Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks

Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks
Author: Travis D. Stimeling
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2011-05-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199747474

Country music of the late 1960s and early 1970s was a powerful symbol of staunch conservative resistance to the emerging counterculture. But starting around 1972, the city of Austin, Texas became host to a growing community of musicians, entrepreneurs, journalists, and fans who saw country music as a part of their collective heritage and sought to merge it with countercultural ideals to forge a distinctly Texan counterculture. Progressive country music-a hybrid of country music and rock-blossomed in this growing Austin community, as it played out the contradictions at work among its residents. The music was at once firmly grounded in the traditional Texan culture in which they had been raised, and profoundly affected by their newly radicalized, convention-flouting ways.In Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Music Scene, Travis Stimeling connects the local Austin culture and the progressive music that became its trademark. He presents a colorful range of evidence, from behavior and dress, to newspaper articles, to personal interviews of musicians. Along the way, Stimeling uncovers parodies of the cosmic cowboy image that reinforce the longing for a more peaceful way of life, but that also recognize an awareness of the muddled, conflicted nature of this counterculture identity. Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks provides new insight into the inner workings of Austin's progressive country music scene-by bringing the music and musicians brilliantly to life.

Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks

Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks
Author: Travis D. Stimeling Ph.D.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2011-05-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199831912

Country music of late 1960s and early 1970s was a powerful symbol of staunch conservative resistance to the flowering hippie counterculture. But in 1972, the city of Austin, Texas became host to a growing community of musicians, entrepreneurs, journalists, and fans who saw country music as a part of their collective heritage and sought to reclaim it for their own progressive scene. These children of the Cold War, post-World War II suburban migration, and the Baby Boom escaped the socially conservative world their parents had created, to instead create for themselves an idyllic rural Texan utopia. Progressive country music--a hybrid of country music and rock--played out the contradictions at work among the residents of the growing Austin community: at once firmly grounded in the conservative Texan culture in which they had been raised and profoundly affected by the current hippie counterculture. In Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Music Scene, Travis Stimeling connects the local Austin culture and the progressive music that became its trademark. He presents a colorful range of evidence, from behavior and dress, to newspaper articles, to personal interviews of musicians as diverse as Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Doug Sahm. Along the way, Stimeling uncovers parodies of the cosmic cowboy image that reinforce the longing for a more peaceful way of life, but that also recognize an awareness of the muddled, conflicted nature of this counterculture identity. Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks brings new insight into the inner workings of Austin's progressive country music scene -- by bringing the music and musicians brilliantly to life. This book will appeal to students and scholars of popular music studies, musicology and ethnomusicology, sociology, cultural studies, folklore, American studies, and cultural geography; the lucid prose and interviews will also make the book attractive to fans of the genre and artists discussed within. Austin residents past and present, as well as anyone with an interest in the development of progressive music or today's 'alt.country' movement will find Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks an informative, engaging resource.

The South of the Mind

The South of the Mind
Author: Zachary J. Lechner
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2018-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 082035371X

"This interdisciplinary work is driven by the question, 'What can imaginings of the South reveal about the recent American past?' In it, Zachary J. Lechner bridges the fields of southern studies, southern history, and post-World War II American cultural and popular culture history in an effort to discern how conceptions of a tradition-bound, 'timeless' South shaped Americans' views of themselves and their society and served as a fantasied refuge from the era's political and cultural fragmentations, namely, the perceived problems associated with urbanization and 'rootlessness.' The book demonstrates that we cannot hope to understand recent U.S. history without exploring how people have conceived the South"--

Progressive Country

Progressive Country
Author: Jason Mellard
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292753004

"Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University."

Country Soul

Country Soul
Author: Charles L. Hughes
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2015-03-23
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1469622440

In the sound of the 1960s and 1970s, nothing symbolized the rift between black and white America better than the seemingly divided genres of country and soul. Yet the music emerged from the same songwriters, musicians, and producers in the recording studios of Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama--what Charles L. Hughes calls the "country-soul triangle." In legendary studios like Stax and FAME, integrated groups of musicians like Booker T. and the MGs and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section produced music that both challenged and reconfirmed racial divisions in the United States. Working with artists from Aretha Franklin to Willie Nelson, these musicians became crucial contributors to the era's popular music and internationally recognized symbols of American racial politics in the turbulent years of civil rights protests, Black Power, and white backlash. Hughes offers a provocative reinterpretation of this key moment in American popular music and challenges the conventional wisdom about the racial politics of southern studios and the music that emerged from them. Drawing on interviews and rarely used archives, Hughes brings to life the daily world of session musicians, producers, and songwriters at the heart of the country and soul scenes. In doing so, he shows how the country-soul triangle gave birth to new ways of thinking about music, race, labor, and the South in this pivotal period.

