Clifford Muprhy's Yankee Twang: Country and Western Music in New England explores “New England country and western music”—a regional inflection of the genre that locals call “traditional country music.” Based upon archival and ethnographic work, including dozens of interviews by the author with New England musicians, Yankee Twang brings important, oft-neglected points of view to the table of country and folk music scholarship. Murphy looks “to revive the notion that country music is, at its foundation, a traditional social music that, nationally, encompasses many regional styles” (12-13). He adds, “The point of it all is not to convince you that the best country and western music is from New England. Rather, it is to introduce you to extraordinary everyday New Englanders, to document the full participation of the New England working class in the story of North American vernacular music, and to celebrate that community’s remarkable contributions to New England folklife” (12). Yankee Twang is at its best when working in this mode of expansion and inclusivity.
Murphy frames Yankee Twang’s insights into the history and character of New England country and western music with his arguments against the so-called southern thesis, commonly attributed to the commercial country music entities in Nashville, Tennessee, and to foundational country music scholars like Bill C. Malone and Charles K. Wolfe. On this issue, Yankee Twang joins a list of relatively recent works that have set out to disprove and disapprove of the theoretical proposition that country music grew out of a special relationship with southern folk and commercial music in the first half of the twentieth century.[1] Writing specifically about Malone’s seminal Country Music, U.S.A. (1968) in his first chapter, “New England Country and Western Music and the Myth of Southern Authenticity,” Murphy qualifies his version of the anti-southern-thesis argument: “I would not argue that Malone’s treatment of country music is wrong, just that his portrait of the music is incomplete, as it leaves so many regional variations of the music out of the picture” (22).
While it remains unlikely that scholars will come to an agreement on the southern thesis any time soon, Murphy’s book successfully captures the localized pride that permeates New England country and western musicians’ stories and music. As Murphy puts it, “Regional musicians and their fans outside of the South have soldiered on through decades of self-aware disenfranchisement and have come to view themselves as stewards of traditional country music” (13). The chapters that follow consider history (chapter 2), performance (chapter 3), authenticity (chapter 4), show business (chapter 5), and cultural resistance (chapter 6) in the contexts of New Englanders’ regional pride and its conflict with national trends.
Much of Murphy’s fieldwork centers on his trips to local "country and western events"—a kind of New England musical performance that "occupies a space between a show and a dance" (109). Murphy describes the interactions between band members and the audience at these events as a negotiation between “what the band wants to play and what the audience wants to hear” (108). Certainly, performer-audience relationships rest at the heart of country music inside and outside of New England, but Murphy’s attribution of the contemporary structure of an “event” to the structure of shows performed by New England’s hillbilly orchestras who provided both songs for dancing and songs for show in the 1920s and 1930s presents an interesting case for direct regional diffusion within the larger category of country music performance (42-43, 109-10). Separate anecdotes in which Murphy—as an outsider and a guitarist—is invited to sit in with the band (at a community center in Union, Maine) and is benevolently forced along with his wife onto the dance floor (at a Legion Post in East Greenwich, Rhode Island) highlight the pronounced inclusivity of these events.
Yankee Twang also addresses the careers of some of New England’s nationally recognized country musicians, including Mellie Dunham, Yodelin’ Slim Clark, Grandpa Jones, and Jo Dee Messina. The most impressive of these discussions features the trucking-song country star and New England native, Dick Curless, who is known widely for his 1965 hit, “A Tombstone Every Mile.” Curless battled commercial politics, alcoholism, and health problems throughout much of his career, and Yankee Twang’s final chapter begins with a piercing recollection of the cancer-stricken Curless’s final studio sessions in 1994. Recording in Massachusetts, backed by local musicians, and removed by more than two decades from the height of his stardom, Curless and his fellow musicians lament “industrial abandonment—in their case, the music and media industries they helped to build” (168). Pointing out the fact that in Curless’s later years, the singer moved back to the woods of Maine “in the face of industrial collapse,” Murphy convincingly likens Curless’s resistant leitmotifs and his eventual move home to traditional country musicians’ and fans’ tendency to prioritize “a certain way of life over the pursuit of material comforts” (182).
While Yankee Twang is in one sense a study of regional inclusivity, the book’s appealing ethnographic description of New England country musicians and fans can manifest in problematic ways—especially when its rhetorical attention to the problems of regional standards for authenticity morphs into a rhetoric of the anti-southern and by extension the anti-Nashville. The machines of commercialism can and do affect—sometimes negatively—the folk traditions we study, but folklorists must carefully untangle the knots of traditional and commercial music. Describing the differences between alternative country and Nashville (main-stream) country, for example, Murphy quips: “Alternative country pays homage to its antecedents, while Nashville wallows unabashedly in a pop heritage that begins with the Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd” (172). Leaving aside the more complicated issues of what (or who) exactly is being referred to when Murphy refers to Nashville, we can safely say that even the most tourist-dollar-driven, pop-cultural entities in “Nashville” do a much better job of telling the story of the folk musicians who helped give rise to the country music industry than Murphy’s Eagles-Lynyrd Skynyrd jab suggests.[2] Likewise, it is not true that Nashville musicians completely ignore traditional influences or that commercialism has completely trumped Nashville’s sense of regional pride. Many professional artists who live and record in Nashville, such as Paul Franklin, Andy Leftwich, and the White Family, work diligently to create art with respect to traditional music and traditional musicians. In that regard, we might also remember that the kind of small-town country music venues and events that Murphy correctly lauds in New England are found throughout the south as well. Folklorists (and two-step fans) will find a good example at the Long Hollow Jamboree and Restaurant, some fifteen miles north of Nashville’s honky tonks.
Regardless, Yankee Twang offers important insights to scholars of regional country music, and when its theoretical frame works to erase untenable biases that leave out certain empirical evidence, Yankee Twang provides fruitful (re)interpretations of the genre’s commercial/folk continuum.
[1] See the recent Journal of American Folklore special “Country Music” issue (Vol. 127, No. 504).
[2] Consider the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum or visit the Grand Ole Opry’s “History of the Opry” webpage (www.opry.com/history)
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[Review length: 1172 words • Review posted on September 8, 2015]