Abstract
‘It so happens’ writes Michael O’Brien, ‘that a disproportionate amount of American popular culture […] is southern. Jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, rock music, country and western, much in those genres is southern or part of a southern cultural diaspora’. He goes on to mention the omnipresence of depictions of the South in film and television, the influence of Southern literature before claiming that ‘to know the South is indispensable to understanding America’ (O’Brien 2007: 11). It was not always thus: James Cobb argues that the late arrival of Southern music — especially country music — to the rest of America occurred at a time (1970s) when the nation was adjusting to the ‘twin shock of defeat and disillusionment previously only associated with the experience and heritage of the Southern states’ (Cobb 1999: 78). It is worth noting that Southern music — hillbilly music — was not simply unknown previously, it was actively reviled for it was seen as the noise made by the primitive half of the US. If New England was understood as the ‘genesis and crystallization of “American civilization”’, argues Larry Griffin (2006: 7), then the South was ‘America’s opposite, its negative image, its evil twin’.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Works cited
Allen, Ray (2010). Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).
Ayers, Edward L. (2005). What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (New York: W.W. Norton).
Barker, Hugh and Yuval Taylor (2007). Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (London: Faber and Faber).
Baudrillard, Jean (1989). America (London: Verso).
Benjamin, Walter (1997). ‘The translator’s task’ (tr. Steven Rendall), TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction 10(2), pp. 151–165.
Booth, Michael (2005). ‘A certain South rises again’, Denver Post, 10 July. http://www.denverpost.com/movies/ci_3089941 (accessed 20 July 2014).
Boym, Svetlana (2008). ‘Ruinophilia: Appreciation of Ruins’, http://monument-totransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/r/ruinophilia/ ruinophilia-appreciation-of-ruins-svetlana-boym.html (accessed 20 July 2014).
Cobb, James C. (1999). Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South (Athens: University of Georgia Press).
Connell, John and Chris Gibson (2003). Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place (London: Routledge).
Dubey, Madhu (2002). ‘Postmodern geographies of the U.S. south’, Nepantla 3(2), pp. 351–371.
Eco, Umberto (1998 [1976]). Faith in Fakes. Travels in Hyperreality (London: Vintage).
Felperin, Leslie (2003). ‘Review: “Searching for the wrong-eyed Jesus”’, Variety, 17 December. http://variety.com/2003/film/reviews/searching-for-the-Wrong-eyed-jesus-1200537375/ (accessed 20 July 2014).
Filene, Benjamin (2004). ‘O Brother, what next? Making sense of the folk fad’, Southern Cultures 10(2), pp. 50–69.
Fink, Matt (2003). ‘Sixteen horsepower–Olden’, Delusions of Adequacy, August 4. http://www.adequacy.net/2003/08/sixteen-horsepower-olden/.
Fisher, Mark (2013). Ghosts of My Life.Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books).
Gill, Andy (2004). ‘Album: Jim White’, The Independent, 16 April, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/ album-j im-white-6171062.html (accessed 20 July 2014).
Griffin, Larry J (2006). ‘The American south and the self’, Southern Cultures 12(3), pp. 6–28.
Grønstad, Asbjørn (2005). ‘Wonders of the invisible world: The handsome family and the ‘topographical uncanny’, Chapter and Verse. A Journal of Popular Music and Literature Studies, Spring, http://www.popmatters.com/chapter/Issue3/gronstad.html.
Hutson, Cecil, K (1993). ‘Cotton pickin’, Hillbillies and Rednecks: An analysis of black Oak Arkansas and the perpetual stereotyping of the rural south’, Popular Music and Society$117(4), pp. 47–62.
Knudsen, Britta Timm and Anne Marit Waade (2010). ‘Performative authenticity in tourism and spatial experience: Rethinking the relations between travel, place and emotion’, in Britta Timm Knudsen and Anne Marit Waade (eds), Re-investing Authenticity. Tourism, Place and Emotions (Bristol: Channel View Publications), pp. 1–21.
Lomax, John Avery and Harold William Thompson (1994 [1934]). American Ballads and Folk Songs (New York: Macmillan, Dover Books).
MacCannell, Dean (1973). ‘Staged authenticity: Arrangements of social space in tourist settings’, American Journal of Sociology 79(3), pp. 589–603.
Marcus, Greil (1997). Invisible Republic. Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (London: Picador).
Moore, Allan (2002). ‘Authenticity as Authentication’, Popular Music 21(2), pp. 209–223.
O’Brien, Michael (2007). Placing the South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi).
Orvell, Miles (1989). The Real Thing. Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).
Paz, Octavio (1992). ‘Translation: Literature and Letters’ (trans. Irene del Corral), in Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (eds), Theories of Translation. An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 152–162.
Petridis, Alexis (2014). ‘Neil young: A letter home review–A gloriously gloomy album of lo-fi covers’, The Guardian 22 May, http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/may/22/neil-young-a-letter-home-review (accessed 20 July 2014).
Reed, John Shelton (1972). The Enduring South. Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books).
Richards, Keith (2010). Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
Roberts, Lisa C. (1997). From knowledge to narrative. Educators and the changing museum. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press).
Smith, Barnaby (2010). ‘Johnny Dowd’ http://landlockedbluesblog.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/johnny-dowd/ (15 April accessed 20 July 2014).
Smith, Lindzee (1990). ‘Nick cave’, BOMB 31 (Spring) http://bombmagazine.org/article/1313/ nick-cave (accessed 20 July 2014).
Sweetman, Simon (2014). ‘Neil young’s letter home’, blogonthetracks, 4 June, http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/blogs/blog-on-the-tracks/10117006/ Neil-Youngs-Letter-Home (accessed 20 July 2014)
Urry, John and Jonas Larsen (2011). The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London: Sage).
Yaffe, David (2009). ‘Bob Dylan and the Anglo-American tradition’, in Kevin J. H. Dettmar (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan (Cambridge: CUP), pp. 15–28
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Nick Hodgin
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hodgin, N. (2015). In Praise of Authenticity? Atmosphere, Song, and Southern States of Mind in Searching for the Wrong-eyed Jesus. In: Mazierska, E., Gregory, G. (eds) Relocating Popular Music. Pop Music, Culture and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463388_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463388_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-69057-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-46338-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)