The Country Music Reader

The Country Music Reader
Author: Travis D. Stimeling
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2015-01-02
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190233737

In The Country Music Reader Travis D. Stimeling provides an anthology of primary source readings from newspapers, magazines, and fan ephemera encompassing the history of country music from circa 1900 to the present. Presenting conversations that have shaped historical understandings of country music, it brings the voices of country artists and songwriters, music industry insiders, critics, and fans together in a vibrant conversation about a widely loved yet seldom studied genre of American popular music. Situating each source chronologically within its specific musical or cultural context, Stimeling traces the history of country music from the fiddle contests and ballad collections of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the most recent developments in contemporary country music. Drawing from a vast array of sources including popular magazines, fan newsletters, trade publications, and artist biographies, The Country Music Reader offers firsthand insight into the changing role of country music within both the music industry and American musical culture, and presents a rich resource for university students, popular music scholars, and country music fans alike.

The Opioid Epidemic and US Culture

The Opioid Epidemic and US Culture
Author: Travis D. Stimeling
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9781949199703

"The Opioid Epidemic and US Culture brings a new set of perspectives to one of the most pressing contemporary topics in Appalachia and the nation as a whole. A project aimed both at challenging dehumanizing attitudes toward those caught in the opioid epidemic and at protesting the structural forces that have enabled it, this edited volume assembles a multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners to consider the ways that people have mobilized their creativity in response to the crisis. Written for an audience of people working on the front lines of the opioid crisis, the book is essential reading for social workers, addiction counselors, halfway house managers, and people with opioid use disorder. It will also appeal to the community of scholars interested in understanding how aesthetics shape our engagement with critical social issues, particularly in the fields of literary and film criticism, museum studies, and ethnomusicology"--

Nashville Cats

Nashville Cats
Author: Travis D. Stimeling
Publisher:
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2020
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0197502814

The "Nashville Cats" were a group of session musicians who bounced from studio to studio along Nashville's "Music Row," providing the instrumental backing tracks for countless recordings in the mid-20th century. Including music industry titans like Chet Atkins, Anita Kerr, and Charlie McCoy, these versatile Cats not only established the city as a well-known hub for recording popular music, but also defined the era of country music known as the "Nashville Sound."Drawing upon a rich array of previously unexplored primary sources and original oral histories, Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City, 1945-1975 is the first account of the role that these musicians, along with recording engineers and record producers, played in shaping the sounds of country music during one of its most definitive periods. This era produced some of the genre's most celebrated recording artists, including Country Music Hall of Fame inductees Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, and Floyd Cramer. The Nashville Sound attracted musicians like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen to the city's studios, and marked the establishment of a recording industry that has come to define the city of Nashville in the national and international consciousness. Author Travis D. Stimeling explores how the Nashville system came to be, how musicians functioned within it, and how the desires of an ever-growing and diversifying audience affected record production practices. Through interviews with key players of the period and close analysis of hit songs, Nashville Cats provides an exciting look into this prolific era of music history.

An American Demon

An American Demon
Author: Jack Grisham
Publisher: ECW Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2011
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1550229567

Complex memoir about 1980's punk culture by the band True Sons of Liberty's front man.

The Oxford Handbook of Country Music

The Oxford Handbook of Country Music
Author: Travis D. Stimeling
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 800
Release: 2017-06-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190683856

Now in its sixth decade, country music studies is a thriving field of inquiry involving scholars working in the fields of American history, folklore, sociology, anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and geography, among many others. Covering issues of historiography and practice as well as the ways in which the genre interacts with media and social concerns such as class, gender, and sexuality, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music interrogates prevailing narratives, explores significant lacunae in the current literature, and provides guidance for future research. More than simply treating issues that have emerged within this subfield, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music works to connect to broader discourses within the various fields that inform country music studies in an effort to strengthen the area's interdisciplinarity. Drawing upon the expertise of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook presents an introduction into the historiographical narratives and methodological issues that have emerged in country music studies' first half-century.