Conference Agenda

Few things typify country music better than songs about heartbreak. From Jimmie Rodgers to Patsy Cline, George Jones to Tim McGraw, country singers of all stripes have poured out their lonely broken hearts. Such laments of lost love are a staple of the genre, and they usually strike an emotional tone that only country songs do. They are both regretful and nostalgic, at once melodramatic and down-to-earth. And their sorrow is echoed and colored by musical devices peculiar to the genre—a rough but emotive singing style, simple phrasing that mirrors the plainspoken lyrics. But while I am hardly the first to point out the ubiquity of country heartbreak songs (Hill 1999, Kosar 2017, Malone & Neal 2010, Neal 2018), their structure and stylistic conventions have gone mostly unexplored.

This talk will fill this gap by tracing the history of a structural formula common in country heartbreak songs. This formula, which I call the tear-jerking refrain, amounts to what Neal (2007) would call a “narrative paradigm”—a prototypical scheme for structuring the lyrics and music together. The technique had its heyday during the honky-tonk years of the 1940s and 50s, during which most country songs lacked choruses but verses often ended with a one-line refrain. In the heartbreak songs, a formula was common in which the verse’s first lines describe the narrator’s sorrow while the refrain pointedly crystalizes it—in tear-jerking fashion.

Examples abound in the catalogue of Hank Williams—when he confesses that “I’m so lonesome I could cry,” for example, or asks “why can’t I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart?” But the technique was also used by later songwriters, as when Dolly Parton longed for her “Blue Ridge mountain boy” or Merle Haggard recalled his “Mama’s hungry eyes.” Postwar decades, however, saw major changes in country music, including widespread adoption of verse-chorus form. As I will detail, drawing on examples from not only Parton and Haggard but also George Strait and Garth Brooks, songwriters found various ways to adapt the technique to these more complex forms.

The question “who is singing” is both a central concern in popular music contexts (Eisdheim 2019, Moore 2012) and often a difficult one to answer (Nobile 2022, BaileyShea 2014). Investigations of song persona—i.e., the narrative voice taken on by the singer—in lyrical narratives that employ the first person have shown how we perceive and interact with these personae (Auslander 2021; Burns 2010). Our desire to connect with stories in songs is perhaps explained through our preference “to hear ‘I want’ and ‘I hurt’ rather than ‘she wants’ or ‘he hurts,’” (BaileyShea 2014). When stories in songs are told in third person, the narrator’s voice—which in song can always be heard—is hidden (Frith 1996, 184). Country music relies especially on third-person stories; however, the identity of the storyteller is arguably more important than that of the protagonist in this genre (Fox 2004, Moore 2002). When country star Carrie Underwood pairs her powerhouse vocal delivery with third-person narratives of feminine empowerment and overcoming, we can’t help identifying with “she hurts”—we relate to not only the protagonist, but also to Underwood’s personae.

In this paper, I explore two of Underwood’s songs (“Church Bells” and “Blown Away”) that primarily use third person. Drawing upon literary theory (Wyile 2003), narrative film theory (Slugan 2019; Heldt 2013) and from music theory (BaileyShea 2022; Burns 2010), I tease out the difference between the song persona and narrator (see Example 1) before analyzing three features in these songs: special moments of second-person address (you), the narratives of overcoming and female empowerment, and Underwood’s vocal delivery. In these analyses, I answer not only “who is singing?” but also “if someone else sang this song, what would change?” When hearing a story in song, the listener can be keenly aware of the narrative being told, but variably attuned to the singer’s individuality in telling that story (Moore 2012). Underwood’s persona—and voice, through which listeners ascribe authenticity and meaning—creates a representative for a larger community who identify with the narratives of overcoming and female empowerment.