Country Music and the Expression of Loss

The recipient of CSW’s 2008 Constance Coiner Graduate Award talks about his by Marcus Desmond Harmon CURRENT research on grief, Loss, and mourning in the music As a doctoral candidate in the Department of Musicology at UCLA, I have of Emmylou Harris had the opportunity to work with a variety of scholars studying the intersection between music and cultural practice. In my research and my classroom teaching, I work to bring a class-aware, feminist perspective

DEC08 14 CSupdateW Since the meaning of musical gestures is so often the result of individual experience artists of any ideological affiliation and how they contribute to the larger eschew the religious and patriotic American discourse about trauma, interacting with broader social and cultural norms, I’ve taken a psychoanalytic signifiers that make many secular critics grief, and memory. Since the meaning approach to interpretation–looking not just at what artists and audiences say about uncomfortable, but artists deploy of musical gestures is so often the result the music they listen to, but also the ways in which that music evokes (or resists) them in a number of complex ways. of individual experience interacting other artifacts and institutions. For example, it would be hard to discuss the age- In any case, working-class concerns with broader social and cultural norms, worn last albums of Johnny Cash without understanding the particular beliefs about have rarely been of great interest to I’ve taken a psychoanalytic approach to sin, punishment, and redemption that stem from his Southern Baptist cosmology. the neoconservative movement of the interpretation–looking not just at what last three decades (outside of a few artists and audiences say about the flashpoint issues). music they listen to, but also the ways to popular music studies, one that is in the academic research I read! In If country music isn’t an expression in which that music evokes (or resists) rooted in both my personal experiences my work, I look at country music as of right-wing ideology or the product other artifacts and institutions. For and my beliefs about what studying a set of relationships that creators, of a homogenous “white working- example, it would be hard to discuss the the music around us can do to help listeners, and the songs themselves class culture,” then what is it and what age-worn last albums of Johnny Cash us understand the culture that we are always renegotiating. Neither does it do? While that question must without understanding the particular simultaneously make and participate in country artists, nor country fans, nor necessarily have many answers, I have beliefs about sin, punishment, and every day. the white working-class in general is tried to show how country music can redemption that stem from his My research currently focuses an isolated monolith—they move in articulate loss, grief, and nostalgia in Southern Baptist cosmology. on American country music, a genre diverse and often surprising directions ways that help country fans incorporate A feminist consciousness informs that even popular-music scholars in response to all sorts of cultural these feelings into everyday cultural all of my work, both within and beyond often deride as commodified and needs and anxieties. In fact, the practices. My dissertation, “In a my dissertation project. I firmly believe devoid of serious cultural import, a “conservative” voice of country music, Melancholic Country: Identity, Loss, that feminism is best served by taking neo-conservative bastion of jingoistic while often the loudest, is hardly the and Mourning at the Borders of a holistic view of gender–men as well politics, religious hysteria, and casual only political discourse–country music’s Country Music,” looks at four case as women must negotiate difficult and racism. Having lived in a country-music relationship to contemporary politics is studies in country-music expression of contradictory gendered terrain, and no culture for most of my life, I often multivalent enough to displease either melancholy–Emmylou Harris, Gillian gender expressions (including the so- found it difficult to find the music or the Republican campaign strategist or Welch, Dar Williams, and Johnny called “normative”) are homogenous, its listeners as I experienced them the academic apologist. Few country Cash–to see what the songs are saying simplistic, or otherwise “easy.” Since

DEC08 15 CSupdateW gendered experience is so often the poised at the edge of a Miss Havisham- turn to the work of Melanie Klein site of trauma and anxiety in much of esque obsession with tragedy and (1882–1960), a leading figure of post- American culture, it naturally finds a abandonment. Freudian psychoanalysis. Like Freud, place in my dissertation. My chapter, My work on Harris begins more Klein was puzzled by melancholia, the “Still with Every Turn the World than twenty years later, when Harris then-current term for complicated grief Becomes a Sadder Place: Emmylou revisited the ideas of grief, loss, and depression with no obvious cause. Harris and Regret,” discusses the ways and regret in the “crossover” album Freud imagined that melancholia was that Harris, long considered one of Wrecking Ball (Asylum, 1995) created a strange, rare disease that affected Nashville’s most sensitive and eclectic with rock producer Daniel Lanois. In this people with weak or vulnerable vocalists, uses the longstanding cultural album and the two others that follow characters. Klein, on the other hand trope of the permanently lovelorn it (Red Dirt Girl [Nonesuch, 2000] and (perhaps because she herself suffered woman to explore ways of moving Stumble into Grace [Nonesuch, 2003]), from melancholia) saw melancholy as (or not moving) beyond irreplaceable Harris’s songs are striking in their abject the basis not just for depression and losses. Harris first rose to fame as portrayal of mourning. Her first-person illness, but also for love, guilt, and the the duet partner of country-rock characters are often the friends, lovers, desire to repair wrongs. By folding long- pioneer Gram Parsons. As with other or near-strangers left behind after term grief into the realm of “normal” country duet acts (like Dolly Parton/ disaster, unable to really mourn their emotional development, Klein made Porter Waggoner and Loretta Lynn/ losses and even less able to put those the melancholic experience (which, like Conway Twitty), speculation about losses firmly into the past. Rather than modern clinical depression, primarily romantic involvement between Harris allowing these damaged creatures to sit affected women) a valuable one. and Parsons flourished, but Parsons’s mired in what they have lost, however, sudden death from drug overdose Harris emphasizes the fact that in 1973 ended that possibility. In despite crushing grief and intense self- On these albums, Emmylou Harris 1975, Harris released “Boulder to castigation, these survivors continue explores the feelings related to Birmingham,” an elegy for Parsons their lives one way or another—even if loss, grief, and mourning that made her (now-impossible) love they often would rather not. for him explicit. Its success cemented To examine Emmylou Harris’s her image as a grief-stricken survivor portrayals of grief more closely, I

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