Introduction
Throughout the 1960s and much of the 1970s, Nashville record producers developed a streamlined and efficient approach to tracking instruments and vocals in the city's many recording studios. Studios frequently booked as many as four sessions every day, including Sundays, and cut an average of four songs per session. Session musicians, many of whom played on more than one session each day, set up their equipment, sketched out head arrangements of the songs to be recorded and worked quickly to record the requisite number of songs in each session (Jensen Reference Jensen1998, pp. 76–82; Levy Reference Levy, Wolfe and Akenson2000, pp. 22–29; Streissguth Reference Streissguth2004, pp. 57–65; Kosser Reference Kosser2006). Overdubbing was rare, often limited to the addition of string parts and, occasionally, backing vocals,Footnote 1 and experimentation with microphone placement and the location of instruments within the recording studio space was even rarer because staff engineers had developed time-tested techniques specifically for each studio.Footnote 2
In the first years of the 1970s, however, a group of recording artists – described in the press as the ‘Outlaw movement’ – challenged the standard business and production practices of the record labels along Nashville's Music Row and took more direct control over the production and distribution of their music (Hickey Reference Hickey1974, p. 93; Bane Reference Bane1978, p. 6; Frith Reference Frith1981, p. 75).Footnote 3 Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, both having worked for RCA Victor since the mid-1960s, negotiated new contracts that challenged Nashville's producer-centred model and granted artists the right to select the songs they would cut, record with their road bands rather than studio musicians, and serve as the final arbiter of decisions about mixes, publicity and tours (Tucker Reference Tucker1984, pp. 100–101; Jennings with Kaye Reference Jennings and Kaye1996, pp. 187–94; Patoski Reference Patoski2008, pp. 247–50). The release of Waylon Jennings' album Ladies Love Outlaws (RCA Victor, Reference Jennings1972) marked the first use of the term in relation to these artists. The label then became attached to these artists around 1973, when Hazel Smith, a publicist at Tompall Glaser's Nashville recording studio, coined the term ‘outlaws’ to describe Jennings and the other members of Nashville's musical counterculture who were frequenting the Glaser studios. Smith offered the term to a North Carolina disc jockey because, as she recalled, the musicians were ‘not going along with the Music Row establishment, the Nashville Sound. So I figured they could be living on the outside of the law’ (Smith, quoted in Bane Reference Bane1978, p. 6). Within months, the term ‘outlaw’ became ubiquitous in record reviews, concert reports and publicity interviews devoted to Jennings, Nelson and others as a marker of the movement's independence from the Nashville industry (Hickey Reference Hickey1974, p. 93; Coppage Reference Coppage1976, p. 104). Ironically, this led to the industry co-opting the term in the wake of RCA Victor's Reference Jennings, Nelson, Glaser and Colter1976 compilation album Wanted! The Outlaws (Peterson Reference Peterson and Tichi1998, p. 248; Negus Reference Negus1999, p. 116).
Using his new-found freedom, Outlaw musician Waylon Jennings played a more direct role in the production of his recordings than did many contemporary country recording artists who were not part of the Outlaw movement. Jennings, a member of RCA Victor's country roster since 1965 and a one-time member of Buddy Holly's road band, negotiated a new contract with RCA Victor in 1972, allowing him to select the songs he recorded and to serve as the producer or co-producer for many of his recording sessions (Denisoff Reference Denisoff1983, pp. 60–75, 122, 183–8; Jennings with Kaye Reference Jennings and Kaye1996, pp. 57–74). This new role permitted him to adopt what Alan Williams, writing about bluegrass recordings of the early 1970s, has described as ‘sonic aesthetics … [that] were as much informed by the flowering of British art-rock as by any [John and Alan] Lomax field recording’ (Williams Reference Williams2002, para. 3). Working primarily at studios operated by Tompall Glaser, ‘Cowboy’ Jack Clement and, occasionally, RCA Victor, Jennings used the latest recording technologies to create sonic landscapes that reflected not only the inner drama of the songs he recorded but also his emergent Outlaw image. As journalist Michael Bane observed, Glaser's studio was:
where down-home values meet the Space Age, complete with all the phase shifters, digital delays and Dolby circuits a simple songwriter/singer/producer/arranger/picker/businessman could possibly ever want or have time for. This is the home of all those records Nashville didn't want to make. This is where the Outlaws spent all those countless hours over their music. (Bane Reference Bane1978, pp. 36, 38)
In these studios, Jennings and others treated the recording studio as an experimental space and took control over the most minute elements of vocal performance and production, as evidenced by Jennings' recollections of the way their engineer, Kyle Lehning, was treated during his marathon sessions:
