Stories from Summer Vacation: Karl Hagstrom Miller on Amateur Musicians

Our next account of summer vacation comes from Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller, who discusses some research from his fascinating book project on amateur pop musicians in America:

I’ve spent my summer working on my book project Sound Investments: Amateur Musicians Make American Pop.  It rewrites the history of pop music in the United States from the perspective the millions of relatively anonymous musicians who play pop music in their everyday lives—from 19^th-century parlor pianists to YouTube warblers.  This is not how we usually tell the story.

Finding evidence of amateur music making has been a challenge.  I have spent a good deal of the summer reading the first two chapters of musical biographies.

If you read enough musical biographies, you can soon predict what will happen in “Chapter Three.”  Not every time, of course.  Sometimes the moment comes a bit sooner or later in the book, but it almost always comes.  Here are some opening lines from third chapters:

“Kathy Dawn Lang found the man who would help make her a star in a classified ad in the local newspaper.  His name was Larry Wanagas, owner of Homestead Recorders, a small recording studio on Edmonton’s west side.”¹

“We will probably never know exactly how Rosietta Atkins Tharpe—as she was then calling herself—made the leap from a COGIC church in Miami to the stage of the Cotton Club, New York City’s most renowned nightspot.”²

“By the early spring of 1981, Husker Du had logged upward of fifty local gigs in Minneapolis/St. Paul when they left to play Chicago on March 21 and 22.  The industrious trio pulled off two major hat tricks for their first out-of-towner.”³

“Nineteen-year-old Ernest Dale Tubb had indeed been bitten by the entertainment bug, and so had his friends the Castlemans and ‘Buff’ Buffington.  All migrated to San Antonio about the same time in late 1933.”⁴

“Producers’ promises come cheap, the price of drinks or maybe even a dinner tab.  Each year the Country Music Association figures, thousands of hopefuls find their way to Nashville, and for nearly every one of them there is someone who will promise, ‘I’ll make you a star’…Yearwood had heard plenty of that talk by the time she met Garth Fundis.”⁵

“As soon as he could, Gordy started sending Mary out to appear at theaters and clubs, first in Detroit and later all over the country.  She would continue to perform on stage for paying audiences for most of the rest of her life.”⁶

“I played my guaranteed two weeks on the KMTR ‘Breakfast Club’ for winning the contest, and then they hired me as a regular member of the show.  The pay was not great, $7.50 a show, but it was a paying job and I was doing what I loved—singing.”⁷

I could go on.  In the standard stories we tell about pop musicians, “Chapter Three” is the move into show business.  It changes the frame of the story from the home to the industry.  Opening chapters are about mothers and fathers, family and childhood.  “Chapter Two” chronicles protagonists’ initial musical exposure, growing passion, and experiences playing with family and friends—their lives as amateur musicians.  “Chapter Three” is the story of the integration into some component of the established music industry. The move is from preoccupation to occupation, from fandom to eventual stardom, from drudgery to meaningful work. It could be playing a modest circuit, a quick rise to fame, or a move to an entertainment industry hub. In “Chapter Three,” professional peers, managers, and well-known musicians replace old friends in the narrative. These new characters typically remain throughout the rest of the tale of what is now a life more than ordinary, a life of someone with talent, tenacity, and a record contract. They may have recorded for Sony or Folkways, a major label or tiny independent.  They may have been wildly successful or obscure and forgotten. They are all winners here.  They all have their “Chapter Three.”⁸

The scope of popular music scholarship is limited largely to the people and products of the commercial recording industry, and that is a problem.  It focuses on a miniscule subset of the people that play popular music.  It equates the culture with the industry, even as many stories are critical of the corporatism or consumerism at its heart.  Such criticisms—often expressed in terms of artistic autonomy, authenticity, or keeping it real—are always incomplete or contested, because commercial recording artists are, by definition, part of the commercial recording industry.   They are in the business of making music that pays.  “Chapter Three” tales thus conform to the narratives of progress and upward mobility, self-made bootstrapping and individual genius, deeply woven into the rhetoric of United States exceptionalism. They inevitably chart progress from being anonymous to being known, from inchoate dabbling to artistic vision. Of course, there is often a fall:  irrelevance, selling out, destitution.  But the prominence and repetition of these narratives tend to equate participation in popular music with navigating the commercial record industry and doing it well, whether that means getting rich or maintaining integrity in the face of outside demands. They reinforce the myth of the American Dream, what Alex de Tocqueville called “the charm of anticipated success.”⁹

