1997

20.1

David Fillingim
A Flight from Liminality: "Home" in Country and Gospel Music

In a 1994 article in the journal Popular Music & Society, Dennis Hall analyzes New Age music as "A Voice of Liminality in Postmodern Popular Culture." New age music, Hall contends, occupies a liminal position in record store bins, on radio dials and program schedules, and between musical categories. But more importantly, New Age music "embodies" liminality: it offers the listener "a self-conscious experience of the indeterminate, the decentered, and the transitional--elements characteristic of contemporary culture--and does so in a significantly nonthreatening and satisfying way" (13). In other words, New Age music represents an embracing of the liminality of postmodern upper-middle-class (or "Yuppie") life. New Age music provides a "background" which facilitates the continual transitions between work and home and social event, between the varying roles assumed in personal and professional life (14-20). Hall's account of the liminality of postmodern Yuppie existence is perceptive and engaging, as is his assessment of New Age music as a mouthpiece of that liminality. But do other groups experience liminality to be the (post)modern condition? And, if so, how do their music(s) give voice to liminality?

I would like to examine the ways in which country music can be seen as a response to liminality. I suggest that, traditionally, country music (and its cousin, Southern Gospel) represents a rejection rather than an embracing of liminality. This is so because the liminality to which country music has traditionally responded is not the chosen liminality of postmodern professionals, but the liminality imposed upon working-class folks by economic forces beyond their control. The social location of the music and its listeners is the key factor. If New Age music is the music of the Yuppies, country music is, at least traditionally, the music of the "Rednecks." The liminality experienced by rednecks results from the marginality of the redneck community. Ironically, country music's traditional rejection of liminality is most evident in the ways songs employ the metaphor of "home"-an image that prima facie suggests centeredness and permanence rather than liminalty. I will argue that it is the absence of any real sense of permanence or centeredness that makes home such a strong and central image in country and gospel music. The rednecks' liminal homelesness at the socioeconomic margins-their uninvited "experience of the indeterminate, the decentered, and the transitional"-produces a longing for home that finds expression in redneck music.

In using the word redneck I refer primarily to Southern rural and working-class whites, taking my cue from Will Campbell, who describes the redneck as "the underpriviledged white of mill town and rural South" (37). I read country music primarily as the music of the redneck community, though I recognize that it has never been exclusively such. The musical category known as Southern Gospel appeals to an audience with narrower demographics, almost exclusively rural and working-class and mostly Southern. Both musics, of course, derive from a number of influences. But both can be seen as percolating from the liminality of redneck life. Rednecks have always been at the margins of American life and have thus occupied positions of liminality--between homes, between jobs, at odds with both African-Americans and white elites. Southern rural life in the nineteenth century was a frontier life: poor white Southerners moved often in search of arable land, as the best lands were consumed by the plantation economy (Bruce 13-35). After the civil war, the redneck stereotyped as an ignorant bigot became a scapegoat for the South's problems, and, as Campbell notes, has been exploited as such by cultural and political elites from both North and South ever since. Later, the redneck migrated to urban and semi-urban areas for factory and cotton-mill jobs, and this migration is one key factor in the emergence of commercial country music in the first half of the twentieth century.

As Don Cusic explains in The Sound of Light, the gospel song tradition emerged in the revivals of the nineteenth century, and was galvanized by Dwight L. Moody and his songleader Ira Sankey. Billy Sunday's songleader Homer Rodeheaver, a hillbilly from Jellico, Tennessee, brought musical showmanship to the revivals. Southern Gospel emerged when rural Southerners appropriated the style of traveling gospel quartets sent out by publishers to sell sheet music, and is thus an outgrowth of the frontier gospel song tradition. Significantly, songs about home occupy a prominent place in both country and Southern Gospel music. That a song like "Home, Sweet Home" could emerge from the famed Bristol sessions speaks volumes about how complicated country music history really is. This song, written in 1820 by an American expatriate in England and set to the tune of English nobleman Henry Bishop's "Sicilian air," was a popular American parlor ballad throughout the nineteenth century (and poor folks don't have parlors). It emerges as one of the reputedly traditional mountain pieces performed by one of the groups of musicians who found their way to Bristol to be recorded by Ralph Peer in 1927, and has since become something of a Bluegrass standard, having been recorded by Flatt and Scruggs, among others. By the time of the Bristol recordings, another "home" song--this one from the West, "Home on the Range"--was already so well known that it was sung by schoolchildren (White). These two songs represent the deep roots of "home" in American popular music. To listeners in mainstream culture, these songs represent a romantic nostalgia for an idealized past or, as Cecilia Tichi suggests in High Lonesome (19-28), a longing for Emersonian nature as an escape from modern culture. But to listeners in marginalized communities--liminal communities--the longing for home is more eschatological than nostalgic. Hillbillies and cowboys in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not looking for any innocence once had but now lost. Instead, they were looking for an end to the constant need to move from place to place in search of a viable living. The image of home as a permanent residence represents an end to the turmoil of a liminal existence at the ecomomic margins.

