Country Music

During the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West famously interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for "Best Female Video." A year later both performers returned to the VMAs with songs that responded directly to the original incident. In the meantime, the U.S. media and record-buying public had come to interpret the original incident using the stock scripts and characters of what Linda Williams has called “U.S. racial melodrama,” the fact of which both performers seemed aware. In this way, the Swift-West “incident” had come to reflect and mimic larger racial tensions, especially between black men and white women, as they had specifically come to be understood and portrayed during the Obama presidency, which many commentators have hastily and incorrectly identified as a symptom of “post-racialism.” This essay discusses how Kanye West and Taylor Swift reflect on and revise the tropes of racial melodrama, in the latter case to reinforce what Charles Mills calls "the epistemology of ignorance" when it comes to racism in America, and in the former case to challenge it.

Poster presentation based on the Ph.D. study "Folkelige og distingverte fellesskap: Gentrifisering av countrykultur i Norge – en festivalstudie" [Popular and distinguished communities: Gentrification of country music culture in Norway – a festival study] (Vestby, 2017).

This book examines the post-1960s era of popular music in the Anglo-Black Atlantic through the prism of historical theory and methods. By using a series of case studies, this book mobilizes historical theory and methods to underline different expressions of alternative music functioning within a mainstream musical industry. Each chapter highlights a particular theory or method while simultaneously weaving it through a genre of music expressing a notion of alternativity―an explicit positioning of one’s expression outside and counter to the mainstream. Historical Theory and Methods through Popular Music seeks to fill a gap in current scholarship by offering a collection written specifically for the pedagogical and theoretical needs of those interested in the topic.

“This study of ‘insurgent’ modes of popular music in the last third of the 20th century accomplishes quite a feat.  It yokes together a wide swath of sub-genres and styles--including reggae, punk, hip hop, alternative rock and country—through the lens of what the authors are calling “historical theory,” in order to chart a different, more comprehensive pathway through the annals of pop music history.  Shonk and McClure achieve an enviable balance of accessibility and scholarly depth, making this volume ideal for introductory college courses as well as more experienced researchers seeking a quick guide to specialized topics.”

--Pamela Fox, author of Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music; co-author of Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music

I have taught this course in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas four times between Fall 2014 and Spring 2016. Students published much of their writing to the class blog, located at: http://faigley.dwrl.utexas.edu/countrymusic

Since the 1970s, Tamworth has become well known as Australia's ‘country music capital’. Its annual Country and Western Music Festival has become the leading event of its type in Australia, attracting over 60,000 visitors every year. The festival, and country music more generally, have become central to the town's identity and tourism marketing strategies. This article discusses the social constructions that have surrounded Tamworth's transition to ‘country music capital’—of the ‘rural’, and of ‘country’—within the context of debates about the politics of place marketing. Textual analysis of promotional material and built landscapes reveals representations of rurality (or ‘senses of the rural’). In their most commercial form, representations of rurality converge on a dominant notion of ‘country’, quite different from the ‘countryside’ and ‘rural idyll’ in England. This dominant, or normative ‘country’ forms the basis of imagery for the festival, the Town's marketing strategy, and associated advertising campaigns by major sponsors. It is predominantly masculine, white, working class and nationalist. But links between musical style and discourses of place are complex. Colonial British histories, Celtic musical traditions and North American popular culture all inform ‘country’ in Tamworth, dissipating nationalist interpretations. Normative constructions also contrast with other, heterogeneous ruralities in Australia, that include the lived experiences of rural Australians, and on stage—in country music—where multiple ‘ruralised’ identities are performed. Even those who stand to benefit from place promotion have been uncertain about country music and ‘the country’, because of associated discourses of Tamworth as ‘hick’ and ‘redneck’. In the final section of the paper, reactions of residents to constructions of Tamworth as country music capital are discussed, via the results of a simple resident survey. In contrast to previous studies of the disempowering politics of place marketing, Tamworth residents were on the whole supportive of the new associations and images for the town, despite ‘hick’ connotations, as it has become a centre for ‘country’, and for country music. Reasons for this are explored, and resistances discussed. The result is a complex and entangled politics of national identity, gender, race and class, where meanings for place are variously interpreted and negotiated.

