A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music

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

vii Foreword Muddying the Clear Water The Dubious Transparency of Country Music DAVID SANJEK 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 paths leads to the satisfaction of an insatiable appetite for authenticity. Confronted by globalization, cross-media merchandising, and the vertigo-inducing transfer of entertainment properties between an ever-shrinking number of conglomerates, many people yearn for something unsullied by deal making, debt ceilings, and demographic surveys. Something that, notwithstanding its transformation into digital bits and bytes, will retain upon its broadly disseminated lines of code uncontested evidence of the sweat and spirit that led to its creation. Inevitably, that appetite remains evanescent through and through, for it encourages the belief that the need to be compensated for any creative enterprise reduces that activity to nothing more or less than mercenary labor. We attach our investment in unvarnished communication to an ideological currency that invariably proves to be counterfeit when we separate the spheres of musical meaning from money making. As Joli Jensen pointedly observes, “Cultural products are not like shoes and sausages, and imagining their production as handicrafts that become tainted by industrial or market forces is nostalgic and simplistic.”1 And yet, agonizing over authenticity and yearning for a sphere of activity free from institutional or monetary constraints enters the cultural dialogue year after year, even though these notions constitute some of the most contested concepts in our entire cultural vocabulary. The hankering after evidence of some kind of creative purity continues, therefore, to lead any number of people on any number of quests, however chimerical their object might appear. In the context of country music, that quest can be traced back to the body of recordings made at Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927, which history has come to regard as maybe not the birth but then the formal ascendance of the genre. If it is possible to put either Eck Robertson’s or Fiddlin’ John Carson’s earlier efforts out of mind temporarily, one can subsequently engage in the kind of originary mythologizing that accords the work supervised by Ralph Peer on this occasion as a kind of initial efflorescence. Many historians of the genre have gone even a step further and taken the efforts of the emerging stars of the episode, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, and assigned to each of them the two principal tributaries that constitute the range of stylistic expression in country. With the former, all the material and mindset associated with the sentiments of stability and tradition; the home place and the hearth. With the latter, the transient proclivities of the rambler and, with them, the stylistic predisposition to nibble away at generic boundaries that led Rodgers to record with such a range of artists, from Hawaiian guitarists to Louis Armstrong. It doesn’t take a great deal of thought to recognize the gender dynamics at work in this construction, assigning to the feminine habits of constancy and tradition while the masculine becomes associated with a predisposition for impatience and innovation. So straight-jacketed are these definitions that country performers for many years were expected, if not coerced, to toe the line. When Kitty Wells responded to Hank Thompson’s ode to the honky-tonk life, it was a demure, almost polite performance. What would the history of the genre be like if, instead, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” were recorded by Rose Maddox, or Jean Shepherd for that matter? The dubious notion that the female side of the genre did not begin to kick up its heels until a number of years after Wells’s rise to stardom held sway for quite some time. It took the groundbreaking efforts of Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann in Finding Her Voice to trace the substantial contribution of women to country.2 David Sanjek viii Efforts that include this volume follow in the wake of their work and begin the complex task of analyzing and appraising the body of performances to which they brought attention...