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The purpose of this study is to explore the ways Black women and queer artists and their audiences employ country music as a way to facilitate a reclamation and complication of (Black) Americanness. The data for this study emerges from a qualitative content analysis of six music videos by Black artists released on YouTube between January 2016 and December 2022 and their associated comment sections. The years between 2016 and 2022 have seen the United States contend with what has been considered a "racial reckoning." This study recognizes these six music videos as sites for personal and communal reflection and re-evaluation on how this moment of race-based national conversation brings into question the ways we typify American identity and citizenship. The foundational literature for this study focuses on the production of culture perspective, disidentification, quare studies, and musical construction of identity. / Master of Science / This project explores how Black women and queer artists and their audiences use country music to facilitate reclaim and complicate Black Americanness. The data for this study emerges from a qualitative content analysis of six music videos by Black artists released on YouTube between January 2016 and December 2022 and their associated comment sections. The years between 2016 and 2022 have seen the United States contend with what has been considered a "racial reckoning." This study recognizes these six music videos as sites for personal and communal reflection and re-evaluation on how this moment of race-based national conversation brings into question the ways we typify American identity and citizenship.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1979 S84 / Master of Arts

Book Summary: Massively popular for the past century, country music has often been associated with political and social conservatism. While such figures as George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ted Cruz have embraced and even laid claim to this musical genre over the years, country performers have long expressed bold and progressive positions on a variety of public issues, whether through song lyrics, activism, or performance style.Bringing together a wide spectrum of cultural critics, The Honky Tonk on the Left takes on this conservative stereotype and reveals how progressive thought has permeated country music from its beginnings to the present day. The original essays in this collection analyze how diverse performers, including Fiddlin’ John Carson, Webb Pierce, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, O. B. McClinton, Garth Brooks, and Uncle Tupelo, have taken on such issues as government policies, gender roles, civil rights, prison reform, and labor unrest. Taking notice of the wrongs in their eras, these musicians worked to address them in song and action, often with strong support from fans.In addition to the volume editor, this collection includes work by Gregory N. Reish, Peter La Chapelle, Stephanie Vander Wel, Charles L. Hughes, Ted Olson, Nadine Hubbs, Stephanie Shonekan, Stephen A. King, P. Renee Foster, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Travis D. Stimeling, and Jonathan Silverman.

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PRODUCING COUNTRY: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings. By Michael Jarrett. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 2014.

Review of Legends of Old-Time Music: Fifty Years of County Records

Review of Tennessee’s New Deal Landscape: A Guidebook. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001. 281 pp.

The rising popularity of country music in the United States since WWII is a cultural phenomenon intimately related to the ascendance of conservative values, leaders, and movements over the same period. By routinely celebrating themes like heterosexual love, the patriarchal nuclear family, hard work, individualism, freedom, patriotism, religion, and small-town life, country music provided the soundtrack for the insurgent conservatism of politicians like George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. In the sixties and seventies, while other forms of popular music (rock, folk, soul) articulated the values of liberals, socialists, hippies, war protestors, feminists, and civil rights activists, country music alone stood for the "traditional" values cherished by the so-called "silent majority" that powered the rise of the Right. The spread of both country music and conservatism is also a reflection of the "southernization" of America---the diffusion across the nation of cultural and political traits long associated with the South.