Table Of ContentCountry Boys redneCk Women
and
American Made Music Series
Advisory Board
David Evans, General Editor
Barry Jean Ancelet
Edward A. Berlin
Joyce J. Bolden
Rob Bowman
Susan C. Cook
Curtis Ellison
William Ferris
John Edward Hasse
Kip Lornell
Bill Malone
Eddie S. Meadows
Manuel H. Peña
Wayne D. Shirley
Robert Walser
Country
Boys
a nd
redneCk
Women
New Essays in Gender and Country Music
Edited by Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member
of the Association of American University Presses.
“Gender Deviance and Class Rebellion in ‘Redneck Woman,’” by Nadine
Hubbs, was originally published in Southern Cultures 17, no. 4 (Winter 2011),
and is reprinted here with permission. www.southerncultures.org.
Selected lyrics and music from “Fist City” by Loretta Lynn reprinted with
permission by Wilburn Family at Sure Fire Music Company, Inc.
“Jolene” written by Dolly Parton. Velvet Apple Music (BMI). All rights
reserved. Used by permission.
Portions from the lyrics of “Remember That,” “Come On Over,” and “Some
Men Don’t Cheat” are reprinted by permission of Victoria Banks.
Copyright © 2016 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2016
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Country boys and redneck women : new essays in gender and country
music / edited by Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker.
pages cm. — (American made music series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4968-0491-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4968-0492-1
(ebook) 1. Country music—History and criticism. 2. Country musicians—
United States. 3. Women country musicians—United States. 4. Sex role in
music. I. Pecknold, Diane. II. McCusker, Kristine M.
ML3524.C615 2016
781.642081—dc23 2015023700
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Contents
vii Introduction
DiAne PecknolD AnD kriStine M. MccuSker
3 Why “Ladies Love Country Boys”: Gender, Class, and Economics in Contemporary
Country Music
Jocelyn r. neAl
26 “Hey! If I Should Grab Ya”: “College Country” and the Ruralization of Urban Brazil
AlexAnDer S. Dent
44 Act Naturally: Charley Pride, Autobiography, and the “Accidental Career”
MAtthew D. Sutton
64 Holding On to Country: Musical Moorings for Desired Masculinities in Aboriginal Australia
ÅSe ottoSSon
84 Taylor Swift’s “Pitch Problem” and the Place of Adolescent Girls in Country Music
trAviS StiMeling
102 Gender and the Nashville Songwriter: Three Songs by Victoria Banks
chriS wilSon
126 As if They Were Going Places: Class and Gender Portrayals through Country Music in the
Texas State Prison, 1938–1944
cAroline gnAgy
146 Negotiating Gender, Race, and Class in Post–Civil Rights Country Music: How Linda
Martell and Jeannie C. Riley Stormed the Plantation
DiAne PecknolD
166 Remarkable Women and Ordinary Gals: Performance of Identity in Songs by Loretta Lynn
and Dolly Parton
kAte heiDeMAnn
189 “Backwoods Barbie”: Dolly Parton’s Gender Performance
leigh h. eDwArDS
Contents
211 Kitty Wells, Queen of Denial
georgiA chriStgAu
231 Gender Deviance and Class Rebellion in “Redneck Woman”
nADine hubbS
255 Selected Bibliography
267 Notes on Contributors
271 Index
vi
Introduction
DiAne PecknolD AnD kriStine M. MccuSker
In 2004 we published A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music in an effort
to redress what we considered a major gap in the field of country music stud-
ies. At the time, there existed a substantial body of literature that sought to
restore to memory women’s contributions to country music history, but little of
it explored how gender as a social construct had affected the genre’s develop-
ment.1 Our aim was to demonstrate that country music had served as an impor-
tant arena for negotiating gender within American culture, and that ideas about
masculinity and femininity had helped define the generic boundaries of coun-
try, had played a significant role in its commercial development, and had shaped
the ways that audiences listened to and identified with it.
