Recycled "Trash": Gender and Authenticity in Country Music Autobiography
Pamela Fox
Somebody said I should write all these memories down. But it ain't like writing a song. . . . I'm not pretending I know how to write a book--not even a book about me. . . . The first thing I insisted was that it [Coal Miner's Daughter] sound like me. When all those city folks try to fix up my talking, all they do is mess me up. . . . This is MY book. Instead of using Webster's Dictionary, we're using Webb's Dictionary--Webb was my maiden name.
--Loretta Lynn, preface to Coal Miner's Daughter
What I want . . . is that my (mobile) image, buffeted among a thousand shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) "self"; but it is the contrary that must be said: "myself" never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn . . . and "myself" which is light, divided, dispersed.
--Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
As I passed among the tables in my costume, speaking to people, smiling and saying Howdy, an incredible thing happened to me. I felt myself moving out of Sarah Ophelia Colley into Minnie Pearl. I felt more uninhibited than I ever had felt doing her before, but it was more than that. I BECAME the character.
--Minnie Pearl, An Autobiography
Tammy, Minnie, Loretta; Dolly, Naomi, Reba. Each name, instantly recognizable to country music fans, not only occupies a specific location in the past and present pantheon of legendary country performers, but invokes an entire "personal" history that is both symptomatic [End Page 234] of, and unique to, traditional celebrity identity. Four of the six are explicitly associated with a particular autobiographical trend in country music, and all can be found gracing the covers of popular autobiographies published over the last twenty years. Tammy Wynette's Stand By Your Man (1979), Sarah Ophelia Colley's Minnie Pearl: An Autobiography (1980), Loretta Lynn's Coal Miner's Daughter (1976), Dolly Parton's Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business (1994), Naomi Judd's Love Can Build A Bridge (1993), and Reba McEntire's Reba: My Story (1994) certainly join the ranks of countless celebrity "told-to" stories issuing from Hollywood and the pop/rock music world, but they also comprise a rapidly growing body of country music autobiographies by women and men--"co"-authored with professional writers--which both respond to and themselves create a distinct tradition or genre. 1
Composites of both low and high life story, these texts are in a rather unique position to deepen our understanding of the class and gender-coded notions of authenticity, discourse, and performative identity shaping the distinctly American form of popular culture known as country music. The six memoirs I have chosen here strike me as an especially rich source of assumptions about myriad conventions governing both the genres of country and star autobiography, as well as about individual women's lives. They collectively narrate and enact one revealing story of class politics in the United States.
As Richard Peterson has most recently argued, autobiography proves to be one of country's most cherished components, in part because it is linked in country music historiography with the traditional sound known as hard or hard-corecountry. 2 Distinguished from the "sell-out" pop of the post-World War II Nashville Sound and its contemporary imitators--what he terms soft-shell country music--hard country claims the imprimatur of authenticity, "made by and for those who remain faithful to the 'roots' of country." 3 In Peterson's schema, artists such as Hank Williams (hard country's most treasured icon), George Jones (running a strong second), and Loretta Lynn share similarities not only in their "raw" singing style but also in their propensity to write and record songs reflecting their own "rough" life experiences. 4 The stars' attitude, performance style, and stage presence are all characterized by informality, humble origins, and a lack of professional music training. Hard-core performers unabashedly reveal themselves to their audiences to emphasize that they are "just like" the men and women in the crowd: [End Page 235] as Peterson notes, they appear someone "who could easily have been a farmer, truck driver, housewife, or hairdresser instead." 5 As such, they have come to represent an increasingly fetishized standard of "pure" country music culture.
With this context in mind, I want to use the above female stars' written autobiographies, representing three different eras in country music history, to examine two key sets of issues/questions:
1) How might the intervention of a third dimension--literary discourse--affect the presentation of "country" life narrative by these six performers? Does the role of the collaborative or ghost writer, for instance, accentuate or deflate the notion of authenticity when rusticity is the standard at stake?
2) What happens in these texts when such a category is compounded, or crossed, by gendered notions of authenticity? (This has been a surprisingly neglected question in otherwise quite sophisticated country music criticism.) As I will explore in the second section of this essay, hard country is often superficially defined by masculine codes of behavior, appearance, and gesture: the mythic hard-drinking, hard-driving, honky-tonk brawler nursing calloused hands and a wounded heart. While Peterson incorporates female country stars such as Lynn and Tanya Tucker into his hard-core classification, others more often end up in the soft-shell category trivialized by country "traditionalists." 6 Yet George Lipsitz and Richard Leppert have also turned hard country inside out to highlight its feminized qualities: unguarded expression of deep, often anguished, personal emotion and vulnerability, frequently conveyed in autobiographical terms. They go even further to equate the concept "country" with the body itself. Other scholars like Ruth Banes seem uninterested in the hard/soft distinction but claim country's autobiographical dimension exclusively for women performers. 7
I am, then, finally interested in exploring the contours and limits of hard country as metanarrative, specifically through its relationship to autobiography. Both have (micro) histories within the larger country music project, associated with shifting notions of rusticity and class. Indeed, autobiography seems particularly useful to the hard-core construct, since it explicitly addresses the relationship between the past and the present--and precisely through the intertwining of private and public histories. But can the two coalesce in written form as (a certain mode of) literary discourse? What does it mean in both gender and [End Page 236] class terms to suggest alternatively that authenticity is registered in the star's performing body, which functions as a kind of medium for the audience/reader's expectations of country conventions? Can the published country music autobiography in fact operate as such a medium, operate as a (mediated) performing "body"?