A short history of Johnny Cash's prison concerts, from his first show for inmates in Texas in the 1950s to his last at Angola in Louisiana in 1980. This paper also examines the legacy of Cash's shows, such as the performance by Los Tigres del Norte at Folsom prison in 2018, 50 years after Cash's famous performance there.

Located in Mount Airy, North Carolina, WPAQ Radio aired its first broadcast in February 1948 and has since served its community by broadcasting the music of the region, specializing in old-time and bluegrass. By the late 1940s America had witnessed almost three decades of radio history, and many stations had become well known for their country barn dances. Radio helped to change the “hillbilly” music of the 1920s into mainstream country music, a lucrative industry since the 1940s controlled in large part by record companies and commercial advertisers. The music no longer retained its simple ensemble format, but rather evolved into a style dominated by stars.
However, not all stations welcomed the change in the music so clearly identified with rural America. Since WPAQ’s first broadcast, Ralph Epperson, the station’s sole proprietor, has been using a mass medium to fight mass media in efforts to protect the regional heritage. In this thesis I will seek to explain the apparent anomaly of WPAQ as one of the few radio stations in America that have continued to broadcast old-time and bluegrass music in the face of commercial pressures to air more mainstream music.
Though various articles have documented episodes within the extensive history of WPAQ, this research investigates and presents a more detailed and comprehensive account of the station. This will be achieved by combining documentation with interviews and archives. In addition, I will argue for WPAQ’s importance in 
ethnomusicology and American music as a preserver of one of America’s distinct musical cultures.

"Investigation of country music from an anthropological and ethnomusicological perspective, utilizing recordings and live performances to put scholarship on country music into conversation with social theory and literature on social class, space/place, and racial identities."
Course Goals:
This course will examine country music's history from the late 1920s to the present to better understand the cultural politics behind a polarizing music genre, which is hated by some and deeply loved by others. The class is writing-and listening-heavy, and includes opportunities to write music reviews and an original song in the style of songs listened to throughout the course. The course will be conducted as a discussion-based class, and is accompanied by optional participation in the " lab " course, the UNM Honky Tonk Ensemble. There is no need to be able to read or write music to take this course.

Class Accompanied by optional one-credit performance course, UNM Honky Tonk Ensemble, MUS 231/560 (Monday nights, 7:15-9:45)

In his chapter on “Containing ‘Country Music Marxism,’” Reece Peck tracks the populist stylistic resonances between country western music and Fox News Channel programming. Using country musician John Rich’s 2009 song “Detroit” as a case study, Peck demonstrates how Fox News employed its unique mix of tabloid aesthetics and populist epistemic appeals to conscribe potentially progressive interpretations of Rich’s song. In doing so, Peck illuminates how Fox endows its conservative political news brand with affective power and social meaning. Tracking the migration of country style from the music sector to the news sector, Peck elucidates how political-taste alignments factor into conservative news cultures. His chapter serves as a call for greater scholarly attention to the way conservative news actively partisanizes national taste divisions, while relying on those very divisions in framing its news coverage.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth consideration of the color line in the US music market, much deeper treatment than that of a superficial social construct. Design/methodology/approach Content analysis was performed using archives from the Performing Arts Division of the New York Public Library. Findings A complex intersection of social and capitalist influences is fueled by culture and economics, filtered through the contributions of artists and media. Six major categories: social, media, artist, culture, industry, and economics contribute to its development and propagation. It continues to affect contemporary music markets. Research limitations/implications Interpretation of archival data is subject to availability of material and subjectivity of the researcher. Steps were taken to minimize bias. The research implies an opportunity for the US music market to celebrate diversity and social justice. Practical implications Focusing on the symbolic use of mus...

