View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by espace@Curtin School of Communication and Cultural Studies Nation, Culture and Family: Identity in a Scottish/Australian Popular Song Tradition Josephine Kathleen Dougal This Thesis is presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Curtin University of Technology April 2010 Declaration To the best of my knowledge and belief this thesis contains no material previously published by any other person except where due acknowledgement has been made. This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university. Josephine Dougal May 2011 Contents Acknowledgements iii 1 Introduction 1 Summary 1 Research Context and Rationale 3 2 Overview of the Study’s Analytical Framework 25 Research Objectives 32 Research Methodology 33 3 A Framework for Identity 42 Identity 42 National Identity as a Cultural Construct 43 Personalising National Identity 48 Implications for the Study 51 4 Narratives of Nation: Scottishness, Rarely of Our Own Making 55 Narratives of Nation 55 Narratives of Nation and Agency 84 5 Singing the Nation: Dancing to a Tune Laid Down by Others 95 A Shared Voice - The Nation in Song 96 A Vivid Scots Graffiti - Scottish Popular Song Traditions 103 The New ‘Folk’ 126 6 The Nation in Context 139 i 7 Migration, Family and Music: An Overview 150 Migration and Family 155 Migration and Memory 161 Narrative and Culture 165 Music: Migrant Identity, Place and Home 169 Migrants’ Musical Choices 180 8 Singing Home: A Vernacular Hotchpotch 190 A Repertoire of Songs that has Stood the Test of Time 191 The Battered Appeal of a Lifetime’s Use: Narrative Form and Pattern 197 Songs that Give Voice to Place, Home and Family 205 A Family’s Scotland 231 9 Home and Attachment 243 Performing Home and Attachment 250 A Narrative of Home and Attachment 264 10 At Home: Becoming Scottish in Australia 269 Migrant Border Crossings 276 Musical Border Crossings 279 Locating Home 286 11 Conclusion The Right Storied Relationship: Carving Theory out of Experience 298 Bibliography 309 Discography 350 ii Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the involvement of my sisters and brother and their willingness to assist me in ‘recovering’ and documenting our family song traditions. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance given to me over the course of this project, and in the years before it became a PhD thesis. Many people in Australia, Scotland, England, the USA and elsewhere provided advice, responded to queries and gave generously of their time and expertise. I am especially grateful to David Atkinson, Valentina Bold, Janey Buchan, John Burnett, John Connell, Ron Day, David Francis, Ian Gadd, Vic Gammon, Jessica Hemming, Marie Hamilton, Jim Hammerton, Peter Hughes, Miriam Jones, Gregory Lauder-Frost, Tim Lawrence, Emily Lyle, Patricia Lysaght, Cathlin Macaulay, Kirsteen McCue, Gavin MacDougall, Ruth Lee Martin, Ed Miller, Martin Moonie, Andrew Newby, Malcolm Prentis, Eric Richards, Jean Ritchie, Steve Roud, Ian Russell, Caroline Scott, Eoin Shalloo, Pete Shepheard, Catherine Shoupe, Jonathan Stock, Robert Strachan, Mark Trewin, Alex Tyrrell, and Sheena Wellington. In particular, I would like to thank my PhD Supervisor Professor Graham Seal for his wisdom, support and guidance. I would also like to thank the following music publishers for permission to use the lyrics of songs under copyright in this thesis: A Gordon For Me by Robert Wilson © 1950 Lawrence Wright Music Co Limited For Australia and New Zealand: EMI Allans Music Australia Pty Limited PO Box 35, Pyrmont, NSW 2009, Australia International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission Donald Where's Your Troosers? by Andy Stewart/Neil Grant © 1960 James S. Kerr Music Publishers For Australia and New Zealand: EMI Davis Music Australia Pty Limited PO Box 35, Pyrmont, NSW 2009, Australia International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission A Scottish Soldier Words and music by Andrew Stewart and Iain MacFadyen © James Kerr Ltd. administered by Essex Music Australia Pty Ltd. iii 1 Introduction Summary This study arose out of an interest in my own family’s Scottish song traditions and a desire to understand them within a wider cultural context. Its purpose is to create a critical account of music and migrant identity that brings insights from folklore studies, cultural studies, and migration and diaspora studies together to shed light on transcultural identity formation and maintenance. More specifically, it seeks to ‘discover’ an explanation for why and how the cultural resources/traditions that migrants bring with them continue to have force in migrant family life. It examines the complex of ways in which homeland and