Standard pop music narratives ignore musicians who did not enter show business.  When these players do appear, they are often merely prologue to the professional journey of our commercial recording artist of interest.  They are childhood chums or early influences, the basic musical protoplasm that our evolving hero will eventually transcend.  This is akin to writing an industrial labor history that suddenly, in chapter three, veers from the shop floor to follow a worker’s career after he is promoted to management.  It misses a great deal of what is going on by not remaining with the rank and file to see how its story develops.  Those who stay behind continue to work, continue to create, even as watching one of their ranks climb the corporate ladder affects their sense of what they are doing and shapes their dreams about their own futures.

This is not to say that ordinary people never make it into the scholarship on popular music.  It is just to say that they usually are not identified as pop musicians.  They are fans or consumers, listeners or audiences or aspirants.  When they do play music, authors often distinguish what they are doing from the workings of the pop music business.  They play folk or community music instead of pop.  They play art music that is immune to the infection of commercialized ditties.  They forge local music cultures that are oppositional or resistant to the corporate mainstream.  While these approaches are useful and fascinating, I am not interested in them here.  They, like the “Chapter Three” turn, draw a line between the activities of professional pop musicians and those of musical amateurs.

In my book, I want to avoid the “Chapter Three” turn as well as the temptation to identify amateurs as part of a separate culture from commercial pop stars.  Here, I am not interested in isolated folk cultures or local scenes, community choirs or school orchestras.  I am interested in understanding how pop music has functioned as a mass participatory culture.  I am interested in how ordinary people play well-known pop music in their everyday lives and how that shapes their conceptions of themselves, their society, and the pop stars whom they emulate.  Jay-Z and Alicia Keys may be very different from the ordinary folks singing “Empire State of Mind” in their bedrooms, but I want to imagine the contours of a pop music culture that thrives on their connections and resonances across that divide rather than the divide itself.

In the end, musicians who vault into the music business are the exception rather than the rule. They are the outliers.  There are millions more musicians who never have a “Chapter Three” moment.  Some may desire one.  Some may work hard to make it happen.  Almost all will fail.  The predominant experience of pop musicians is to play in relative anonymity, to enjoy music with friends and family, and to imagine the odd characters for whom music becomes a source of wealth and renown.

“In later years other members of Last Exit would sometimes look back on that strange winter and wonder at Sting’s ambition.”¹⁰

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1. Victoria Starr, k. d. lang: All You Get is Me (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), p. 27.

2. Gayle Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Store of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Boston: Beacon, 2007), p. 33.

3. Andrew Earles, Husker Du: The Story of the Noise-Pop Pioneers who Launched Modern Rock (Voyager: Minneapolis, 2010), p. 46.

4. Ronnie Pugh, Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubadour (Durham: Duke, 1996), p. 19

5. Lisa Rebecca Gubernick, Get Hot or Go Home: Trisha Yearwood: the Making of a Nashville Star (New York: William Morrow, 1993), p. 41.

6. Peter Benjaminson, Mary Wells: The tumultuous Life of Motown’s First Superstar (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2012), p. 26.

7. Patsy Montana with Jane Frost, The Cowboy’s Sweetheart (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2002), p. 37.

8. Full disclosure:  In my last book, I made the same move but saved it for later.  Rookie.  Chapter Four begins, “In 1907, as the folklorist John Lomax collected material for Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, a young white Texas singer picked up stakes and moved fifteen hundred miles to new York City.”  See my Segregating Sound:  Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke, 2010), p. 121.

9. Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York: Oxford, 2003), p. 5.