The set of star-authors I have assembled here span generations and represent a variety of educational backgrounds; additionally, several have blurred the line dividing hard and soft country in the later stages of their career. I thus intend in the following pages to pair up these women's texts to foreground their intriguing differences, as well as similarities, though I cannot hope to offer extensive close readings in the space allowed. A brief sampling will begin to tease out their understanding of what it means to perform as a woman in country music.
I. Constructing Country Music Autobiography
Although four of the six autobiographers in question are noted songwriters as well as singers (Lynn, Parton, Wynette, and Judd), they cannot, in the realm of published life story, automatically adopt the persona of "author." As Lynn so boldly confesses in the epigraph fronting this essay, one identity does not necessarily translate into the other--particularly within an industry that until quite recently had showcased its own lowbrow tastes. The autobiographical memoir, in other words, cannot be conflated with autobiographical song: it establishes unique conditions of authorship and reception. As I explore below, these texts betray considerable anxiety about the act of writing itself. This section thus briefly examines theoretical properties of autobiography in order to emphasize the performativity of identity in country's autobiographical tradition--to accentuate that autobiography is, precisely, a performance--as well as to illuminate the unique dilemma of the female country performer as she enters the arena of literary discourse. 8
Tracking the "I" of Country
Contemporary autobiography theory, spearheaded by feminist scholars, has used postmodern models of subjectivity to transform entirely our understanding of the I which dominates life story writing. Essentialist [End Page 237] notions of a single, authoritative, whole "self" have had a surprisingly tenacious toehold in autobiography criticism, but the humanist individual has finally been supplanted by a dynamic, fragmented subject positioned by and in multiple discourses. 9 And some argue that it is women autobiographers specifically who begin with the assumption that "selfhood is mediated," producing life narratives that challenge in both content and form the traditional privileged white male autobiographical genre. 10 The result has been a virtual explosion of critical material on women's autobiography that underscores the inherently fictive nature of the autobiographical enterprise.
But all too little work has been produced about the contemporary life stories of, as Philippe Lejeune calls them, "those who do not write": "common people" who cannot imagine adopting the mantle of "writer" at all--who often lack the very skills to do so--and need another's assistance to tell their narrative. 11 Lejeune's study of the collaborator/editor/translator/ghostwriter's role in such texts most clearly resembles feminist examinations of the transnational power dynamics underwriting third world women's life stories published in the West. 12 In both instances, the written autobiographical form can appear alien or forbidding and requires another's participation/intervention.
My contention is that country music autobiography in many ways illustrates the blurred boundaries between Lejeune's "hero" and "antihero" modes of autobiography. 13 The six texts I am examining here clearly fall into the former category, recounting the unusual, model lives of those who have "made it." They are celebrities who have become, as Lejeune puts it, "owners of their life . . . and make of it the place for passing on social values." 14 Accordingly, in such cases the very presence of a ghostwriter must be erased or effaced. "Heroes" must appear as if they possess the sophistication or savvy to write their own story. Yet country authenticity presumes humble origins, anti-intellectualism, and literary naivete. Indeed, Lynn, Parton, and Wynette, who hail respectively from Kentucky coal-mining, Tennessee sharecropping, and Mississippi cotton-picking families, highlight their grindingly poor, uneducated backgrounds in their autobiographies--and the former two have virtually fashioned their musical careers out of such pasts. These women's narratives also, then, function as "common" or "antihero" autobiography, wherein the story's value derives chiefly from the subject's very membership in a "culture defined by the exclusion of writing" and hence virtually demands a collaborator or [End Page 238] ghostwriter to ensure the celebrity author's rustic authenticity. 15 Their autobiographies maintain a notable tension between, as well as complicate further, these two positions: that is, the "common" voice of the southern girl who still remembers picking cotton, and the worldly perspective of the glamorous woman whose very name has become a material end unto itself.
Mapping the Country Female Autobiographical Text
In addition to employing a professional writer, the texts all contain star photos, which function to denaturalize and renaturalize identity in ways similar to and different from those on compact disc covers and in liner notes. These two distinctive formal aspects have a complex relationship to one another in need of careful examination.
