Conference Agenda

In the late 1950s, the “Nashville Sound” production aesthetic revolutionized the sound of country music, replacing steel guitar and fiddles with classical-influenced string arrangements, layered background vocals, and an increased emphasis on clean electric guitar timbres. But, of the many sonic markers of the Nashville Sound, perhaps none was as iconic as the “tic-tac” bass style. Created by picking a muted six-string electric bass guitar, this style was established by a close-knit community of session musicians known as the Nashville A-Team, who developed it, in part, to overcome the technological limitations of consumer audio equipment. As bassist Harold Bradley recalled, “The acoustic bass didn’t record evenly. Some of the notes would drop out and so, naturally, it would drop out on the radio. So the six-string bass, when I’d mute it with my hand, it gives you a click and a note, and that note would come out on the radio… [I]t reinforced whatever the bass was doing.”

In this paper, I trace the origin and evolution of the tic-tac style through the work of A-Team musician Harold Bradley (1926-2019), who popularized the technique while playing on sessions produced by his older brother, Owen Bradley (1915-1998). As I argue, the tic-tac style represented the culmination of an experimental pop tradition in which producers and musicians collaborated to craft distinctive bass timbres for their recordings—timbres that consciously foregrounded the use of a pick. Building on Travis D. Stimeling’s work on Nashville production practices, including their extensive oral history interviews with members of the A-Team, I analyze how the tic-tac bass sound served as an important form of musical branding for Brenda Lee and Patsy Cline, two of the most successful singers to come out of the Nashville Sound era. In the end, the tic-tac bass style was not only a signature component of early ‘60s country-pop records, but it also influenced wider developments in the recording industry. Most notably, electric bassists like Harold Bradley helped foster a significant shift in popular tastes toward recordings that foregrounded more clearly audible bass lines.

Country music critic Chet Flippo lauded 1997 as the “Year of the Woman,” referencing the widespread national and international success of female country artists such as Shania Twain and Faith Hill. This era was ultimately short-lived. Following the corporate consolidation of country radio and The Chicks’ blacklisting in early 2003, there was a rapid decline in the number of female artists who could sustain superstar-level careers in country music. By 2005, the advancements that women had made in the industry in the 1990s had been so dismantled that only a few were able to be successful at the same time. The two women that exemplified this era were Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift.

This paper explores the differing strategies that Underwood and Swift adopted in order to navigate the country music industry’s institutionalized exclusion of women. As I argue, to counteract potential claims of pop inauthenticity because she won American Idol, Underwood developed a persona that explicitly and humbly emphasized her cultural and geographic ties to country music. The teenage Swift, by contrast, chose to emphasize her girlhood and white innocence while also shaping her persona around female singer-songwriter archetypes. Building on the work of Jada Watson, Kristine McCusker, and Joli Jensen, I contextualize both singers’ careers within the backdrop of early 2000s country music. Then, in dialogue with Travis D. Stimeling’s work on Taylor Swift and teenage vocality, I analyze how Swift’s and Underwood’s first major country radio singles—“Tim McGraw” and “Jesus, Take the Wheel,” respectively—employ contrasting modes of songwriting and vocal performance. Against the odds, Underwood and Swift overcame the country industry’s hostility toward women, and they eventually found even further success as crossover artists. At the same time, however, their early triumphs inadvertently established the narrow set of pathways that future female country artists would be expected to work within. Ultimately, Underwood’s and Swift’s early careers not only highlight the limitations placed on women in modern country music, but they also serve as case studies for the complex ways in which female artists continue to navigate contested cultural spaces through explicitly gendered musical performances.

Travis D. Stimeling continually called into question the tendency of country journalists and scholars to equate the concept of authenticity with music performed by white, Southern male artists. Their analyses of competing masculinities in specific country styles—including progressive country, outlaw country, and Southern rock—challenged not only reductive accounts that focused solely on hypermasculine displays but also demonstrated how the gender and racial schema of authenticity erased the genre’s musical and cultural diversity.

Inspired by Stimeling’s pursuits, this paper examines how women performers in contemporary country deliberately use humor to challenge the established gendered and racialized codes of authenticity. Specifically, I focus on the music of the African American female trio Chapel Hart, who recently broke into country music with their comical song “You Can Have Him Jolene” (2021), a response to Dolly Parton’s 1971 hit “Jolene.” Analyzing this song, as well as their recording “Jesus & Alcohol” (2021), I explore how comedy has served as a rhetorical strategy in creating discursive and commercial spaces for women artists in country music and argue that Chapel Hart’s comedic aesthetic aims to highlight the genre’s history of women and Black musical expression. In “You Can Have Him Jolene,” the trio’s girl group vocals transform the depiction of female longing in “Jolene” to a comedic display of communal triumph over the obstacles of male infidelity, as well as country commercial success. In “Jesus and Alcohol,” Chapel Hart collaborated with ZZ Top’s lead guitarist Billy Gibbons, an icon of Southern rock, in a risible narrative about female heartache in which a jilted bride seeks the palliative powers of Protestant religion and hard liquor. The ensemble’s humorous dramatization of the battle between piety and hedonism in a Southern rock arrangement offers a critique of how these cultural and musical tropes became tied to white Southern masculinity. Drawing upon Stimeling’s research on Southern rock musicianship, I suggest that Chapel Hart clarifies that underneath the codes of country authenticity lie Southern vernacular Black music and culture. Thus, this paper addresses humor’s role in illuminating the musical expressions of difference in genre frameworks that marginalize diversity.