A similar dynamic operates in the gospel song tradition. The revivals throve in frontier settings. The most popular gospel songs were songs about heaven, which promise an end to the turmoil of life in this world. Moody has been credited with promoting the dichotomy between public and private spheres, and the subsequent domestication of American religion. In this sense, heaven becomes a perfect home, while the virtues of home life (as opposed to the aggressive, competitive impulses of public life) become the Christian virtues. Thus, revivalistic preaching and gospel singing have been interpreted by Sandra S. Sizer as forms of social control-effective reinforcements of the Victorian sexual and domestic ideologies that form a backdrop for the rise of industrial capitalism. Songs about heaven continue to be among the most popular gospel songs. And these songs continue to contribute to social conservatism, primarily by utterly rejecting the significance of life in this world. This world is not our home: our true home is heaven. Therefore, what happens in this world is of no significance. The intransigent sufferings that accompany life in this world are to be tolerated with patience, not politically resisted . This message of world-rejection is so welcome among redneck audiences precisely because of their experience of liminality. The idea that life in this world doesn't matter offers some consolation for and explanation of the failure to find a place in this world.

Songs about home, then, express a longing for a life that does matter, a longing for a place with some permanence. Cowboys gathered around the campfire to sing "Home on the Range," making up new verses to fit their particular circumstances, as John I. White explains, experience a temporary community of respite from the liminality of their existence. Mainstream culture then appropriates the song as a way of valorizing the frontier values of individualism and adventure and romanticizing an allegedly simpler life. The range as the cowboy's "home" is celebrated in movies and other aspects of popular culture, as evidenced, for example, in Cole Porter's "Don't Fence Me In." This song, written in 1935 for a movie which was never produced, was sung by Roy Rogers in the 1944 wartime-morale-building movie musical "Hollywood Canteen," and a year later in a movie with the same title as the song. According to Jim Bob Tinsley, the message of unbridled freedom served as a rallying point to oppose the tyranny of Hitler in WWII. The song and the movies also served to reinforce the romantic ideal of the self-sufficient hero who, unburdened by commitments, enjoys the simple life of total freedom in the wide open spaces of the American West. But a simpler life is not always an easier life. For many if not most "simple" folk, it has been a difficult struggle to gain an unreliable grasp on the means of survival. Thus the key phrase of Porter's cowboy classic--"turn me loose"--reappears in Merle Haggard's "Big City," a song which demands release from the drudgery of working-class existence. Haggard's song expresses the discontent of Hillbillies who are trapped on the underside of the capitalist economic machine. But his longing is not to return to the home of his past. After all, it was the hopelessness of rural life that sent him to the dismal city in the first place. His longing is to find the mythical cowboy's elusive freedom. The home he seeks is an eschatological home, like the heaven of the gospel songs.

A similar longing is expressed in songs which do hearken to the ancestral home. Dolly Parton's "Appalachian Memories" and Bobby Bare's "Detroit City" express a longing to leave the urban factories and return to the rural home that was left behind. At one level, then, such songs are nostalgic. But at another level, the songs express a fatalistic resignation and an eschatological longing. The fatalistic resignation is in the realization that liminality is unavoidable. The big city offers rednecks no better place in society than the economically depressed rural home. The eschatological longing is for a home which transcends both the economically depressed rural countryside and the economically abusive big city. Like the gospel songs about heaven, these country songs about home offer bitter criticism of the liminality that life-in-this-world imposes upon the economically marginalized. Home, then, serves as a complex metaphor, carrying much freight and evoking responses at a number of levels. What the various and even paradoxical dimensions of the "home" metaphor have in common is a sense that life in the present lacks value. Home represents a flight perhaps into an idealized past but more often into a longed-for future to escape the liminality of the present.

African-American spirituals and blues employ equally ambiguous metaphors without de-valuing present existence. In the spirituals, for example, the longing for heaven represents a longing to cross the river of death into that perfect home where suffering is no more, and, at the same time, the slave's longing to cross the Ohio River to a new home in the free states--both longings evoking, as James H. Cone explains, the memory of God guiding an enslaved people through the Red Sea and into the promised land (Cone). In the blues, cities like Chicago evoke a similar double longing. In "Sweet Home Chicago," for example, the city is a literal physical place to which poor rural blacks might migrate, but also a mythical promised land of bright lights and unbridled opportunity. In the spirituals and the blues, the present is the place where one is moving (with or without God's help) toward a better future. In country and Southern Gospel music, however, the present has more often been a marginal place in which one is simply stuck for the time-being.

