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I really enjoyed Martyn Bone's contribution to the 'what is southern rock and where is it from' discussion -- not least as I'm currently writing a book on connections between British music and the American South! He's spot on with his comments about the recent fetishization of the Kings of Leon, a phenomenon that forms part of a venerable tradition of responses to an imagined South and its musical culture that stretches back past reactions to early REM (whose southerness -- or lack thereof -- the British music press found quite vexing in the 1980s), through the 'southern rock' vogue that Paul Wells writes about so wittily, into a postwar world of skiffle, blues and Dixieland jazz revivalism, and encounters with early southern rock and rollers like Jerry Lee, Elvis, and Buddy Holly. And then there's the reception to numerous southern and southernesque minstrel shows and spiritual groups who toured the UK in the 19th and early 20th Century, the significance of overlapping Atlantic 'folk' and ballad traditions, and much more besides, to consider. Perhaps most signficantly, Martyn reminds us that definitions of 'southerness' in music (and more generally) are simultaneously created, assumed, and imposed from within and beyond the region itself with rather different meanings, coordinates, and consequences in each locale and over time. Consequently, at the risk of trotting out platitudes, notions of what constitutes real southern rock, or any other form of putatively authentic 'southern' music, have always been contested -- which is part of the fun and fascination, of course. So, let's hear it for those displaced giants of southern music, Elton John (c. Tumbleweed Connection/Honky Chateau); Exile on Main Street-era Rolling Stones, and Elvis Costello as heard on the recent Delivery Man album....I'll cut my losses before I embark on paeans to "the Glasgow Hillbilly" Lonnie Donegan, the Downliners Sect, and the Nashville Teens. Cheers, Brian PS: there's an almost coherent version of some of these thoughts in a chapter called "By Elvis and All The Saints" that appeared in Joseph Ward (ed) Britain and the American South (U of Miss. Press, 2003). Professor Brian Ward, Dept. of History, Keene Flint Hall, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL32611 Tel: 352 392 0271 (w) Fax: 352 392 6927 Personal Homepage: http://plaza.ufl.edu/wardb/ History Homepage: http://web.history.ufl.edu/ HFP: History Homepage: http://web.history.ufl.edu/internal/
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