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

“…Fox notes that the martyred housewife was a common role for female characters in country music of the era, noting that women represented the embodiment of the home and were responsible for the protection of that institution in that genre of music (p. 244 13 ). A happily married mother of three, Wells was content to give women a voice, but not to the extent of alienating the male country establishment.…”

Section: Loretta Lynn's Emergence Into Country Music 1960-1965mentioning

confidence: 99%

Loretta Lynn: Writin’ Life

Shipka¹

2010

Online Journal of Rural Research & Policy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The release of Loretta Lynn"s 2004 album Van Leer Rose welcomed back after 33 years one of the premier feminist voices in recorded music. The songs that Loretta wrote in 60s and early 70s were some of the most controversial and politically charged to hit the airwaves. They encompassed a microcosm of issues that rural women were facing including the changing sexual roles of women, ideas on marriage, the ravages of war and substance abuse. This textual analysis looks at the 94 songs that Loretta wrote and co-wrote between the years 1960 to 1972 (the year which she stopped writing), as well as the music of Van Leer Rose. By looking at Lynn"s writing, we begin to understand the viewpoints of this trailblazing artist and how she reflected her life and the social times in her music. It is a testament to her that these works remain as timely and as politically charged today as they did 40 years ago.

show abstract

“…According to Fox, humour is 'the least recorded but certainly one of the most important aspects of live country music'. 41 For several decades now, especially in the United States, country has been a major commercial form. However, despite its apparent simplicity, country music's more 'minor' varieties, like folk and minor literature, still point to political complexities.…”

Section: Textual Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Music as a Model for Postmodernist Textual Analysis

Breyley¹

2009

New Formations

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

For most of the twentieth century, Western analysis of music drew largely on notions of an idealised 'unity' or 'organic coherence'. The concept of 'organicism' in music derives principally from readings of music theorist Heinrich Schenker's idea that music 'grows' and 'develops' in layers (background, middleground and foreground) from a structural 'seed'. Schenker saw music as 'a living motion of tones in a naturally-given space, a composing out, a melodicising and horizontalising of the chord given in Nature'. 1 He also described music as the 'image of our life-motion', in which 'motion toward the goal' involved 'great distances'. 2 While the final decades of the century saw a growing critique of aspects of Schenkerian analysis, often drawing on movements in literary criticism, postmodernist approaches to music have been applied somewhat belatedly.This essay is concerned less with the analysis of musical texts than with the application of musical concepts to the analysis of non-musical texts. Alongside postmodernist analyses of music, music itself, with its range of structural possibilities, provides a useful model with which to analyse any text. Applying the notion of music in its broadest sense -as an assemblage of sounds and silences, rather than as the Schenkerian 'natural system' -the essay considers the possibilities of such analysis. Referring to the work of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it explores theoretical approaches to hearing, seeing, time and space. It argues that the mutable elements of music -such as pitch, tempo and volume, as well as music's dynamic cultural connections -provide a model for multidirectional analytical activity and for intersections of the spatial, temporal, aural and visual. While a musical model may initially appear to represent a return to History's traditional privileging of time over space, it in fact rejects the privileging of either time or space. It is, rather, an extension of twentieth-century moves toward models of multiplicity, mobility and diversity. A musical model complements and extends the possibilities of Benjamin's labyrinth, Derrida's différance, Foucault's genealogy, and Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome. Most of these paradigms seem at first to stress the spatial over the temporal and thus, arguably, the visual over the aural. However, multidirectional and 'musical' readings of the theorists' texts (as advocated by their own models) make the interdependence of temporal, spatial, aural and visual categories clear.Each of the above-mentioned theoretical models offers possibilities for approaching the role of memory in textual analysis. Like memory, music presents multilayered patterns of modulating texture; music thus offers an especially useful model for the twists and turns of memory. Repetition, variation and crowded moments of simultaneous sound between silences or 'blanks' emerge as both temporal and spatial effects of memory, history and their readings. Musical patterns are useful for tracing such ge...

show abstract

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

Cited by 28 publications

References 20 publications

Yo, DJ, That's My Brand: An Examination of Consumer Response to Brand Placements in Hip-Hop Music

Yo, DJ, That's My Brand: An Examination of Consumer Response to Brand Placements in Hip-Hop Music

Loretta Lynn: Writin’ Life

Music as a Model for Postmodernist Textual Analysis

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About