Academic literature on the topic 'Guitar music (Folk-rock)'

Within the study of rock music, religion appears as a racial marker or a biographical attribute. The concept of religion, and its co-produced opposite, the secular, needs critical analysis in popular music studies. To inaugurate this work this article returns to the moment in singer-songwriter Bob Dylan’s career that is most unmarked by religion, namely his appearance with an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Dylan’s going electric became, through subsequent years of narrative attention, a secularizing event. “Secularizing event” is a phrase coined to capture how certain epochal moments become transforming symbols of divestment; here, a commitment writ into rock criticism as one in which rock emerged by giving up something that had been holding it back. Through a study of this 1965 moment, as well as the history of electrification that preceded it and its subsequent commentarial reception, the unreflective secular of rock criticism is exposed.

the phrase ‘this magic moment’ recurs throughout elvis costello's ‘it’s time' (1996). an allusion to pop history – the drifter's ‘this magic moment’ (1960) – is thus used in the service of a fatalistic narrative that manages to evoke both the ‘revenge and guilt’ famously associated with costello's early career and the early 1960's romanticism of brill building pop. the musical ‘magic moment’ of the song arrives in a ringing e major chord at the end of the chorus, played in open position on the electric guitar. the use of this e major chord references another line of pop music history, one that stretches back to the formation of ‘folk-rock’ in the mid-1960s. this paper serves as an example of how one song creates a series of magic moments that resonate densely with simultaneous histories.

Playing a musical instrument involves the repetitive use of muscles, often at their extreme range of motion. Consequently, musicians in general are at an increased risk for the development of pain syndromes related to nerve or musculoskeletal damage. Acoustic and electric guitars are among the most popular instruments in the world today, with a large population of musicians at risk of injury. This article examines the results of a survey completed by 261 professional, amateur, and student guitarists to determine the most common anatomic locations of playing-related pain and its relationship to possible etiologic factors. A survey of 15 questions was distributed to professional, amateur, and student guitarists who play the musical genres of rock/blues, jazz, and folk across the United States and Canada. The questions addressed type of guitar played, style of music performed, playing posture, picking technique, anatomic location of pain, history of formal training, presence of playing-related pain in the past 12 months, history of trauma to the affected area, and history of other nonrelated medical problems. Playing-related pain was reported by 160 (61.3%) of 261 guitarists who completed the survey. The most often reported location was the fretting hand, with 109 (41.8%) of 261 subjects reporting the presence of playing-related pain in the previous 12 months. The back and neck were the next most reported sites of playing-related pain, with 45 (17.2%) of 261 subjects reporting back pain and 39 (14.9%) of 261 subjects reporting neck pain in the previous 12 months. The results suggest that a substantial number of guitarists playing various styles of popular music are experiencing playing-related pain.

Most instruction in electric guitar, bass guitar, drums and electronic keyboards is conducted on a one-to-one basis by uncertified, independent teachers. The lessons are face-to-face, and based on the student's imitation of the teacher's example. Popular music education is a ‘little tradition’ (in comparison to school music departments) and largely an oral one, thus meeting the usual criteria of folk cultures.

Introduction One of the ways in which ‘country’ is made to work discursively is in ‘country music’ – defining a genre and sensibility in music production, marketing and consumption. This article seeks to excavate one small niche in the historical geography of country music to explore exactly how discursive antecedents emerged, and crucially, how images associated with ‘country’ surfaced and travelled internationally via one of the new ‘global’ media of the first half of the twentieth century – sheet music. My central arguments are twofold: first, that alongside aural qualities and lyrical content, the visual elements of sheet music were important and thus far have been under-acknowledged. Sheet music diffused the imagery connecting ‘country’ to music, to particular landscapes, and masculinities. In the literature on country music much emphasis has been placed on film, radio and television (Tichi; Peterson). Yet, sheet music was for several decades the most common way people bought personal copies of songs they liked and intended to play at home on piano, guitar or ukulele. This was particularly the case in Australia – geographically distant, and rarely included in international tours by American country music stars. Sheet music is thus a rich text to reveal the historical contours of ‘country’. My second and related argument is that that the possibilities for the globalising of ‘country’ were first explored in music. The idea of transnational discourses associated with ‘country’ and ‘rurality’ is relatively new (Cloke et al; Gorman-Murray et al; McCarthy), but in music we see early evidence of a globalising discourse of ‘country’ well ahead of the time period usually analysed. Accordingly, my focus is on the sheet music of country songs in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century and on how visual representations hybridised travelling themes to create a new vernacular ‘country’ in Australia. Creating ‘Country’ Music Country music, as its name suggests, is perceived as the music of rural areas, “defined in contrast to metropolitan norms” (Smith 301). However, the ‘naturalness’ of associations between country music and rurality belies a history of urban capitalism and the refinement of deliberate methods of marketing music through associated visual imagery. Early groups wore suits and dressed for urban audiences – but then altered appearances later, on the insistence of urban record companies, to emphasise rurality and cowboy heritage. Post-1950, ‘country’ came to replace ‘folk’ music as a marketing label, as the latter was considered to have too many communistic references (Hemphill 5), and the ethnic mixing of earlier folk styles was conveniently forgotten in the marketing of ‘country’ music as distinct from African American ‘race’ and ‘r and b’ music. Now an industry of its own with multinational headquarters in Nashville, country music is a ‘cash cow’ for entertainment corporations, with lower average production costs, considerable profit margins, and marketing advantages that stem from tropes of working class identity and ‘rural’ honesty (see Lewis; Arango). Another of country music’s associations is with American geography – and an imagined heartland in the colonial frontier of the American West. Slippages between ‘country’ and ‘western’ in music, film and dress enhance this. But historical fictions are masked: ‘purists’ argue that western dress and music have nothing to do with ‘country’ (see truewesternmusic.com), while recognition of the Spanish-Mexican, Native American and Hawaiian origins of ‘cowboy’ mythology is meagre (George-Warren and Freedman). Similarly, the highly international diffusion and adaptation of country music as it rose to prominence in the 1940s is frequently downplayed (Connell and Gibson), as are the destructive elements of colonialism and dispossession of indigenous peoples in frontier America (though Johnny Cash’s 1964 album The Ballads Of The American Indian: Bitter Tears was an exception). Adding to the above is the way ‘country’ operates discursively in music as a means to construct particular masculinities. Again, linked to rural imagery and the American frontier, the dominant masculinity is of rugged men wrestling nature, negotiating hardships and the pressures of family life. Country music valorises ‘heroic masculinities’ (Holt and Thompson), with echoes of earlier cowboy identities reverberating into contemporary performance through dress style, lyrical content and marketing imagery. The men of country music mythology live an isolated existence, working hard to earn an income for dependent families. Their music speaks to the triumph of hard work, honest values (meaning in this context a musical style, and lyrical concerns that are ‘down to earth’, ‘straightforward’ and ‘without pretence’) and physical strength, in spite of neglect from national governments and uncaring urban leaders. Country music has often come to be associated with conservative politics, heteronormativity, and whiteness (Gibson and Davidson), echoing the wider politics of ‘country’ – it is no coincidence, for example, that the slogan for the 2008 Republican National Convention in America was ‘country first’. And yet, throughout its history, country music has also enabled more diverse gender performances to emerge – from those emphasising (or bemoaning) domesticity; assertive femininity; creative negotiation of ‘country’ norms by gay men; and ‘alternative’ culture (captured in the marketing tag, ‘alt.country’); to those acknowledging white male victimhood, criminality (‘the outlaw’), vulnerability and cruelty (see Johnson; McCusker and Pecknold; Saucier). Despite dominant tropes of ‘honesty’, country music is far from transparent, standing for certain values and identities, and yet enabling the construction of diverse and contradictory others. Historical analysis is therefore required to trace the emergence of ‘country’ in music, as it travelled beyond America. A Note on Sheet Music as Media Source Sheet music was one of the main modes of distribution of music from the 1930s through to the 1950s – a formative period in which an eclectic group of otherwise distinct ‘hillbilly’ and ‘folk’ styles moved into a single genre identity, and after which vinyl singles and LP records with picture covers dominated. Sheet music was prevalent in everyday life: beyond radio, a hit song was one that was widely purchased as sheet music, while pianos and sheet music collections (stored in a piece of furniture called a ‘music canterbury’) in family homes were commonplace. Sheet music is in many respects preferable to recorded music as a form of evidence for historical analysis of country music. Picture LP covers did not arrive until the late 1950s (by which time rock and roll had surpassed country music). Until then, 78 rpm shellac discs, the main form of pre-recorded music, featured generic brown paper sleeves from the individual record companies, or city retail stores. Also, while radio was clearly central to the consumption of music in this period, it obviously also lacked the pictorial element that sheet music could provide. Sheet music bridged the music and printing industries – the latter already well-equipped with colour printing, graphic design and marketing tools. Sheet music was often literally crammed with information, providing the researcher with musical notation, lyrics, cover art and embedded advertisements – aural and visual texts combined. These multiple dimensions of sheet music proved useful here, for clues to the context of the music/media industries and geography of distribution (for instance, in addresses for publishers and sheet music retail shops). Moreover, most sheet music of the time used rich, sometimes exaggerated, images to convince passing shoppers to buy songs that they had possibly never heard. As sheet music required caricature rather than detail or historical accuracy, it enabled fantasy without distraction. In terms of representations of ‘country’, then, sheet music is perhaps even more evocative than film or television. Hundreds of sheet music items were collected for this research over several years, through deliberate searching (for instance, in library archives and specialist sheet music stores) and with some serendipity (for instance, when buying second hand sheet music in charity shops or garage sales). The collected material is probably not representative of all music available at the time – it is as much a specialised personal collection as a comprehensive survey. However, at least some material from all the major Australian country music performers of the time were found, and the resulting collection appears to be several times larger than that held currently by the National Library of Australia (from which some entries were sourced). All examples here are of songs written by, or cover art designed for Australian country music performers. For brevity’s sake, the following analysis of the sheet music follows a crudely chronological framework. Country Music in Australia Before ‘Country’ Country music did not ‘arrive’ in Australia from America as a fully-finished genre category; nor was Australia at the time without rural mythology or its own folk music traditions. Associations between Australian national identity, rurality and popular culture were entrenched in a period of intense creativity and renewed national pride in the decades prior to and after Federation in 1901. This period saw an outpouring of art, poetry, music and writing in new nationalist idiom, rooted in ‘the bush’ (though drawing heavily on Celtic expressions), and celebrating themes of mateship, rural adversity and ‘battlers’. By the turn of the twentieth century, such myths, invoked through memory and nostalgia, had already been popularised. Australia had a fully-established system of colonies, capital cities and state governments, and was highly urbanised. Yet the poetry, folk music and art, invariably set in rural locales, looked back to the early 1800s, romanticising bush characters and frontier events. The ‘bush ballad’ was a central and recurring motif, one that commentators have argued was distinctly, and essentially ‘Australian’ (Watson; Smith). Sheet music from this early period reflects the nationalistic, bush-orientated popular culture of the time: iconic Australian fauna and flora are prominent, and Australian folk culture is emphasised as ‘native’ (being the first era of cultural expressions from Australian-born residents). Pioneer life and achievements are celebrated. ‘Along the road to Gundagai’, for instance, was about an iconic Australian country town and depicted sheep droving along rustic trails with overhanging eucalypts. Male figures are either absent, or are depicted in situ as lone drovers in the archetypal ‘shepherd’ image, behind their flocks of sheep (Figure 1). Figure 1: No. 1 Magpie Ballads – The Pioneer (c1900) and Along the road to Gundagai (1923). Further colonial ruralities developed in Australia from the 1910s to 1940s, when agrarian values grew in the promotion of Australian agricultural exports. Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’ to industrialisation, and governments promoted rural development and inland migration. It was a period in which rural lifestyles were seen as superior to those in the crowded inner city, and government strategies sought to create a landed proletariat through post-war land settlement and farm allotment schemes. National security was said to rely on populating the inland with those of European descent, developing rural industries, and breeding a healthier and yet compliant population (Dufty), from which armies of war-ready men could be recruited in times of conflict. Popular culture served these national interests, and thus during these decades, when ‘hillbilly’ and other North American music forms were imported, they were transformed, adapted and reworked (as in other places such as Canada – see Lehr). There were definite parallels in the frontier narratives of the United States (Whiteoak), and several local adaptations followed: Tex Morton became Australia’s ‘Yodelling boundary rider’ and Gordon Parsons became ‘Australia’s yodelling bushman’. American songs were re-recorded and performed, and new original songs written with Australian lyrics, titles and themes. Visual imagery in sheet music built upon earlier folk/bush frontier themes to re-cast Australian pastoralism in a more settled, modernist and nationalist aesthetic; farms were places for the production of a robust nation. Where male figures were present on sheet music covers in the early twentieth century, they became more prominent in this period, and wore Akubras (Figure 2). The lyrics to John Ashe’s Growin’ the Golden Fleece (1952) exemplify this mix of Australian frontier imagery, new pastoralist/nationalist rhetoric, and the importation of American cowboy masculinity: Go west and take up sheep, man, North Queensland is the shot But if you don’t get rich, man, you’re sure to get dry rot Oh! Growin’ the golden fleece, battlin’ a-way out west Is bound to break your flamin’ heart, or else expand your chest… We westerners are handy, we can’t afford to crack Not while the whole darn’d country is riding on our back Figure 2: Eric Tutin’s Shearers’ Jamboree (1946). As in America, country music struck a chord because it emerged “at a point in history when the project of the creation and settlement of a new society was underway but had been neither completed nor abandoned” (Dyer 33). Governments pressed on with the colonial project of inland expansion in Australia, despite the theft of indigenous country this entailed, and popular culture such as music became a means to normalise and naturalise the process. Again, mutations of American western imagery, and particular iconic male figures were important, as in Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail (Figure 3): Wagon wheels are rolling on, and the days seem mighty long Clouds of heat-dust in the air, bawling cattle everywhere They’re on the overlander