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Defining Dixie: Creating and Deploying Country Music’s Mythic South
Strom, Phoebe
Strom, Phoebe
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Text, History, Department of, Honors papers, Student research
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Abstract
Tracing country music's evolution reveals that its mythic South is the result of a
confluence of social, political, economic, and cultural factors involving both sides of
the nation and of the aisle. The process of homogenizing the South in country music
functioned to reaffirm the belief system the region ostensibly represented, serving
as both a provocation and a reaction to alternate condemnation, mockery, and
idealization in the larger American political context. Thus, country's Southernness
cannot be understood as the inevitable product of the genre’s Southern origins or
static musical tradition. Rather, country emerged as hillbilly music in the 1920s and
was promoted in racialized, regionalized ways. Attracting derision and expanding
nationally, the genre adopted an overtly American tone and sound beginning in the
30s and continuing through the early Cold War. Underground segregationist music
signaled the first signs of country's new conception of Southernness as an
expression of white backlash to the Civil Rights Movement. In mainstream country,
Southern nostalgia embodied everything that was missing from an America
struggling with counterculture, the Civil Rights Movement, and Vietnam. 'Outlaw'
country and Southern rock directly built off and challenged this view; the market
power of their rebellious South and their connections to more progressive politics
meant that their aggressive brand of Southernness became normalized. Modern
country is defined by a combination of these two Southern identities, identities
whose construction provides insight into the role of popular culture in the political
sphere and how to structure conversations on race relations and Southern memory.
Description
Phoebe Strom granted permission for the digitization of his paper. It was submitted by CD.