Music articulates different kinds of selves; this is the central thrust behind Philip M. Gentry's recent book, What Will I Be: American Music and Cold War Identity. The study takes up a range of examples of popular and art musics from the 1950s, approaching its subject in a thoroughly interdisciplinary fashion. An ambitious and beautifully written book, What Will I Be follows the lead of recent cultural history that centres on the major geopolitical conflict of the century's second half; it brings together musics not often considered under the umbrella of the Cold War to suggest new links between genres that share a Cold War sensibility. Discussions of the Orioles, Doris Day, a number of musicals including South Pacific, The King and I, and Flower Drum Song, and John Cage's 4′33″ are interleaved with thick descriptions of political change and new assertions of identities.

In his introduction, Gentry asserts that the question of identity was especially important during the post-war period: ‘The social dislocations and migrations of the two previous decades, through famine and war, had created a situation in which the question of who one's self ought to be in relation to others was at the forefront of the popular imagination’ (4). What Will I Be situates anxieties over identity in the context of the 1950s and the decade's attendant political movements: McCarthyism, the African-American civil rights movement, the emergence of gay rights organizations, and stirrings of second-wave feminism. As the guiding question of his project, he asks: ‘What is the relationship between these waves of new postwar political movements and the musical revolutions that seem to dovetail so neatly?’ (5). He probes identity formation or self-making from psychological, sociological, and historical perspectives, suggesting that ‘music became a space, and perhaps the most important one, for collective articulations of self’ and that ‘musical performances took center stage in the new project of identity’ (5).

Gentry eschews more sweeping claims about identity, resisting urges to posit identity as either a universal or a transhistorical idea. Instead, he insists on the significance of sharing specific historic moments within particular communities; at the same time, he acknowledges that identity is ‘perhaps the most challenging and politically fraught concept of the late 20th century’ (6). He adds that ‘pervasive status anxiety characterized not just an elite group clinging on to power but also formerly marginalized groups now moving up in society’ (9).

Gentry identifies three trends that resurface throughout his book: ‘the larger international political context of the Cold War or, rather, perhaps a tension between that context and a more hermetic, domestic sensibility’ (10); the ‘conceptual change in racial formation [that] went from biological to cultural, under the paradigm of “ethnicity”’ (13); and the psychologization of identity via a ‘widespread interest in popularized psychology’ (13). Here he traces how a certain set of ideas about identity emerged in the 1950s, focusing especially on psychological definitions offered by Erik Erikson, who imagined identity as being formed by ‘a system of “processes which govern us”: those of the body, of the individual ego, and of social organization’ (14). Indeed, these three trends illustrate the breadth of the intellectual sweep, roving ambitiously through a range of interdisciplinary texts and materials.

In the introduction, Gentry positions himself as a musicologist, but the book's ambitions are grander as an example of creative and interdisciplinary music study. For instance, he cites performance studies – what Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett refers to as the ‘postdiscipline of inclusions’ (21) – as an important framework for his ensuing discussions. For his purposes, he explains that ‘the basic strategy of performance studies is deceptively simple: rather than treat different forms of performance separately, according to the logic of text, it considers them together, as instances of a fundamental human practice. Accordingly, when considering “performance”, that term is taken to mean as wide a range of human behavior as possible’ (21). One of the aims, then, is to reinsert the people who are engaged in the cultural work of identity formation. Here he states his interest in pursuing the following – rather Christopher Small inspired – questions: ‘What kinds of bodies are present, producing and consuming the music? How does the music and its context privilege certain bodies above others, and what changes might it thus effect in structures of privilege (21–2)? Towards the end of his introduction, he writes: ‘to summarize, the focus of this book is thus on the political work of identity as found in the realm of music. The outcome hopes to be more descriptive than prescriptive, focusing on small details of specific individuals rather than on grander theories of social behavior’ (24). Indeed, throughout he offers thick descriptions of historical political context; however, these arise at the expense of musically rich descriptions or analysis.

Chapter 2, ‘Singing Smoothly: Masculinity in Early Doo-Wop’, takes R&B vocal group the Orioles as its case study. Gentry situates the Baltimore group's output in the context of US preoccupation with and anxiety over representations of African-American masculinity. ‘The immediate source of this discourse’, he adds, ‘was the process of intense racial desegregation that occurred during World War II’ (28). For Gentry, the Orioles offered an alternative masculinity that contrasted with the more aggressive jump blues of the era.

In this chapter, Gentry considers recordings, accounts of live performance, fiction, advertisements, poetry, and record reviews in black periodicals, especially Tan Confessions, as his performance archive. Using Susan Leigh Foster's framework of ‘the choreography of gender’, he analyses the sartorial choices and hair styling of lead singer tenor Sonny Til, as well as the physical exertion of his stage performances. He also interprets the group's vocal performance; unlike other popular doo-wop groups, the Orioles ‘kept their harmony close and high, and rarely separated the accompanying voices in any meaningful way. Their vocal aesthetic emphasized smoothness and blend to an extreme degree’, relying on ‘the vague, ambiguous, “blended” middle’ (36). In the song ‘It's Too Soon to Know’ the singers harmonized in thirds. Unlike many of the vocal groups in the Northeast, the Orioles lacked musical training. Similarly, their manager/songwriter could not read music. This led the group to approach harmonizing with an intuitive ‘feeling through’ of chords resulting in simple triads (38). Gentry writes that this ‘strange, contingent, heterogenous ideal of “blending” struck a chord with thousands of young African American teenagers’ (39).

