Why Does Country & Western Music
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NEW ENGLAND COUNTRY & WESTERN MUSIC: SELF-RELIANCE, COMMUNITY EXPRESSION, AND REGIONAL RESISTANCE ON THE NEW ENGLAND FRONTIER BY CLIFFORD R. MURPHY B.A. GETTYSBURG COLLEGE, 1994 M.A. BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2005 SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE PROGRAM IN MUSIC: ETHNOMUSICOLOGY AT BROWN UNIVERSITY. PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2008 © 2008 CLIFFORD R. MURPHY This dissertation by Clifford R. Murphy is accepted in its present form by the Department of Music as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. (signed and dated copy on file at Brown University) Date_______________ _________________________ Jeff Todd Titon, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date_______________ __________________________ Jennifer Post, Reader Date_______________ __________________________ Paul Buhle, Reader Date_______________ __________________________ Rose Subotnik, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date_______________ __________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Clifford R. Murphy was born in Ridgewood, New Jersey in 1972 and was raised in New Hampshire in the towns of Durham and Newmarket. Cliff learned to play guitar at age 16, graduated from Newmarket High School in 1990, and attended Gettysburg College where he majored in History and English. Following graduation in 1994, Cliff returned to New Hampshire and spent the next nine years working as a singer, songwriter, and rhythm guitarist in the internationally touring alternative country rock band Say ZuZu. Constant touring was accompanied by a steady diet of truck stop food, which led to a sizeable collection of truck driving music. During these years, Cliff worked a series of part-time, full-time, and temp jobs: swinging a sledgehammer on a demolition crew, writing back cover copy for a book publisher, editing online travel publications, painting houses, constructing indoor plant irrigation systems, installing windows at a Naval shipyard, loading furniture and appliances onto 18-wheelers, and working as a record store clerk. It was while working as a freelance music journalist for the Portsmouth Herald in 1995 that Cliff received a review copy of Dick Curless‘ posthumous release, Traveling Through. That good fortune led Cliff to found a Country & Western band called Hog Mawl and – following the breakup of Say ZuZu in 2003 – to enroll in the PhD program in Ethnomusicology at Brown University. While at Brown, Cliff interned at the Massachusetts Cultural Council for state folklorist Maggie Holtzberg and there began fieldwork in the New England C&W community. In 2005 he received his MA degree in Ethnomusicology, writing a MA thesis on the African-American blues record producer J. Mayo ―Ink‖ Williams. In 2006, Cliff was awarded a Mellon Dissertation Research Fellowship in Original Sources from the Council on Library and Information Resources. iv PREFACE Research in historical primary sources – field recordings, commercial recordings, photographs, oral histories, print media, radio transcriptions, recording contracts, show posters, advertisements, fan mail, and business documents – was conducted in the archives of the Maine Folklife Center at the University of Maine, Orono, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the New England Country Music Historical Society, the New England Folk Music Archives at the Passim Center, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, and the John Edwards Memorial Foundation (JEMF) Collection of the Southern Folklife Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The archives of the now-defunct New England Country Music Historical Society are maintained by Gordon ―Country Gordy‖ Brown of Watertown, Massachusetts; Mr. Brown and his archive contributed the bulk of primary source materials (rare radio transcriptions, photographs, regional commercial recordings) used in this work. A series of oral histories and field recordings conducted by folklorist Edward D. ―Sandy‖ Ives and his Anthropology students (Greg Boardman, Lisa Feldman, and Deborah Kodish) at the University of Maine in Orono between 1975 and 1980 with musicians, fans, and radio executives active in Country & Western and Hillbilly Orchestra music in Maine and the Canadian Maritimes between the 1920s and the 1980s proved an invaluable resource. These materials are housed in the Northeast Archive of Folklife and Oral History at the Maine Folklife Center at the University of Maine, Orono. Other items located in the archives of the Maine Folklife Center and utilized in this work are a series of oral v histories, field recordings, and rare radio transcriptions of Maine Country & Western musicians