10. Christopher Sandford, Sting: Demolition Man (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1998), p. 44.

Stories from Summer Vacation: Andi Gustavson Launches Personal Pin-up Project

Andi Gustavson describes the launch of a digital archive on war and photography to which servicemembers of all kinds can contribute – take a look!

from the Personal Pin-up PRoject

This summer I launched the digital humanities portion of my dissertation on Cold War snapshot photography, the Personal Pin-up Project. I am collecting the private photographs that servicemembers carried or kept with them during their time in the military. These personal “pin-ups” can be snapshots of loved ones taken by the soldiers themselves or pictures of women or men who posed for the camera and then sent that snapshot off to war. I am looking for the photograph kept in the pocket, or worn in the helmet, or hidden in the gear of each servicemember. These images of loved ones do not often make their way into archives or art galleries. And yet, if most military members had one special photograph with them when they went away to war, then there must be thousands of these snapshots—in shoeboxes under beds, tucked into the back of closets, left in journals or letters, or stored on cellphones. The Personal Pin-up Project brings together the private images scattered across thousands of homes into a public and digital archive.

The Personal Pin-up Project is a public digital archive of the private images taken and kept by many American veterans and their loved ones. There is currently no archival repository to collect such a specific subset of war-related photographs that were, nevertheless, very common. Over the last several years as I was working on my dissertation about snapshot photography and the Cold War, I kept coming across references to these personal photographs of loved ones that were treasured by servicemembers and carried with them while they were deployed. Tim O’Brien, for example, notes in The Things They Carried, “Almost everyone humped photographs. In his wallet, Lieutenant Cross carried two photographs of Martha. The first was a Kodacolor snapshot signed Love, though he knew better. She stood against a brick wall. Her eyes were gray and neutral, her lips slightly open as she stared straight-on at the camera” (3). These snapshots are incredibly common and yet I had not come across many–I kept searching and muttering to my dissertation group that “surely these photographs are out there, so why can’t I find them?” After several failed attempts to discover the type of snapshots I knew existed, I decided it might be a better use of my time to just create the archive I hope to find.

Hopefully, The Personal Pin-up Project can become a way for servicemembers to preserve their collective memories about the role of photographs carried overseas. This is not an archive of professional photojournalism nor it is a catch-all for thousands of soldier snapshots. This collection of treasured photographs will document the private experience of war, making publicly available for the first time images that were highly valued and extremely personal. By exploring the personal snapshots taken by servicemembers into warzones and overseas, we can learn more about the intimate and daily experiences of war and its relationship to love, hope, longing, desire, frustration, admiration, and nostalgia.

Please consider contributing to this archive or encouraging someone you know to contribute to the archive at www.personalpinupproject.com.

Stories from Summer Vacation: Caroline Pinkston and Teaching Teachers

Here’s a report from Caroline Pinkston, who shares some details about her job with Breakthrough Austin:

At first glance, my summer job might not sound that great. During the academic year, when I’m not haunting the halls of Burdine, I’m living a double life as a high school English teacher. My summer is therefore exceptionally valuable to me, as both teacher and student. And yet, instead of getting to take a break from teaching and learning, somehow I was tricked into working as an Instructional Coach with Breakthrough Austin. That means I’m spending my whole summer with a combination of 19-year-olds and middle-schoolers. I spend my days walking between buildings on the UT campus, literally covered in sweat.  Sometimes I run into friends or coworkers or former students, and I have to try to avoid eye contact because, again, I’m literally covered in sweat.

Breakthrough Austin

You might be thinking that this doesn’t sound like a great way to spend a summer. But you’re wrong. I have the greatest job on the planet. Here’s why:

1. I’m working with an awesome program. Breakthrough Austin is part of a national collaborative working to support students who will be first-generation college graduates. Breakthrough begins working with these students in middle school, and continues to provide support all the way through college graduation. One fundamental part of Breakthrough is the summer program, which provides enrichment and summer learning opportunities to Breakthrough students entering 7th, 8th, and 9th grades. Breakthrough’s summer program at UT is part summer camp, part school, and part mentoring program. Students do ridiculous cheers, build model roller coasters, tour local universities, perform Shakespeare, and throw pie at each other. It’s good stuff.

