Conference Agenda

At the turn of the 20^th century, horseless carriages began to appear on roads around New York City. Almost simultaneously, automobiles became a point of fascination for Tin Pan Alley. Songs expressed reactions that ranged from skeptical anxiety to harmless infatuation, providing a discursive site for Americans to negotiate the meanings of automobility. By the 1960s, driving was a naturalized habit of daily American life. Car scholars (Sheller) and environmental sociologists (Norgaard) suggest that any attempt to critique or modify driver behavior today must account for the ingrained emotional relationships of driving. The responsibility falls to music scholars to ask: how did music mediate foundational emotional relationships in the formative years of automobility? While musicologists (McLeod, Williams) and cultural scholars (Duffett and Peter) have begun to examine economic and aesthetic links between popular music and automobiles, no study has yet been dedicated to the single song that undoubtedly played the biggest role in shaping how Americans feel about their cars.

Penned by Vincent Bryan and Gus Edwards in 1905, “In My Merry Oldsmobile” arguably remains the most popular song ever written about a car. This paper traces its history through dozens of iterations over six decades to show how popular music reconstructed American identities in the dawn of automobility, easing anxieties and encouraging Americans to associate cars with romance, friendship, and family. As automobile technology and consumer ideologies evolved, so too did “In My Merry Oldsmobile.” By the 1950s, the song had transformed from a hapless, loping waltz into seductive orchestrations and supercharged up-tempo swing. But while the 1958 Oldsmobile car looked nothing like the model produced in 1905, the melody of “In My Merry Oldsmobile” remained recognizable—a familiar, friendly face—across its myriad iterations in sheet music, records, radio, movies, cartoons, and television. In Freudian terms, its adaptations accompanied a cathexis whereby the car itself became the object of libidinal desire, enabling a hybridization of driver and vehicle. In barely half a century, the “merry” musical car transformed courtship rituals, mobilized domestic space, bridged ontological divides, and integrated the automobile into the American dream.

As a sound recordist working in the British film industry from the mid-1930s, Peter Handford excelled in location recording. He was part of the Army Film Unit during World War II and, after a string of post-war British New Wave films, worked in Turkey on Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and in Kenya on Out of Africa (1985). Alongside his day job, Handford was an avid railway enthusiast who began producing and distributing recordings of steam locomotives in the 1950s. Initially available via mail order (and advertised exclusively to readers of specialist magazines), Handford’s train tracks proved unexpectedly popular and were marketed more widely from the 1960s onwards. The label name for these releases was usually some variation on Transacord, a contraction of TRANScribe and reCORD that Handford had been using since his first attempts at curating the sound of the British railways. Each LP came with extensive sleeve notes, inviting the listener to read along while the record was playing. The net result was both intensely localised—a particular locomotive on a particular line at a particular time in particular weather conditions—and broadly evocative of a disappearing “age of steam.” At a time when branch lines were withering and diesel was in the ascendency, Handford’s steamscapes contributed to a broader project (in Britain and beyond) of transport-oriented nostalgic. In this paper I consider how these recordings can be taken as postcards-in-sound, revealing aspects of British attitudes to steam power in the mid twentieth century. Yet the chains of signification they set in motion were not exhausted by nostalgia alone. I suggest that Handford taught his listeners to attend to constellations or sequences of sounds—whistles and blasts, shunting and shouting—so as to (re)imagine some combination of the built and natural environment. At the heart of this working method was a nebulous aesthetics of steam. However fleetingly, Handford's recordings of engines at work put energy at the heart of a distinctive project that sought to capture aspects of cultural memory and sonic identity.

In the early days of 2025, large swaths of Los Angeles burned to the ground, taking with them priceless collections of recordings, instruments, scores, sound equipment, and above all, lives and real-and-imagined communities. The stories flooding out from Angelenos in the Pacific Palisades and in Altadena paint the picture of a landscape silenced. It was only a matter of weeks before people began to imagine the city’s decades’-long rebuilding. In these moments of profound loss, we are given a chance to reflect on what we were and where we hope to head to next—a position the city knows all too well. Mike Davis’ 1995 journal piece “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” lays out the rhythm of fire, both along the coast and further east, that Los Angeles has settled into after decades of dis-/mis-regulation and hubris. As Joan Didion famously wrote in her 1969 essay "The Santa Ana Winds", "The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself.”

This paper will explore Los Angeles’ current moment of sonic re-imagination to evaluate the ways a region could/should sound, from the hum of a healthy ecology, to reimaginings of acceptable background “noise,” to questions of which communities will be welcome to make noise at all. On a larger scale, I ask how this fire will affect the sound of the music emerging from this new Los Angeles? In considering answers to a question like this in conversation with critical texts by Michel Chion, Macs Smith, Kodwo Eshun, Ana Ochoa Gautier, and Edward Soja, I will evaluate the ways humans attempt to restructure their worlds through sound in the wake of social, political, cultural, and environmental turmoil. I will also urge creative communities, both in Los Angeles and beyond, to consider their roles in a rebuilding process that asks, “What should a city of four million people sound like?”