Southern Cultures: 2013 Global Southern Music Issue, Enhanced Ebook: Spring 2013 Issue, includes Music tracks

By Harry L. Watson

The Global Southern Music Issue enhanced eBook includes all the tracks on Traveling Shoes, our special free CD and:

The South meets Senegal as hip-hop goes Trans-Atlantic.
Hawaiian steel guitar sways the Southern musical landscape.
Poet Allen Ginsberg and bluesman James "Son" Thomas trade verses.
Aussie Elvis impersonators keep the king alive.
A U.K. scholar offers a new perspective on the study of the blues.
Music pirates keep alive another tradition of bootlegging in the South.
And much more.

Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Feb 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781469609041

Book preview

front porch

In The New Masters of Eloquence: Southernness, Senegal, and Transatlantic Hip-Hop Mobilities, Ali Colleen Neff reveals how the sounds of the Dirty South and West Africa continue to evolve in tandem. Sister Anta (here) is a member of GOTAL, an all-woman Senegalese music group that draws inspiration from Akon and other famous Dirty South artists. Photograph by Ali Colleen Neff.

For more than a century, non-southerners have headed South on a series of musical quests and pilgrimages. At the core of their motivations sat a paradox: they sought music that was quintessentially southern, forged in a particular place—with all its intrinsic meaning—and carrying the essence of the South within its reverberations. Yet, at the same time, they were searching for the threads of connection, lineages, pipelines of influence, and trails of sonic breadcrumbs that led out of the South and back to other, faraway sourcepools as a way of explaining southern music. In many instances, they came with well-formed notions of what they thought they would find, and throughout its chameleon appeal and mystical ability to tantalize its seekers, southern music did not disappoint: it yielded both a deep-rooted portrait of the region and a tapestry of global connections, sometimes simultaneously. The musical pilgrims, in turn, found and heard what they came to hear.

Those ideas—that a listener’s engagement with southern music involves a great deal of reflexivity, and that the compulsion of southern music lies in part in its multiplicity of meanings—are at the core of this collection of writings, in which we explore music and the global South. Music that could claim to be of or from the South has long carried a cachet of authenticity in many different settings: southern Soul stood as a foil against the pop sheen of (northern) Motown; Kansas City jazz injected new life into the slick (northern) big bands; honky-tonk singers claimed twang as a southern birthright denied to (northern) transplants. In line with those notions of regional roots, record producers in the 1920s sought African American performers, whose repertory represented the outsider’s ideas about what country blues sounded like, and white performers whose repertory represented old-time tradition, even if the material was in fact newly composed on the models of pop songwriting. These producers knew what they wanted the region’s music to sound like, and the music obliged.

On the other hand, musicians and writers alike have also occupied themselves for decades with tracing lines of transmission that challenge the native grounding of this same music. In the early twentieth century, song collectors descended on Appalachia in search of preserved specimens of ballads from the British Isles. Although they had to wade through versions of pop songs and radio hits that had been absorbed into the oral tradition, they managed to find what they were looking for. A few decades later, blues scholars expounded on the African connections in blues and R&B traditions and located the sonic evidence to bolster their interpretive claims. In each of these cases and many more, the lines of influence fit into larger narratives of meaning that the writers were advancing, narratives that gained significant traction by locating the sources of southern musical identity far beyond the region’s borders.

The writers in this special issue all connect to the paradoxes that characterize southern music within a global lens: the relationship between southern music’s perceived native identity and narratives of its far-flung origins. But what trumps these ideas in many instances is the mystique of its performance: how southern music puts on a show for its audiences, entertains their imaginations, and feeds them what they want or need to hear with spectacle and illusion. It is no small coincidence that two of our essays highlight lyrics about payday, a musician’s reward for the performance that satisfies the audience. These three ideas—the music’s southern roots, its global connections, and its performative nature—form the nodes around which all our authors write.

In Steelin’ the Slide: Hawai‘i and the Birth of the Blues Guitar, John W. Troutman chronicles Hawaiian musical influences on the South, including how Memphis artist Furry Lewis sang a bluesy number he called Farewell to Thee and played a guitar solo that replicated the melody to Aloha ‘Oe (which means Farewell to Thee), a song written by the islands’ Queen Lili‘uokalani. Lili‘uokalani, c. pre-1890, courtesy of the Hawai‘i State Archives.

Ali Colleen Neff opens with a powerfully woven tale of connection, influence, and diasporic conversation between Senegal and the Atlantic Coast, where literal migration resounds in musical cross-pollination so thoroughly that it is impossible to separate the musical exports from the musical imports or to claim what styles influenced what styles. Her subject is hip-hop, specifically the Dirty South brand that differentiates itself sharply from those of the East and West Coasts. The dance beats and vocal stylings of which she writes travel across the Atlantic Ocean, blending traditional Senegalese musical practices with the rhymes and pulse of pop-infused hip-hop. Concrete familial connections underpin the musical familiarity, as a Senegalese DJ has cousins in Atlanta and Houston. The music’s audience, by extension, hears multiplicities of meaning. The boat that appears in popular music videos, for instance, functions as a status symbol of wealth and privilege and simultaneously invokes a means of migration and escape from foreign lands, albeit often to arrive elsewhere in circumstances still mired in poverty. Neff’s deft interpretation ties the language and cadence of the rhymes in the recordings to the complex performance of cultural traditions in which these hip-hop artists engage.