trail Where only sheer determination will prevail Men of Aussie with a job to do, they’ll stick and drive the cattle through And though they sweat they know they surely must Keep on the trail that winds a-head thro’ heat and dust All sons of Aussie and they will not fail. Sheet music depicted silhouetted men in cowboy hats on horses (either riding solo or in small groups), riding into sunsets or before looming mountain ranges. Music – an important part of popular culture in the 1940s – furthered the colonial project of invading, securing and transforming the Australian interior by normalising its agendas and providing it with heroic male characters, stirring tales and catchy tunes. Figure 3: ‘Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail and Smoky Dawson’s The Overlander’s Song (1946). ‘Country Music’ Becomes a (Globalised) Genre Further growth in Australian country music followed waves of popularity in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and was heavily influenced by new cross-media publicity opportunities. Radio shows expanded, and western TV shows such as Bonanza and On the Range fuelled a ‘golden age’. Australian performers such as Slim Dusty and Smokey Dawson rose to fame (see Fitzgerald and Hayward) in an era when rural-urban migration peaked. Sheet music reflected the further diffusion and adoption of American visual imagery: where male figures were present on sheet music covers, they became more prominent than before and wore Stetsons. Some were depicted as chiselled-faced but simple men, with plain clothing and square jaws. Others began to more enthusiastically embrace cowboy looks, with bandana neckerchiefs, rawhide waistcoats, embellished and harnessed tall shaft boots, pipe-edged western shirts with wide collars, smile pockets, snap fasteners and shotgun cuffs, and fringed leather jackets (Figure 4). Landscapes altered further too: cacti replaced eucalypts, and iconic ‘western’ imagery of dusty towns, deserts, mesas and buttes appeared (Figure 5). Any semblance of folk music’s appeal to rustic authenticity was jettisoned in favour of showmanship, as cowboy personas were constructed to maximise cinematic appeal. Figure 4: Al Dexter’s Pistol Packin’ Mama (1943) and Reg Lindsay’s (1954) Country and Western Song Album. Figure 5: Tim McNamara’s Hitching Post (1948) and Smoky Dawson’s Golden West Album (1951). Far from slavish mimicry of American culture, however, hybridisations were common. According to Australian music historian Graeme Smith (300): “Australian place names appear, seeking the same mythological resonance that American localisation evoked: hobos became bagmen […] cowboys become boundary riders.” Thus alongside reproductions of the musical notations of American songs by Lefty Frizzel, Roy Carter and Jimmie Rodgers were songs with localised themes by new Australian stars such as Reg Lindsay and Smoky Dawson: My curlyheaded buckaroo, My home way out back, and On the Murray Valley. On the cover of The square dance by the billabong (Figure 6) – the title of which itself was a conjunction of archetypal ‘country’ images from both America and Australia – a background of eucalypts and windmills frames dancers in classic 1940s western (American) garb. In the case of Tex Morton’s Beautiful Queensland (Figure 7), itself mutated from W. Lee O’Daniel’s Beautiful Texas (c1945), the sheet music instructed those playing the music that the ‘names of other states may be substituted for Queensland’. ‘Country’ music had become an established genre, with normative values, standardised images and themes and yet constituted a stylistic formula with enough polysemy to enable local adaptations and variations. Figure 6: The Square dance by the billabong, Vernon Lisle, 1951. Figure 7: Beautiful Queensland, Tex Morton, c1945 source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn1793930. Conclusions In country music images of place and masculinity combine. In music, frontier landscapes are populated by rugged men living ‘on the range’ in neo-colonial attempts to tame the land and convert it to productive uses. This article has considered only one media – sheet music – in only one country (Australia) and in only one time period (1900-1950s). There is much more to say than was possible here about country music, place and gender – particularly recently, since ‘country’ has fragmented into several niches, and marketing of country music via cable television and the internet has ensued (see McCusker and Pecknold). My purpose here has been instead to explore the early origins of ‘country’ mythology in popular culture, through a media source rarely analysed. Images associated with ‘country’ travelled internationally via sheet music, immensely popular in the 1930s and 1940s before the advent of television. The visual elements of sheet music contributed to the popularisation and standardisation of genre expectations and appearances, and yet these too travelled and were adapted and varied in places like Australia which had their own colonial histories and folk music heritages. Evidenced here is how combinations of geographical and gender imagery embraced imported American cowboy imagery and adapted it to local markets and concerns. Australia saw itself as a modern rural utopia with export aspirations and a desire to secure permanence through taming and populating its inland. Sheet music reflected all this. So too, sheet music reveals the historical contours of ‘country’ as a transnational discourse – and the extent to which ‘country’ brought with it a clearly defined set of normative values, a somewhat exaggerated cowboy masculinity, and a remarkable capacity to be moulded to local circumstances. Well before later and more supposedly ‘global’ media such as the internet and television, the humble printed sheet of notated music was steadily shaping ‘country’ imagery, and an emergent international geography of cultural flows. References Arango, Tim. “Cashville USA.” Fortune, Jan 29, 2007. Sept 3, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/01/22/8397980/index.htm. Cloke, Paul, Marsden, Terry and Mooney, Patrick, eds. Handbook of Rural Studies, London: Sage, 2006. Connell, John and Gibson, Chris. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place, London: Routledge, 2003. Dufty, Rae. Rethinking the politics of distribution: the geographies and governmentalities of housing assistance in rural New South Wales, Australia, PhD thesis, UNSW, 2008. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture, London: Routledge, 1997. George-Warren, Holly and Freedman, Michelle. How the West was Worn: a History of Western Wear, New York: Abrams, 2000. Fitzgerald, Jon and Hayward, Phil. “At the confluence: Slim Dusty and Australian country music.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Phil Hayward. Gympie: Australian Institute of Country Music Press, 2003. 29-54. Gibson, Chris and Davidson, Deborah. “Tamworth, Australia’s ‘country music capital’: place marketing, rural narratives and resident reactions.” Journal of Rural Studies 20 (2004): 387-404. Gorman-Murray, Andrew, Darian-Smith, Kate and Gibson, Chris. “Scaling the rural: reflections on rural cultural studies.” Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008): in press. Hemphill, Paul. The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Holt, Douglas B. and Thompson, Craig J. “Man-of-action heroes: the pursuit of heroic masculinity in everyday consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2004). Johnson, Corey W. “‘The first step is the two-step’: hegemonic masculinity and dancing in a country western gay bar.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 18 (2004): 445-464. Lehr, John C. “‘Texas (When I die)’: national identity and images of place in Canadian country music broadcasts.” The Canadian Geographer 27 (1983): 361-370. Lewis, George H. “Lap dancer or hillbilly deluxe? The cultural construction of modern country music.” Journal of Popular Culture, 31 (1997): 163-173. McCarthy, James. “Rural geography: globalizing the countryside.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008): 132-137. McCusker, Kristine M. and Pecknold, Diane. Eds. A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music. UP of Mississippi, 2004. Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Saucier, Karen A. “Healers and heartbreakers: images of women and men in country music.” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (1986): 147-166. Smith, Graeme. “Australian country music and the hillbilly yodel.” Popular Music 13 (1994): 297-311. Tichi, Cecelia. Readin’ Country Music. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. truewesternmusic.com “True western music.”, Sept 3, 2008, http://truewesternmusic.com/. Watson, Eric. Country Music in Australia. Sydney: Rodeo Publications, 1984. Whiteoak, John. “Two frontiers: early cowboy music and Australian popular culture.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. P. Hayward. Gympie: AICMP: 2003. 1-28.

augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Blackthorne, Angus. “Robert Johnson Slowed Down.” YouTube.com 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/user/ANGUSBLACKTHORN?feature=watch›. Blesh, Rudi. Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1946. Blischke, Michael. “Slowing Down Robert Johnson.” The Straight Dope 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=461601›. Block, Rory. The Lady and Mrs Johnson. Rykodisc 10872, 2006. Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: De Capo Press, 1959. Collins UK. Collins English Dictionary. Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers, 2010. DiGiacomo, Frank. “A Disputed Robert Johnson Photo Gets the C.S.I. Treatment.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/10/a-disputed-robert-johnson-photo-gets-the-csi-treatment›. DiGiacomo, Frank. “Portrait of a Phantom: Searching for Robert Johnson.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/11/johnson200811›. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Vol 1. London: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Evans, David. Tommy Johnson. London: November Books, 1971. Ford, Charles. “Robert Johnson’s Rhythms.” Popular Music 17.1 (1998): 71-93. Freeland, Tom. “Robert Johnson: Some Witnesses to a Short Life.” Living Blues 150 (2000): 43-49. Gibbens, John. “Steady Rollin’ Man: A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson.” Touched 2004. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html›. Gioia, Ted. Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionised American Music. London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Gioia, Ted. "Robert Johnson: A Century, and Beyond." Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection. Sony Music 88697859072, 2011. Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. London: Pimlico Books, 2002. Graves, Tom. Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Spokane: Demers Books, 2008. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers". London: Plume, 1998. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hammond, John. From Spirituals to Swing (Dedicated to Bessie Smith). New York: The New Masses, 1938. Johnson, Robert. “Hellbound.” Amazon.co.uk 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hellbound/dp/B0063S8Y4C/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376605065&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=robert+johnson+hellbound›. ———. “Contracted to the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2002. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contracted-The-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00006F1L4/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376830351&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Contracted+to+The+Devil›. ———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia Records CL1654, 1961. ———. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Amazon.co.uk 2003. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Devil-Blues-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00008SH7O/ref=sr_1_16?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604807&sr=1-16&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “The High Price of Soul.” Amazon.co.uk 2007. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Price-Soul-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000LC582C/ref=sr_1_39?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604863&sr=1-39&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “Up Jumped the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2005. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Jumped-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000B57SL8/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376829917&sr=1-2&keywords=Up+Jumped+The+Devil›. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. London: Plume, 1997. Morris, Christopher. “Phonograph Blues: Robert Johnson Mastered at Wrong Speed?” Variety 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.varietysoundcheck.com/2010/05/phonograph-blues-robert-johnson-mastered-at-wrong-speed.html›. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD. Universal Pictures, 2000. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “For–the–Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music 26.1 (2007): 65-81. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “Myth and Collective Memory in the Case of Robert Johnson.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 189-205. Schroeder, Patricia. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (Music in American Life). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Segalstad, Eric, and Josh Hunter. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock and Roll. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009. Stewart, Jon. “Rock Climbing: Jon Stewart Concludes His Investigation of the Myths behind Robert Johnson.” Guitarist Magazine 327 (2010): 34. The Search for Robert Johnson. DVD. Sony Pictures, 1991. Talley, Ron. “Robert Johnson, 'Sweet Home Chicago', as It REALLY Sounded...” YouTube.com 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHod3_yEWQ›. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. The Robert Johnson Speed Recording Controversy. Elijah Wald — Writer, Musician 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html›. Wilde, John . “Robert Johnson Revelation Tells Us to Put the Brakes on the Blues: We've Been Listening to the Immortal 'King of the Delta Blues' at the Wrong Speed, But Now We Can Hear Him as He Intended.” The Guardian 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues›. Wolkewitz, M., A. Allignol, N. Graves, and A.G. Barnett. “Is 27 Really a Dangerous Age for Famous Musicians? Retrospective Cohort Study.” British Medical Journal 343 (2011): d7799. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7799›.

Getting the Family Together: A Fieldwork Account The final gig of Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band’s 2013 tour is a hometown show at New Lambton Community Hall in Newcastle on the coast of New South Wales, Australia. The tour had already covered Newcastle and surrounds at various locations within 50 to 100km of the Newcastle CBD. In addition to lead singer and guitarist Bob Corbett, there are three main members of the Roo Grass Band, Sue Carson on fiddle and mandolin, Dave Carter on banjo, bass and bagpipes and Robbie Long on guitar, mandolin and bass. I enter the building and at the top of the stairs a tall, slim woman with a shock of red hair rushes to greet me with a hug, “It is so good to see you!”This is Veronica, Bob Corbett’s Mum. She’s been busy setting up the merchandise desk, taking tickets, and greeting almost every member of the audience by name. Veronica has functioned as de facto tour manager throughout the band’s Lucky Country Hall Tour. As well as running the merchandise desk and ticketing, she’s occasionally acted as roadie, and has supervised the packing of cars and trailers. These day-to-day jobs on the tour have been done with help from either her sister Roberta or, for most of the tour, a close friend of the band, Jenny. I deposit home-made chocolate brownies and biscuits in the kitchen, setting them up alongside fruit brownies made by Veronica for the audience. Bob’s wife, Kirrily, comes and says hello, followed by their son Marley, who heads straight for the goodies. Their daughter Matilda is running around with her best friend and next-door neighbour, Sophie. Dave, who plays banjo, bass and bagpipes in the band, greets his wife Karen as she arrives with their kids. The band’s fiddle player, Sue, is pacing around, looking fractious. I ask if she’s okay. “Yeah, it is just that my family is meant to be here already and they’re running late. They’re going to miss it.”Not long after, Sue’s partner, Michael (who is also Veronica’s brother, Bob’s uncle) arrives with their son Elijah and his son Gabe, in time for the show. This final gig of the tour seemed to have been largely arranged for the families of the band, and there was little advertising for it. In the way of family get-togethers a mix of tension and excitement fill the room. But once the band starts playing things calm down, a group of kids occupy the dance floor, twirling, swaying, skipping and running along with the music. Family, Authenticity, and Commercial Practices in Australian Country MusicI open with this fieldwork account to illuminate how the presence and involvement of family, through parents, spouses, aunts, uncles, children and even close friends are central to the experience of what it is to be a country music artist in Australia. In the case of Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band, for example, band members make choices to involve family in the activity of “being” a band—touring, performing, engaging with fans—and these choices have emotional value for them, but are also yoked to broader discourses of family which circulate in the field of Australian country music. This field story reveals that “family” is not something carved off from artists’ public engagement with the field of Australian country music but is central to it. Discourses of and around “family” are implicit in the practices of Australian country music artists and are strategically used by artists to define what country music is and what is valued in the field. Crucially, the discourse of family is used to support claims to authenticity within country music culture. Ideas about and associated practices concerning, “authenticity” permeate the culture of country music. The discourse reaches across all aspects of the field, and all participants in the scene are compelled to at least turn their minds to questions of authenticity, and develop strategies for dealing with them. Value is conferred on artists seen to convey so-called “true” and “genuine” personas. Indeed the country music community demands something referred to as “honesty” from performers. It needs to be noted that country music is a commercial popular music form and culture. Many agents in the scene have an uneasy symbolic relationship with the commercial aspects of country music, but it is a basic premise within the field: the music exists to make money. This is not to say that financial and popular success (in their quantifiable forms: money made, units sold, crowd sizes, radio spins) is the only thing valued in country music. As a form of cultural capital, authenticity is also valued. But within Australian country music a tension exists between the part of field underpinned by commercial logic and the idea of the popular and those underpinned by notions of creativity, independence and musical integrity. Authenticity is deployed to distinguish country music from other styles of music in a number of keys ways. Authenticity can be taken as an essential quality of music, which “honestly” reflects or expresses an identity or experience (e.g., Australian national identity, rural experience, heartbreak) (Watson, Volume 1; Watson, Volume 2; Sanjek); as a proper way of relating music, artist and audience (Smith); as a ideological watchword which tempers commerciality (Sanjek); or as something “fabricated” or constructed in the codification of the genre (Akenson; Peterson; Carriage and Hayward). I am not positing authenticity as a feature unique to Australian country music. A number of authors have highlighted the role authenticity plays in many forms of popular music to navigate, understand or obfuscate the functions of the commercial music industry and shape its output (Frith; Sanjek; Barker and Taylor). The scholarship on country music and popular music in general often explores how authenticity is inscribed in the products of country music, rather than the processes and practices behind those products: the everyday, extra-musical activities of participants in the scene. This article is concerned then with how discourses of authenticity are sutured to business, musical and promotional practices, and how such tropes function alongside discourses and practices concerning “family” in the negotiation of commercial realities in Australian country music. Rather than looking at end products, my research takes a ground-up approach, exploring what people are doing and how they talk about their practices and decisions. Discourses of “family”, and practices around kin, provide one of many possible entry points for this exploration. MethodologyThis article is based on ethnographic research on Australian country music. Between 2012-2014 I spent many months of focused immersion with Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band at festivals and on tour. This research was part of broader participant observation I conducted which included attending more than 150 country music events across New South Wales and Queensland. I also conducted hundreds of informal interviews at these events, as well as in-depth, semi-structured interviews with key informants, including band members Bob Corbett, Sue Carson, Robbie Long, and Michael Carpenter (sometimes drummer).Bob Corbett was recognised by the “mainstream” Australian country music scene in 2012 after winning the Star Maker competition. Since the win Bob and the band’s success within the field has increased—higher album sales, larger crowds, more airplay, recognition, sponsorships and nomination for Golden Guitar Awards (the main Australian country music industry awards). They play a mercurial mix of styles including bluegrass, Western swing, pop folk, and rock. At the core is a concern with storytelling and live, acoustic based performance is central. Bob and the band are primarily engaging with the field of Australian country music (through festivals, media, and self-identification), rather than the folk or bluegrass scenes, which, while related, are distinct fields with different logics, rules and relations.The conceptual framework for this article is indebted to Pierre Bourdieu. In using the term “field” to talk about Australian country music, I understand it as a discrete, relatively autonomous social microcosm, which is located within the social space of Australian society and the broader music industry, yet it is ruled by logics which are “specific and irreducible to those that regulate other fields” (Bourdieu in Bourdieu and Wacquant 97). Australian country music consists of systems of relations, which define the occupants of the field—country musicians, country music stars, or country music fans (to name but a few)—and shape the products and practices of the field. Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band are participants in the field of Australian country music, and work to differentiate their position, and gain a monopoly over authority and influence within the field—to be recognised as successful, authentic country music artists (Bourdieu and Wacquant 100). This framework allows analytic space for exploring and understanding a tension between authenticity, as a form of cultural capital, and the commercial imperatives of country music as a popular music form.Family Bands and the Family BusinessThe significance and foregrounded presence of “family” within Australian country music is a result of the history of the field in which family bands have been prominent. The practice of touring with your spouse, children or other kin has been connected to a discourse of the “Family Band” in Australian country music. Slim Dusty and his family, as pioneers in the Australian country music industry, and arguably the most commercially and culturally successful artists in the scene’s history, are held up as an example par excellence of the country music canon, and provide the model for how country music should or could be done as a family. Slim, his wife Joy, daughter Anne Kirkpatrick and other extended family worked as a “family band” touring, performing, songwriting, recording, and being country music artists. As the “first family” Australian country music band (Baker; Ellis) they dominate the social and cultural imaginary of Australian country music. They represent a tradition of family involvement in the business of country music as a way of dealing with the practical realities of touring, providing emotional support and enjoyment, and as a part of a relatively conservative set of values drawn from country life­. These features work together to discursively distance the “family band” from the commercial music industry and imbue integrity and naturalness in those artists’ engagement with the music business. Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band is a family band: fiddle player Sue is Bob’s aunty; her partner Michael Stove, Bob’s uncle, was an original member of the Roo Grass Band. But more than that, the band understands themselves as a “family”. Sometimes-drummer in the band, Michael Carpenter, talked at length about the “Roo Grass Family” when I interviewed him, including the affective value he places on those relationships:I love it when Bob says… ‘Michael’s been a part of the Roo Grass family for a long time’ … it’s a very country music thing to say … when Bob says it, it actually means something, there’s a certain level of weight to it, because I know the way he treats his bands, I know the way he treats the people who are involved ... it does make them feel like they are a part of something special and so, and that’s beyond just doing a gig … it kind of creates this sense of loyalty that is important to me.The other members of the band also understand and value their involvement with the band in a similar way, and it spills into the chemistry the band has on stage, and the enjoyment they derive from playing together. The idea of the family band opens out beyond the actual band as well: the “Roo Grass Family” includes friends, fans and others with strong ties and involvement with the band.Practical, on the ground support (both on tour and also at home) offered by family to artists in Australian country music is a significant source of capital for those artists. However, participants also talk about this family help as a chance to spend time together, and couch it within discourses of loyalty, love, fun and commitment. Practices and discourses of small, DIY business are also sutured to discourse of family, as a way of reinforcing the fierce independence from big business and record companies. The fieldwork account at the beginning of this article reveals some of the work done by family on tour for Bob and the band, mainly through the presence of Bob’s mum, Veronica, as defacto tour manager. During the gig Bob offered a series of acknowledgments for the tour. After thanking the audiences and tour sponsors, he moved on to family:Bob: I’d like to thank my aunty Roberta, she came along and helped us on a tour leg … Ah, I’m going to forget people, I’m going to leave the special ones to last … I would like to thank Kirrily personally, but as Sue said, all partners and stuff, so I love you Kiz. But the most special one of all: Mrs Veronica Corbett [loud applause and cheers]. She’s the backbone! Of the tour, so thanks mum, thanks for everything.Veronica: Absolute pleasure Bobby.Bob: It’s been, it’s been a pleasure. You love doing it.Veronica: I love it.Bob: Yeah, you do love doing it, it’s been great, you know. I don’t want to get too, too sentimental, but, um just before dad died, he turned to me and said ‘look after mum’, and I don’t, I don’t look after mum, but in a way, just sharing all these experiences, like, we’re looking after each other, so, thank you for doing that.In this account, I am interested in the ways in which Bob, Veronica and Sue talk about the labour provided by family. There are a number of ways that participants talk about the practice of getting family to help do the work of touring and performing country music, which emerge here, and are consistently used by Bob and the band. It is spoken of in terms of “spending time” with each other, and of loving that time. Discourses of enjoyment and sociality permeate Bob, Veronica, and others’ discussions of the practical reality of people giving up their time to help. This is part of the cultural capital of authenticity: being a professional country music band out on the road is about more than hard slog, making money and cold business; it is an enjoyable experience, underpinned with love. To be authentic, it should be about more than the dollars.While the involvement of family in the activities of the band is discussed and understood as a chance to spend time together, an enjoyable experience, there are also discourses of support and help tied to these practices by those in and around the band. It is often acknowledged as a practical reality that family members are involved in the activities of the band (or in maintaining the home front) as a source of free or cheap labour which makes touring and performing possible. Sue acknowledged the importance of family support to the band, particularly as an independent band, in the interview: Main sources of support? … the management from Toyota and everything … after winning Star Maker, that was really great, so they’ve really helped … and also family … you certainly need that support, because you can’t, you’ve got to get out there and do it, that’s the only way to do it … it’s very personal support in a lot of ways … we’re not at that stage where, we’re not at a bigger level where there’s plenty of money being thrown around by record companies, that sort of support.In acknowledging the role of family at home while the band tours, as well as the “personal support” given to the band, Sue binds the practices of individuals staying at home, minding kids and maintaining home life, to the discourse of family. She is also linking the practices to the band’s “independent” status and the lack of “money being thrown around by record companies” as the reason this support and other on the road, tour based work, is essential. Within Sue’s account here, and at other times during my fieldwork, there was a sense that she saw the need for family support as a sign of inadequacy, a sign that the band had not yet “made it” to the level where the support comes from record companies, and there will be money thrown around to support the activities of the band. This touches on a broader set of discourses that circulate in the country music community about professionalism and amateurism, which are also linked to ideas about family. While the foregrounding of family has value within the field of country music, there is something else going on here. A division is often drawn between “commercial” and “creative” endeavours in Australian country music. By linking practices involving kin and discourses of family, Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band position themselves as authentic, or real, grass roots, and with creative freedom, in contrast to being creatively constrained or selling out. Within this division, a reliance on one’s family can be understood in some ways as a rejection of the commercial, business networks of country music. In the case of Sue’s account above there is a sense that it is also a way of negotiating success when you do not have access to a record label or other big business support, which may seem the easier route. Sue’s view differs somewhat from Bob’s in this respect. Bob often expressed pride in the fact that they are “doing it on their own” and boasting an independent DIY model of music business (for example through ticketing, tour organisation and production); a business model that relies on the support of their family, but which is respected and valued within Australian country music. ConclusionArtists such as Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band all occupy “positions” in the field of Australian country music, and the discourses of “commercial”, “creative”, and “authentic” all work to categorise artists, and their position in the field. Economic and material circumstances limit, enable or influence the decisions to involve families or not: for Bob, a desire to remain in control of his creative output and career, and the need to maximise income to feed his family makes DIY ticketing, and taking his mum and friends on the road a good choice. But these material factors work with symbolic and cultural factors, in the game of cultural legitimisation about what it is to be a country music artist. The way in which Bob and the band invoked particular discourses of family, loyalty, fun and enjoyment, to talk about the on-the-ground practices of having family involved (or not) in their working lives as musicians is part of the work these bands and artists are doing to represent themselves to the country music community; they are attempting to establish themselves as adequately, legitimately and authentically “country”. In the process they are also shaping what it is to be a country music artist and what is valued within the field—in this case “family”. The constant struggles over what country music is, what is “authentic” country and what represents success, are struggles over the “schemata of classification … which construct social reality” (Bourdieu 20). Bob Corbett and the Roo Grass Band are using strategies in this struggle, in this case the strategies link practices involving kin to discourses of honesty and openness by collapsing public and private, heritage and tradition through the family band, and authenticity, professionalism, and success in the way family support can limit the need to rely on record labels and big business. ReferencesAkenson, James E. “Australia, The United States and Authenticity.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Philip Hayward. Gympie, QLD: aicmPress for the Australian Institute of Country Music, 2003. 187–206. Baker, Glen A. “Liner Notes - Annethology: The Best of Anne Kirkpatrick.” July 2010.Barker, Hugh, and Yuval Taylor. Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.Bourdieu, Pierre. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory 7.1 (1989): 14–25. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, eds. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1992. Carriage, Leigh, and Philip Hayward. “Heartlands: Kasey Chambers, Australian Country Music and Americana.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Philip Hayward. Gympie, QLD: aicmPress for the Australian Institute of Country Music, 2003. 113–143. Ellis, Max. “Liner Notes: The Slim Dusty Family Reunion CD.” 2008.Frith, Simon. Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. Oxford: Polity Press, 1988.Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.Sanjek, David. “Pleasures and Principles: Issues of Authenticity in the Analysis of Rock’n’Roll.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 4.2 (1992): 12-21.Sanjek, David. “Blue Moon of Kentucky Rising Over the Mystery Train: The Complex Construction of Country Music.” In Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-tonk Bars. Ed. Cecelia Tichi. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. 22–44. Smith, Graeme. Singing Australian: The History of Folk and Country Music. North Melbourne, VIC: Pluto Press Australia, 2005. Watson, Eric. Eric Watson’s Country Music in Australia, Volume 1. Pennsylvania: Rodeo Publications, 1982. Watson, Eric. Eric Watson’s Country Music in Australia, Volume 2. Pennsylvania: Rodeo Publications, 1983.

