Manifestations of Collective Identity in Country Music - Cultural, Regional, National

Manifestations of Collective Identity in Country Music - Cultural, Regional, National
Author: Stephanie Schäfer
Publisher: diplom.de
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2011-12-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 3842823010

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: All American music reflects the landscape from which it springs and as that landscape changes, chewed up by the developments and industry and environmental disasters, as the air we heave in and out of our lungs is filled with new particles, as the water we drink gets its fluoride levels regulated and mineral content tweaked, it makes perfect sense that American music becomes slicker, more machinated, less like reality. We are all subject to our environs, fashioned and chiseled and sanded into shapes We have highways for arteries and clouds for brains and sticks for bones, The sounds we make are Americana. As one of the first musical expressions of the United States, country music represents the values and ideals on which the nation was founded. Country music can be seen as the epitome of the American Dream. It has its origins in the 19th century, when cowboys were working in the fields and riding through the lonely prairie, an image that has been romanticized by numerous Hollywood movies. This thesis focuses on country music as a genre as well as the identity which it represents and by which audience and performers are linked. Country music can be regarded as the music of Southern working class Americans. Since before the Civil War, the South has always been looked down upon as being primitive, simple-minded, and extremely religious. Having its roots in the South, country music has had to face substantial criticism in terms of unsophistication and over-sentimentalization. Due to a shift in national economic power, the United States have become increasingly Southernized, both culturally and musically. Southern culture and identity have become desirable. This phenomenon allowed country music to shed its dubious reputation and gain popularity across the country. This paper will shine a light on the American South as a cultural region that has more to offer than what meets the eye. Southern working class culture and its core values are going to be described and put in context with country music as a form of cultural expression. Central themes in American country music are family, love, heartbreak, work, friends, religion, and patriotism. Characteristic for the country music genre are its narrative structures, which by telling a story, enhance its ability to form a collective identity as well as a connection between the narrator, the performer, and the audience. However, country musicians are not solely messengers of the [...]

The Real Story of Real Americans

The Real Story of Real Americans
Author: Hannah Renee Blackwell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2011
Genre:
ISBN:

The purpose of this study was to analyze modern country music lyrics and the messages they contain about American life. The themes, messages, and social narratives ultimately play a role in the formation of both individual and collective identity. Looking at modern country song lyrics allowed certain popular themes to become apparent and ultimately provide a better understanding of the role music plays in individual and national perceptions. One way cultural and national identity is formed is through the management of societal cues through media such as music. Music can then develop shared and collective meanings among listeners and form a perceived collective national identity that can ultimately perpetuate the dominant hegemonic constructs of society. Music has the power to share the narrative of America and as a result the listener hears an instruction manual for how to live, work, love, behave, and be American.

"Cashville" - Dilution of Original Country Music Identity Through Increasing Commercialization

Author: Stephanie Sch„fer
Publisher: Diplomica Verlag
Total Pages: 125
Release: 2012-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3842878451

Where I come from, it?s cornbread and chicken... This line from Alan Jackson?s country hit defines the genre as the music of the American South. All its ambiguity set aside, the South stands proudly for its hospitality, politeness, sense of place and community. Family and religion are traditionally more important down there than in the rest of the country. As Southern culture becomes more and more americanized and the music of the small town Southern man (another Jackson song) is adapted for a mainstream audience, the original rustic identity that defines the true American genre loses its charm. Modern country music has become slick and professionalized and sounds more and more like common pop music to make it more profitable. This study focuses on the authentic country music identity and how it is threatened by increasing commercialization. It defines said identity and the working class culture from which it springs. It traces the history of country music and its different genres from the 19th and early 20th century cowboy music over Western Swing and Honky-Tonk of the 1930s and 1940s, the progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s up to today?s mainstream Country Pop, and shows how its target audience has changed over time and how the opposition tries to preserve traditional sounds. Authentic Texas Country is set in contrast to the commercial Nashville recording industry and both are compared in their respective developments over the years. In the face of terrorism, which poses a threat to the American National identity, country music with its representative American values has become increasingly popular and enforces a strong collective identity on a national level. However, in doing so, it also dilutes the original identity that was once restricted to life in a small town community rather than the country as a whole. What sets country music as a genre apart is its narrative structure. Every song has a story to tell: Be it about ?The Cold Hard Facts of Life?, a prayer finally answered, or the first kiss on a Saturday night.

Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music

Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music
Author: Nadine Hubbs
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2014-03-22
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0520280660

In her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs looks at how class and gender identity play out in one of America’s most culturally and politically charged forms of popular music. Skillfully weaving historical inquiry with an examination of classed cultural repertoires and close listening to country songs, Hubbs confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics. In Hubbs’s view, the popular phrase “I’ll listen to anything but country” allows middle-class Americans to declare inclusive “omnivore” musical tastes with one crucial exclusion: country, a music linked to low-status whites. Throughout Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Hubbs dissects this gesture, examining how provincial white working people have emerged since the 1970s as the face of American bigotry, particularly homophobia, with country music their audible emblem. Bringing together the redneck and the queer, Hubbs challenges the conventional wisdom and historical amnesia that frame white working folk as a perpetual bigot class. With a powerful combination of music criticism, cultural critique, and sociological analysis of contemporary class formation, Nadine Hubbs zeroes in on flawed assumptions about how country music models and mirrors white working-class identities. She particularly shows how dismissive, politically loaded middle-class discourses devalue country’s manifestations of working-class culture, politics, and values, and render working-class acceptance of queerness invisible. Lucid, important, and thought-provoking, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of American music, gender and sexuality, class, and pop culture.

Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles

Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles
Author: Sara Cohen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2017-09-29
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1351218409

How is popular music culture connected with the life, image, and identity of a city? How, for example, did the Beatles emerge in Liverpool, how did they come to be categorized as part of Liverpool culture and identity and used to develop and promote the city, and how have connections between the Beatles and Liverpool been forged and contested? This book explores the relationship between popular music and the city using Liverpool as a case study. Firstly, it examines the impact of social and economic change within that city on its popular music culture, focusing on de-industrialization and economic restructuring during the 1980s and 1990s. Secondly, and in turn, it considers the specificity of popular music culture and the many diverse ways in which it influences city life and informs the way that the city is thought about, valued and experienced. Cohen highlights popular music's unique role and significance in the making of cities, and illustrates how de-industrialization encouraged efforts to connect popular music to the city, to categorize, claim and promote it as local culture, and harness and mobilize it as a local resource. In doing so she adopts an approach that recognizes music as a social and symbolic practice encompassing a diversity of roles and characteristics: music as a culture or way of life distinguished by social and ideological conventions; music as sound; speech and discourse about music; and music as a commodity and industry.

Place, Culture and Community

Place, Culture and Community
Author: Johanne Devlin Trew
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2009-10-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443816132

The Ottawa Valley is a region of Canada straddling the Ottawa River in Ontario and Québec that is well known for its rich singing, storytelling, fiddling and step dancing traditions. Settled largely by the Irish, Scots and the French over the past two hundred years, it had largest concentration of people of Irish origin in Canada by the late 19th century. Travelling through the Valley one gets the sense of coming face to face with the past. While its dramatic history is filled with incidents of extreme hardship and tragedy, the overriding impression is of a triumphant survivalism associated with its strong men of the past; the voyageurs, the coureurs du bois and the lumbermen. The legacy of this unique heritage—from fiddling and step dancing to tales of priests, lumberman, and Orange and Green rivalries—is explored in this book through the voices of Valley people themselves. The author reveals the importance of place and history in the transmission of this vibrant regional culture down to the present day.

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.

Music Cultures in the United States

Music Cultures in the United States
Author: Ellen Koskoff
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2005-08-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1135888817

Music Cultures in the United States is a basic textbook for an Introduction to American Music course. Taking a new, fresh approach to the study of American music, it is divided into three parts. In the first part, historical, social, and cultural issues are discussed, including how music history is studied; issues of musical and social identity; and institutions and processes affecting music in the U.S. The heart of the book is devoted to American musical cultures: American Indian; European; African American; Latin American; and Asian American. Each cultural section has a basic introductory article, followed by case studies of specific musical cultures. Finally, global musics are addressed, including Classical Musics and Popular Musics, as they have been performed in the U.S.. Each article is written by an expert in the field, offering in-depth, knowledgeable, yet accessible writing for the student. The accompanying CD offers musical examples tied to each article. Pedagogic material includes chapter overviews, questions for study, and a chronoloogy of key musical events in American music and definitions in the margins.

Sounds American

Sounds American
Author: Ann Ostendorf
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2011-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820341363

Sounds American provides new perspectives on the relationship between nationalism and cultural production by examining how Americans grappled with musical diversity in the early national and antebellum eras. During this period a resounding call to create a distinctively American music culture emerged as a way to bind together the varied, changing, and uncertain components of the new nation. This played out with particular intensity in the lower Mississippi River valley, and New Orleans especially. Ann Ostendorf argues that this region, often considered an exception to the nation—with its distance from the center of power, its non-British colonial past, and its varied population—actually shared characteristics of many other places eventually incorporated into the country, thus making it a useful case study for the creation of American culture. Ostendorf conjures the territory’s phenomenally diverse “music ways” including grand operas and balls, performances by church choirs and militia bands, and itinerant violin instructors. Music was often associated with “foreigners,” in particular Germans, French, Irish, and Africans. For these outsiders, music helped preserve collective identity. But for critics concerned with developing a national culture, this multitude of influences presented a dilemma that led to an obsessive categorization of music with racial, ethnic, or national markers. Ultimately, the shared experience of categorizing difference and consuming this music became a unifying national phenomenon. Experiencing the unknown became a shared part of the American experience.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Black Sociology

The Ashgate Research Companion to Black Sociology
Author: Earl Wright II
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317044029

The Ashgate Research Companion to Black Sociology provides the most up to date exploration and analysis of research focused on Blacks in America. Beginning with an examination of the project of Black Sociology, it offers studies of recent events, including the ‘Stand Your Ground’ killing of Trayvon Martin, the impact of Hurricane Katrina on emerging adults, and efforts to change voting requirements that overwhelmingly affect Blacks, whilst engaging with questions of sexuality and family life, incarceration, health, educational outcomes and racial wage disparities. Inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’s charge of engaging in objective research that has a positive impact on society, and organised around the themes of Social Inequities, Blacks and Education, Blacks and Health and Future Directions, this timely volume brings together the latest interdisciplinary research to offer a broad overview of the issues currently faced by Blacks in United States. A timely, significant research guide that informs readers on the social, economic and physical condition of Blacks in America, and proposes directions for important future research. The Ashgate Research Companion will appeal to policy makers and scholars of Africana Studies, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Anthropology and Politics, with interests in questions of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, social inequalities, health and education.