Alumni Voices: Jason Mellard, History Lecturer at Texas State University

We're back this week with a feature on an alumnus of the American Studies Ph.D. program. Jason Mellard currently teaches history at Texas State University and recently (as in, this month!) published his first book, Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture with the University of Texas Press. You can nab a copy here. Do it! (And, if you're in the Austin area, Threadgill's South will be hosting a book release party this Wednesday, October 30, at 6:00pm.)

How is the work that you’re doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?

I work with the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University in San Marcos. Under Director Gary Hartman, we publish the annual Journal of Texas Music History, produce the short This Week in Texas Music History radio segments for KUTX, advise on the Dickson Series in Texas Music with Texas A & M University Press, and teach popular music courses in the Department of History and Honors College at Texas State.

The interdisciplinary habit of mind fits the Center’s broad audience quite well. We speak to musicologists, historians, record collectors, industry types, artists, and fans, all of whom have strong, but often divergent, affective investments in Texas Music. This requires the ability to pivot, to see the relevance of popular music history from each of their vantage points.  The conversations we seek to foster beyond the academy also involve a populist sentiment I feel to be deep in the American Studies vein. Janet Davis, Elizabeth Engelhardt, and Randy Lewis, among others, have modeled this sensibility in the department, one that dates back to our UT forebears in Henry Nash Smith, J. Frank Dobie, and Américo Paredes.

In teaching, I credit the wide latitude the department offered in allowing us to design and teach our own courses. In the spring I have the opportunity to return to the first class I ever offered at UT, “The 1970s in America: Revolution, Malaise, Reaction, and Sleaze.” I feel lucky that AMS gave me free reign to present students with the disorienting smorgasbord of disco, Patty Hearst, AIM, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And, it is likely that I never would have been in a position to teach it had not the department given the same freedom, years before, to Joel Dinerstein in developing his legendary “The History of Being Cool in America.” It was there I first learned of American Studies as a UT undergrad, and I continually endeavor to develop that same combination of curiosity, wonder, and critical acumen that UT-AMS faculty and grad students offer in the classroom, semester after semester.

Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?

Say “yes.” This is a tricky piece of advice, as I am only now reaching a place where I tell people to learn to say “no.” In grad school, though, I found it served me best to stay hungry. My dissertation and book project evolved from answering an Austin Chronicle open call to aid Threadgill’s proprietor Eddie Wilson in researching material for his memoirs. Saying yes also earned me a writing gig with UT AMS alum Farbrizio Salmoni’s magazine American West: La Rivista Italiana di Western Lifestyle, where I covered rodeo and Texas Music for a fervent Italian audience. Also know that there is a network of alumni locally, nationally, and internationally that wish for your success and the success of the department as a whole. Take advantage of these contacts to learn of the various possible career paths out of the graduate experience.

And, have a life outside of the university. In addition to cultivating the Italian rodeo circuit, I worked at a shoe store that sprung out of the Emo’s orbit and at Toy Joy’s short-lived vegan bakery. American Studies folks tend to be drawn to these opportunities of their own accord, but I just want to ratify the impulse. Do something that engages your physical and social intelligence to get you out of your head now and again.

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Stories from Summer Vacation: Karl Hagstrom Miller on Amateur Musicians

Our next account of summer vacation comes from Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller, who discusses some research from his fascinating book project on amateur pop musicians in America:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=EIcyTWrD1oA]

I’ve spent my summer working on my book project Sound Investments: Amateur Musicians Make American Pop.  It rewrites the history of pop music in the United States from the perspective the millions of relatively anonymous musicians who play pop music in their everyday lives—from 19^th-century parlor pianists to YouTube warblers.  This is not how we usually tell the story.Finding evidence of amateur music making has been a challenge.  I have spent a good deal of the summer reading the first two chapters of musical biographies.If you read enough musical biographies, you can soon predict what will happen in “Chapter Three.”  Not every time, of course.  Sometimes the moment comes a bit sooner or later in the book, but it almost always comes.  Here are some opening lines from third chapters:

“Kathy Dawn Lang found the man who would help make her a star in a classified ad in the local newspaper.  His name was Larry Wanagas, owner of Homestead Recorders, a small recording studio on Edmonton’s west side.”¹“We will probably never know exactly how Rosietta Atkins Tharpe—as she was then calling herself—made the leap from a COGIC church in Miami to the stage of the Cotton Club, New York City’s most renowned nightspot.”²“By the early spring of 1981, Husker Du had logged upward of fifty local gigs in Minneapolis/St. Paul when they left to play Chicago on March 21 and 22.  The industrious trio pulled off two major hat tricks for their first out-of-towner.”³“Nineteen-year-old Ernest Dale Tubb had indeed been bitten by the entertainment bug, and so had his friends the Castlemans and ‘Buff’ Buffington.  All migrated to San Antonio about the same time in late 1933."⁴“Producers’ promises come cheap, the price of drinks or maybe even a dinner tab.  Each year the Country Music Association figures, thousands of hopefuls find their way to Nashville, and for nearly every one of them there is someone who will promise, ‘I’ll make you a star’…Yearwood had heard plenty of that talk by the time she met Garth Fundis.”⁵“As soon as he could, Gordy started sending Mary out to appear at theaters and clubs, first in Detroit and later all over the country.  She would continue to perform on stage for paying audiences for most of the rest of her life.”⁶“I played my guaranteed two weeks on the KMTR ‘Breakfast Club’ for winning the contest, and then they hired me as a regular member of the show.  The pay was not great, $7.50 a show, but it was a paying job and I was doing what I loved—singing.”⁷

