Recycled "Trash": Gender and Authenticity in Country Music Autobiography

Somebody said I should write all these memories down. But it ain’t like writing a song. . . . I’m not pretending I know how to write a book—not even a book about me. . . . The first thing I insisted was that it [Coal Miner’s Daughter] sound like me. When all those city folks try to fix up my talking, all they do is mess me up. . . . This is MY book. Instead of using Webster’s Dictionary, we’re using Webb’s Dictionary—Webb was my maiden name.

—Loretta Lynn, preface to Coal Miner’s Daughter

What I want . . . is that my (mobile) image, buffeted among a thousand shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) “self”; but it is the contrary that must be said: “myself” never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn . . . and “myself” which is light, divided, dispersed.

—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

As I passed among the tables in my costume, speaking to people, smiling and saying Howdy, an incredible thing happened to me. I felt myself moving out of Sarah Ophelia Colley into Minnie Pearl. I felt more uninhibited than I ever had felt doing her before, but it was more than that. I BECAME the character.

—Minnie Pearl, An Autobiography

Tammy, Minnie, Loretta; Dolly, Naomi, Reba. Each name, instantly recognizable to country music fans, not only occupies a specific location in the past and present pantheon of legendary country performers, but invokes an entire “personal” history that is both symptomatic of, and unique to, traditional celebrity identity. Four of the six are explicitly associated with a particular autobiographical trend in country music, and all can be found gracing the covers of popular autobiographies published over the last twenty years. Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man (1979), Sarah Ophelia Colley’s Minnie Pearl: An Autobiography (1980), Loretta Lynn’s Coal Miner’s Daughter (1976), Dolly Parton’s Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business (1994), Naomi Judd’s Love Can Build A Bridge (1993), and Reba McEntire’s Reba: My Story (1994) certainly join the ranks of countless celebrity “told-to” stories issuing from Hollywood and the pop/rock music world, but they also comprise a rapidly growing body of country music autobiographies by women and men—“co”-authored with professional writers—which both respond to and themselves create a distinct tradition or genre. ¹

Composites of both low and high life story, these texts are in a rather unique position to deepen our understanding of the class and gender-coded notions of authenticity, discourse, and performative identity shaping the distinctly American form of popular culture known as country music. The six memoirs I have chosen here strike me as an especially rich source of assumptions about myriad conventions governing both the genres of country and star autobiography, as well as about individual women’s lives. They collectively narrate and enact one revealing story of class politics in the United States.

As Richard Peterson has most recently argued, autobiography proves to be one of country’s most cherished components, in part because it is linked in country music historiography with the traditional sound known as hard or hard-core country. ² Distinguished from the “sell-out” pop of the post-World War II Nashville Sound and its contemporary imitators—what he terms soft-shell country music—hard country claims the imprimatur of authenticity, “made by and for those who remain faithful to the ‘roots’ of country.” ³ In Peterson’s schema, artists such as Hank Williams (hard country’s most treasured icon), George Jones (running a strong second), and Loretta Lynn share similarities not only in their “raw” singing style but also in their propensity to write and record songs reflecting their own “rough” life experiences. ⁴ The stars’ attitude, performance style, and stage presence are all characterized by informality, humble origins, and a lack of professional music training. Hard-core performers unabashedly reveal themselves to their audiences to emphasize that they are “just like” the men and women in the crowd: [End Page...