Kyle Lehning, who became one of Nashville's great producers, was our engineer [for several sessions in the mid-1970s], and he runs whenever we see him now. We gave him a trial by fire, Tompall and I. We plumb wore his ass out. He'd be sitting there, nodding, falling over after two straight days in the studio, and we wouldn't let him go home. One night, and Captain [Midnight Schutt, a former radio disc jockey associated with the Outlaw movement] counted, Tompall worked on redoing a phrase eighty times. He wanted to get it just right. (Jennings with Kaye Reference Jennings and Kaye1996, pp. 212–13)
Unlike most Nashville recording studios, which often featured women in prominent roles as arrangers and session musicians (Streissguth Reference Streissguth2004, pp. 53–66), Jennings' sessions created a decidedly male homosocial space in which Jennings and others not only made music but also freely indulged in hard drugs before heading out to a local hamburger joint for marathon pinball sessions (Flippo Reference Flippo, Kingsbury and Axelrod1994, pp. 313–27; Jennings with Kaye Reference Jennings and Kaye1996, p. 213).Footnote 4 In this almost exclusively male environment, Jennings, Nelson and Glaser were able to position themselves as the sole authors of their work, even though they often recorded the compositions of others. In so doing, they offered a public critique of the mediating effects of the Nashville studio system and reinforced notions of authenticity grounded firmly in their white working-class masculinity. As a consequence, the Outlaw movement infused Nashville's country music scene with rock's overtly masculine rhetoric of creativity, self-sufficiency and anti-authoritarianism by bringing to country music what Motti Regev has described as the ‘rock aesthetic’: ‘a set of constantly changing practices and stylistic imperatives for making popular music based on the use of electric and electronic sound textures, amplification, sophisticated studio craftsmanship, and “untrained” and spontaneous techniques of vocal delivery’ (Regev Reference Regev, Hesmondhalgh and Negus2002, p. 253). Furthermore, by challenging the primacy of Nashville Sound-era production practices, the Outlaw country musicians could reject what country music historian Diane Pecknold has characterised as a ‘vision of masculine domesticity that [ordered] the development of the country music business’ in the 1950s and 1960s (Pecknold Reference Pecknold, McCusker and Pecknold2004, p. 106).
The Outlaw artists, as Jason Mellard (Reference Mellard2009, pp. 256–73) has recently suggested, might also be seen as exploring a crisis of masculinity that resulted in a ‘backlash’ (Faludi Reference Faludi1991) against the Women's Liberation Movement. As heard through the strong feminist voices of country artists Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton, feminist perspectives challenged the hegemony of white working-class masculinity (Bufwack and Oermann Reference Bufwack and Oermann2003, pp. 263–70, 281–92, 311–19; Vander Wel Reference Vander Wel2008, pp. 234–58; Fox Reference Fox2009, pp. 113–44). Consequently, we may hear in many Outlaw recordings a deliberate and introspective inquiry into the nature of white working-class masculinity. As sociologist Michael Messner has observed, two masculine figures emerged in response to the Women's Liberation Movement: ‘the emergent, emotionally-expressive New Man, who is heavily involved in parenting, and the inexpressive, hypermasculine Traditional Man’ (Messner Reference Messner1993, pp. 723–4). The outlaw, as a figure who exists outside the confines of mainstream society either by choice or by force, is painfully aware of his outcast status and often feels unworthy of the attention he receives from women (Dunne Reference Dunne and Lewis1993). For example, the Outlaw artists were frequently depicted as wild-eyed, hulking figures living in a world in which women – including Outlaw-associated women Jessi Colter and Sammi Smith – were at once the saviours of these out-of-control men and the very forces that propelled them to lose control in the first place.Footnote 5 The cover photograph of Jennings' Ladies Love Outlaws (RCA Victor, Reference Jennings1972), for instance, features Jennings dressed in black, standing casually on the boardwalk of an Old West-style storefront, and gazing down at a playful little girl who embodies feminine purity and innocence yet, as her broad smile suggests, is uncontrollably enrapt with the hulking Jennings. The title track, penned by songwriter Lee Clayton, casts the outlaw in equally gendered terms, arguing that ‘ladies love outlaws / like babies love stray dogs’. Similarly, Willie Nelson's Reference Nelson1975 concept album Red Headed Stranger (Columbia, 1976), which sympathetically depicts the psychological turmoil of a man who murdered his adulterous wife, suggests that it was an unfaithful woman who caused the protagonist to be ‘wild in his sorrow’ (Stimeling Reference Stimeling2011, pp. 402–6).