Every act of art is able to reveal, balance and revive the relations between a territory and its inhabitants (François Davin, Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue)Introducing the Understory Art in Nature TrailIn February 2015, a colossal wildfire destroyed 98,300 hectares of farm and bushland surrounding the town of Northcliffe, located 365 km south of Perth, Western Australia (WA). As the largest fire in the recorded history of the southwest region (Southern Forest Arts, After the Burn 8), the disaster attracted national attention however the extraordinary contribution of local knowledge in saving a town considered by authorities to be “undefendable” (Kennedy) is yet to be widely appreciated. In accounting for a creative scene that survived the conflagration, this case study sees culture mobilised as a socioeconomic resource for conservation and the healing of community spirit.Northcliffe (population 850) sits on a coastal plain that hosts majestic old-growth forest and lush bushland. In 2006, Southern Forest Arts (SFA) dedicated a Southern Forest Sculpture Walk for creative professionals to develop artworks along a 1.2 km walk trail through pristine native forest. It was re-branded “Understory—Art in Nature” in 2009; then “Understory Art in Nature Trail” in 2015, the understory vegetation layer beneath the canopy being symbolic of Northcliffe’s deeply layered caché of memories, including “the awe, love, fear, and even the hatred that these trees have provoked among the settlers” (Davin in SFA Catalogue). In the words of the SFA Trailguide, “Every place (no matter how small) has ‘understories’—secrets, songs, dreams—that help us connect with the spirit of place.”In the view of forest arts ecologist Kumi Kato, “It is a sense of place that underlies the commitment to a place’s conservation by its community, broadly embracing those who identify with the place for various reasons, both geographical and conceptual” (149). In bioregional terms such communities form a terrain of consciousness (Berg and Dasmann 218), extending responsibility for conservation across cultures, time and space (Kato 150). A sustainable thematic of place must also include livelihood as the third party between culture and nature that establishes the relationship between them (Giblett 240). With these concepts in mind I gauge creative impact on forest as place, and, in turn, (altered) forest’s impact on people. My abstraction of physical place is inclusive of humankind moving in dialogic engagement with forest. A mapping of Understory’s creative activities sheds light on how artists express physical environments in situated creative practices, clusters, and networks. These, it is argued, constitute unique types of community operating within (and beyond) a foundational scene of inspiration and mystification that is metaphorically “rising from the ashes.” In transcending disconnectedness between humankind and landscape, Understory may be understood to both culturalise nature (as an aesthetic system), and naturalise culture (as an ecologically modelled system), to build on a trope introduced by Feld (199). Arguably when the bush is cultured in this way it attracts consumers who may otherwise disconnect from nature.The trail (henceforth Understory) broaches the histories of human relations with Northcliffe’s natural systems of place. Sub-groups of the Noongar nation have inhabited the southwest for an estimated 50,000 years and their association with the Northcliffe region extends back at least 6,000 years (SFA Catalogue; see also Crawford and Crawford). An indigenous sense of the spirit of forest is manifest in Understory sculpture, literature, and—for the purpose of this article—the compilation CD Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests (henceforth Canopy, Figure 1).As a cultural and environmental construction of place, Canopy sustains the land with acts of seeing, listening to, and interpreting nature; of remembering indigenous people in the forest; and of recalling the hardships of the early settlers. I acknowledge SFA coordinator and Understory custodian Fiona Sinclair for authorising this investigation; Peter Hill for conservation conversations; Robyn Johnston for her Canopy CD sleeve notes; Della Rae Morrison for permissions; and David Pye for discussions. Figure 1. Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests (CD, 2006). Cover image by Raku Pitt, 2002. Courtesy Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, WA.Forest Ecology, Emotion, and ActionEstablished in 1924, Northcliffe’s ill-founded Group Settlement Scheme resulted in frontier hardship and heartbreak, and deforestation of the southwest region for little economic return. An historic forest controversy (1992-2001) attracted media to Northcliffe when protesters attempting to disrupt logging chained themselves to tree trunks and suspended themselves from branches. The signing of the Western Australian Regional Forest Agreement in 1999 was followed, in 2001, by deregulation of the dairy industry and a sharp decline in area population.Moved by the gravity of this situation, Fiona Sinclair won her pitch to the Manjimup Council for a sound alternative industry for Northcliffe with projections of jobs: a forest where artists could work collectively and sustainably to reveal the beauty of natural dimensions. A 12-acre pocket of allocated Crown Land adjacent to the town was leased as an A-Class Reserve vested for Education and Recreation, for which SFA secured unified community ownership and grants. Conservation protocols stipulated that no biomass could be removed from the forest and that predominantly raw, natural materials were to be used (F. Sinclair and P. Hill, personal interview, 26 Sep. 2014). With forest as prescribed image (wider than the bounded chunk of earth), Sinclair invited the artists to consider the themes of spirituality, creativity, history, dichotomy, and sensory as a basis for work that was to be “fresh, intimate, and grounded in place.” Her brief encouraged artists to work with humanity and imagination to counteract residual community divisiveness and resentment. Sinclair describes this form of implicit environmentalism as an “around the back” approach that avoids lapsing into political commentary or judgement: “The trail is a love letter from those of us who live here to our visitors, to connect with grace” (F. Sinclair, telephone interview, 6 Apr. 2014). Renewing community connections to local place is essential if our lives and societies are to become more sustainable (Pedelty 128). To define Northcliffe’s new community phase, artists respected differing associations between people and forest. A structure on a karri tree by Indigenous artist Norma MacDonald presents an Aboriginal man standing tall and proud on a rock to become one with the tree and the forest: as it was for thousands of years before European settlement (MacDonald in SFA Catalogue). As Feld observes, “It is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability” (201).Adhering to the philosophy that nature should not be used or abused for the sake of art, the works resonate with the biorhythms of the forest, e.g. functional seats and shelters and a cascading retainer that directs rainwater back to the resident fauna. Some sculptures function as receivers for picking up wavelengths of ancient forest. Forest Folk lurk around the understory, while mysterious stone art represents a life-shaping force of planet history. To represent the reality of bushfire, Natalie Williamson’s sculpture wraps itself around a burnt-out stump. The work plays with scale as small native sundew flowers are enlarged and a subtle beauty, easily overlooked, becomes apparent (Figure 2). The sculptor hopes that “spiders will spin their webs about it, incorporating it into the landscape” (SFA Catalogue).Figure 2. Sundew. Sculpture by Natalie Williamson, 2006. Understory Art in Nature Trail, Northcliffe, WA. Image by the author, 2014.Memory is naturally place-oriented or at least place-supported (Feld 201). Topaesthesia (sense of place) denotes movement that connects our biography with our route. This is resonant for the experience of regional character, including the