Which brings us to hot new suburban country music. During the 1990s, country became the dominant force in the music industry. Country has become the music of the upwardly mobile. No performer better embodies this trend in country music than Garth Brooks. An examination of the themes of Garth's songs reveals an embracing of the liminality of postmodern upper-middle-class life (similar to what Hall sees in New Age music) rather than a flight from the liminality of the marginalized working class. The signature images in Garth's songs are the dance, the river, the rodeo--images of movement, change, instability. Garth's songs embrace change and make it normative; stability and simplicity are not even longed for. In fact, they are rejected outright as morally complacent. In "That Summer," in which a boy becomes a man, and several songs dealing with issues of male mid-life--"Learning to Live Again," "If Tomorrow Never Comes," "Much Too Young to Feel this Damn Old"--Brooks also embraces the liminality of life passages. Garth's message is that one should engage fully in relationships, passionately embracing one's position in the world, and move with gusto through all of life's changes.

When Brooks does refer to traditional working-class country music themes, it is often with a (post)modern twist. "American Honky-Tonk Bar Association," for example, comes across as a higher octane Okie-from-Muskogee-spirited anthem, but with an emphasis on community that transcends narrow-minded parochialism. "Friends in Low Places" presents the traditional predicament of a common man whose woman has left him for a man of higher social status. But rather than seek some lonely escape, the protagonist engages in a toast to his former beloved, and (especially in the third verse to the live version) relishes the opportunity to rejoin his community. Moreover, though he sings often of rodeo themes, Brooks avoids American popular culture's earlier romantic idealization of the cowboy. Instead, the cowboy is a pitiable creature, incomplete by himself, lacking self-control, and in need of companionship and community ("Beaches of Cheyenne," "The Fever," "Rodeo," "Wild Horses," and especially "Cowboys and Angels"--a retelling of the biblical creation myth). In Brooks' music, companionship and community are prized above individual freedom ("We Shall Be Free," "The River," "Friends in Low Places," "The Old Stuff").

New country as embodied in Garth Brooks, like the New Age music analyzed by Hall, is a postmodern music. In place of the other-worldly detachment of gospel music and the fatalistic resignation of traditional country music, it offers a plea for passionate engagement in the processes of life. In place of the nostalgia and rugged individualism found in the popular culture of mainstream capitalist modernity, it affirms the importance of building community. The sad irony is that, as mainstream popular culture becomes more traditional with the rising popularity of country music, the tradition loses its original impulse. As country music becomes the music of the upwardly mobile, it ceases to be the voice of the liminally stuck. The rednecks, an invisible, unacknowledged, marginal minority become more invisible, less acknowledged, more marginal. A musical tradition once referred to as the poor white man's blues comes to more closely resemble a series of suburban sitcom theme songs. Even the academic community follows suit: Tichi's acclaimed readings of country music, for example, focus on its continuity with mainstream popular culture and overlook its status as the self-expression of a marginalized group. Unless the social location of a text's author and/or core audience is taken into account, the contrast between the embracing of liminality in some popular culture texts and the resistance to liminality in other texts can be reduced to the schizophrenic tension between the "home" and "road" impulses that Tichi contends has always characterized mainstream American culture. Apparent cultural shifts become vacillations between poles of an all-inclusive hegemonic culture, and marginal voices are silenced by being subsumed. I think, for example, of the gulf between Dorothy's realization in The Wizard of Oz that "There's no place like home" and Buckaroo Banzai's 1986 exhortation that "Wherever you go, there you are," which became a 1990s country music hit for Joe Diffie. Both affirmations are echoed in 1997's recreational vehicle ad slogan, "Wherever you go, you're always at home." For cultural elites, the nostalgic yearning for home, a luxury born of the free decision to move for professional reasons, and the road fever that valorizes the cosmopolitan professional skill of being at home anywhere come together to sell products.

Ignoring the social location of country music's traditional core audience results in an inability to hear in it the voices of marginalized persons. I can barely imagine anyone trying to interpret the blues as a set of texts subsumed within and reflecting the concerns of mainsteam culture. To those who are marginalized by the dominant culture, whether poor black or poor white, the yearning for home is a protest, and any valorization of life on the road is a survival strategy. The shift toward an embracing of liminality in Garth Brooks and other 1990s artists signals a shift in the social location of country's audience. That country's 1990s audience is made up of persons of relatively high economic status is born out by the statisitics cited by Feiler and by Peterson & Kern. I find myself wondering if the variation between mainstream/upper class themes and marginal/working class themes has corresponded with the "hard core/soft shell" dialectic Peterson finds in country music's history. It would be a mistake, of course, to overlook the place country music holds and has held in relation to mainstream popular culture. But for most of its history it has been primarily a music of the plain-folk--the rednecks--and readings of country music should be grounded at this level. Students of the culture of the American South should look to country and Southern Gospel music for clues to deciphering the particular self-understanding of the rednecks, always and still in search of "home." Like other marginalized groups, rednecks deserve to be taken seriously and given a place in our cultural understanding from which they will not be easily moved.

Department of Religion and Philosophy
Chowan College
Murfreesboro, NC 27855
 

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