A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music

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

86 “I Wanna Play House” Configurations of Masculinity in the Nashville Sound Era DIANE PECKNOLD 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, and rockabilly the sexual braggadocio of their adolescent sons, then the Nashville Sound, with its angelic backing vocals and orchestral strings, was the soggy reverie of the postwar suburban wife. “Pandering to that imaginary housewife’s sense of propriety,” journalist Patrick Carr has argued, eviscerated country and quashed innovation in the 1960s. “The honky-tonk blues, the hillbilly fever, the rockabilly fire—all core ingredients of the country musician’s most powerful creative reality—couldn’t be allowed to show in public,” presumably because female listeners could not appreciate them. Drifting oil-field cowboys were replaced by effete crooners in dinner jackets. Country music’s masculine edge, the consensus seems to indicate , was driven underground to winter over until the emergence of the Bakersfield sound and the Outlaw movement.1 A number of commentators have observed that performances of masculinity constitute an important part of country’s “core” identity, particularly in rusticated styles like honky-tonk, the Bakersfield sound, and the Outlaw movement. But just as honky-tonk’s appeal drew on its ironic performance of the stereotypical poor white Southern male, and the Outlaws on their halfserious burlesque of the rugged artistic individualist as frontier gunslinger, so the mature, commercialized aesthetic of the Nashville Sound represented its own brand of masculinity. This vision, in keeping with postwar social norms, cast masculinity in a distinctly domestic light, as a combination of fatherhood , breadwinning, and, for white-collar workers, corporate success.2 This particular ideal of manhood became important in Nashville in the late 1950s and early 1960s not only because it was prevalent everywhere in the nation, but also because it meshed with changes in the way country music was produced. Music Row emerged during those years as a fully formed commercial music center, complete with sophisticated recording facilities, licensing agencies, and local representation of major record labels. This elaboration of the corporate structure was accompanied by the rise of a new generation of executives whose personal histories were steeped in mainstream corporate culture. As it achieved full integration with the larger popular music industry, those in the country music field worked to fashion a new professional image for themselves, to counter the prevailing consensus that theirs was music made “by hillbillies for hillbillies.” Much of that effort fell to the Country Music Association (CMA), which assumed the task of marketing country music to entertainment, advertising, and broadcasting executives. Through sales presentations , consulting projects, and other public relations activities, the CMA challenged the traditional cultural hierarchies and stereotypes that had long denigrated the country field. Gender discourse became a key symbolic language for communicating the industry’s claims to professionalism and respect. Country music’s representatives wanted to reach broadcasters and advertisers where they lived—literally—by capitalizing on what they imagined to be the intimate life of the white-collar male: his relationship with his wife, his status anxieties, his personal investment in the ideology of the self-made company man. The experience of the middle-class breadwinner both motivated and underpinned the industry’s efforts to revise its professional image.3 But even as the CMA and other elements of the industry deployed middleclass gender norms to make the country music business palatable to media executives, the genre’s commercial power remained rooted in the image of the blue-collar man. The Nashville country industry staked its claim to independence from the popular music establishment by proclaiming its unique ability to deliver the nation’s average working men as “the largest unduplicated audience in the world.” Despite complaints that country music was selling out to middleclass pretensions, the commercialized image of the Nashville Sound was Configurations of Masculinity in the Nashville Sound Era 87 Diane Pecknold 88 intended for working-class audiences, and it reinforced the era’s prevailing faith that the fruits of American democracy were best represented by the universal consumerism...