Popular Music (2020) Volume 39/3-4. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Popular Music. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, pp. 568–584 10.1017/S0261143020000550 The country and Irish problem STAN ERRAUGHT University of Leeds, Music, Music, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract Country music has been popular in Ireland since the 1960s, most notably in the work of homegrown performers. Despite the durability of this appeal in the face of huge changes in Ireland and in the Irish music industry over a half-century, it remains curiously underexamined in the literature on Irish popular music. In this paper, I wish to argue the following: (1) Country music did not simply arise ‘naturally’ in Ireland as a reflection of musical or national char- acteristics: it was promoted as such. (2) Both popular and academic literature on the subject have tended to unreflectively echo the narrative that was introduced alongside the music in order to fix its audience. (3) In so doing, the literature reproduces a set of anxieties about modernity as it arrived in Ireland, about the postcolonial condition and about authenticity, even as it attempts to locate Irish popular music within these concerns. Introduction In the late 1960s, the pages of New Spotlight magazine, then Ireland’s only national popular music journal, were filled with comment, features and readers’ letters dis- cussing the so-called ‘country boom’.