This project examines the transformation in the early 20th century of the steel guitar from a Hawaiian folk instrument to a mainstay of American popular music. The steel guitar – here characterised as a prepared instrument and a performance style whereby a guitar is positioned face up on the lap of a seated player who stops the strings by means of a steel bar – is a late 19th century Hawaiian adaption of the Spanish guitar. Its original role was that of a solo and accompanying instrument in the performance of Hawaiian music, which was itself an ethnic music tradition that had developed under American and European colonial influences. Once Hawaiian music was exposed to Western audiences in the early 20th century, its popularity grew rapidly and it evolved from an ethnic curiosity to a global popular music phenomenon. The steel guitar was at first synonymous with Hawaiian music, but just as the music became more global in its outreach, so too did the instrument itself. The steel guitar came to be gradually divorced from its original, ethnic Hawaiian context, and was incorporated steadily into a range of mainland American popular music stylings. This study examines the origins of the steel guitar, the evolution of early steel guitar style and the context in which the evolution occurred.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the proposition that Scottish traditional folk tunes (from now on referred to as “Scotunes”) carried by emigrants from Scotland to America 1750–1800 survived to influence American folk music of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  The writer believes that melodic forms, fragments, and tendencies from these Scotunes also survived to influence today’s contemporary popular music and produce what modern listeners recognize as fragments or forms that “sound Scottish.”  That will be the foundation for further study.

When the Saints Go Marching In – Herostratically famous, well-known to one and all, and the song some of us love to hate. The Saints began its existence as a serene African-American spiritual, presumably well spread in the American South. Initially it was recorded by jubilee singers, self-accompanied vocalists and country musicians in the 1920:ies. The tune later became the jazz standard, worn out to disgrace. It was eventually taken up by a plethora of rock singers, gospel artists, folk singers, comedians, dance orchestras and marching bands, and the song also made its way into children's music. The Saints has become emblematic of the city of New Orleans, LA and even provided the name to its American football team. All the time, however, the tune has maintained its role as a religious hymn, sung by individuals, in congregations and played at funerals.

It is certainly not easy to decipher why and how The Saints became what it did and a tune everybody almost everywhere is familiar with, but a good start is to look at the music itself in retrospect. The present book is thus the accompaniment to a 4-CD collection of 82 recordings of the song, comprising a chronological compilation of all extant recordings of The Saints from 1923 and through the 1930:s, including 'field recordings' from the US Library of Congress. After 1940, the collection is more selective, in that it encompasses versions of the tune that were deemed particularly interesting or representative for some reason or another. The waning of the 78 rpm era put a natural end to this cavalcade. The recordings can be obtained from the author in mp3 format.

This dissertation examines the relations between country-western music produced in Quebec between 1942 and 1957 and the concept of popular modernity. Drawing together musical and historical analysis, it explores the cultural significance of country-western at the beginning of the genre.

Most people do not expect gay or transgender people to create country music, and certainly not in earnest. This essay explores the music and approach of two North American innovators of gay and transgender country music, Patrick Haggerty of the band Lavender Country and Rae Spoon, spanning the early 1970s to the present. Both musicians cultivate an aesthetic of sincerity, which is discussed in relation to possibilities for queer and transgender expression and ideological critique, as well as for camp performance. One longstanding challenge for “othered” folk musicians is that they are expected to be both exotic and yet also relatable. Their aesthetic of “queer sincerity” aids their navigation of this “outsider populism.”

In this dissertation I examine the MuzikMafia, a distinct musical community that developed from a stylistically diverse Nashville scene into a social collective and commercial enterprise, both of which emphasize musical excellence and promote musical and artistic diversity. In order to understand the MuzikMafia more deeply, I explore three of its defining structures: community, identity, and change. Analysis of each aspect provides insight into what the MuzikMafia actually is, the role of music in the lives of its members, and the reasons behind the MuzikMafia’s period of commercial growth and development from 2001 through 2005. I observe how a shared musical and social ideology created a bond between several marginalized Nashville artists and how that bond, or rather its commodification, transformed the MuzikMafia into a significant part of the commercial mainstream. The dispossessed interact with the dominant structures of capitalist society in a variety of ways. Music serves as a medium of expression and often as an agent of social change through individual and group action. The MuzikMafia is an example of one such dispossessed group that eventually gained national and international popularity. I argue that, despite its numerous anti-establishment sentiments, the MuzikMafia confirms if not supports the existing hegemony of Nashville’s commercial music industry. Based upon participant observation, oral history fieldwork, and behind the scenes experiences among several platinum-selling artists, this research provides new insight into the study of popular music, presenting evidence that, not only is ethnomusicological fieldwork in the popular mainstream possible, but such research contributes much to the ongoing development of ethnomusicology and popular music studies.