John W. Troutman and Christian O’Connell each confront long-established narratives of the blues’ origins, which, they suggest, emerged from a generation of writers’ deep investiture in specific ideologies. Troutman proposes that the extent to which blues reception has been invested in narratives of African origins has pushed aside compelling historical evidence that slide guitar was in fact brought to the African American blues community by Hawaiian entertainers. O’Connell starts from a similar point, namely the 1960s and ’70s scholarship on the blues that was heavily shaped by the ideologies of the folk revival. Influential writers on the blues, he argues, sought blues musicians, recordings, and traditions that would reinforce their ideas of blues as symbolic manifestations of anticommercial folk culture. By finding what they wanted to find, he intimates, they tilted our perception of the blues away from a body of popular artists who historically were far better known, more popular, and more representative of the complete performance tradition and toward those whose music and biographies reinforced the folk narrative. The conclusions of these two essays, which posit early blues as commercially savvy, popular music that drew one of its signature performance techniques from traveling Hawaiian entertainment troupes, is a wonderfully provocative reconfiguration of the southern musical identity.

Alex Sayf Cummings’s study of music piracy in the bootleg South probes the region’s characteristic defiance of authority, entrepreneurial spirit, and embodiment of resistance, all made manifest in the practice of producing, distributing, and marketing bootleg recordings. The music on which the mostly southern bootleggers turned a dime was in many instances not southern at all, but rather a sonic import brought to the region for the sole purpose of cultivating its underground market. It is worth noting, as Cummings points out, that one proffered defense of these recordings was that they were merely excellent sound-alikes, or, in other words, their producers attempted to get away with making an illegal duplicate by claiming the duplicate recording was, in fact, a fake. The irony here deserves pause: the recordings claimed to be such good imitations of the stars’ versions that the listener couldn’t tell them apart—the ultimate illusion, since, in fact, they actually were the stars’ versions. One hears what one wants to hear.

When eminent scholar William R. Ferris, beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and blues legend James Son Ford Thomas sat down to trade a few blues verses and throw down a few rhymes, the performative aspects of southern music shone through in sharp relief. Their exchange is art as illusion and entertainment at its best, partially obscuring from us as bystanders the depth of personal experience ensconced in those couplets, as they simultaneously define and parody their own performances as bluesmen.

When William R. Ferris brought James Son Ford Thomas to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, neither had expected an encounter with Allen Ginsberg—much less for the famous Beat Generation poet to join them in a session full of half-spoken, half-sung conversation, which we present here in Trading Verses. James Son Ford Thomas, courtesy of the William R. Ferris Papers, Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The nature of performance is once again highlighted in both Gretchen Wood’s photo essay on an Australian Elvis festival and Thomas Hackett’s character sketch of Rufus Thomas. As Wood recounts, the Elvis birthday celebration encourages a more conservative or wholesome image of Elvis, even while the festival’s participants embrace the white bespangled jumpsuit version of Elvis, the pop construction of him at his most glamorized, drug-addled, and least genuine. These Australian fans have found an incarnation of Elvis that matches what they were looking for, or, to borrow from O’Connell’s essay directly, the apparent revival of an image in practice constitutes an invention of an image. That an Elvis celebration has taken root Down Under is symptomatic of the global exportation of popular culture symbolically rooted in the South that has been happening since the first blues and hillbilly records made their way to Australia and into the hands of avid enthusiasts in the early twentieth century.

Hackett similarly rises to the challenge of making sense of a performance—in the richest tradition of southern performances—that is on the surface eccentric and comedic, but that belies a record of affecting social change. As Hackett listens, a Howlin’ Wolf impersonator trades off-color lines with DJ and artist Rufus Thomas on his weekly radio show. In his lime green cape and black leather boots, Rufus Thomas’s performance style dares his listeners to take him seriously. During his half-century on the radio, however, Thomas’s voice and presence on the airwaves galvanized a generation to unite in racial solidarity and claim a rightful place within their home region.

Our music issue moves beyond prose to its own presentation of artistic performance, as poet Michael McFee leaves us with the parting image of music both scarring and healing, permanently branding the hand of the banjo player with a musician’s mark. And the CD from music editor Aaron Smithers lets the music speak for itself most capably of all.

Sound travels. Its waves propagate through the air and whatever objects get in their way, gathering meaning until they penetrate the ears of the listener. Yet the sound waves dissipate during their journey, the surroundings exerting a dampening effect until they fade away into nothingness, leaving only to memory the instantiation of the performance in any one particular place. People travel, relocate, plant roots, uproot, migrate, and claim identities via remote places, and they take with them their sounds. The journeys of southern music, into and out of the South, mirror many centuries of people coming to the region, whether by necessity or curiosity, or brought to the region forcibly and against all will; then claiming a home and mixing (or not) with the peoples who preceded them; and, finally, in many instances, later generations leaving the South and taking its music with them. Many a writer has commented that one often feels the deepest sense of southern identity when one is far from the region; only by leaving it, in other words, does one become of a place. Music makes those same journeys, as its listeners search for grounded origins in an elusive soundscape that is full of migrations and transplantations, past and present, which then dissipates to silent memory.

In spite of well over a decade in the region, I have not lived in North Carolina long enough to be regarded as a southerner by most gatekeepers of cultural identity. But the questions we ask of our music suggest parallels for our own reflections: where did it come from, how can it both be and become southern, and how much of its nature is created through the act of