Dougie Young and political resistance in early Aboriginal country music

Abstract

Country music has a reputation for being the music of the American white working-class South and being closely aligned with conservative politics. However, country music has also been played by non-white minorities and has been a vivid way of expressing progressive political views. In the hands of the Indigenous peoples of Australia, country music has often given voice to a form of life-writing that critiques colonial power. The songs of Dougie Young, dating from the late 1950s, provide one of the earliest and most expressive examples of this use of country music. Young's songs were a type of social-realist satire and to be fully understood should be placed within the broader socio-political context of 1950s and 1960s Australia. Young's legacy was also important for Aboriginal musicians in the 1990s and the accompanying reassessment of Australia's colonial past. Country music has provided particular opportunities for minority and Indigenous groups seeking to use popular culture to tell their stories. This use of country music provides a new dimension to more conventional understandings of its political role.

This Is Not a Drill: Towards a Sonic and Sensorial Musicriminology

“…That is not to say criminology and related fields have not had interest in music and its clear cultural and social relevance in exploring social harms, resistance, redemption and criminalisation. For example Kauzlarich (2012) and Kauzlarich and Awsumb (2017) have highlighted music’s role in protest, resistance and post-colonial policing (also see Martin, 2019); Lee (2010) has explored the role music plays in correctional settings; Hamm (1993) has explored music’s role in recruitment to skinhead Neo-Nazi groups; Ferrell et al (2008) have traced music’s complex association with a range of deviant and resistance cultures, highlighting inter-alia the confusion between rap music and the so-called ‘street gangs’; Linnemann and McClanahan (2017) have similarly explored this slippage in relation to ‘straight edge’ subcultures; Newman (2017) has analysed the pleasures and desires wrapped up in violent or salacious crime story-telling; Muzzatti (2004) has explored the vilification of musicians and scape-goating of music as a cause of violence; Ilan (2020) has used drill music to explore street cultures, where music often highlights the meaning of obscured language, values and rituals; research has also identified how rap lyrics are now often used as evidence in criminal cases featuring musicians, with disproportionately negative outcomes for young black men (Nielson et al, 2019; Rykajdo, 2020). Indeed, there has been a body of scholarship that has focused on hip-hop and gangsta rap, right through to drill music, highly relevant to the current paper 1 .…”