In the small but growing literature on the philosophy of country music, the question of how we ought to understand the genre's notion of authenticity has emerged as one of the central questions. Many country music scholars argue that authenticity claims track attributions of cultural standing or artistic self-expression. However, careful attention to the history of the genre reveals that these claims are simply factually wrong. On the basis of this, we have grounds for dismissing these attributions. Here, I argue for an alternative model of authenticity in which we take claims about the relative authenticity of country music to be evidence of 'country' being a dual character concept in the same way that it has been suggested of punk rock and hip-hop. Authentic country music is country music that embodies the core value commitments of the genre. These values form the basis of country artists' and audiences' practical identities. Part of country music's aesthetic practice is that audiences reconnect with, reify, and revise this common practical identity through identification with artists and works that manifest these values. We should then think of authenticity discourse within country music as a kind of game within the genre's practice of shaping and maintaining this practical identity.

“TransAmericana” describes a contemporary sociomusical phenomenon of transgender and queerly gendered musicians who have chosen American roots genres including country and folk as their expressive material. This combination of gender and genre may seem unexpected. Roots functions through assertions of authenticity and sincerity, framing itself as a simple and historical music “of the people.” Meanwhile, biased views of transgender people assume deceit, while radical queer voices tend to be heard via genres linked to rebellion or camp. Yet several of these musicians have come to their gender and genre identifications simultaneously, describing a cogenerative relationship. My essay argues that assumptions of normative identity in Americana music make it an attractive and powerful musical space for transgender and queerly gendered artists to play with both the sociomusical identifications around Americana and expectations of “the transgender narrative."

Musicians discussed: Rae Spoon, Joe Stevens/Coyote Grace, Namoli Brennet, Tylan Greenstein/Girlyman, Actor Slash Model

A dominant pattern in bluegrass and country music song lyrics enacts a male version of the Romantic quest myth, in which the hero, the good-old-boy, a descendant of the ante-bellum Southern Cavalier, seeks to navigate life's journey. Starting out in a homeplace he is impatient to leave, he travels along a road whose demeaning labor, worldly temptations and fleeting pleasures, impinge on his liberty and threaten his honor. Unable to establish or return to a homeplace that now has become an object of nostalgia, he feels guilt and shame while seeking solace where he can find it, knowing that a heavenly home is beyond reach. Note: the essay contains a misprint: not knowing the word "trotline," the Canadian editor mistakenly changed my word to "troutline" without consulting me.

Although the origins of the steel guitar are irrefutable, historians have been loath to attribute much of the art of western swing steel guitar to Hawaiian influences. First applied to the inceptive stylings with which Bob Dunn cemented the position of the instrument in the western swing ensemble in 1935, this prejudice does not survive a close examination of the evolution of steel guitar style in the 1930s. This paper will show how prominent steel guitarists of the South West drew on innovations and stylings from a dynamic Hawaiian music scene that was evolving simultaneously.

According to Greimas, the semiotic square is far more than a heuristic for semantic and literary analysis. It represents the generative "deep structure" of human culture and cognition which "define the fundamental mode of existence of an individual or of a society, and subsequently the conditions of existence of semiotic objects". The veracity of this bold hypothesis has received little attention in the literature. In response, this paper traces the history and development of the square of opposition from Aristotle to Greimas and beyond, to propose that the relations modeled in these diagrams are rooted in gestalt memories of kinesthesia and proprioception from which we derive basic structural awareness of opposition and contrast-including verticality, bilaterality, transversality, markedness and analogy. The paper draws on findings in the phenomenology of movement, recent developments in the analysis of logical opposition, recent scholarship in (post)Greimasian semiotics and prescient insights from Greimas himself. The argument is further tested via multimodal content analyses of a popular music video-highlighting relationships the semiotic square shares with mundane cultural ideologies and showing how these relationships might be traced to memory structures of bodily movement. The paper highlights the neglected relevance of embodied chiasmus and illustrates the enduring relevance of Greimasean thought.

