Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls

Well before the success of Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, female artists were integral to the commercial expansion and aural reception of country music. Women in early country music took on and redefined the theatrical and musical roles of the hillbilly maiden, the unruly Okie, the singing cowgirl, and the honky-tonk angel in live performance, on radio, in film, and in the recording studio. This book accounts for the vibrant presence of female country artists through an interdisciplinary focus on performance and vocal expression in relation to the cultural currents of the 1930s and 1950s. Across a variety of media, women’s country music engendered new ways of making sense of public and private spaces (such as the home, the dance hall, and the honky-tonk) that were integral to the real and imagined lives of working-class women striving for upward social mobility and/or resisting the rigidity of middle-class codes of behavior. Connecting the female singing voice to the theatrics of the popular stage and to the musical practices of specific country styles, this study shows how women in country music wielded a range of performative devices in order to work within and against social and commercial expectations.

Labor Pains

Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work and Sex in the South is about southern modernist fictions centered on the imagined lives of black folk workers from the 1930s to the 1960s. This period encompasses the clashes surrounding New Deal-era policy reforms and their legacies as well as a surge in Popular Front artistic expressions from the Depression, to World War II, to the Civil Rights era and following. Labor Pains sets out to show that black working-class representations of the Popular Front have not only been about the stakes of race and labor but also call upon an imagined black folk to do other work. The book considers tropes of black folk workers across genres of southern literature to demonstrate the reach of black radicalism and how the black folk worker was used to engage the representative feelings we think we know and the affective feelings that remained unsaid. Labor Pains emphasizes feeling, namely the sensual and the sexual, imbued in narratives by George Wylie Henderson, William Attaway, Eudora Welty, and Sarah Elizabeth Wright. Each employs tropes of black folk workers to get a fuller picture of gender and desire during this time. As a result, a glimpse into feminist and gender-aware aspects of the outgrowths of black radicalism come into view.