2. Middle school students are hilarious. If you don’t think middle-schoolers are hilarious, it could be because you’re remembering being a middle school student, which — in my own experience, at least — is often more traumatic than funny. Being around middle-schoolers as an adult no longer immersed in a sea of anxiety and awkwardness,* however, is a different story. I’m no mathematician, but I feel confident asserting that 65% of what 14-year-olds say is really, really funny (and often unintentionally so, which is even better).  I spend a lot of my day laughing, or trying not to laugh, or thinking about how funny this will be later. It’s a pretty good way to spend a day.

*Actually, this is still a remarkably accurate description of my life.

3. I’m not the one who actually has to control the middle-schoolers. This is where things start to get really awesome. Breakthrough’s summer program is based on a students-teaching-students model, which means classes are run by college students (and a few high school students) who come to Austin from all over the country to try out teaching. My job as an Instructional Coach is to work with these young teachers and help them figure out what good teaching is all about. It turns out that brainstorming ways to stop Student X from doing whatever ridiculous thing he or she is doing in class is significantly more fun than being the one who actually has to stop Student X. It also turns out that spending all day watching energetic, motivated, insanely creative young people teach is the best way I can imagine to recharge my own teaching energy before I am running a classroom of my own again.

4. I get to talk about nerdy education stuff all the time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the people I work with are also really interested in education and its connection to various things American Studies-related, and said coworkers will talk with me about these things literally all day long! It’s great! The fact that I’ve found this outlet is a welcome relief to many of my other friends, I’m sure. It also means I’m going back into my graduate school life full of new ideas and energy and ready to read and talk about things again.

5. I am finished most days by 2pm. This perhaps speaks for itself, but just in case, I will elaborate: most afternoons, I have plenty of time to read 1Q84, attempt to train my new puppy Thelma, and think about going to free Russian classes at Russian House, but not actually go. What more could you want from the summer?

Thelma

Stories from Summer Vacation: Dr. Julia Mickenberg in the UK

Next up is a dispatch from across the pond! Dr. Julia Mickenberg discusses her time spent in the UK:

A reading of Dubliners at Sweny’s Pharmacy in Dublin

I spent the first part of the summer trying to finish some writing projects, putting together a new Plan II Signature Course on “College and Controversy,” and getting ready to spend six weeks in Ireland and the UK. On July 4th my family left for Ireland, where we spent a week, mostly in the West—we visited Yeats’ Tower (closed, but still really cool, down a narrow lane and next to a beautiful stream) and Coole Park, the home of Lady Gregory, containing a huge tree autographed by pretty much every literary figure from early twentieth-century Ireland. My daughters busked in Galway, and took in 7 Euros, which they spent on fancy ice cream cones. In Dublin we visited Sweny’s Pharmacy, featured in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and now preserved as a kind of tribute to Joyce: there we participated in a rather magical reading from Dubliners.

Now I’m in Oxford, England, tagging along with a crew from UT’s English department (including my husband, Dan Birkholz), which runs a summer program here. Outside my window are green fields where old men and women do lawn bowling and play bocce, and boys and girls play soccer. Running between two fields (and also just outside my window) is a bicycle path that goes to the city (we’re in an area called Summertown, just north of Oxford) and out into the countryside. Nearly every morning I’ve been running through a green meadow and woods with walking paths, the Thames River slowly winding alongside.

After a bike ride along the Thames

Sometimes I work at home, in my little study looking out over the athletic fields. Other days bicycle into Oxford, which seems to be filled with American students. No matter, it’s still a pretty fabulous place, heavy with history, the kind of place that makes you want to do nothing but read. Blackwell’s Bookstore is dizzying. Every site in town is a literary reference. Speaking of books and literature, I’ve been working in the Bodleian Library, which is probably the ur-library of libraries. There’s an exhibit going on right now in the library about Magic in Children’s Literature, from the Middle Ages to Middle Earth. Pretty awesome stuff, with original Tolkien manuscripts alongside illuminated manuscripts that you can’t believe they’ve just put in a case for everyone to see. I’ve met with some British children’s literature scholars, and Oxford is, of course, home to Alice Liddel of Alice in Wonderland fame, not to mention Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, etc., but mainly I’m working on the book that’s been preoccupying me for years, on Russia in the American Feminist Imagination, 1905-1945.