During the last few years, Nashville’s country music industry has been mourning a larger number of its citizens than usual. These losses included two, Norma Gerson (“makeup artist to the stars”) and Rainbow Room owner/-erstwhile “Hee Haw” bit-player David “Skull” Schulman (“the mayor of Printers’ Alley”), that underscore the little-known range and diversity of roles Jews have played in Nashville and country-music history.

Though frequently ignored by the music mainstream, queer and transgender country and Americana artists have made essential contributions as musicians, performers, songwriters, and producers. Queer Country blends ethnographic research with analysis and history to provide the first in-depth study of these artists and their work. Shana Goldin-Perschbacher delves into the careers of well-known lesbian artists like k.d. lang and Amy Ray and examines the unlikely success of singer-songwriter Patrick Haggerty, who found fame forty years after releasing the first out gay country album. She also focuses on later figures like nonbinary transgender musician Rae Spoon and renowned drag queen country artist Trixie Mattel; and on recent breakthrough artists like Orville Peck, Amythyst Kiah, and chart-topping Grammy-winning phenomenon Lil Nas X. Many of these musicians place gender and sexuality front and center even as it complicates their careers. But their ongoing efforts have widened the circle of country/Americana by cultivating new audiences eager to connect with the artists’ expansive music and personal identities.

Detailed and one-of-a-kind, Queer Country reinterprets country and Americana music through the lives and work of artists forced to the margins of the genre's history.

Publication supported by a grant from the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Winner, Woody Guthrie First Book Award, International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch (IASPM-US), 2024

A Pitchfork Best Music Book of 2022
A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022
A Variety Best Music Book of 2022
A Boot Best Music Book of 2022
A Ticketmaster Best Music Book of 2022
A Happy Magazine Best Music Book of 2022

Certificate of Merit, Best Historical Research in Country, Folk, Roots or World Music. category, 2023 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, 2023

Country music remains one of the most popular genres in U.S. American society but is historically under-researched compared to rock, rap and other styles. This article extends the social science literature on the genre by examining themes of masculine identity in popular country hits of the current century. A content analysis of 35 top country hits from the last 15 years of the Billboard charts reveals three key masculine archetypes: the lover, the family man and particularly the country boy, which is the dominant masculine image within the last few years of the genre. Together, the three create a life-course narrative where the rambunctious country boy will eventually settle into monogamous heterosexual romance, with marriage and fatherhood presented as the ultimate achievement of successful manhood. A fourth, lesser, archetype, the roughneck, presents an "arrested development" version of the country boy, fully-grown but rejecting the social and familial responsibilities of the other archetypes. These narratives simultaneously challenge some aspects of hegemonic masculinity (urbanity, white-collar labor) while reinforcing others (whiteness, heterosexuality).

Country music has been popular in Ireland since the 1960s, most notably in the work of homegrown performers. Despite the durability of this appeal in the face of huge changes in Ireland and in the Irish music industry over a half-century, it remains curiously underexamined in the literature on Irish popular music. In this paper, I wish to argue the following: (1) Country music did not simply arise 'naturally' in Ireland as a reflection of musical or national characteristics: it was promoted as such. (2) Both popular and academic literature on the subject have tended to unreflectively echo the narrative that was introduced alongside the music in order to fix its audience. (3) In so doing, the literature reproduces a set of anxieties about modernity as it arrived in Ireland, about the postcolonial condition and about authenticity, even as it attempts to locate Irish popular music within these concerns.

Theoretical trends and debates around the notion of popular culture: analyses in different countries on how context shapes the meaning of mass consumption, symbolic exchanges, and cultural and media productions.