tactile, olfactory, gustatory, visual, and auditory qualities of a place (Ryan 307). By walking, we are in a dialogue with the environment; both literally and figuratively, we re-situate ourselves into our story (Schine 100). For example, during a summer exploration of the trail (5 Jan. 2014), I intuited a personal attachment based on my grandfather’s small bush home being razed by fire, and his struggle to support seven children.Understory’s survival depends on vigilant controlled (cool) burns around its perimeter (Figure 3), organised by volunteer Peter Hill. These burns also hone the forest. On 27 Sept. 2014, the charred vegetation spoke a spring language of opportunity for nature to reassert itself as seedpods burst and continue the cycle; while an autumn walk (17 Mar. 2016) yielded a fresh view of forest colour, patterning, light, shade, and sound.Figure 3. Understory Art in Nature Trail. Map Created by Fiona Sinclair for Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue (2006). Courtesy Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, WA.Understory and the Melody of CanopyForest resilience is celebrated in five MP3 audio tours produced for visitors to dialogue with the trail in sensory contexts of music, poetry, sculptures and stories that name or interpret the setting. The trail starts in heathland and includes three creek crossings. A zone of acacias gives way to stands of the southwest signature trees karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor), jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata), and marri (Corymbia calophylla). Following a sheoak grove, a riverine environment re-enters heathland. Birds, insects, mammals, and reptiles reside around and between the sculptures, rendering the earth-embedded art a fusion of human and natural orders (concept after Relph 141). On Audio Tour 3, Songs for the Southern Forests, the musician-composers reflect on their regionally focused items, each having been birthed according to a personal musical concept (the manner in which an individual artist holds the totality of a composition in cultural context). Arguably the music in question, its composers, performers, audiences, and settings, all have a role to play in defining the processes and effects of forest arts ecology. Local musician Ann Rice billeted a cluster of musicians (mostly from Perth) at her Windy Harbour shack. The energy of the production experience was palpable as all participated in on-site forest workshops, and supported each other’s items as a musical collective (A. Rice, telephone interview, 2 Oct. 2014). Collaborating under producer Lee Buddle’s direction, they orchestrated rich timbres (tone colours) to evoke different musical atmospheres (Table 1). Composer/Performer Title of TrackInstrumentation1. Ann RiceMy Placevocals/guitars/accordion 2. David PyeCicadan Rhythmsangklung/violin/cello/woodblocks/temple blocks/clarinet/tapes 3. Mel RobinsonSheltervocal/cello/double bass 4. DjivaNgank Boodjakvocals/acoustic, electric and slide guitars/drums/percussion 5. Cathie TraversLamentaccordion/vocals/guitar/piano/violin/drums/programming 6. Brendon Humphries and Kevin SmithWhen the Wind First Blewvocals/guitars/dobro/drums/piano/percussion 7. Libby HammerThe Gladevocal/guitar/soprano sax/cello/double bass/drums 8. Pete and Dave JeavonsSanctuaryguitars/percussion/talking drum/cowbell/soprano sax 9. Tomás FordWhite Hazevocal/programming/guitar 10. David HyamsAwakening /Shaking the Tree /When the Light Comes guitar/mandolin/dobro/bodhran/rainstick/cello/accordion/flute 11. Bernard CarneyThe Destiny Waltzvocal/guitar/accordion/drums/recording of The Destiny Waltz 12. Joel BarkerSomething for Everyonevocal/guitars/percussion Table 1. Music Composed for Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests.Source: CD sleeve and http://www.understory.com.au/art.php. Composing out of their own strengths, the musicians transformed the geographic region into a living myth. As Pedelty has observed of similar musicians, “their sounds resonate because they so profoundly reflect our living sense of place” (83-84). The remainder of this essay evidences the capacity of indigenous song, art music, electronica, folk, and jazz-blues to celebrate, historicise, or re-imagine place. Firstly, two items represent the phenomenological approach of site-specific sensitivity to acoustic, biological, and cultural presence/loss, including the materiality of forest as a living process.“Singing Up the Land”In Aboriginal Australia “there is no place that has not been imaginatively grasped through song, dance and design, no place where traditional owners cannot see the imprint of sacred creation” (Rose 18). Canopy’s part-Noongar language song thus repositions the ancient Murrum-Noongar people within their life-sustaining natural habitat and spiritual landscape.Noongar Yorga woman Della Rae Morrison of the Bibbulmun and Wilman nations co-founded The Western Australian Nuclear Free Alliance to campaign against the uranium mining industry threatening Ngank Boodjak (her country, “Mother Earth”) (D.R. Morrison, e-mail, 15 July 2014). In 2004, Morrison formed the duo Djiva (meaning seed power or life force) with Jessie Lloyd, a Murri woman of the Guugu Yimidhirr Nation from North Queensland. After discerning the fundamental qualities of the Understory site, Djiva created the song Ngank Boodjak: “This was inspired by walking the trail […] feeling the energy of the land and the beautiful trees and hearing the birds. When I find a spot that I love, I try to feel out the lay-lines, which feel like vortexes of energy coming out of the ground; it’s pretty amazing” (Morrison in SFA Canopy sleeve) Stanza 1 points to the possibilities of being more fully “in country”:Ssh!Ni dabarkarn kooliny, ngank boodja kookoorninyListen, walk slowly, beautiful Mother EarthThe inclusion of indigenous language powerfully implements an indigenous interpretation of forest: “My elders believe that when we leave this life from our physical bodies that our spirit is earthbound and is living in the rocks or the trees and if you listen carefully you might hear their voices and maybe you will get some answers to your questions” (Morrison in SFA Catalogue).Cicadan Rhythms, by composer David Pye, echoes forest as a lively “more-than-human” world. Pye took his cue from the ambient pulsing of male cicadas communicating in plenum (full assembly) by means of airborne sound. The species were sounding together in tempo with individual rhythm patterns that interlocked to create one fantastic rhythm (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Composer David Pye). The cicada chorus (the loudest known lovesong in the insect world) is the unique summer soundmark (term coined by Truax Handbook, Website) of the southern forests. Pye chased various cicadas through Understory until he was able to notate the rhythms of some individuals in a patch of low-lying scrub.To simulate cicada clicking, the composer set pointillist patterns for Indonesian anklung (joint bamboo tubes suspended within a frame to produce notes when the frame is shaken or tapped). Using instruments made of wood to enhance the rich forest imagery, Pye created all parts using sampled instrumental sounds placed against layers of pre-recorded ambient sounds (D. Pye, telephone interview, 3 Sept. 2014). He takes the listener through a “geographical linear representation” of the trail: “I walked around it with a stopwatch and noted how long it took to get through each section of the forest, and that became the musical timing of the various parts of the work” (Pye in SFA Canopy sleeve). That Understory is a place where reciprocity between nature and culture thrives is, likewise, evident in the remaining tracks.Musicalising Forest History and EnvironmentThree tracks distinguish Canopy as an integrative site for memory. Bernard Carney’s waltz honours the Group Settlers who battled insurmountable terrain without any idea of their destiny, men who, having migrated with a promise of owning their own dairy farms, had to clear trees bare-handedly and build furniture from kerosene tins and gelignite cases. Carney illuminates the culture of Saturday night dancing in the schoolroom to popular tunes like The Destiny Waltz (performed on the Titanic in 1912). His original song fades to strains of the Victor Military Band (1914), to “pay tribute to the era where the inspiration of the song came from” (Carney in SFA Canopy sleeve). Likewise Cathie Travers’s Lament is an evocation of remote settler history that creates a “feeling of being in another location, other timezone, almost like an endless loop” (Travers in SFA Canopy sleeve).An instrumental medley by David Hyams opens with Awakening: the morning sun streaming through tall trees, and the nostalgic sound of an accordion waltz. Shaking the Tree, an Irish jig, recalls humankind’s struggle with forest and the forces of nature. A final title, When the Light Comes, defers to the saying by conservationist John Muir that “The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes the heart of the people is always right” (quoted by Hyams in SFA Canopy sleeve). Local musician Joel Barker wrote Something for Everyone to personify the old-growth karri as a king with a crown, with “wisdom in his bones.”Kevin Smith’s father was born in Northcliffe in 1924. He and Brendon Humphries fantasise the untouchability of a maiden (pre-human) moment in a forest in their song, When the Wind First Blew. In Libby Hammer’s The Glade (a lover’s lament), instrumental timbres project their own affective languages. The jazz singer intended the accompanying double bass to speak resonantly of old-growth forest; the cello to express suppleness and renewal; a soprano saxophone to impersonate a bird; and the drums to imitate the insect community’s polyrhythmic undercurrent (after Hammer in SFA Canopy sleeve).A hybrid aural environment of synthetic and natural forest sounds contrasts collision with harmony in Sanctuary. The Jeavons Brothers sampled rustling wind on nearby Mt Chudalup to absorb into the track’s opening, and crafted a snare groove for the quirky eco-jazz/trip-hop by banging logs together, and banging rocks against logs. This imaginative use of percussive found objects enhanced their portrayal of forest as “a living, breathing entity.”In dealing with recent history in My Place, Ann Rice cameos a happy childhood growing up on a southwest farm, “damming creeks, climbing trees, breaking bones and skinning knees.” The rich string harmonies of Mel Robinson’s Shelter sculpt the shifting environment of a brewing storm, while White Haze by Tomás Ford describes a smoky controlled burn as “a kind of metaphor for the beautiful mystical healing nature of Northcliffe”: Someone’s burning off the scrubSomeone’s making sure it’s safeSomeone’s whiting out the fearSomeone’s letting me breathe clearAs Sinclair illuminates in a post-fire interview with Sharon Kennedy (Website):When your map, your personal map of life involves a place, and then you think that that place might be gone…” Fiona doesn't finish the sentence. “We all had to face the fact that our little place might disappear." Ultimately, only one house was lost. Pasture and fences, sheds and forest are gone. Yet, says Fiona, “We still have our town. As part of SFA’s ongoing commission, forest rhythm workshops explore different sound properties of potential materials for installing sound sculptures mimicking the surrounding flora and fauna. In 2015, SFA mounted After the Burn (a touring photographic exhibition) and Out of the Ashes (paintings and woodwork featuring ash, charcoal, and resin) (SFA, After the Burn 116). The forthcoming community project Rising From the Ashes will commemorate the fire and allow residents to connect and create as they heal and move forward—ten years on from the foundation of Understory.ConclusionThe Understory Art in Nature Trail stimulates curiosity. It clearly illustrates links between place-based social, economic and material conditions and creative practices and products within a forest that has both given shelter and “done people in.” The trail is an experimental field, a transformative locus in which dedicated physical space frees artists to culturalise forest through varied aesthetic modalities. Conversely, forest possesses agency for naturalising art as a symbol of place. Djiva’s song Ngank Boodjak “sings up the land” to revitalise the timelessness of prior occupation, while David Pye’s Cicadan Rhythms foregrounds the seasonal cycle of entomological music.In drawing out the richness and significance of place, the ecologically inspired album Canopy suggests that the community identity of a forested place may be informed by cultural, economic, geographical, and historical factors as well as endemic flora and fauna. Finally, the musical representation of place is not contingent upon blatant forms of environmentalism. The portrayals of Northcliffe respectfully associate Western Australian people and forests, yet as a place, the town has become an enduring icon for the plight of the Universal Old-growth Forest in all its natural glory, diverse human uses, and (real or perceived) abuses.ReferencesAustralian Broadcasting Commission. “Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests.” Into the Music. Prod. Robyn Johnston. Radio National, 5 May 2007. 12 Aug. 2014 <http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/intothemusic/canopy-songs-for-the-southern-forests/3396338>.———. “Composer David Pye.” Interview with Andrew Ford. The Music Show, Radio National, 12 Sep. 2009. 30 Jan. 2015 <http://canadapodcasts.ca/podcasts/MusicShowThe/1225021>.Berg, Peter, and Raymond Dasmann. “Reinhabiting California.” Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California. Ed. Peter Berg. San Francisco: Planet Drum, 1978. 217-20.Crawford, Patricia, and Ian Crawford. Contested Country: A History of the Northcliffe Area, Western Australia. Perth: UWA P, 2003.Feld, Steven. 2001. “Lift-Up-Over Sounding.” The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts. Ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 193-206.Giblett, Rod. People and Places of Nature and Culture. Bristol: Intellect, 2011.Kato, Kumi. “Addressing Global Responsibility for Conservation through Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Kodama Forest, a Forest of Tree Spirits.” The Environmentalist 28.2 (2008): 148-54. 15 Apr. 2014 <http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-007-9051-6#page-1>.Kennedy, Sharon. “Local Knowledge Builds Vital Support Networks in Emergencies.” ABC South West WA, 10 Mar. 2015. 26 Mar. 2015 <http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2015/03/09/4193981.htm?site=southwestwa>.Morrison, Della Rae. E-mail. 15 July 2014.Pedelty, Mark. Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2012.Pye, David. Telephone interview. 3 Sep. 2014.Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion, 1976.Rice, Ann. Telephone interview. 2 Oct. 2014.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Ryan, John C. Green Sense: The Aesthetics of Plants, Place and Language. Oxford: Trueheart Academic, 2012.Schine, Jennifer. “Movement, Memory and the Senses in Soundscape Studies.” Canadian Acoustics: Journal of the Canadian Acoustical Association 38.3 (2010): 100-01. 12 Apr. 2016 <http://jcaa.caa-aca.ca/index.php/jcaa/article/view/2264>.Sinclair, Fiona. Telephone interview. 6 Apr. 2014.Sinclair, Fiona, and Peter Hill. Personal Interview. 26 Sep. 2014.Southern Forest Arts. Canopy: Songs for the Southern Forests. CD coordinated by Fiona Sinclair. Recorded and produced by Lee Buddle. Sleeve notes by Robyn Johnston. West Perth: Sound Mine Studios, 2006.———. Southern Forest Sculpture Walk Catalogue. Northcliffe, WA, 2006. Unpaginated booklet.———. Understory—Art in Nature. 2009. 12 Apr. 2016 <http://www.understory.com.au/>.———. Trailguide. Understory. Presented by Southern Forest Arts, n.d.———. After the Burn: Stories, Poems and Photos Shared by the Local Community in Response to the 2015 Northcliffe and Windy Harbour Bushfire. 2nd ed. Ed. Fiona Sinclair. Northcliffe, WA., 2016.Truax, Barry, ed. Handbook for Acoustic Ecology. 2nd ed. Cambridge Street Publishing, 1999. 10 Apr. 2016 <http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/handbook/Soundmark.html>.

Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith & Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. 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