The profile of Outlaw masculinity is made still more complex when we listen to the ways that these musicians, working with hand-selected producers and session players, used their voices to depict a variety of ‘hard country’ characters. Looking at the entire corpus of Jennings' Outlaw recordings, it becomes clear that the vocal staging practices deployed in his work offer a unique musical exploration of the duality of the outlaw's masculinity. I do not, however, intend to imply that the techniques that were used in these recordings are distinctive to the artists of the Outlaw movement; in fact, contemporary country, pop and rock recordings frequently exhibit similar vocal staging practices. Rather, this essay uses case studies, drawn from Waylon Jennings' Outlaw-era recordings, to examine how Jennings, working with co-producers ‘Cowboy’ Jack Clement, Chips Moman and Willie Nelson, among others, deployed vocal staging practices in conjunction with other musical practices to construct narratives that reveal the ‘outlaw’ character's psychological turmoil and reflect the complicated state of traditional masculinity in the age of Women's Liberation.Footnote 6
Vocal staging, narrative and the gendered voice
Authenticity in country music ‘is continually negotiated in an ongoing interplay between performers, diverse commercial interests, fans, and the evolving image’ (Peterson Reference Peterson1997, p. 6). A significant component of that negotiation takes place in the voice of the artist (Rogers Reference Rogers1989, pp. 221–2; Leppert and Lipsitz Reference Leppert and Lipsitz1990; Ellison Reference Ellison1995, p. xix; Brackett Reference Brackett2000, pp. 75–107; Walser Reference Walser and Moore2003, p. 28; Fox Reference Fox2004, pp. 43–4; Mather Reference Mather, Fox and Ching2008, pp. 162–70). As cultural critic Jacob Smith has argued, the power of the human voice – and the disembodied recorded voice – lies in its ability to ‘function as an index of the body, a conveyor of language, a social bond, a musical instrument of sublime flexibility, a gauge of emotion, a central component in the art of acting, and a register of everyday identity’ (Smith Reference Smith2008, p. 3). The rhetoric of many country musicians, producers and historians suggests that, when we hear the singer's body in the song – the Barthesian ‘grain of the voice’ (Barthes Reference Barthes and Heath1977, p. 181) – we are, in fact, hearing an autobiographical reflection of the artist's own experiences, what Simon Frith has described as ‘everything that is necessary to put together a person to go with a voice’ (Frith Reference Frith1996, p. 196). Because, as Sheila Whiteley has observed, ‘the voice … is inevitably heard as gendered’ (Whiteley Reference Whiteley and Jarman-Ivens2007, p. 31), vocal staging can play an important role in reinforcing or complicating the performance of gender in country recordings – both explicitly and implicitly – especially if, as Mike Howlett notes, vocal tracks are frequently ‘comped’, or compiled ‘line-by-line, sometimes word-by-word’, from multiple takes (Howlett Reference Howlett, Cook, Clarke, Leech-Wilkinson and Rink2009, p. 30; see also Isenhour Reference Isenhour2011, p. 169).
The voice's power to affect musical meaning becomes especially apparent in country music, which, more so than most popular music, places a strong emphasis on the voice as the narrative medium. While songwriters frequently use formal structure to create narratives (Neal Reference Neal2007), both the voice (Hawkins Reference Hawkins1996, pp. 31–2) and vocal staging (Lacasse Reference Lacasse2000, p. 229–30; Nicholls Reference Nicholls2007, pp. 303–7) often play key roles in supporting and creating narratives in recorded popular song. Musicologists, music analysts and recordists have only recently begun to turn their attention to the musicology of recording, outlining theories and identifying typologies of recording practice (Clarke Reference Clarke1983; Frith Reference Frith1996, pp. 187–8; Zak Reference Zak2001; Williams Reference Williams2002; Wolk Reference Wolk and Weisbard2004; Hodgson Reference Hodgson2007; Moylan Reference Moylan2007; Gibbs and Dack Reference Gibbs, Dack and Doğantan-Dack2008; Moore and Dockwray Reference Moore and Dockwray2008; Moylan Reference Moylan2009; Zagorski-Thomas Reference Zagorski-Thomas2009; Dockwray and Moore 2010). Careful examination of vocal staging – and, in fact, the staging of all recorded tracks – offers a key entry point into understanding the dialogic relationship between recorded sounds and the social and cultural contexts in which they are created. Serge Lacasse, in his exploration of the effects of recording practices on musical meaning in rock music, has defined vocal staging as ‘any deliberate practice whose aim is to enhance a vocal sound … with the help of any mechanical or electrical process, presumably in order to produce some effect on potential or actual listeners’ (Lacasse Reference Lacasse2000, p. 4). Lacasse (Reference Lacasse2000), William Moylan (Reference Moylan2007, Reference Moylan2009), and Simon Zagorski-Thomas (Reference Zagorski-Thomas2009) have identified a variety of approaches to vocal staging, and this study borrows extensively from the typologies they have developed. This analytic approach has been developed still further in Allan F. Moore and Ruth Dockwray's exploration of the ‘sound-box’ (Moore and Dockwray Reference Dockwray and Moore2008), which accounts for the horizontal, vertical, proximal and temporal spatialisation of recorded tracks and their subsequent identification of the ‘diagonal mix’ (Dockwray and Moore Reference Dockwray and Moore2010, see also Hodgson Reference Hodgson2007).