Gentry situates the Orioles’ musical smoothness within the pervasive discourse of smoothness more broadly. ‘Smoothness, then, was an attempt to create a masculinity that did not draw excessive attention to itself, or traduce the narrow boundaries of black bourgeois propriety, but nevertheless maintained a certain power and control over women's minds and bodies’ (52). This chapter on sensitive men joins discourses of domestic ease and smoothness as outlined by Keir Keightley as well as masculinity in male singers as enumerated in Allison McCracken's landmark study on crooners.Footnote ¹ Gentry also links the musical strategies of smoothness with the political strategies enacted by the NAACP who by necessity emphasized smoothness. He closes the chapter with a short discussion of the Orioles’ ‘Crying in the Chapel’: the song, according to Gentry, finds ‘a new way to represent black masculinity as smooth and sensitive, attractive and yet unthreatening’ (56).

In the third chapter, ‘The Blonde Who Knew Too Much: The Whiteness of Doris Day’, Gentry attends to the most popular music of the post-war era: white, female pop vocalists, including Doris Day, Patti Page, and Rosemary Clooney. Most of the chapter, as its title suggests, focuses on the output of Doris Day. Not only was Day the most popular woman performer of her time, but according to Gentry, the ‘Doris Day type looms especially large as the paradigmatic symbol of a particular kind of white, middle-class femininity’ (60). In particular, he concentrates on Day's early career, discussing three important roles in her first film musicals: Romance on the High Seas (1948), Calamity Jane (1953), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

Drawing on Richard Dyer's White (1997), a film studies analysis of whiteness, Gentry proposes that one could also study how whiteness sounds in the works of 1950s female pop vocalists: ‘Conspicuous whiteness marked not only their appearance but also their singing styles and on-screen personae, and this became integral to the story of “pop” music’ (73). The bulk of the analysis, however, focuses on plot points of the musicals under consideration as well as lighting and the interconnectedness of femininity and whiteness. He historically situates the performances of the female pop vocalists in the enormous expansion of the American middle class, the hastening pace of ethnic assimilation, and the McCarran Walter Act, or revision of immigration law in 1952.

‘This Promise of Paradise: Identity and Performance in the Pacific Theatre’, the fourth chapter of the study, sets out to consider representations of Asian-American identity during an era of new encounters with the Pacific Rim. In this chapter, Gentry brings together a range of texts and performances both purportedly about Asian-American characters and performed by Asian-American actors. His examples include three orientalist Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musicals – South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and Flower Drum Song (1958). Arguing for an intercultural analysis, he asks: ‘What is the relationship of these musicals not just to white Americans’ perspective on Asian issues but also to the perspective of Asian Americans?’ (95). In so doing, he aims to ‘press against a notion of middlebrow American culture as being presumptively white, with subcultural African American performance offered as a binary other’ (95). Gentry positions these works in relationship to ‘a range of cultural work that engaged with the intercultural moment brought on by the Pacific theater’ (103). By and large these musicals articulate the perspectives of white Americans and explore themes of Cold War paranoia and anxiety.

Gentry situates these works in the context of the segregation of the Chinese American community in the San Francisco Bay area: ‘An important consequence of suburbanization was the development of an identity that was truly Chinese American, in a hybridized and bicultural sense’ (106). A short closing section discusses the cultural work performed in Chinese American nightclubs in San Francisco, documented by Arthur and Lorraine Dong. Here Gentry points out the dearth of texts available for interpretation; these documantarians’ work, however, offers him access to the social world of Asian-American working musicians (111).

In the fifth chapter, entitled ‘Making Sense of Silence: John Cage's Queer Avant-Garde’, Gentry asks us to reconsider Cage's 4′33″ in the context of Cold War queer history and its attendant anxieties. For Gentry, ‘listening closely to the premiere of 4′33″ opens a window into the tense negotiations between one's private sense of self and one's relationship with the world’ (121). He argues that the significance of this work in particular pertains to Cage's sexuality: ‘as he prepared the piece, John Cage was himself struggling precisely with the question of identity’ (121).

Using a range of sources – concert programmes, interviews, and personal letters – Gentry reconstructs the circumstances of the work's premiere in the Maverick Concert Hall outside of Woodstock, NY, on 29 August 1952. He pays particular notice to the negative reactions: it sparked anger, Cage lost friends over it, and some listeners thought it was an embarrassing and disingenuous trick. One anecdote, in particular, strikes Gentry as significant: a voice from the back of the hall shouted: ‘Good people of Woodstock, let's run these people out of town!’ (124). For him these reactions represent a rather disproportionate anger from an audience of new music supporters, which might be explained by the fact that ‘Cage's performance of a gay subject position posed a real danger in 1952’ (128–9). Here he shows how male homosexuality was tied to the threat of communism. Despite the context of this perceived threat, he outlines the complexity of gay identity in the 1950s, arguing that Cage's position was ‘more subtly articulated than a simple “closeted” model of sexuality would give us’ (137).

