playground of the Hollywood jet set—the Cooleys showed off their 1200-acre ranch and talked about the television bandleader’s plans to build a fifteen-million-dollar Disneyland-style water theme park in the area. Although...

Charline Arthur: The (Un)Making of a Honky-Tonk Star

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pp. 44-58

“She was a woman before her time” is the oft-repeated phrase used to describe Charline Arthur and her flash-in-the-pan career as a honky-tonk singer. In the early 1950s she was a charismatic, rising talent who sported an individualism unique to female country performers. She released singles through RCA, performed at choice venues, such as the Louisiana Hayride and the Grand Ole Opry, and toured with the big names in honky-tonk, all the while maintaining a bold and assertive stage persona....

I Don’t Think Hank Done It That Way: Elvis, Country Music, and the Reconstruction of Southern Masculinity

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pp. 59-85

Describing his first impression of Elvis Presley in performance, country singer Bob Luman vividly captured the image of a generational fissure set to rock the southern cultural landscape. His account centered on a mid-1950s touring country music jamboree headlined by the venerable Hank Snow. As adults watched and listened to the traditional artists who made up the majority of the playbill, teenagers sat nervously in anticipation, waiting to see for themselves the new hillbilly singer whose records sounded...

“I Wanna Play House”: Configurations of Masculinity in the Nashville Sound Era

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pp. 86-106

The Nashville Sound, producer Billy Sherrill once quipped, was made for “the housewife washing dishes at ten a.m. in Topeka, Kansas.” Music critic John Morthland suggested a similar audience for the smooth countrypolitan style in the 1960s when he observed that, “like country people, country music was moving to the suburbs,” in the process becoming “primarily listening music, even easy listening music.” If honky-tonk had been the lament of men displaced by war and economic upheaval,...

Patsy Cline’s Crossovers: Celebrity, Reputation, and Feminine Identity

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pp. 107-131

Patsy Cline is far more famous now than she ever was in life. But who is this posthumously celebrated Patsy Cline? What is her connection to the Patsy Cline who recorded songs from 1957 until her sudden death in 1963, fell into obscurity, and then sparked a revival in the 1980s that turned Patsy Cline into a “country music legend”? Patsy Cline has had two careers—one when she was alive and trying to make hit records, and another after she became a posthumous star. The posthumous Patsy bears...

Dancing Together: The Rhythms of Gender in the Country Dance Hall

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pp. 132-153

The pathway from Nashville, Tennessee, to the Atlantic coast spans nearly seven hundred miles, a stretch of land that houses many of country music’s oldest and richest traditions. The country music that emerged from that area has blended with other sources and styles, evolved, and morphed into the current commercial genre, and this commercial country music is readily accessible through radio stations, recordings, and live performances across the nation, undifferentiated by regional traditions. That very sameness in available commercial country music has led...

Between Riot Grrrl and Quiet Girl: The New Women’s Movement in Country Music

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pp. 155-177

During the last decade, the nation’s attention and entertainment headlines have been captured by a fascinating movement in rock music characterized as the era of angry young females. Artists such as Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, and PJ Harvey burst onto the scene with an adrenaline-fueled, machismomimicking ferocity that equaled their testosterone-driven male counterparts. The antithesis of people-pleasing females, these women revealed raw anger, frank sexuality, and in-your-face attitudes...

Going Back to the Old Mainstream No Depression, Robbie Fulks, and Alt.Country’s Muddied Waters

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pp. 178-195

In 1972, when Doctor Hook and the Medicine Show sang “The Cover of the Rolling Stone,” they cast rock critics as arbiters of stardom. By the time Cameron Crowe used this song in his 2000 film Almost Famous, it held little irony. Sex and drugs were good but they just couldn’t compare to joining the magazine’s anointed. Currently, some alternative country...

Postlude

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pp. 221-223

The remarkable essays in A Boy Named Sue represent some of the ongoingresearch by a new generation of country music scholars, and reflect a varietyof new directions in the study of country music. Just how dramatic these newapproaches are can only be appreciated by seeing them in perspective of earlier, more traditional efforts to understand one of our culture’s most ...

Notes

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pp. 199-223

Contributors

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pp. 224-226

Index

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pp. 227-232