Such an approach necessitates the consideration of the ways that song, performance and electroacoustic composition come together in a popular music recording. Consequently, the notion of song as a stable text is challenged when we explore how the manipulated sound of a singer's voice affirms, complicates or undermines the musical and lyrical texts of the song (Zak Reference Zak2001, pp. 24–47). Michael Chanan has observed that the advent of the multi-track recording and the mixing board created ‘new musical possibilities; the new mode of production therefore begins to turn the recording engineer – the mixer – into a musical creator of a new kind’ (Chanan Reference Chanan1997, p. 147; see also Kealy Reference Kealy, Frith and Goodwin1979/1990; Zak Reference Zak, Cook, Clarke, Leech-Wilkinson and Rink2009, pp. 63–76), necessitating an analysis of the staging techniques deployed in a specific recording that alludes to the collaborative nature of record production and the complex distributions of power that occur within a recording session (Kealy Reference Kealy, Frith and Goodwin1979/1990; Hennion Reference Hennion, Frith and Goodwin1983/1990; Williams Reference Williams2007; Davis Reference Davis2009). By challenging the commonly held understanding of the recording artist or producer as auteur, this approach raises questions about the appropriateness of mapping artist biographies and a belief in the sincerity of a singer's emotions onto the characters presented in and the character of a vocal recording. Moore, Schmidt and Dockwray have further developed a hermeneutics of spatialisation for popular song using image schemata and proxemics to consider ‘the ways in which spatialisation and references to spatial location create meaning within the context of the recorded song or track’ (Moore et al. Reference Moore, Schmidt and Dockwray2009, p. 83). As a predominantly voice-centred genre, country music offers a particularly rich field for the study of the effects of vocal staging in popular music, permitting an exploration of the ways in which songs, arrangements, performances and recording practices converge in the final recording (Lacasse Reference Lacasse2000, p. 18; Zak Reference Zak2001, p. 24; Moore et al. Reference Moore, Schmidt and Dockwray2009) and, perhaps more importantly, how recordings mediate the experiences of listeners and artists alike.
Several of the songs that Jennings recorded during the six years of his Outlaw phase complicated a long-standing characterisation of country masculinity in which men are cast as larger-than-life figures whose out-of-control behaviours mask a profound sadness, sensitivity and loneliness (Leppert and Lipsitz Reference Leppert and Lipsitz1990, pp. 266–71; Tichi Reference Tichi1994, pp. 51–78). Barbara Ching, in her frequently cited work, has suggested that hard country is normally presented from the perspective of ‘an absurdly unregenerate white man who jokes and suffers while women and conventionally successful men brandish the normative values that underscore abjection’ (Ching Reference Ching2001, p. 30), and Michael Dunne has argued for the ‘romantic narcissism’ of Outlaw country, noting that the outlaw's ‘alienation had been deliberately chosen’ (Dunne Reference Dunne and Lewis1993, p. 231). Yet the lyrics and vocal staging practices deployed by Jennings and his co-producers suggest that the speakers are frequently quite aware of their inner shortcomings and seek desperately to remedy them, even if they might fail in their efforts toward self-improvement. Vocal staging thus works to reinforce narratives that underscore and amplify the complex emotions that these male speakers experience as they try to process and come to terms with their feelings of inadequacy and their desire for domestic bliss, a process that requires them to reconcile normative constructions of masculinity – which emphasise the public performance of hypermasculinity and encourage men to suppress their emotions – with their deeply felt love for their family.
Vocal staging and the hypermasculine Outlaw façade
Although the outlaw's public appearance was one of danger, unpredictability and potential violence, the vocal staging deployed in many of Jennings' Outlaw-era recordings reveals this stance to be a façade that masks profound insecurity. These speakers often acknowledge their desire for female companionship, but they fear that their rambling lifestyle will alienate them from the security they so deeply desire. Nowhere is this made more apparent than in the title track of the first Jennings album released after signing his new contract with RCA Victor, Lonesome, On'ry and Mean (RCA Victor, Reference Jennings1973). Initial tracking took place at RCA's Nashville studios on 18 December 1972, vocal harmonies were likely overdubbed on 27 December 1972,Footnote 7 and it was released in March 1973 (Smith Reference Smith1995, pp. 55–7, 262). The speaker in Steve Young's composition – who, in this and all future songs, will be described as ‘Waylon’ – embodies the hypermasculine outlaw character that Jennings would make famous throughout the decade.Footnote 8 He exists on the margins of acceptable society, ‘driving these highways, doing things my way’, enjoying the company of an evening with ‘the cream of the Basin Street queens’ and engaging in some backroom gambling. Yet, despite his ceaseless enjoyment of the pleasures of the flesh, his life remains unfulfilled. In the fourth verse, the posturing speaker retreats to a Greyhound bus, where he prays for God's intercession to help him find what he is looking for, to help him quit being ‘lonesome, on'ry, and mean’ and, presumably, to transport him to the safety of the domestic sphere.