hereland are implicated in migrant identities, the role of cultural tradition and family in the migrant experience, and their part in shaping migrant memories, identities and concepts of ‘home’. In examining the salience of homeland culture in migrant family life, this study addresses one of the core questions in migration theory and research, that is, why and how migrants maintain connections to their homeland.1 Much of the migration theory and research that addresses this question focuses on the role of migrant communities and institutions, ethnic networks, and transnational social, economic and political ties, often stressing the connections between kinship groups and families across borders. Some of this work, in the fields of transnational migration and diaspora studies, has placed greater emphasis on the role of ‘imagined’ connections, and on the ways in which migrants make symbolic connections to a sense of homeland as a means of supporting new identities.2 It is these symbolic connections with homeland, rather than the social, 1 Introduction political and economic that this study seeks to investigate. This investigation will focus on music as a source of symbolic connections to homeland, and its role in the construction of family and migrant identity. The study posits that national/cultural identity is not determined by membership, nor pervasive cultural constructions of identity, but is rather a process in which people draw upon, appropriate and customise these discourses in an active process of self-making. Its guiding proposition is that national/cultural identity arises in the intersection between the ‘nation’ and the individual, between the ‘public’ and ‘private’, and is mediated by the particular social and cultural contexts in which people operate - migration being one such context. The ways in which the ‘nation’ comes to have personal relevance at the local level is explored through the interchanges between public song traditions and localised forms of song tradition. The focus of the thesis is on the role of Scottish song culture in constructing representations of national/cultural identity, and how such cultural constructions, their modes of production and dissemination interact with local practices and meanings, and how these dynamics play out in the construction of migrant cultural identity. In pointing to how the ‘nation’ is made local in the context of migration, the study challenges the idea that cultural traditions are backward looking and regressive, and frozen in time in diaspora, arguing instead that tradition and the past are actively deployed as key cultural strategies in migrants’ creation of home and belonging. In doing so, it makes a case for how collective ideas of nation are appropriated and customised at the local level, and how the cultural construction of Scottishness in song, deployed in a Scottish/Australian migrant family, acted as important referents to their identity and gave shape and meaning to their formulations of Scottish/Australian identity. 2 Introduction Research Context and Rationale This study brings migration and its impact on families, ethnicity and cultural tradition to bear on family folklore traditions; and draws into the analysis the role of music, memory, and narrative in considerations of identity. This reflects a strategic purpose, that is, to conduct a project that investigates the cross-disciplinary benefits of bringing together folklore, cultural studies and migration studies to a critical investigation of the relationship between culture and identity in the context of migration.3 In doing so it addresses research areas that have been identified as deserving further attention. With respect to this project’s attempt to bring insights from various fields to bear on this issue, Caroline Brettell and James Hollifield argue that migration is a subject that ‘cries out for an interdisciplinary approach’.4 Elliott Oring, as well as Harris Berger and Giovanna Del Negro also refer to the interdisciplinary nature of folklore, and the contributions of ethnomusicology, performance studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology.5 The common ground that can be addressed through an interdisciplinary approach is that of ‘identity’ - a pervasive concept in contemporary folklore studies, and one that is a focus in migration studies. Oring states that ‘the definition of folklore has been anchored to a concept of identity. That is to say, when we define and redefine folklore, we are conceptualizing and reconceptualizing a set of cultural materials and their privileged relation to the identities of individuals and groups’.6 Oring suggests that: “Folklorists can begin to explore in what ways their studies augment, deepen,