What Will I Be concludes with a short epilogue entitled ‘The Practice of Identity’. Here Gentry links his historical discussion of Cold War identities with more contemporary debates about identity politics through a short discussion of Lin-Manuel Miranda's 2015 hit musical Hamilton. In the final pages of the book he states plainly his admiration for the transformational power of identity politics, noting that they offer a sense of political hope. For him, Hamilton represents a moment wherein a musical accomplishes the feat of belonging, a feeling of identification, and the possibility of mobilizing people together. He writes, ‘Miranda makes [history's] emotional intimacy potentially available to all’ (155).

Throughout, What Will I Be loosely theorizes the ways that music activates a sense of belonging and for whom. Here readers might expect an engagement with literatures on imagined communities, intimate publics, and counterpublics, but this is largely missing. And because of the sheer volume of materials under consideration, it was not always clear who was doing the work of identity construction, who was receiving or interpreting it, and who was identifying with that work. The irony of this, of course, is that it runs counter to Gentry's stated goal of allowing ‘more and different voices to creep into the historical narrative’ (151). On the other hand, this lack of specificity allows for an ambiguity or openness about the possibility of identification. Some readers might be left with questions concerning who felt like they did or did not belong and how the music accomplished the work of belonging.

The case studies approach no doubt allows Gentry to consider a wide array of musical materials. However, the politics of selection remains a topic that he does not address. Two examples come to mind. The book opens with an extended discussion of Patti Page's recording of ‘The Tennessee Waltz’, a song that he notes was the biggest hit of 1949. ‘The Tennessee Waltz’, according to Gentry, ‘wears its simplicity on its sleeve’ (1). He goes on to suggest that ‘the performance aspires to be as unmarked as possible, hoping that the widest possible audience might identify with its small story of love and loss’ (2). According to Gentry, the success of ‘The Tennessee Waltz’ indicates that the song promoted a feeling of listener identification or communality; this was possible on the individual level, but also on a group level. Is ‘The Tennessee Waltz’ exceptional in this regard, and if so, how is it different from other popular songs? Surprisingly, he never returns to the ‘Tennessee Waltz’. In a similar fashion, the title of his book borrows the lyric ‘What Will I Be’ from the hit song ‘Que Sera, Sera’, recorded and popularized by Doris Day in 1956. The song does not appear in the introduction and in the chapter on Doris Day, it receives only scant attention. Presumably the question posed by the lyric seemed appropriate to the book's topic. But for readers familiar with the song, we might ask if ‘Que Sera, Sera’ is anymore ‘about’ identity than any other kind of music? Moreover, why bring these particular examples together and what is the payoff?

In his introduction, Gentry aligns his work with feminist theory by reminding us of the importance of citational practice. Here, he riffs on Sara Ahmed in order to raise concerns about positioning white male academics as originators and authorities while simultaneously failing to acknowledge the work ‘accomplished by people of color and others working from a space of oppression’ (19). In his third chapter, however, he troubles this alignment by unselfconsciously importing some problematic terms. First, he recycles the term ‘girl singers’ from 1950s discourse without commentary. This is not to suggest that the term was not used in the 1940s and 1950s, but to reuse it without commentary reinforces the condescending – if not downright derogatory – tone of the term.Footnote ² (In 1954, the year Gentry discusses, Doris Day was 32, Patti Page was 27, and Rosemary Clooney was 26.) This is made all the more troubling by the fact that throughout the chapter, Gentry refers to Doris Day as ‘Doris’ – repeatedly – and Rosemary Clooney as ‘Rosemary’. These may seem like small points, but are worth highlighting 1) because of Gentry's own feminist intellectual orientation and 2) because it reveals – perhaps unwittingly – some of the disciplinary attitudes about popular musics in comparison with more conventional areas of musicological study. Popular music topics are still taken less seriously within musicological circles and this is often made evident by a lack of investment in the literature, histories, and debates of popular music studies.

What Will I Be reveals some of the challenges of interdisciplinary work; ultimately, it lays out a rich array of materials, but leaves the reader to stitch the fabrics together. This is potentially the tradeoff of a case studies approach and in particular one that is wary of grander social theories. Nevertheless, readers familiar with Cold War topics such as state department sponsored composer diplomacy and cultural imperialism or genres including jazz and folk will appreciate Gentry's fresh take on mid-century musics. The introduction states his goals outright: ‘This book hopes to join this conversation concerning the future of identity politics. My goal is that it will enrich the conversation and activism in two ways: by emphasizing both the historicization of identity and the performative nature of politics’ (18). It is less clear that What Will I Be advances an activist framework, but certainly it enriches our understanding of identity formation during the early years of the Cold War.