The vocal staging of ‘Lonesome, On'ry and Mean’ can be heard as an accentuation of the speaker's frustration, anger and unpredictability and an effort to underscore the immediacy of his lonesomeness. In line with country music's voice-centred mixing strategies (Fox Reference Fox2004, p. 283), Jennings' voice is situated forward in the proximal plane and in front of the entire band. Behind him, the harmonica, bass guitar and drums are placed in what Dockwray and Moore have termed the ‘diagonal mix’, a technique heard in many contemporaneous rock recordings (Dockwray and Moore Reference Dockwray and Moore2010, p. 186). The effect of this mix is an increased overall ‘loudness’ that grants the rhythm section a strong presence in the mix and announces the speaker as a brash and imposing figure. Moreover, Jennings' vocal track is itself loud and treated with post-production reverberation, further amplifying the speaker's volatility, orneriness and meanness.
The lyrical hook that concludes each verse of ‘Lonesome, On'ry and Mean’ finds the speaker expressing his loneliness and anxiety most directly. Many pop, rock and country records of the time introduced additional background vocalists at such a key structural juncture, but Jennings' lead vocals are joined here not by another singer's voice but by what sounds to be an overdubbed recording of his own voice, singing a high harmony line that is situated behind the rhythm section in the proximal plane. The overdubbed harmony enters at precisely the moment that ‘Waylon’ gives voice to the emptiness he feels, signalling that his emotions are so intense that they cannot be contained in the environmental and melodic spaces that ‘Waylon’ had previously inhabited during the verse. In setting the harmony vocal with heavy reverb and situating it at a substantial proximal distance from Jennings' lead vocals, Jennings and co-producer Danny Davis highlighted ‘Waylon's’ lonesomeness by placing his voice in the empty and boundless psychological space in which he finds himself.Footnote 9
The ‘Waylon’ depicted in Waylon Jennings's recording of ‘Lonesome, On'ry and Mean’ certainly displays machismo, reinforcing the masculine rhetoric and imagery of the emerging Outlaw movement. So too, as part of the rhetoric, he privately hides emotions that might reveal that he has been hurt by society's scorn for his lifestyle and which could undermine his decidedly hypermasculine public image. ‘Waylon’ insists on ‘doing things [his] way’, regardless of the impact of his decisions on others, especially the women in his life. The vocal staging of ‘Lonesome, On'ry and Mean’ thus reinforces readings of Jennings' voice that are informed by his rugged physical image and rough-and-tumble autobiography and further encourages us to hear Jennings himself as an outlaw, both among the Nashville music industry establishment and in every aspect of his public and private life. Yet, while much post-Outlaw criticism has latched onto the unflinching hypermasculinity that is suggested by the vocal staging, rhetoric and public image that Jennings portrayed throughout the 1970s (for example, Joseph Reference Joseph1984, p. 24), the vocal overdubs and spatial effects heard in the refrain of ‘Lonesome, On'ry and Mean’ suggest a more nuanced masculinity that foregrounds a vulnerability that is not present elsewhere in the mix. While the marked change in the vocal staging also has the effect of highlighting the song's hook, it also demonstrates that ‘Waylon’ is a complicated man who is compelled to keep running, despite what his own better judgment might indicate.
A similar theme can be heard in the title track of Jennings' Reference Jennings1975Dreaming My Dreams, co-produced with ‘Cowboy’ Jack Clement. Directing his words to a former lover, ‘Waylon’ clearly demonstrates his deep feelings for the object of his attention, noting in the chorus his hopes to ‘someday … get over you’. The reasons for the breakup are not entirely clear, but ‘Waylon’ is leaving to ‘find what [he's] reaching for’, implicitly invoking the rambling trope heard in many other Jennings recordings from this era. He also proclaims a strong personal belief in the power of love and a desire to ‘give it away / As much as I can’. The arrangement is scored for acoustic rhythm guitar, electric guitar played through a flange pedal, electric bass, bass drum and high hat, electric piano, mandolin and a small ensemble of brass and strings. A rather large assemblage when compared to many of Jennings' Outlaw-era cuts, the arrangement is decidedly understated, with the electric piano, brass and mandolin quietly marking key structural moments over sustained strings and guitars and a slow, simple drum and bass groove. For the majority of the recording, Jennings' voice is treated flatly and located in the far front of the proximal plane from 0'13” until 2'02”, during which time Jennings delivers the entire lyric. But in the recording's final 17 seconds, those flat vocals recede into the background as the speaker intones the words of the refrain – ‘Someday, I'll get over you …’ – using a modified version of the verse melody. Accompanied by a fadeout, the vocal's slow disappearance into inaudibility parallels the speaker's own disappearance from view as he leaves in search of something nameless.