Ten years later, we are pleased to know that the original A Boy Named Sue
was part of a larger trend in country music historiography that posited gender
as more than just a “useful category of analysis,” to quote Joan Wallach Scott,
but rather as an essential way of understanding the past, including the history
of country music.2 Several essays in the collection were themselves forerunners
of longer works that expanded on country’s complex gender politics. Kristine
McCusker’s work on Linda Parker, one of the first “girl singers” on barn dance
radio stages, became part of Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-Tonk Angels, which
argued that women’s images and performances, rooted in an imagined pre-
industrial South and West, helped define the tone and content of early country
music.3 Peter La Chapelle’s Proud to Be an Okie extended the argument he pre-
sented in his essay on the early Los Angeles country scene, emphasizing both
the gendered dynamics of the popular culture image of the Okie and the demo-
cratic gender relations that characterized the migrants’ musical subculture.4 In
The Selling Sound, Diane Pecknold’s exploration of breadwinner masculinity as
a sign of class respectability in the developing country music industry became
a starting point for understanding how gender emerged as a key fault line in
debates over the genre’s commercialism during the Nashville Sound era.5
But the contributors to A Boy Named Sue were not alone in recognizing that
country’s constructions of authenticity, race, and class were accomplished in
large part through the symbolic domain of gender. Collectively, this work called
for reexamination of country’s central themes, from its status as “the white man’s
vii
Introduction
blues” to its formulations of American identity, and in doing so it revitalized the
field of country music scholarship. The same year A Boy Named Sue appeared,
Aaron Fox’s Real Country extended Barbara Ching’s argument in Wrong’s What
I Do Best that the traditional working-class image of country music is con-
structed in part through its contrast with an implicitly feminized middle- or
upper-class ideal, showing how that dialectic was embodied in everyday social
practices surrounding country music and how such constructions had begun
to shift as the global mobility of manufacturing jobs undermined the security
of the American working class.6 In Natural Acts, Pamela Fox demonstrated that
gender is a symbolic mode through which artists and audiences have navigated
class and racial identities, from barn dance radio to honky-tonk to alt.coun-
try.7 In Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity, Leigh H. Edwards
contended that Cash became an icon in both country music and American cul-
ture in large part because of the way he both embodied and questioned the
“hard-bodied masculinity” of the working-class country music patriarch.8 Tra-
vis Stimeling’s body of work compellingly argued that the authenticity of the
progressive country movement of the 1970s was firmly rooted in its concep-
tion of Texan exceptionalism, colonial privilege, and rugged masculinity, even
as Outlaw artists such as Waylon Jennings used the style to explore shifting
and contradictory expectations of masculinity in the age of women’s liberation.9
And in Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs demonstrated that
class resistance in country music is articulated in part through expression of
working-class gender and sexual forms considered deviant or queer according
to dominant middle-class norms.10
Given the dramatic maturation of gender studies within country music
scholarship, and its increasing centrality to the field as whole, it seems time
to present a new set of essays that take stock of and build upon this prolifera-
tion of research. In part, this collection updates the original simply by address-
ing significant developments that have taken place in the gender discourse of
country music since A Boy Named Sue appeared. More than half of the essays
here examine country music of the past decade, a much more recent chrono-
logical focus than in the first volume. For that reason, we imagine the current
collection as complementing rather than superseding the first, and hope they
will be read together. While the historical scope has narrowed somewhat, how-
ever, the methodological range has notably expanded. Over the past decade,
country music has become an accepted subject of scholarship not only in his-
tory and literary studies, where it first gained legitimacy, but also in fields such
as anthropology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. This collection therefore
brings together a more diverse set of disciplinary approaches and organizes
their contributions thematically rather than historically to account for the intel-
lectual reorganization of the field itself. Greater interdisciplinarity has also led
viii
Introduction
to the emergence of new organizing questions and themes, encouraging schol-
ars to attend to country music as a global phenomenon, for instance, or to more
thoroughly explore its constructions of race and sexuality in relation to earlier
analyses of class and gender. The collection reflects these shifts as well.
One notable shift has been the dramatic expansion of masculinity studies
in country music scholarship, as in cultural studies more generally. Although
one of our central goals in the first A Boy Named Sue was to argue that “gender”
should not be treated merely as a stand-in for women or femininity, the col-
lection reflected the relatively more advanced state of women’s studies as com-
pared to masculinity studies at that time, and the majority of the essays explored
how femininity was constructed and performed in the genre. Ten years later, the
construction of masculinity has arguably become the dominant object of gen-
der analysis in country music scholarship.11 This work has immeasurably deep-
ened our understanding of the ways country music serves to mediate identity
and structure social relations, but it has tended to focus on a singular form of
masculinity: that of white, working-class (and implicitly straight and cisgender)
men in the United States.12 As a result, it runs the risk of solidifying and natu-
ralizing a particular form of masculinity that also brings together race, class,
region, and nationality in historically contingent ways.
We thus open the collection with an inquiry into the ways specific histori-
cal contexts shape expressions of masculinity in country music. Musicologist
Jocelyn R. Neal argues that the emergence of a strikingly cohesive set of gender
narratives on country radio in the late 2000s and early 2010s can be linked to
the impact of globalization and economic crisis during those years. In “redneck-
blueblood” anthems such as “Remind Me” and “Wrong Side,” the country boy
wins over the wealthy, cosmopolitan woman despite her material success and
his limited economic and social prospects. This popular narrative extends the
long-standing tradition described by Barbara Ching and Aaron Fox, in which
down-home country masculinity is defined partly through its relationship to
the character of the upwardly mobile woman who has moved from working-
class to middle- or upper-class status. But whereas Ching and Fox view country
culture as articulating a form of working-class male abjection or degradation,
Neal suggests that “redneck-blueblood” songs also provided a narrative of suc-
cess that directly reclaimed the value of working-class masculinity. This nar-
rative, she argues, resonated with audiences confronting intensely threatening
economic and social dislocation in the global economy.
Alexander S. Dent suggests that this negotiation of masculinity in an age of
economic instability is not unique to US country music. Building on his book
River of Tears, he revisits Brazilian música sertaneja of the 1990s and compares
it with more recent sertaneja universitária (or “college country”).13 Despite
their differences, he argues, both are crucially underpinned by a performance
ix
