Despite evolving out of both European and African musical traditions, country music has been constructed as a genre by and for white people since it was first formally marketed in the 1920s. This racial mythology has ongoing consequences today: in a recent study on redlining in country music, Dr. Jada Watson found that artists of color made up just 3% of music played on country radio from 2002-2020. Country music’s whitewashed self-conception and its material impact on the music industry is just one example of how the genre shapes notions of identity and power.
My project, Cowboy Centos, combines historical/cultural analysis with creative writing to explore how country music transmits these ideas about race, gender, class, and sexuality. Country music concerns itself deeply with “authenticity,” yet the racial, class, and regional imaginaries that characterize country music are just as performative as in any other genre. This summer, I am working to compose a series of cento poems and creative prose pieces that consider how country artists reify and challenge these entrenched cultural narratives.
The word “cento” comes from the Latin for “patchwork,” and as this etymology suggests, centos are stitched together from fragments of other poems. Centos, like collages in visual art, posit that deconstructing existing pieces of art or other objects to rearrange them into something new is itself a mode of creation. This framework refutes the idea of an individual artistic genius whose work springs, fully formed and “original,” from their mind, and their mind only. Instead, centos allow the artist to intentionally engage with and unsettle the many layers of associative meaning that language relies on. Signs and signifiers transform when removed from their original context and linked with different voices, words, and symbols. Approaching this project primarily through the cento form allows me to identify and subvert aesthetic signifiers that are often used to conjure an idealized, ahistorical antebellum past or a hypermasculine, heterosexual “Old West.”
I have chosen to focus on three specific albums for my research, all of which are recent (released between 2019 and 2022) and created by artists with at least one marginalized identity. Queer South African artist Orville Peck’s Bronco introduces questions about the performance of whiteness/Americanness while simultaneously troubling normative ideas of heterosexual masculinity in country music. Our Native Daughters, a country supergroup made up of four Black women country musicians, offer an example of music as resistance to archival silences through their album Songs of Our Native Daughters. Finally, Gaslighter by the Chicks (formerly known as the Dixie Chicks) presents a portrait of female rage, personal and political, that is both empowering and problematic in its feminism.
So far, I have primarily focused on familiarizing myself with these albums and beginning to contextualize them with scholarship from Sara Ahmed, Saidiya Hartman, and Kimberly Mack. Next week, I’m excited to dive into “field work” at an Orville Peck concert and Stud Country, a queer line-dancing event in New York City. Yeehaw!