Unlike ‘Lonesome, On'ry and Mean’, ‘Dreaming My Dreams with You’ is noteworthy for its restraint and intimacy. Projecting ‘cool’, Jennings approaches the lyric with a resonant and relaxed baritone voice that sits comfortably at a relatively soft volume. The vocal track, tempered by the absence of reverberation, suggests that his listeners – the second-person ‘you’ to whom he often refers – are with him in an intimate setting, perhaps in an acoustically dry bedroom furnished with reverberation-absorbing bedding. The effect of this restraint, which is reinforced by the aimless verse melody, is to encourage listeners to lean in to hear the recording, further inviting us into the speaker's intimate sphere and positioning us as the object of his affection. The listener is, therefore, not situated as a neutral observer but as part of the narrative drama; the listener becomes the jilted lover. As a consequence, ‘Dreaming My Dreams with You’ reveals the hypermasculine Outlaw façade as little more than a strategy to obtain freedom from domesticity. Even if we hear the speaker's words as authentic and honest, the recording makes Jennings' performance of these words seem cool, calculated and distant. Thus, much as the recording of ‘Lonesome, On'ry and Mean’ displays an Outlaw masculinity defined by an uncontrollable impulse to ramble, so too does ‘Dreaming My Dreams with You’ underscore the challenge of genuinely expressing one's emotions while maintaining the Outlaw posture.
The contradictions between the outlaw's impulses toward rambling and domesticity are highlighted in Jennings' 8–9 January Reference Jennings1977 recording of Hal Bynum and Roger Bowling's ‘Lucille’, which was co-produced by Jennings and Chips Moman at American Studios in Nashville (Smith Reference Smith1995, p. 96). Made famous in singer Kenny Rogers's United Artists recording released in January Reference Rogers1977, ‘Lucille’ tells the story of a man whose unfaithful wife has left him and his ‘four hungry children’ to search ‘for whatever the other life brings’. Yet, rather than being told from the perspective of either Lucille or the anonymous husband, the story is presented by a narrator who, after meeting Lucille in a bar in Toledo, is forced to choose between the immediate pleasures of a midnight rendezvous with her or honouring the dignity of the maligned husband. The song makes compelling use of reported speech as the narrator recounts the words of both Lucille and her husband, employing vocal staging practices as part of a larger body of musical parameters that differentiate the distinctive voices of each character.
Narration in country ballads is commonplace, and ethnomusicologist Aaron Fox asserts that it is common for a country singer to perform the speech of another person, mimicking the timbre, rhythm and inflections of the original speaker (Fox Reference Fox2004, p. 38). Yet, the vocal staging applied to Jennings' voice does not attempt to simulate Lucille's speech. Rather, it maintains the same character that defines the first-person narrator's voice: location in the front of the proximal plane, slight off-centre placement horizontally, and treatment with mild plate reverberation. Only when the husband confronts Lucille in the song's chorus does the vocal staging change, dramatically helping Jennings' voice convey his anguish and volatility. Unlike Rogers's hit recording, which sets his voice in a flat stage throughout the entire recording, the vocal staging in Jennings' recording undergoes a dramatic transformation when the husband realises that he is being cuckolded. Amplifying this key structural and narrative moment, Jennings' previously direct vocals are joined by a more reverberant overdub of Jennings' voice and additional background vocal, exemplifying what Lelio Camilerri has described as ‘changing morphological space’ (Camilerri Reference Camilleri2010, pp. 202–3). The background vocal tracks are panned to the centre of the horizontal plane and only slightly behind the lead vocals in the proximal plane, seemingly directing the husband's emotional outburst toward Lucille. This moment is combined with a dramatic change in the song's groove. The verses feature the speech of both the narrator and Lucille and are accompanied by a steady two-beat feel at a tempo of around 104 beats per minute, while the husband's rage is set to a lilting waltz at 175 beats per minute. As such, the vocal staging combines with rhythm, meter, tempo and the formal demarcation between verse and chorus to create a clear demarcation between the speaker as a narrator and the speaker as the performer of the husband's histrionic speech. Moreover, these vocal effects play a mimetic role, reinforcing the notion that the maligned man ‘looked like a mountain’ and presenting an outraged, hypermasculine exterior that hides his emotional devastation.
The decision to use vocal staging to focus on the husband's words is especially interesting since Lucille herself receives no special vocal staging. Lucille speaks only in the first verse, and any changes in the vocal staging, inflection or arrangement would have certainly disrupted the verse's sonic character and internal logic. Yet the application of these vocal staging techniques may still be heard as having clear gendered implications for the song's characters. Lucille has betrayed not only her husband but, more importantly, the four children she has left behind. As the narrator concedes in the final verse, the neglect of one's children simply cannot be tolerated from a woman. Her brief utterance and non-discrete vocal staging suggest that she might not deserve the listener's sympathy. The husband, on the other hand, dominates the song, speaking in every chorus, first directly to Lucille and later in the narrator's memory, and he is presented as a hard-working and honest man who has been devastated by his wife's misjudgements but who, we are assured, will recover to take care of the children for whom he had been working so hard. Moreover, the absence of reverb in the vocal staging of the narrator casts him in the role of an objective observer, absolving him from any involvement in the situation. What emerges from ‘Lucille’, therefore, is the double standard that lies at the core of Outlaw masculinity: while the Outlaw man is celebrated for rambling around the country, drinking and carousing with friends, keeping the company of innumerable women and searching for some deeper meaning from life, women are still expected to be constant and faithful in a domestic setting.
