Real Men Don't Sing: Crooning in American Culture (Refiguring American Music) - Softcover

McCracken, Allison

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822359367 ISBN 13: 9780822359364

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

The crooner Rudy Vallée's soft, intimate, and sensual vocal delivery simultaneously captivated millions of adoring fans and drew harsh criticism from those threatened by his sensitive masculinity. Although Vallée and other crooners reflected the gender fluidity of late-1920s popular culture, their challenge to the Depression era's more conservative masculine norms led cultural authorities to stigmatize them as gender and sexual deviants. In Real Men Don't Sing Allison McCracken outlines crooning's history from its origins in minstrelsy through its development as the microphone sound most associated with white recording artists, band singers, and radio stars. She charts early crooners' rise and fall between 1925 and 1934, contrasting Rudy Vallée with Bing Crosby to demonstrate how attempts to contain crooners created and dictated standards of white masculinity for male singers. Unlike Vallée, Crosby survived the crooner backlash by adapting his voice and persona to adhere to white middle-class masculine norms. The effects of these norms are felt to this day, as critics continue to question the masculinity of youthful, romantic white male singers. Crooners, McCracken shows, not only were the first pop stars: their short-lived yet massive popularity fundamentally changed American culture.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Allison McCracken is Associate Professor of American Studies at DePaul University.

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Real Men Don't Sing

Crooning in American Culture

By Allison McCracken

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5936-4

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
ONE Putting Over a Song: Crooning, Performance, and Audience in the Acoustic Era, 1880–1920, 
TWO Crooning Goes Electric: Microphone Crooning and the Invention of the Intimate Singing Aesthetic, 1921–1928, 
THREE Falling in Love with a Voice: Rudy Vallée and His First Radio Fans, 1928, 
FOUR "The Mouth of the Machine": The Creation of the Crooning Idol, 1929, 
FIVE "A Supine Sinking into the Primeval Ooze": Crooning and Its Discontents, 1929–1933, 
SIX "The Kind of Natural That Worked": The Crooner Redefined, 1932–1934 (and Beyond), 
Conclusion, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

PUTTING OVER A SONG

Crooning, Performance, and Audience in the Acoustic Era, 1880– 1920

An excerpt from the 1884 song "Crooning to the Baby" conveys the way the word croon originally evoked a comforting maternal figure, typically the soothing black mammy of the antebellum South, and an idealized state of childhood:

'Cross de path of time I see her still
Hush de piccaninny off to rest
Still I hear her voice so soft and low
Croon, croon, crooning to de baby
Backward along de years I seem to go
To de little cotton farm 'way West.

Twenty years later the term connoted romantic vocal address:

Each day they spoon to the engine's tune
Their honeymoon will happen soon
He'll win Lucile with his Oldsmobile
And then he'll fondly croon:
"Come Away with me Lucile
In my merry Oldsmobile
Down the road of life we'll fly
Automo-bubbling you and I."

Although in both cases croon describes singing within an intimate relationship, the term broadened from the exclusively nostalgic associations of minstrel shows to modern courtship. The industrial developments and social dynamics that enabled and accompanied crooning's evolution — changes in popular song texts and publishing, performers and venues, and audiences — are the subject of this chapter.

Standard histories of popular music have addressed these developments in partial ways, through minstrelsy, ragtime, coon songs, jazz, and blues. Yet the evolution of popular crooning love songs has remained little more than a footnote, despite their great popularity. Minstrelsy, for example, is primarily known for its syncopated comic and dance songs, despite the importance of sentimental songs to its repertoire beginning in the 1830s. Likewise female blackface singers of the 1890s are better remembered for their "coon shouting" than for their performances as crooning mammies. This emphasis is commonly attributed to the fact that crooning songs are not genuinely "American" music because they are based in European-derived musical traditions. But all American popular music is fundamentally hybrid, the product of a variety of different stylistic, cultural, and social influences. Mainstream love songs have been neglected historically because they are "feminine": sentimental, emotional. American popular music is typically celebrated for its "masculine" energy, the rhythms that encourage listeners to dance, jump, and wail. In contrast, crooning songs activate passions that are more internalized, focusing on private, intimate relations, whether between mother and child or two lovers, comforting listeners or inviting them to empathize. All these features — comfort, intimacy, privacy, emotionality — are associated with the cultural feminine; indeed what uniquely defines crooning songs is their grounding in gender difference. Perceived femininity, both real and representational, lies at the core of crooning, its significance in the history of American popular song, and its historical marginalization.

In the beginning the "women" were men. The story of crooning begins, as does so much of American popular music, with blackface minstrelsy. Minstrelsy was a product of northern, urban, white male working-class culture of the 1830s, but troupes dominated American popular culture generally from the 1840s through the rise of vaudeville in the 1880s and 1890s. Minstrel singers, overwhelmingly Irish, first employed the British-derived term croon in the 1870s to describe the soothing sound of a plantation mammy singing a lullaby to her charges. The mammy figure was primarily employed to comfort white audiences unnerved by post–Civil War social change; she represented an idealized agrarian southern past in which social divisions of race, class, and gender were naturalized and harmonious. By the 1890s mammies were being regularly embodied by black and white female minstrel performers, known as "coon-shouters." Although the crooning mammy figure tells us little about the historical conditions of actual black women or their children, her growing popularity reveals the white male's need for reassurance amid anxieties in the postbellum world.

Between 1880 and 1920 the public sphere in northern American cities was transformed by rapid urbanization, an emergent mass culture, loosening sexual mores, and the increasing public presence of immigrants, independent working women, non-Anglos, and same-sex-oriented groups. The consumer products and targets of the new entertainment industries transgressed established Victorian divisions between high and low culture (with all the attached ethnic and racial hierarchies and assumptions) and between public male and private female cultures. By contrast, prewar minstrelsy had worked within Victorian social conventions as their abject counterpoint: vulgar and erotic pleasures of the poor and socially marginalized. Because minstrels wore blackface and projected their transgressions onto society's others — primarily blacks and women — such performances preserved racial and gender hierarchies while still giving performers access to expressions of emotional intensity and sensuality. These qualities were still associated with many immigrant groups not yet considered white, such as the Irish, but blackface allowed Irish players to displace them onto other groups. Minstrelsy had also been protected from criticism by the nature of its audience; particularly in urban areas, minstrelsy was largely a male preserve until the 1870s. Minstrels themselves, however, were never completely assimilable; their status as entertainers in working-class culture automatically put them beyond the pale of respectable middle-class society, in which actors of any kind were looked upon with suspicion.

As popular culture became increasingly corporatized in the late nineteenth century, however, new leisure industries such as burlesque, musical comedy, the circus, vaudeville, and cabaret targeted a much broader audience that included wives and often children, thrived on novelty and variety, and allowed more social interaction between performers and audience members. Women's presence as performers exponentially increased beginning in the late 1800s, as did the presence of non-Anglos and gender variants, such as male and female impersonators and "sissy" characters. Vaudeville offered a variety of acts on a single bill, and replaced minstrelsy as the most popular entertainment form in America from the 1890s until the 1920s. Blackface began to fade by the 1910s and shifted from troupes to solo performers and duos as vaudeville and the music industry increasingly...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822359367
• ISBN 13: 9780822359364
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 444
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande