The Sociology of Country Music

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Ethnic Relations ◽  
Geographic Mobility ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Race And Ethnic Relations ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
The American South ◽  
Political Realignment

How can a sociological approach improve our understanding of country music? This chapter answers this question by focusing on the intersections between country music history and the core sociological theme of modernity. Challenging standard interpretations of country music as folk culture, it shows how the emergence of the popular commercial genre corresponds to the increasing modernization of the American South. The genre’s subsequent growth and evolution tracks central objects of sociological study including industrialization, geographic mobility, race and ethnic relations, the changing social class structure, political realignment in the United States, and (paradoxically) urbanization. Country music is comparatively understudied in the sociology of music despite its rich history and massive popularity; this chapter shows that the genre and the discipline nevertheless mutually illuminate one another in robust and often surprising ways.

scholarly journals Collecting locally : Walker Evans's photographs of Alabama in Alabama institutions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mallory Lapointe Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of Photography ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Walker Evans ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South

Within the United States, the American South can be perceived as its own entity. From the arts to Southern cuisine, the South commands attention with its own history, myths and culture. Within the history of photography, Walker Evans's photographs of Alabama are arguably some of the most culturally significant images taken of the state and its residents. This thesis investigates how photographs of Alabama are collected in the same locality. By examining the collecting practices of four Alabama institutions in regards to photographs in general, and Walker Evans specifically, this case study will expand on the question of how photographs, in a Southern cultural context, work to create a sense of place and attachment to local geography.

scholarly journals War, religion, and white supremacy in comparative perspective: South Africa and the American South

2004 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
R M
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
White American ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Religious Symbolism ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
The American South

The southern states of the United States of America and South Africa share a number of analogous historical realities. One of these, which is the main subject of  this article,  is  the way in which the memory of a lost war had fused cultural mythology and religious symbolism to provide a foundation for the formation and maintenance of attitudes of white supremacy in both contexts.  This article seeks to achieve a historical  understanding of the complex interrelationship between the development of cultural identity and Protestant Christianity by  focusing on these issues in the histories of the Afrikaner and the white American Southerner in comparative perspective. 

Latinas/os in the Southern United States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perla M. Guerrero
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
The South ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
New Destinations ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
The American South ◽  
And Migration

Latinas/os were present in the American South long before the founding of the United States of America, yet knowledge about their southern communities in different places and time periods is deeply uneven. In fact, regional themes important throughout the South clarify the dynamics that shaped Latinas/os’ lives, especially race, ethnicity, and the colorline; work and labor; and migration and immigration. Ideas about racial difference, in particular, reflected specifics of place, and intersections of local, regional, and international endeavors and movements of people and resources. Accordingly, Latinas/os’ position and treatment varied across the South. They first worked in agricultural fields picking cotton, oranges, and harvesting tobacco, then in a variety of industries, especially poultry and swine processing and packing. The late 20th century saw the rapid growth of Latinas/os in southern states due to changing migration and immigration patterns that moved from traditional states of reception to new destinations in rural, suburban, and urban locales with limited histories with Latinas/os or with substantial numbers of immigrants in general.

scholarly journals Slavery and the new history of capitalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-244
Author(s):  
Trevor Burnard ◽  
Giorgio Riello
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Great Divergence ◽  
The American South

AbstractThe new history of capitalism (NHC) places a great deal of emphasis on slavery as a crucial world institution. Slavery, it is alleged, arose out of, and underpinned, capitalist development. This article starts by showing the intellectual and scholarly foundations of some of the broad conclusions of the NHC. It proceeds by arguing that capitalist transformation must rely on a global framework of analysis. The article considers three critiques in relation to the NHC. First, the NHC overemphasizes the importance of coercion to economic growth in the eighteenth century. We argue that what has been called ‘war capitalism’ might be better served by an analysis in which the political economy of European states and empires, rather than coercion, is a key factor in the transformation of capitalism at a global scale. Second, in linking slavery to industrialization, the NHC proposes a misleading chronology. Cotton produced in large quantities in the United States came too late to cause an Industrial Revolution which, we argue, developed gradually from the latter half of the seventeenth century and which was well established by the 1790s, when cotton started to arrive from the American South. During early industrialization, sugar, not cotton, was the main plantation crop in the Americas. Third, the NHC is overly concentrated on production and especially on slave plantation economies. It underplays the ‘power of consumption’, where consumers came to purchase increasing amounts of plantation goods, including sugar, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, and coffee. To see slavery’s role in fostering the preconditions of industrialization and the Great Divergence, we must tell a story about slavery’s place in supporting the expansion of consumption, as well as a story about production

“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done”: Southern Religious History in Retrospect and Prospect

1998 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald G. Mathews
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious History ◽  
The South ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Many

One of the most distinguishing marks of the American South is that religion is more important for the people who live there than for their fellow citizens in the restof the country. When this trait began to identify the region is surprisingly unclear, but it has begun to attract attention from scholars of religion and society who have hitherto been esteemed as students primarily of areas outside the South. The study of religion in Dixie cannot but benefit from this change. After centuries of obsession with thickly settled, college-proud, and printexpressive New England—an area not noted for excessive modesty in thinking about its place in the New World—students of American religion are turning to a region whose history has sustained a selfconsciousness that makes its place in American religious history unique. For studying the American South begins with a dilemma born of ambiguity: whether to treat it as a place or an idea. Sometimes, to be sure, the South appears to be both; but sometimes it is “place” presented as an idea; and sometimes it is a place whose historical experience should have, according to reflective writers, taught Americans historical and moral lessons they have failed to learn. Confusion results in part from the South's contested history not only between the region and the rest of the United States but also among various competing groups within its permeable and frequently indistinct borders. Differences between region and nation will, however, continue to dominate conversation even though the myth of southern distinctiveness may mislead students as much as the myth of its evangelical homogeneity. If inquiry about religion in the South should be sensitive to the many faith communities there, the history of the South will still by contrast provide insight into the broader “American” society.

