Sounding Sentimental: American Popular Song from Nineteenth-Century Ballads to 1970S Soft Rock Emily Margot Gale Vancouver, BC B
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Sounding Sentimental: American Popular Song From Nineteenth-Century Ballads to 1970s Soft Rock Emily Margot Gale Vancouver, BC Bachelor of Music, University of Ottawa, 2005 Master of Arts, Music Theory, University of Western Ontario, 2007 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Music University of Virginia May, 2014 © Copyright by Emily Margot Gale All Rights Reserved May 2014 For Ma with love iv ABSTRACT My dissertation examines the relationship between American popular song and “sentimentality.” While eighteenth-century discussions of sentimentality took it as a positive attribute in which feelings, “refined or elevated,” motivated the actions or dispositions of people, later texts often describe it pejoratively, as an “indulgence in superficial emotion.” This has led an entire corpus of nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural production to be bracketed as “schmaltz” and derided as irrelevant by the academy. Their critics notwithstanding, sentimental songs have remained at the forefront of popular music production in the United States, where, as my project demonstrates, they have provided some of the country’s most visible and challenging constructions of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and morality. My project recovers the centrality of sentimentalism to American popular music and culture and rethinks our understandings of the relationships between music and the public sphere. In doing so, I add the dimension of sound to the extant discourse of sentimentalism, explore a longer history of popular music in the United States than is typical of most narratives within popular music studies, and offer a critical examination of music that—though wildly successful in its own day—has been all but ignored by scholars. As a whole, my dissertation takes a long view of sentimentality and music, but each chapter offers a close-reading of a particular moment in sentimental song history, including: sentimental ballads of the long nineteenth century; The National Barn Dance, an early radio show from Chicago; Mitch Miller’s 1960s television show Sing Along with v Mitch; and 1970s soft rock. Engaging with literary criticism, histories of technology, feminist theory, and popular music historiography, I move across various media—print, radio, television, and recordings—in order to highlight the relationships between musical amateurs, listeners, and their publics. My project theorizes the idea of sentimental song in the United States over the last two centuries, not necessarily to argue “for” sentimentality, but rather to more fully consider sentimentality as a conspicuous and persistent strain in the history of American popular music and American culture. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Examples and Figures ........................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements............................................................................................................ ix Introduction..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 Sentimental Songs for Sentimental Men; or, the Feminization of the Nineteenth-Century Sentimental Song ......................................................21 Chapter 2 “Sing Me The Old Songs Tonight”: Sentimental Folk Radio in the Early Years of WLS’s National Barn Dance ............................................76 Chapter 3 “The Gang That Sang Heart of My Heart”: Sounding Citizenship in Mitch Miller’s Sing Along with Mitch .....................................................131 Chapter 4 “Silly Love Songs”: Sentimentality and 1970s Soft Rock.......................179 Epilogue ...........................................................................................................................228 Appendix A......................................................................................................................243 Appendix B ......................................................................................................................249 Appendix C ......................................................................................................................252 Appendix D......................................................................................................................255 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................260 vii LIST OF EXAMPLES AND FIGURES FIGURES 1.1 Advertisement, Philadelphia Evening Post (1777) ...............................................31 1.2 The Columbian Songster and Freemason’s Pocket Companion (1798)................44 1.3 Song from The I.O.O.F. Harmonia: A Collection of Sentimental and Pleasing Songs (1835) ..........................................................................................................47 1.4 Henry de Marsan’s New and Comic Sentimental Singer’s Journal ......................63 1.5 Hitchcock’s Half Dime Series Music for the Million (1872) .................................65 1.6 Alice Hawthorne, “What Is Home Without a Mother?” Song Sheet.....................72 2.1 Cover from Behind the Scenes at WLS (1932).......................................................87 2.2 Cartoon from Behind the Scenes at WLS (1932) ...................................................90 2.3 WLS National Barn Dance Souvenir Program ......................................................99 2.4 Page from WLS Family Album (1931).................................................................100 2.5 Cover of Bradley Kincaid’s First Songbook (1928)............................................107 2.6 Bradley Kincaid’s version of “Barbara Allen” (1928) ........................................116 2.9 Gene Autry’s Sensational Collection of Famous Original Cowboy Songs and Mountain Ballads (1932) .....................................................................................122 3.1 Advertisement, New York Times (1960) ..............................................................135 3.2 Cover of Sentimental Sing Along with Mitch Songbook (1960)..........................146 3.3 Ballantine Beer coasters.......................................................................................159 3.4 Advertisement for Lowrey Organs, Music Educators Journal (1961)................168 TABLES 3.1 Songs recorded on Sentimental Sing Along with Mitch (1960)..........................151 viii MUSICAL EXAMPLES 2.7 Transcription of Kincaid’s “Barbara Allen”........................................................117 2.8 Kincaid’s strumming pattern on “After the Ball” ...............................................118 4.1 Bread, “Make It With You,” melismatic melody of the verse (1970) .................205 4.2 Wings, “My Love,” McCartney’s vocal climax (1973).......................................208 ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks go first to the music faculty at the University of Virginia. I knew for certain that I had chosen the right place to do my PhD when I had such a hard time deciding who would form my dissertation committee. Michelle Kisliuk, Fred Maus, Michael Puri, and Heather Wiebe shaped my thinking in important ways during seminars and in conversation. Richard Will provided excellent guidance as my advisor, and his comments on my writing never failed to strike a good balance between incisiveness and hilarity. I always left our meetings feeling notably more positive and calm about the work ahead. Scott DeVeaux offered thoughtful comments and encouragement throughout. Bonnie Gordon provided insightful observations, helpful advice, financial support through generous research assistantships, and friendship. I could not have asked for a more fearless and fierce mentor and role model. Grace Hale deserves an extra special thank you for cheerfully joining the committee at a rather late stage, and I am grateful for her astute comments concerning the future of this project. Many organizations and people have helped to facilitate my research and sharpen my thoughts. I am grateful for the generous financial support provided by a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada during the 2011-12 academic year. The Mellon Summer Dissertation Seminar on Poetics and Modern Emotion supplied crucial financial support during the summer of 2013 and also allowed me to exchange ideas with a brilliant and lively group of scholars from across UVa’s humanities departments. My thanks go especially to Professor John Lyons and my writing partner, Lise Leet. I would like to thank John Rumble and the staff at the Frist Library and Archive at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum for their x hospitality, knowledge, and assistance. Winston Barham and Erin Mayhood, and the rest of the staff at the UVa Music Library were always incredibly helpful. I am going to miss that place. Thank you also to Karl Hagstrom Miller who generously took the time to read and discuss my chapter on Mitch Miller. I consider myself very lucky to have been a part of several amazing communities of graduate students and mentors. At the University of Western Ontario, Alexa Woloshyn and Myron Gray helped me to find my way to musicology, offering a liberal supply of friendship and fun along the way. In 2007, I was happy to be included in the inaugural cohort of UWO’s MA in Popular Music and Culture. Richard Parks, Norma Coates,