The Photo Album
All six autobiographies incorporate a chronological series of photographs of the performer and her various family members, from both past and present, to accomplish two (seemingly conflicting) goals: record her transformation from "ordinary" girl into star (the "hero" mode); and insist upon her enduring country authenticity (the "antihero" mode). In asking the reader to treat these images as what Paul Jay terms "visual memory" in the autobiographical text, the insert attempts to close the gap between the real and performing selves--to achieve a kind of damage control as new identities (or fragments thereof) seem to proliferate in the narrative. 16 These star-authors seek what Barthes, as quoted in this essay's epigraph, admittedly sought in his own photographic self-portrait: neat correspondence between (changing) visual image and "core" self.
The texts' use of photo captions helps to expose the naturalising intent of such visuals. In almost every instance, captions are written in first person to amplify the sense that the star is in full control of her image, as well as to verify that such images are trustworthy or real, taken from the star's very own collection. Lynn's book specializes in this approach. Explicitly titled "My Photo Album," the insert offers intimate, down-home commentary on the pictures, such as the following caption accompanying one early shot of young marrieds Loretta and Doolittle: [End Page 239]
That cute little guy I'm cuddling up with is my husband, folks. I sure look different myself, don't I? Well, I was around twenty-one years old and was taking care of four kids and didn't have much time or money for myself. Heck, I had just about figured out what was causing all them kids. 17
The other texts offer similarly comic observations. Captions may make note of visual discrepancies between the past and present, often joking about outdated costumes, hairstyles, and the like. But again, they almost always function to give the illusion of authorial control and static identity--through the years, essentially the same "girl" lies underneath the teen dungarees, cowgirl fringe, and sequined gown. The captions thereby attempt to construct a seamless line connecting private histories and contemporary public lives. At the same time, certain recurring key images destabilize that identity by denaturalising it, documenting the star-author's material progress in sharply clashing visions of rural poverty and glamorous wealth. Almost every memoir, for example, specifically includes comparison/contrast photos of houses, juxtaposing the original dilapidated family homestead with contemporary mansion. Here, the reader detects the strain in the caption "voice" more clearly. While still attempting to make light of her shift in fortune--and typically offset by another photo of the star herself cooking "country" food in that huge state-of-the-art kitchen--there is a lingering sense of desperate pride in her metamorphosis. She wants us to recognize this "other" identity, as much as she alternatively downplays its existence. 18
Authorial Voice
Photo captions, then, often provide one means of controlling or modulating the star-authors' identities, tying together disparate images with an ostensibly consistent and natural voice. Their narrative voices as a whole, however, must accomplish something else entirely. These autobiographies persist in subordinating the collaborative or ghost writer's presence, striving to maintain the spontaneity and vernacular speech which their fan-readers expect. Yet they also reveal awareness of another, conflicting set of expectations which requires the collaborative writer to perform major work on the text. They attempt, in other words, to meet the demands of literary discourse. Current collaborative writer of choice for country stars, Tom Carter, has confirmed that many ask him to "'[m]ake me sound more intelligent than I am,'" admitting, "'I [End Page 240] had one artist who scarcely even wanted to read the manuscript. He told me, 'Just make me sound smart.'" 19
Coal Miner's Daughter, one of the first country autobiographies to appear, illustrates the complexities of this dynamic. Intensely aware of her ungrammatical dialect and fourth-grade level of education, Lynn is, as hinted at earlier, exceptionally candid in the preface about her need to hire writer George Vecsey to help her "talk" through her memories for the task of publishing an autobiography. In "About Me And This Book," she even explains her criteria for his selection:
The way I did it was this: the writers have always been really nice to me, and I've always enjoyed sitting and talking to 'em. But we finally got together with this one writer who used to live in Kentucky, name of George. He knows my part of the country real well; he's visited the coal mines and he's been up to the hollers, so he speaks my language. Now for the past year he's been traveling with me and Doolittle. 20
She then assures the reader of the text's truth, both in content and style: "You can bet your last scrip penny I checked out every word before they sent it to the book company. And if I didn't think it was true, out it went. The first thing I insisted was that it sound like me." 21 Concluding with her tongue-in-cheek reference to "Webb's Dictionary," Lynn invites her fans to apply the following test of authenticity: "So when you're reading this book, just try to picture me up on stage, singing my songs and clowning around, and try to hear me saying 'Butcher Holler.' Then you'll know it's me." 22 She conflates image, voice, and identity here while simultaneously admitting that that voice is a fabrication carefully crafted by Vecsey. Even more interestingly, he is likened to a kind of analyst who elicits and faithfully records material from Lynn's unconscious, capturing its "hillbilly" flavor throughout the narrative, yet clearly filtering it through a slightly more literary mode of speech and narrative structure.