General Course Objectives
What's popular culture? How do we study it anthropologically? From American country music to K-pop, tourism and beauty in Brazil to online gaming, popular culture offers ways to access key insights into contemporary lives. We will take up popular culture today as expressive forms which emerges through the relation between what are often ordinary, yet intimate and particular, everyday acts, and spectacular forms of mass culture. Anthropology brings a uniquely fieldwork-based perspective, which can overlap, but more commonly complements, work done in other disciplines. In this class, we focus on learning specifically anthropological approaches and contributions to the study of popular culture. The course is divided into four equal parts. The first examines ways that folklore and contemporary popular culture have been defined, and their commodification. Then we will do two country case studies, South Korea and Brazil, followed by an in-depth look at what is nonetheless a global form of popular culture, video games. While this work will be done through readings and in class, with weekly analytic memos, we will also be getting practical experience in how to study popular culture by doing a folklore collecting project, and then developing this into participant-observation research on a popular culture phenomenon of your choice.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once articulated for the masses, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. If this is so, it seems important to take the pulse of civil society from time to time, to verify and validate progress along this path, rather than merely trust in the inevitability hoped for, struggled towards, and promised by King and his interlocutors past and present, including the former U.S. President Barack Obama. Popular cultures can be a useful projection for humanists and social scientists alike of how sociocultural norms, politics, and aesthetics are variously formulated, interpreted and policed at large scales. This paper seeks to explore the race-based cultural policing efforts made around two recent events, the “Old Town Road” controversy of 2019 and the “Kendrick Lamar n-word” controversy of 2018, as well as the “metaproblematic” backlash to these efforts, which I argue expose and put pressure on many of the (increasing) contradictions within 21st century American liberalism as it relates to race and popular (public) cultures. I argue that metaproblematics – the problematizing of things construed themselves as problems, as well as those entities doing the initial problematizing – is a mode of counterhegemonic critique that is predicated on ontological (or perceptual) authenticity and epistemological (or conceptual) clarity, including the questioning/challenging of sincerity and “rigid” designations like [calling someone a] racist, in the face of apparent ethical, political and/or aesthetic contradictions. I also reflect on recent cases of false claims of racism at Oberlin College and “n-word” passes at a Maryland high school to introduce the possibility of what I call hypersincerity, which can be absurd and destructive even if/when intentions are pure, and can serve as a metaproblematic trigger, as well as on the case of comedian Dave Chappelle, The Chappelle Show and his “Black White Supremacist” sketch which embody the metaproblematic ethos by rendering racism(s) as absurd, worthy of laughter, via a fearless if inherently controversial authenticity. I conclude by contextualizing these feelings of departure within the much broader arena of freedom and the inevitability of diaspora, not merely of human bodies but of their cultural competencies/artifacts as well.

This chapter (from The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music) focuses, for the most part, on Ralph Stanley (1927-2016), the bluegrass or ‘old-time’ musician whose long career in popular music gained fresh recognition following the use of his music in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? in 2000. Taking as a starting point the song ‘O Death’, the chapter examines discourse around Stanley’s age and the ways in which age is witnessed in his voice. I provide an overview of Stanley’s career, followed by a discussion of different versions of ‘O Death’. I also consider the relationship between the particular and the universal and between the individual and the community.

Houston Bernard battled with different parts of playing when he was a tenderfoot guitarist. Keep in mind that you wouldn't lift everything up right away and you may battle with things like certain harmony movements. At the point when this happens, make a stride back, back yourself off and advise yourself that what you're attempting to do isn't inconceivable.

In the early 1930s, the steel guitar, a Hawaiian invention of the late 19th century, was adopted by musicians in an emerging form of dance music known as western swing, a subgenre of country music. The design of the newly amplified instrument and the style of its players underwent continual change as the music of the genre evolved. However, in the 1950s, as the popularity of western swing declined, the steel guitar was completely supplanted by the pedal steel guitar and a new stylistic approach that it enabled. Through transcription and analysis the study offers new perspectives on what have been anecdotal observations surrounding the various stages in development of the steel guitar between 1935 and 1955.

Course Description
This course focuses on learning to perform country music from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, also known as “honky tonk” music. Artists and material covered include songs by Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Hank Williams,, Buck Owens, Johnny Rodriguez and Charley Pride. Guest artists will be brought in to run clinics on singing and how to communicate with the sound engineer and also give general input on the dynamics of playing in a band.
Taught by performing country artists, the class focuses on country singing style, harmony, rhythm and lead instrumentation, song arrangement, and performance techniques for successful performance. The class is designed to be taught as a group, with students learning to perform as a band in the process.
Desired outcomes for this course include an increased appreciation for the poetics and nuance of country music performance (including stylistic details relating to honky tonk), hands-on knowledge of country music’s sonic progression and history, and a more intimate knowledge of country music’s thematic content from the perspective of someone who has performed it.