Nadine Hubbs and Francesca T. Royster Interview (Journal of Popular Music Studies)
I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. If you’re not familiar with the newsletter already, click here to find out more.
Nadine Hubbs and Francesca T. Royster are co-editors of the new issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. According to Nadine, “It offers what is, I believe, the largest collection of writers of color in any volume of country music commentary to date. Uncharted Country presents perspectives of critical race and ethnicity; the country music industry; gender and sexuality; class; Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness; global country; mental health; radical activism; and ragtime, Latingrass, Mexilachian, and Blackbrown sounds in relation to country music.”
Tell me all about the new journal issue that you've co-edited.
Nadine Hubbs: In early 2018, I attended the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) conference in Nashville. I was struck by the presence of, not just one, but a small handful of junior scholars who were of color, studying people of color, or both, all giving papers on country music. For years I’d had my eye on when, if ever, we would see BIPOC enter country music studies in any numbers. I was eager to see how scholars of color might approach and affect the field—the questions it asks, and the answers. So, I eagerly attended those colleagues’ papers. I heard some interesting and exciting work, and afterward, I introduced myself and chatted with the presenters.
This felt like a moment. And I had wondered if it would ever arrive—I mean, there was no guarantee that BIPOC would want to focus on music that’s often associated with white bigots (in 2019, the Country Music Association would announce that country’s listenership over the previous five years had grown 55 percent among African Americans and 15 percent in the [larger] Latina/o/x audience). But here was a new generation of scholars, and they were engaging country music, bringing serious questions and new perspectives. I wanted to capture this moment in the field and to amplify its potential.
I discussed what I had witnessed with the country and pop music historian Diane Pecknold. She recalled how difficult it had been five years earlier to find Black contributors to her groundbreaking edited collection Hidden in the Mix: The African-American Presence in Country Music (which included the Black authors Michael Awkward and Tony Thomas). I told Diane what I hoped to do, and she raised the possibility of a special issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She was just finishing her term as co-editor of the journal and advised me about the steps for proposing a special issue. I started to reach out to folks who I had heard about doing interesting and apt work, and spreading the word about my interest in this area.
When Robin James and Eric Weisbard came on board later that year as the new JPMS co-editors, I proposed to them a special issue to amplify “new voices and perspectives” in country music studies, which I hoped would encompass writing in memoiristic and creative as well as scholarly genres. I situated the project in relation to the papers I had heard in Nashville; a spate of recent work examining race and ethnicity and Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and class in relation to country music;* and our current social-political context. *(A partial list might include Karl Hagstrom Miller’s Segregating Sound; Pecknold’s Hidden in the Mix; Nadine Hubbs’s Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music; Charles L. Hughes’s Country Soul; Pecknold and Kristine McCusker’s Country Boys and Redneck Women; Kristina Jacobsen’s The Sound of Navajo Country; Rhiannon Giddens’s keynote to the International Bluegrass Music Association, “Community and Connection”; and Mark Alan Jackson’s Honky Tonk on the Left.)
Robin and Eric were very receptive. So, I was then in position to try to recruit the ideal co-editor for this issue, Francesca T. Royster. I hadn’t met Francesca, but I knew that, following a series of other cool projects, she was writing a book on Black queer country listening. I had been teaching her wonderful article on the subject, “Black Edens, Country Eves,” for a few years. I was thrilled when Francesca said yes to my invitation to join a stranger on this two-year, labor-intensive project—and she has been an even more ideal co-editor than I imagined. So, with Francesca on board, we were on our way. We wrote an open call for proposals, posted it, and got a huge response—enough strong submissions for two issues.
The special issue now dropping is big: fourteen pieces, including Francesca’s and my introductory essay. It offers what is, I believe, the largest collection of writers of color in any volume of country music commentary to date. Uncharted Country presents perspectives of critical race and ethnicity; the country music industry; gender and sexuality; class; Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness; global country; mental health; radical activism; and ragtime, Latingrass, Mexilachian, and Blackbrown sounds in relation to country music. And it includes essays by two of the presenters I heard in Nashville in March of 2018, Kimberly Mack and Ryan Shuvera.
Francesca T. Royster: I was so excited to get Dean’s (Nadine Hubbs’s) email to work with her on the special issue. I had begun work on a book on African American Country music performers and fans, and saw this as a great opportunity to work with Dean, whose book Rednecks, Queers and Country Music I’d admired and used in my own work. The special issue gave me the opportunity to find out more about what’s new and exciting happening in the field of country music studies. As an outsider to discussions of country music, it’s been a great opportunity to learn about old and new conversations around country music, identity and sound that we’ve sought out in Uncharted Country. I had co-edited a few special issues before, including a past issue of Journal of Popular Music with Tavia Nyong'o on Trans/Queer Music back in 2013. And I loved the experience of curating conversations around popular music from these new interdisciplinary angles as an editor.