collected by folklorist Jeff ―Smokey‖ McKeen. The New England field recording collections of Phillips Barry, Helen Hartness Flanders, Alan Lomax, and Eloise Hubbard Linscott housed at the American Folklife Center and the Vermont Folklife Center were valuable in providing historical context for this work. The Linscott collection was particularly helpful as – unlike the recordings of Barry, Flanders, and Lomax – it contained a wide variety of styles and reflected a far more elastic definition of ―vernacular‖ or ―folk‖ music worthy of recording in the 1930s and ‗40s. Linscott‘s collection includes several recordings made of radio broadcasts made in 1942 by Massachusetts cowgirl yodeler Georgia Mae, as well as the only known recordings of Maine performers like the Katahdin Mountaineers, the Singing Smiths, and other early Maine string bands experimenting with proto-Country & Western sounds. Finally, the archives of the Country Music Hall of Fame held several high quality rare commercial recordings of New England artists unavailable elsewhere, as well as songbooks from the 1930s through the 1950s of New England artists, and oral histories conducted with Bradley Kincaid and Grandpa and Ramona Jones (which cover their brief tenure in Massachusetts and New Hampshire in the 1930s and ‗40s) by Douglas Greene, and with Kenny and Bettyanne Roberts by John Rumble. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the musicians and fans of New England Country & Western music with whom I was so fortunate to visit with and interview for this work – especially Wendell Austin, Rusty Rogers and Patty Kempton, Bob Elston, Vinnie Calderone, Angelo Boncore, Georgia Mae, Frank Loconto, Jimmy Barnes, and Dan Fulkerson for enduring repeated visits, phone calls, and emails with great patience and good cheer. A great big ―thank you‖ goes to Gordon ―Country Gordy‖ Brown – founder of the New England Country Music Historical Society – who took considerable time over the course of five years to share with me his archival holdings and to put me in touch with so many of the musicians whose words fill these pages. Thanks, too, to Alan Lewis – another vast resource of information about local music – for introducing me to the music of John Lincoln Wright. Thanks to Millie Rahn, Betsy Siggins, and Gerry Katz for opening the archives of Club 47 and the Boston Bluegrass Union to me, and to Cousin Lynn and Captain Larry at Hillbilly at Harvard for letting me hang around the studio. I would also like to thank the Maine Folklife Center – Edward ―Sandy‖ Ives, Pamela Dean, Pauleena MacDougal, and Jeff ―Smokey‖ McKeen – for collecting, preserving, and sharing such a fine archive of Maine Country & Western music, oral histories, and photographs. Thanks too, to Maggie Holtzberg at the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her mentorship in conducting fieldwork (and for giving many of these field recordings a good home), and to Andy Kovolos at the Vermont Folklife Center for writing letters of support that helped fund my research. Thanks to Marcia Segal at the American Folklife Center for her brilliance in navigating the Linscott collection, and to Judith Gray for helping me through vast files and cylinder recordings. Thanks also to John Rumble at the Country Music Hall vii of Fame and Museum and Tim West at the Southern Folklife Collection at UNC Chapel Hill for their assistance during my research visits there. Thanks are also due to Jennifer Post for giving me valuable direction on the study of music, place, and New England, and for making such a long trek to serve on my dissertation committee. Thanks too to Neil V. Rosenberg for helping me develop a reading list on Country & Western music in New England and the Canadian Maritimes, to Richard ―Pete‖ Peterson for sharing an afternoon with me to discuss my research, to Aaron Fox for lunch and encouragement, and to Marian Leighton Levy at Rounder Records for offering valuable insight to the marketing of Dick Curless‘ Traveling Through. I would like to thank Jeff Todd Titon, director of graduate studies in the Brown University Department of Music, for his unwavering support of my pursuit of all things New England Country & Western. Without his good humor, insightful prodding, candid criticism, close reading, and rigorous standards of scholarship, this project would not have been possible. Thanks also go to the other professors of Ethnomusicology, Musicology, American Civilization, and English at Brown University with whom I have had the pleasure of working – namely Marc Perlman, Rose Subotnik, Paul Austerlitz, Paul Buhle, and Elizabeth Taylor. The diligent staff at the Orwig Music Library at Brown – particularly Ned Quist, Sheila Hogg, and Nancy Jakubowski – always helped me find what I needed. Likewise, the Music Department