So, at the Bodleian. Once I found my way to the place where the books I needed were supposedly shelved, through the maze of stairs and passageways, I stood mystified for a while, with no clue as to how to find the books I needed (and I pride myself on being a library person). Finally an old man asked me if I needed help and I said yes, yes I do need help. Turns out, as I have remarked elsewhere, these English people don’t use the Library of Congress cataloguing system. But I found my books and sat happily reading in the bowels of the library (seriously, I was in the sub, sub-basement). I’m mostly working in the Vere Harmsworth Library, specializing in American culture (yup, they haven’t forgotten us in Merrie olde England). I’m also taking a few trips into London: the chapter I’m currently writing concerns a joint American-British Quaker Russian famine relief effort in 1921-1922, and I need to look at materials in the London Friends House. Several radicals (American and British) managed to get into Russia during the allied blockade by volunteering with the Quakers, who didn’t care about their volunteers’ politics. I’m interested especially in how publicity workers created sympathy for the Bolshevik project by playing on the public’s concern for starving Russian children (child savers presenting the possibility of a glorious future if these children are saved, i.e. child saviors). Doing a bunch of other research too depending on how many trips to London I can squeeze in: at the Karl Marx Library, the Women’s Library at London School of Economics, the Society for Cooperation in Russian and Soviet Studies, and the World Education Fellowship.

It’s a lot to cram in, what with all the traveling we’re doing, some with the UT Program (Shakespeare plays, Jane Austen-related sites, William Morris related sites, etc.). In the Lake District we’ll see the landscapes that inspired William Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter, and other luminaries of childhood innocence. And right here in Oxford there’s plenty to do. This past weekend we went on a long bike ride along the Thames, and went punting from the Cherwell Boat House with Lisa Moore (a colleague on the UT program) and her son Max. I’m drinking a lot of tea and spending quality time in English pubs, trying my requisite share of British ales.

Stories from Summer Vacation: The David Byrne Experience, by Carrie Andersen

Our next story comes from Carrie Andersen, who writes about an unexpected collision between her orals exam reading and David Byrne:

This summer finds me in the midst of reading for my oral exams, which will take place next spring, come hell or high water. But I have been fortunate to take a few breaks from the books and from Texas. Of note was a trip with my family and a friend, my perpetual travel companion, to Italy. We explored the Tuscan countryside from our home base in a tiny village, Pian di’ Sco, before travelling southward to Rome, which was not so much a tiny village but a nonetheless welcome break from the books.

Another trip—a decidedly shorter jaunt to my hometown of Chicago—unexpectedly stirred up a host of questions relating to my reading (people have been telling me you can never get completely away from the books; I’m beginning to  think that’s true). The event responsible for the whirring of orals brain? A David Byrne concert.

Stories from Summer Vacation: Bentham in a Box, by Randy Lewis

Today, Dr. Randy Lewis tells us about chilling with philosopher Jeremy Bentham during a research trip to London:

Photo by Randy Lewis

One of my happy tasks this summer was not just exploring the splendors of the British Library, but also visiting the collections at nearby University College London. For anyone writing a book about surveillance, UCL is a special place because it is home to the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Scholars can consult a vast trove of papers and books related to the myriad projects and interests of this early 19th century reformer, best known for his controversial plans for English penitentiaries. Eager to create a more humane alternative to the shackling of convicts in pre-Dickensian hellholes, Bentham tried to imagine a scheme in which mental constraints would replace physical ones. By locating a nearly invisible warden at the center of a specially designed circular prison, Bentham proposed “a new mode of obtaining power, power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” Because prisoners would never know when they were being watched in this so-called Panopticon, they would have to assume that they were under constant surveillance and act accordingly. Although the design was not widely implemented in English penitentiaries, the concept of the Panopticon has become fundamental to surveillance studies in the age of all-seeing drones, online dataveillance, and the sort of Orwellian NSA activities to which Edward Snowden has alerted the world.