My own work crosses genres and critical approaches, including Queer Theory, Critical Race theory, performance studies, African American popular culture and creative writing. Dean and I shared a vision of creating a conversation in Country music studies that drew from all of these sources, as well as in music theory, music history and genre studies. We also wanted to make sure to bring people into the conversation who hadn’t been there before around country music. Highlighting the work of scholars of color seems especially important right now, as well as the work that’s really raising up the hitherto invisible contributions of African American and Latinx music and culture in Country. So we really made an effort to bring in multiple scholars of color, scholars interested in African American and Latinx culture, Japanese, Jewish and Arab Culture, Queer scholars, writers and musicians, transnational scholars, younger scholars, and writers in and outside of academia.
I know this is an impossible ask, but could you both please pinpoint one article we need to read from the journal?
Francesca T. Royster: I would point to Deb Vargas’s essay “Freddy Fender’s Brownblack Country Ecologies” as one that seems especially timely. Vargas writes of how Freddy Fender created his Tex-Mex country sound through his engagements with Chicano musics, together with soul, funk, blues, and rhythm and blues. She complicates a singular narrative of “Brown sound.” Vargas’s essay uses the lens of ecology—the material and psychic sense of place, and space, to think about how music travels and connects populations and histories of struggle, here creating a meeting point between Black and Brown culture in Freddy Fender’s work. She focuses in particular on the experiences of labor, segregation and incarceration shared by Black and Brown folks, and how the music that comes out of this region, including Fender’s, is shaped by those struggles. This essay seems to me to be especially timely right now when the Black Lives Matter movement seeks connections and allies with other freedom struggles in the United States, including the Latinx community, even as these communities have sometimes been in tension with one another. Maybe following Vargas’s lead, Freddy Fender's music could be part of the soundtrack of that movement.
Nadine Hubbs: Wayne Marshall’s “Ragtime Country: Rhythmically Recovering Country’s Black Heritage,” is an innovative and powerful paired-media work—a written historical argument plus a mixtape spanning 120 years of recorded music. The audio piece samples over 170 tracks from 1891 to the present, representing innumerable popular styles, but all sharing in common a particular syncopated rhythm (Marshall names it “American clave”), which zigzags freely across the music-categorical color line. Teamed with his prose piece, Marshall’s megamix deconstructs “Black” and “white” U.S. music marketing categories that have long served sonically to create racial difference and social division, and it gives us audible evidence of a “long history of interracial musical influence and collaboration.”
Tell me about your current research interests.
Nadine Hubbs: I’m writing a book, Country Mexicans: Sounding Mexican American Life, Love, and Belonging in Country Music. Mexican Americans are a significant and long-standing audience in country music and one of the fastest-growing country fan groups in the United States. I’ve talked with Mexican American fans in various parts of the country and attended Mexican American gay vaquero (cowboy) weekends.
My fieldwork points to the unacknowledged ways in which country music is Mexican music. Mexican American fans spoke of country as music centered on “Mexican values” and saw country fandom as “inevitable” for them as Mexican Americans. Contrary to outsiders’ expectations, these fans expressed deep appreciation for patriotic country songs, and they related the messages to feelings of pride and gratitude for both their American and Mexican identities, simultaneously. Country music has often been heard as a “quintessentially American” music form. My research on Mexican influences and Mexican American engagements in country suggests that country music, in its border inheritances and diverse cultural roots, is even more quintessentially American than we have imagined.
Francesca T. Royster: My research interests straddle African American popular music, cultural studies and creative writing. This coming year at DePaul University, I’m teaching a really fun Writing About Music writing course, together with courses on Toni Morrison’s novels and her analysis of the “unspeakable,” LGBTQ Writers of Color, and a course on Graphic Novels and Social Justice.
I’m working on a book right now on African American performer’s and fans experiences and production of country music through a queer feminist lens, tentatively titled Black Edens: Country Music’s Black Queer Frequencies. (It’s under contract at University of Texas Press.) Using personal storytelling as well as theoretical inquiry, this book focuses on Country music as a locus of desire, identification and world making for African American performers and fans.
As I explore the roots of African American presence and participation in country music in the book, I’m also interested in ways that the genre continues to be reinvented and reinvigorated by African American artists, from Our Native Daughter’s use of the banjo as an African American instrument to create new Black country music that’s historically engaged, to Amythyst Kiah’s southern gothic country blues to Valerie June’s “Organic Moonshine Roots Music,” to Lil Nas X’s trap country pop confection, “Old Town Road.”