I could go on.  In the standard stories we tell about pop musicians, “Chapter Three” is the move into show business.  It changes the frame of the story from the home to the industry.  Opening chapters are about mothers and fathers, family and childhood.  “Chapter Two” chronicles protagonists’ initial musical exposure, growing passion, and experiences playing with family and friends—their lives as amateur musicians.  "Chapter Three" is the story of the integration into some component of the established music industry. The move is from preoccupation to occupation, from fandom to eventual stardom, from drudgery to meaningful work. It could be playing a modest circuit, a quick rise to fame, or a move to an entertainment industry hub. In “Chapter Three,” professional peers, managers, and well-known musicians replace old friends in the narrative. These new characters typically remain throughout the rest of the tale of what is now a life more than ordinary, a life of someone with talent, tenacity, and a record contract. They may have recorded for Sony or Folkways, a major label or tiny independent.  They may have been wildly successful or obscure and forgotten. They are all winners here.  They all have their “Chapter Three.”⁸The scope of popular music scholarship is limited largely to the people and products of the commercial recording industry, and that is a problem.  It focuses on a miniscule subset of the people that play popular music.  It equates the culture with the industry, even as many stories are critical of the corporatism or consumerism at its heart.  Such criticisms—often expressed in terms of artistic autonomy, authenticity, or keeping it real—are always incomplete or contested, because commercial recording artists are, by definition, part of the commercial recording industry.   They are in the business of making music that pays.  “Chapter Three” tales thus conform to the narratives of progress and upward mobility, self-made bootstrapping and individual genius, deeply woven into the rhetoric of United States exceptionalism. They inevitably chart progress from being anonymous to being known, from inchoate dabbling to artistic vision. Of course, there is often a fall:  irrelevance, selling out, destitution.  But the prominence and repetition of these narratives tend to equate participation in popular music with navigating the commercial record industry and doing it well, whether that means getting rich or maintaining integrity in the face of outside demands. They reinforce the myth of the American Dream, what Alex de Tocqueville called “the charm of anticipated success.”⁹Standard pop music narratives ignore musicians who did not enter show business.  When these players do appear, they are often merely prologue to the professional journey of our commercial recording artist of interest.  They are childhood chums or early influences, the basic musical protoplasm that our evolving hero will eventually transcend.  This is akin to writing an industrial labor history that suddenly, in chapter three, veers from the shop floor to follow a worker’s career after he is promoted to management.  It misses a great deal of what is going on by not remaining with the rank and file to see how its story develops.  Those who stay behind continue to work, continue to create, even as watching one of their ranks climb the corporate ladder affects their sense of what they are doing and shapes their dreams about their own futures.This is not to say that ordinary people never make it into the scholarship on popular music.  It is just to say that they usually are not identified as pop musicians.  They are fans or consumers, listeners or audiences or aspirants.  When they do play music, authors often distinguish what they are doing from the workings of the pop music business.  They play folk or community music instead of pop.  They play art music that is immune to the infection of commercialized ditties.  They forge local music cultures that are oppositional or resistant to the corporate mainstream.  While these approaches are useful and fascinating, I am not interested in them here.  They, like the “Chapter Three” turn, draw a line between the activities of professional pop musicians and those of musical amateurs.In my book, I want to avoid the “Chapter Three” turn as well as the temptation to identify amateurs as part of a separate culture from commercial pop stars.  Here, I am not interested in isolated folk cultures or local scenes, community choirs or school orchestras.  I am interested in understanding how pop music has functioned as a mass participatory culture.  I am interested in how ordinary people play well-known pop music in their everyday lives and how that shapes their conceptions of themselves, their society, and the pop stars whom they emulate.  Jay-Z and Alicia Keys may be very different from the ordinary folks singing “Empire State of Mind” in their bedrooms, but I want to imagine the contours of a pop music culture that thrives on their connections and resonances across that divide rather than the divide itself.In the end, musicians who vault into the music business are the exception rather than the rule. They are the outliers.  There are millions more musicians who never have a “Chapter Three” moment.  Some may desire one.  Some may work hard to make it happen.  Almost all will fail.  The predominant experience of pop musicians is to play in relative anonymity, to enjoy music with friends and family, and to imagine the odd characters for whom music becomes a source of wealth and renown.

“In later years other members of Last Exit would sometimes look back on that strange winter and wonder at Sting’s ambition.”¹⁰

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1. Victoria Starr, k. d. lang: All You Get is Me (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), p. 27.2. Gayle Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Store of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Boston: Beacon, 2007), p. 33.3. Andrew Earles, Husker Du: The Story of the Noise-Pop Pioneers who Launched Modern Rock (Voyager: Minneapolis, 2010), p. 46.4. Ronnie Pugh, Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubadour (Durham: Duke, 1996), p. 195. Lisa Rebecca Gubernick, Get Hot or Go Home: Trisha Yearwood: the Making of a Nashville Star (New York: William Morrow, 1993), p. 41.6. Peter Benjaminson, Mary Wells: The tumultuous Life of Motown’s First Superstar (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2012), p. 26.7. Patsy Montana with Jane Frost, The Cowboy’s Sweetheart (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2002), p. 37.8. Full disclosure:  In my last book, I made the same move but saved it for later.  Rookie.  Chapter Four begins, “In 1907, as the folklorist John Lomax collected material for Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, a young white Texas singer picked up stakes and moved fifteen hundred miles to new York City.”  See my Segregating Sound:  Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke, 2010), p. 121.9. Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York: Oxford, 2003), p. 5.10. Christopher Sandford, Sting: Demolition Man (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1998), p. 44.