|
View the H-Southern-Music Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Southern-Music's January 2006 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-Southern-Music's January 2006 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-Southern-Music home page.
Authenticity is a rich and tricky subject, as the many responses to this topic have indicated. As a cultural historian, I am always fascinated by how authenticity in cultural forms like music might be located in common historical experiences, for example, the shift from the agricultural south to the industrial one. But I'm most interested in why social groups want to define or claim an "authentic" tradition and identity, and what criteria they use to do so. How much is a need for cultural authority at play when disputes arise about what is or is not authentic? (I think that the piece George Lipsitz published on Mardis Gras "Indians" in the collection _Time Passages_ might be a useful for anyone interested in this topic, by the way.) Responding specifically about music, I see that several of the most recent posts in this discussion have started to raise examples from Texas, California, and other places where southerners and their music migrated throughout the twentieth century. So I'd like to add some observations about the "west" as another region to consider. First, how important are "rural roots" (as opposed to urban ones) to the construction of an authentic southern/country sound? Clearly lots of people play and or listen to country music who have urban roots, but the name signals a rural past. What are the social and political resonances there? And second, what's an authentic "cowboy and western" music, which some commentators and scholars see as separate from country music, despite the common origins of some songs and poems in Texas, Arkansas, etc. In my research with contemporary cowboy poets and singers it's clear that some want to claim work with cattle/horses as the criteria of authenticity--past or present--while others claim and accept a legitimacy that is communicated through philosophy or sensibility in the art work--not through actual regional or occupational origins. It's interesting to me that the debate itself has generated songs and poems about authenticity. I'm still thinking about what I want to say about authenticity and the jazz tradition, by the way. But I will point out that early jazz musicians often wrote (or dictated) jazz autobiographies that signaled authenticity through their origin stories about jazz. How do biographies and autobiographies of southern/country musicians compare? Kathy Ogren University of Redlands
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
|