I’m also finishing a memoir on Black queer motherhood and chosen family, Fierce Love. In it I look at cross-generational stories of home, love, and “making a way out of no way” that links my current queer family with my African American family across history. In many ways, it shares in common with my research work on music the idea of “Queer World Making,” that is, creative ways to imagine the world that we want despite structures of inequality—what José Esteban Muñoz calls Queer Utopia in his book Cruising Utopia.
What pieces from the special issue are you already planning to teach?
Francesca T. Royster: In my Writing About Music course, I begin and end with an assignment that asks students to write a mix-tape memoir about the music that has meant the most to them. I plan to share Joe Kadi’s beautiful memoir essay from our special issue, “Me, Hank Williams and My Dad.” I appreciate the ways that Kadi uses Hank Williams’s music to open up and explore stories of trauma, vulnerability and tenderness in unexpected ways. To me, it’s a great example of how we use music to dream up the worlds that we need to survive.
Nadine Hubbs: Actually, we’re both going to be assigning essays from this special issue immediately next term, and we would like to give your readers a preview of the full contents so they can see for themselves the ground-breaking work they can now assign in their classes:
Uncharted Country: New Voices and Perspectives in Country Music Studies - Nadine Hubbs and Francesca T. Royster
You’re My Country Music - Karen Pittelman
Valerie June, Ghost Catcher - Francesca T. Royster
Thunder in the Heart: Following the Ache of Americana and Decoding the Queer Paul Clayton - Clay Kerrigan
Me, Hank Williams, and My Dad - Joe Kadi
Ragtime Country: Rhythmically Recovering Country’s Black Heritage - Wayne Marshall
“Penned Against the Wall”: Migration Narratives, Cultural Resonances, and Latinx Experiences in Appalachian Music - Sophia M. Enriquez
Freddy Fender’s Blackbrown Country Ecologies - Deborah R. Vargas
Sing Me Back Home: Country Music and Radical Community Organizing in Uptown Chicago - Jesse Montgomery
The Racial Limitations of Country-Soul Crossover in Bobby Womack’s BW Goes C&W, 1976 - Chelsea Burns
Redneck Chic: Race and the Country Music Industry in the 1970s - Amanda Marie Martinez
She’s A Country Girl All Right: Rhiannon Giddens’s Powerful Reclamation of Country Culture - Kimberly Mack
Remapping Country Music in the Pacific: Country Music and Masculinities in Post-War Japan, 1945–56 - Mari Nagatomi
“New Life” into Old Sounds: Listening to Simone Schmidt’s Audible Songs from Rockwood - Ryan Shuvera
The Valley of the Dry Bones: The Presence and Perseverance of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness in Country Music and Bluegrass - Shirli Brautbar, Peter La Chapelle and Jessica Hutchings
“Tennessee Whiskey” and the Politics of Harmony - Jocelyn R. Neal
Anything else you want to plug?
Francesca T. Royster: In terms of work I’d like to raise up, I just want to mention Our Native Daughters, an all-women, all African American Banjo supergroup that is doing amazing storytelling about history and the ways that music has been deeply embedded into that history as a form of survival. There’s so much complexity within this work, headed by Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, together with Amythyst Kiah, Alison Russell, and Leyla McCalla. (For more on Giddens, see Kimberly Mack’s essay “She’s a Country Girl All Right: Rhiannon Giddens’s Powerful Reclamation of Country Culture.”)
The music is beautiful, reflecting a variety of Black experiences, histories and sounds and identities, with songs to their mothers, songs about slave ancestors and the power of music for survival (Giddens’s “Moon Meets the Sun” and “Quasheba, Quasheba”), retellings of the John Henry folk tale from a Black women’s point of view (“Polly Ann’s Hammer,” political manifestos that center self-love as resistance (Kiah’s “Black Myself”) and others.
I love how this group is so like-minded in their passion and commitment to Black music, and yet so distinct in their histories and sound. Giddens is from the Piedmont region of North Carolina, and her music is very much informed by place and the banjo traditions of that region, but she also has a transnational scope to her sound, bringing in Irish music, opera, Sicilian and Middle Eastern music, as well as early African American music. Alison Russell, who is part of the folk group Birds of Chicago, is Afro-Canadian, and while she also plays banjo in the group, her voice is her most distinctive tool; she brings a beautiful sweet, gospel inspired harmonies; and she also writes songs that reflect the experiences of Black folks up North. Leyla McCalla is Haitian American, and her banjo together with her cello and fiddle reflect a variety of French, African, creole sound, often reworking creole folk songs and melodies for the album. And Amythyst Kiah, from Johnson City, TN, is a distinctive queer song writer, banjoist and guitarist, whose strong voice and storytelling highlight songs of struggle and resilience from a queer perspective.
Did you enjoy this interview? You can support this newsletter by subscribing via the button below. Among other things, you’ll get full access to all 100+ interviews I’ve done as part of the newsletter. I’ve talked with writers and editors from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, the Guardian, and many more.