Description
- Abstract:
- This work examines New England Country & Western music as a series of frontiers that construct and reinforce regional working-class community and identity in a multi-ethnic region. Accepting that identity ? racial, ethnic, class, regional, and national/global ? are socially constructed phenomena, this work explores how New Englanders utilize frontier motifs of Country & Western music to establish multi-ethnic sociability, community, and identity in the midst of demographic, economic, industrial, and technological changes. To provide a framework for the discussion of New England Country & Western music, the work begins with a history of the music in New England, from its origins in hillbilly orchestras and old-time fiddle competitions of the 1920s, through the barnstorming era (1935-1955) and national chart success of New England's most prominent singer and song (Dick Curless' "A Tombstone Every Mile" in 1965), and the disappearance of local Country & Western music from local/regional radio in the 1970s with the onset of automated radio. Subsequent chapters examine the New England Country & Western Event ?the pairing of a show and a dance ? as a generative site for social and economic capital, and multi-ethnic sociability and community. The professional life of the barnstorming Country & Western musician is explored as existing along a frontier between individualism and communitarianism, and generative of tensions between personal problems and solutions. The final two chapters examine the New England Country & Western dialectic ? tensions between self-reliance and communitarianism ? in Maine truck driving songs and songs about self-sufficient cowboys and farmers. The archetypal figures of New England Country & Western ? the Maine truck driver and the old cowboy living in changing times ? can be understood as the embodiment of a longing for an imagined age of self-sufficiency, an identity marker of working class community, and a critique of a national/global culture that appears to value financial capital over social capital.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2008)
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Murphy, Clifford R.,
"New England Country & Western Music: Self-Reliance, Community Expression, and Regional Resistance on the New England Frontier"
(2008).
Ethnomusicology Theses and Dissertations, Music Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0D21VWV
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Ethnomusicology Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Ethnomusicology department.... -