University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2012 We Didn't Get Famous: the Story of the Southern Music Underground, 1978-1990 Camilla Ann Aikin Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the Music Commons Recommended Citation Aikin, Camilla Ann, "We Didn't Get Famous: the Story of the Southern Music Underground, 1978-1990" (2012). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 30. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/30 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. WE DIDN’T GET FAMOUS THE STORY OF THE SOUTHERN MUSIC UNDERGROUND 1978-1990 A Thesis Presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Southern Studies The University of Mississippi by CAMILLA ANN AIKIN May 2012 Copyright Camilla Ann Aikin 2012 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT This thesis examines the emergence of the Southern indie music scene in the 1980s as both a rejection of the broader punk scene that had swept America and the UK in the 1970s and the blues and country inflected Southern Rock that preceded it in the 1970s. I first had the idea of doing a project on this musical era while I was living in New York City. I had loved the jangly sounds of 1980s Southern indie bands for a very long time, and I had just begun to develop a very deep interest and love of the South, which had been my home for eighteen years, but whose culture and meaning I had somewhat ignored and taken for granted growing up.