Such is also the case with Jennings' 16–17 October Reference Jennings1973 recording of Willie Nelson's composition ‘Walkin’' (Jennings Reference Jennings1974, Smith Reference Smith1995, pp. 62–3). This was previously recorded by Nelson for his Phases and Stages (Atlantic, Reference Nelson1974), a concept album which chronicles the separation and divorce of a couple from the perspectives of both the husband and the wife (Stimeling Reference Stimeling2011, pp. 398–402). In Nelson's version, the speaker is the wife, who is contemplating the benefits of walking away from her cheating and uncaring husband. As presented from the wife's perspective, the line ‘walkin’ is better than runnin' away, / and crawlin' ain't no good at all' is an empowering iteration of a common honky-tonk trope that resonated with contemporary themes emerging from the women's liberation movement, Nelson's personal awareness of his own romantic mistakes, and his willingness to address these issues in his songwriting. Yet, a fundamental question for the female protagonist of Phases and Stages is how to maintain her dignity while leaving her husband. Jennings' male speaker, on the other hand, seems to wonder how he can maintain his dignity while also admitting his guilt and repairing the relationship that he has damaged. The speaker is vulnerable because he has realised – perhaps too late – that he needs this woman but, for good reasons, she might not be willing to take him back. The speaker here presents a more nuanced masculinity than the daunting caricature of ‘Lonesome, On'ry and Mean’, allowing listeners to hear his private emotions, not just a projection of the rough and tough identity that he wants to convey.
The narrative difference between the male and female speakers in ‘Walkin’' becomes especially clear when we consider the arrangements and vocal stagings of each recording. In both recordings, the lead vocal tracks are located at the front of the proximal plane and treated with a high degree of reverberation, creating the sensation that the speakers are physically alone in an empty house or that these thoughts are part of an internal monologue. In contrast to ‘Lonesome, On'ry and Mean’, this reverberation does not make the speakers stand out as imposing figures; it draws attention to their vulnerability and fragility. Yet, while both speakers find themselves contemplating the fates of their respective relationships and the actions that would be best for their own futures, the arrangements suggest that Jennings' male speaker harbours a kind of fear different from his female counterpart. In Nelson's recording, the proximal plane is shallow, and his vocal track is couched within the supportive context of the instrumental accompaniment. In Jennings' recording, the proximal plane is much deeper, amplified by both the reverberations of Jennings' vocal track and the snare drum's booming rim clicks, which suggest that the speaker has reached the depths of his despair. The horizontal plane in Jennings' recording is also broader, an effect created by panning Ralph Mooney's pedal steel guitar fills hard to the left while panning his reverb to the right, an effect similar to what Moore and Dockwray have identified as the ‘triangular mix’ (Moore and Dockwray 2008, p. 227). The sonic environment in which Jennings' voice is situated is, therefore, much starker than the one that Nelson's inhabits and, when combined with the dramatically slower tempo of Jennings' recording, suggests that his speaker is as uncertain about his future as Nelson's. These observations reinforce Zak's supposition that, ‘while most recorded songs can easily be separated from their specific contexts and performed in any number of ways, arrangements are often more dependent upon the particularities of the recording, and an analytical division between track and arrangement may be artificial and misleading’ (Zak Reference Zak2001, p. 32).
