A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music

Introduction

xix Introduction KRISTINE M. MCCUSKER AND DIANE PECKNOLD 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 strong,” just as he had planned—promised that even wandering and cantankerous fathers could still fulfill their paternal responsibilities and teach their sons about manhood. The song’s irreverent play on masculine gender conventions held obvious appeal for an all-male audience of inmates whose own experiences must have borne out the lyrical assertion that “the world is rough, and if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta get tough,” and who might have sought reassurance about their personal identities as absent fathers, estranged sons, and men. But it also found a much larger audience, eventually reaching number one on the country music charts and number two on the pop music charts. That more diverse audience made its own uses of the song’s gender confusion. For some, the song might have resonated with or satirized the gender-bending politics of hippie youth culture; others may have found in it simple comic relief; and still others heard in its lyrics the comfort they needed to face their own tribulations of challenged masculinity.1 The performance and popularity of “A Boy Named Sue” highlight the underappreciated role gender has played in defining country music’s identity as a genre. Gender has always been critical to the production and consumption of country music. It has demarcated the kinds of sounds and images that could be included within the genre’s boundaries; it has helped to determine the songs and artists audiences would buy or reject; and it has shaped the identities listeners could make for themselves in relation to the music they enjoyed. Gendered imagery has been used to defend and preserve country ’s “essence” and to radically redirect its development. This book is an exploration of the impact of gender on the artistic and institutional development of country music. We use gender here not as a code for “women” but in its more encompassing theoretical sense, to describe social constructions of masculinity and femininity, and to emphasize the way those constructions are used to create shared meaning. While gender made an early appearance in country music scholarship, much of the work to date falls into what Joan Scott has characterized as a descriptive mode, an approach that acknowledges gender without explaining how or why this particular method of categorization has structured meaning, or with what consequences.2 Descriptive accounts have been critical to the project of restoring women to the country music canon, but gender can help us to understand much more about country music than just women’s experiences. Class boundaries, cultural tastes, institutional hierarchies, performance styles, and appropriate roles for audiences have all been constructed partly through the invocation of gender. We view gender as one of the central dynamics of country music history and culture; gender codes are a remarkably flexible way of making meaning, and their uses have been far less predictable than the somewhat rigid dichotomy between male and female cultural domains that has characterized past scholarship on the subject would suggest. This collection of essays shows that social prescriptions for men and women, as they were performed in country music, have evolved over time in response to the changing web of relationships between performers, the industry, the audience, and larger historical forces. Gender has also helped to structure those relationships. In particular , it has been used to establish and defend the stylistic and institutional boundaries separating country music from pop, rock ’n’ roll, folk, and other genres. Indeed, these essays suggest that gender imagery has been a site for stylistic innovation throughout the course of country music’s development, inseparable from more commonly recognized arenas for creativity such as instrumentation, lyrical content, or performance style. When gender is brought to bear in this way on country music’s conventional narrative, it challenges important features of the now-familiar story Introduction xx first outlined by Bill...