Call for papers
Real Country? Geographic, Cultural and Stylistic Challenges to the Country Music Genre
International Symposium
13-14 November 2013
Strasbourg, France
In 2006, an article in the Observer Music Monthly stated, “Country is often seen as the whitest, most segregated of all styles: the redneck soundtrack of the racist South”. First marketed as “old time,” then as “hillbilly music” by northeastern music executives in the 1920s and 1930s country music has been branded with the same stereotypes as its region of origin. Perceived as conventional, vulgar and conservative, it has been charged with wallowing in easy patriotism and mawkish sentimentality, based on a homesickness for a lost agrarian past which at times slips into an unquestioning fondness for pre-Civil War Dixie. Continue reading →