Conclusions
The past decade has witnessed a significant growth in the number of studies exploring how gender is constructed and performed in commercial country music, generating, as a consequence, an increasingly rich portrait of the diverse ways in which musicians and audiences articulate gendered identities through the raced and classed signs of country music sounds and images. The vast majority of this work, however, explores gender issues principally through the lens of women's experiences with country music, often in an overt attempt to bring women into an inaccurately male-dominated historical narrative (see, for example, Bufwack and Oermann Reference Bufwack and Oermann2003; McCusker Reference McCusker2008). As music historian David Sanjek noted, for instance:
[G]round-breaking writers like Bufwack and Oermann [authors of Finding Her Voice: Women in Country Music, 1800–2000 (Reference Bufwack and Oermann2003)] have enumerated how many women have been left out of histories of the genre or examined how roving vagabonds were contrasted with maternal Madonnas. The more demanding work that remains to be done is … investigating how gender operates throughout the whole constellation of images, attitudes, and operations attendant to country music, from fan publications to dance styles to the repertoire broadcast over radio. (Sanjek Reference Sanjek, McCusker and Pecknold2004, p. xiv)
Recent scholarship by historians Diane Pecknold (Reference Pecknold, McCusker and Pecknold2004), Kristine McCusker (Reference McCusker2008) and Peter LaChapelle (Reference LaChapelle2007, pp. 76–110), cultural theorists Barbara Ching (Reference Ching2001), Teresa Ortega (Reference Ortega and Tichi1998) and Pamela Fox (Reference Fox2009), and music analyst Jocelyn Neal (Reference Neal, McCusker and Pecknold2004), among others, has explored many of the areas that Sanjek described. Yet, with the exception of work by Richard Leppert and George Lipsitz (1990), David Brackett (Reference Brackett2000) and Stephanie Vander Wel (Reference Vander Wel2008), little research has been conducted to explore how gender is constructed through musical country compositions and musical performances.
Similarly, masculinity has figured less frequently in recent scholarship on gender in country music, although noteworthy studies by Pecknold (Reference Pecknold, McCusker and Pecknold2004), Michael Bertrand (Reference Bertrand, McCusker and Pecknold2004) and Aaron Fox (Reference Fox2004, pp. 249–71) have offered nuanced examples of the ways in which masculinity figures in country music performance and consumption. Yet, the dominant view of masculinity in country music scholarship is that offered by Barbara Ching (Reference Ching2001) in her influential study, Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture, in which she presents her notion of the ‘burlesque abjection of the white male’ (Ching Reference Ching2001, p. 26), a mode of discourse in which ‘hard country singers unabashedly portray themselves and their listeners as the ‘low other’ of American culture' (Ching Reference Ching2001, p. 33). Such an interpretive framework unfortunately casts hard country musicians as comic stereotypes that are incapable of expressing ‘authentic’ emotion, limiting, as a consequence, the expressive power of country music for both its performers and its fans.
With few exceptions, nearly all of Waylon Jennings' recorded repertoire from the 1970s replicates heteronormative gender roles in some manner, with the woman representing safety, constancy and domesticity and the man embodying adventure, innovation and exploration and eschewing the nuclear family.Footnote 10 At the same time, the Outlaw repertoire augments our understanding of white working-class masculinity in the age of women's liberation because it portrays the stereotypical Outlaw figure not as reactionary and anti-feminist but as a character that deserves some sympathy and compassion as he reconciles his own conflicted masculinity. Pamela Fox's recent discussion of Hank Williams' gender trouble – he ‘laments the absence of romance and/or the domestic as much as he resists its simple-minded fantasy’ (Fox Reference Fox2009, p. 85) – could just as easily describe the repertoire under consideration here. The modifications that Jennings and his co-producers applied to his voice, underscored by arrangement and production practices, add nuance to the standard honky-tonk tropes that one encounters in Williams' music. The Outlaw antihero does not simply retreat to the bottle or the arms of another woman. Rather, he turns inward, searching for the source of his discontent, openly expressing his fears, standing alone in an unfriendly world and revealing his vulnerability. Most Outlaw recordings suggest, through the combination of musical arrangement, vocal staging and lyrics, that the outlaw wants nothing more than to be situated happily within the same domestic environment that the women he loves inhabit. Even in those recordings that depict the outlaw as a dangerous and unpredictable man, these elements align to suggest that his machismo thinly veils his deep-seated fears and hurt. Although he occasionally resorts to hyperbole and grandstanding to make a point, the outlaw's musically performed speech coincides with the moment that women throughout the United States were beginning to embrace newfound reproductive and economic freedoms. Men, too, were attempting to engage with their emotions and express their fears about their place in this new environment, both to themselves and to the people around them. Thus, much as Leigh H. Edwards has suggested in her exploration of the ‘trope of contradiction’ in the songs, images and receptions of Johnny Cash, the Outlaws ‘establish[ed] a marginalized, working-class masculinity [that was] … defiant and critical of middle-class norms, while also considering the uncertainties of that working-class manhood’ (Edwards Reference Edwards2009, p. 70).
The preceding analysis suggests that sonic clues embedded in the vocal staging and arranging encourage listeners to hear through the façade of hypermasculinity that is so commonly foregrounded in these recordings, listening instead to the speaker's internal psychological struggles and identity crises. Yet, just as such crises are often unresolved in our own lives, so too do Jennings' recordings eschew easy resolution or the reduction of his characters' masculine identities into simple archetypes. Rather, each recording permits listeners to witness a brief vignette in the speakers' long-term struggles with the formation of a gendered identity, revealing in the process the shortcomings of traditional white working-class notions of masculinity.
Acknowledgements
Portions of this article were presented in a joint session of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, November 2008. The author would like to thank Sarah Schmalenberger, Jada Watson and this journal's anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.