As delighted as I was to ruminate over Bentham’s correspondence and personal book collection, I was even more charmed to meet the man in the flesh, sagging though it was. It’s not every day that you have a chance to meet a 250-year-old philosopher, but you can always find Mr. Bentham sitting quietly in a public hallway at UCL. In an act of considerable irony, the architect of the Panopticon is now on permanent display in a sturdy wooden box. Fresh-faced students pore over their exam notes at nearby tables, seemingly oblivious to the ghoulish sight in their midst: a well-fed utilitarian, almost two centuries dead, stuffed like a hunter’s trophy and mounted in a box. Philosophical taxidermy may sound off-putting to some, but it is exactly what Bentham sought in his afterlife. The master of omnivalence wanted to keep gazing at the world he loved, keeping a waxwork eye on the subtle passage of time at a university he helped to found. Perhaps his only gripe is that he can’t get out to see more than the contents of a dark academic hallway. Would he enjoy boating on the Thames or a touring the countryside in the back of a pickup? I’d like to think so. Unfortunately for the ever-curious philosopher, his wooden crate is not just stationary (no wheels or hovercraft skirts are evident) but also subject to banker’s hours. Each night at 5:00 pm, he is sealed up unceremoniously in his windowless box like Senor Wences’s puppet on the old Ed Sullivan show.

Notwithstanding the eccentric fate of his corpse, the intellectual seriousness of Bentham’s life and work continues to reward those who approach his oeuvre with an open mind. He is not the heartless stooge of the Enlightenment that some have suggested—even if he is indeed headless. After many years on display, Bentham’s head could no longer survive the inadequacies of 19th century taxidermy. Allegedly, its decomposition was accelerated when UCL students used it as a soccer ball on a campus lawn. The university denies the charge, but does concede that Bentham’s head has been replaced with a suitable replica whose expression is charming to behold. Bentham looks quite pleased with himself nowadays—and why not? He is one of the few 250-year-old men to remain above ground in suit and hat, smiling at students who continue to debate his ideas. Despite his unorthodox afterlife and somewhat distorted intellectual reputation, Bentham still has something to teach us—or so I’m arguing in the pages I’m now writing. As is the case for most books about surveillance, Bentham is lurking somewhere at the core of my project, exerting a subtle influence over all that he surveils from his invisible perch. Indeed, for someone writing about security, discipline, and the psychology of surveillance, Bentham is always the ghost in the machine, the uninvited presence that haunts every page of prose. It may seem spooky to have a spectral companion spying on one’s scholarship, but the master of the Panopticon wouldn’t have it any other way.

Stories from Summer Vacation: Eddie Whitewolf Visits Old Fort Parker

Next up is a travelogue from Eddie Whitewolf, who describes his journey to Old Fort Parker, the site of the Fort Parker Massacre:

This summer has been spent working.  Thrilling, right?  However, my wife Brandi and I have spent each Sunday going on a road trip to the surrounding areas of Austin and/or visiting different Travis County and Texas State parks.  We’ve become incredibly familiar with the hiking trials of Inks Lake State Park, we’ve gone swimming in the Pedernales River the past three Sundays at Milton Reimer’s Ranch, and we’ve climbed to the top of Enchanted Rock (remembering why we shouldn’t while wearing only our jogging shoes).

However, for most of the summer I was looking forward to one road trip in particular.  This was my trip to Fort Parker State Park to visit Old Fort Parker, just north of Groesbeck, Texas.  In 1836, my great-great-great grandmother, Cynthia Ann Parker, was abducted by a group of Comanches during the Fort Parker Massacre.  The first I heard of this story was when my grandmother, Ann Whitewolf (maiden name Parker), told it to me.  She passed it down to me as a sort of watered down family history: Cynthia Ann was kidnapped, assimilated to Comanche life, took a husband and gave birth to the famous Comanche chief Quanah Parker, my great-great-grandfather.  The history is of course a lot more complicated, as I’ve learned over the years, but I’ve always wanted to visit the site where two sides of my family violently clashed in what is a truly mythic story from the American frontier.