The Politics of Populism: Germany and the American South in the 1890s

1989 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 340-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Peal
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
American South ◽  
Safety Valve ◽  
The United States ◽  
German History ◽  
International Dimension ◽  
The American South ◽  
Unique Outcome ◽  
High Tariff

A Populist newspaper in North Carolina commented in 1890 that agrarian unrest was common just about everywhere, in “high tariff and low tariff” countries as well as in “monarchies, empires, and republics.” Historians of this discontent have neglected the international dimension of protest that was so striking at the time. The countries that produced the most vigorous agrarian movements, Germany and the United States, have been especially well protected from the scrutiny of comparison. One reason for this neglect is that scholars in both countries emphasize their nations' peculiarities and capacity to make their own histories. The most influential study of American Populism, for instance, is still John D. Hicks' The Populist Revolt (1931). Hicks ascribed the movement to the closure of the frontier, the “safety valve” once thought to be the special feature of American history. Most scholars today reject the “Turner thesis,” but continue to see populism as uniquely democratic. Just as American Populists have been celebrated as “good guys,” German agrarian leaders have been demonized. The marked anti-Semitic aspect of agrarian movements in the 1890s has led historians to link them more or less directly to national socialism, the arguably unique “outcome” of German history. Whatever the sources of this exceptionalism, the constrained view has distorted the understanding of a crucial historical conjuncture.

Dialect Identity in a Tri-Ethnic Context

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walt Wolfram ◽  
Clare Dannenberg
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
Language Change ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Isolation ◽  
The American South ◽  
English Dialect ◽  
Native American Group

This study examines the development of a Native American Indian variety of English in the context of a rural community in the American South where European Americans, African Americans and Native American Indians have lived together for a couple of centuries now. The Lumbee Native American Indians, the largest Native American group east of the Mississippi River and the largest group in the United States without reservation land, lost their ancestral language relatively early in their contact with outside groups, but they have carved out a unique English dialect niche which now distinguishes them from cohort European American and African American vernaculars. Processes of selective accommodation, differential language change and language innovation have operated to develop this distinct ethnic variety, while their cultural isolation and sense of "otherness" in a bi-polar racial setting have served to maintain its ethnic marking.

Southern Literature and the Civil Rights Era

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Buckner Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Southern Literature ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
South Central ◽  
The Us ◽  
The American South

Southern literature provides numerous, diverse responses to the civil rights era. Produced during the movement itself and continuing into the 21st century, southern civil rights writing appears as poetry, drama, memoir, graphic narrative, short stories, and novels, including literary fiction and bestsellers. Movement-related works commemorate events, places, and people both famous and unknown. Authors speak of political awakening to systemic racism and violence. They consider the effectiveness of organizing tactics and the ethical implications of resistance strategies. They write compellingly about the ways segregation, protest, race relations, and sweeping social changes affect individuals and their relationships. Southern literature also exists in complex relationship to the civil rights era due in part to both terms’ fluid, evolving definitions. “Southern literature” can refer to works written in and about the American South, yet both of these categories remain more dynamic than static. The South is demarcated geographically as the United States’ southeastern and south central tier and historically as a region with ties to the former Confederacy. The South’s vexed legacy of slavery and segregation plays a role in defining a regional identity that some consider to be distinctive in terms of dialect, food culture, and an emphasis on conservative views of family, community, religion, place, and history. Many scholars, however, see constructions of a distinct southern identity with an accompanying literature as outmoded, particularly in an era of shifting demographics within the US and globalization more broadly. Like “southern literature,” the “civil rights era” resists rigid definition. The movement itself can refer to the period from the US Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools to the 1965 Voting Rights Act—an era focused on specific civil rights leadership, goals, and, notably, the American South. Alternatively, one can define the movement more comprehensively to look at what happened before and after “the King years,” referring to the period’s iconic figure Martin Luther King Jr. This version of civil rights extends the movement to points North and West, includes Black Power (typically focused on the late 1960s and early 1970s), and links it to contemporaneous human rights and post-colonial struggles. Authors from the American South respond to this broader story by connecting the movement to issues such as immigration; policing and incarceration; economic and environmental justice; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights. Here writers depict a dynamic, multifaceted South that continues striving to transform political ideals into realities.

The “Southernness” of Country Music

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Huber
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Commercial Product ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Study Country ◽  
The American South

This chapter presents an overview of Bill C. Malone’s “southern thesis,” as first articulated in his 1968 study, Country Music, U.S.A.: A Fifty-Year History, and examines the influential role that this regional interpretation has played in shaping country music scholarship. The chapter surveys some of the major trends in the scholarly literature over the past five decades regarding the music’s perceived southernness. It explores Malone’s problematic presentation of the American South as an exceptional region rooted in a unique rural folk culture, and the resulting historiographical debates. The chapter also identifies some significant topical and interpretative lacunae that now pervade the country music scholarship as a result of Malone’s interpretation, and suggests several approaches to rectifying these omissions, including reinterpreting prewar country music as a commercial product of a modern, urban-industrial America and focusing attention on the American regional traditions and musical tributaries that contributed to its creation.

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