Country Music Goes Global

Autorentext

Toby Martin is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Music Practice at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Australia. He is the author of two books, Yodelling Boundary Riders: Country Music in Australia since the 1920s (2015) and Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Popular Music: Practice-Based Research (co-authored with Seyed MohammadReza Beladi and Ðang Lan, 2025). He has published numerous articles and chapters on country music - consulting on television documentaries on the topic - as well as music and colonialism, Aboriginal popular music and the criminalization of popular music. As a musician, he's released nine albums and toured extensively internationally with his band Youth Group.

Klappentext

This is the first book to analyze the phenomenon of country music outside the USA in a global and transnational way.

Country music, as a commercially recorded popular music form, and has been around for 100 years. Despite its long history and its claims to tradition and classicism, it is in fact growing in popularity as a genre and shifting and morphing as it does so. Not just through the stylings of major artists like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, but also in the development of smaller localized artists and scenes around the world. Country music is a transnational and transcultural phenomenon that has outgrown its American roots and continues to grow and flourish. Wherever country music has been taken up, it has taken on fascinating new forms and styles. From Indigenous artists in the Western Australia, to Iranian cowboy singers to Czech bluegrass, artists have used country sounds and themes to express political ideas and cultural commentary.

Demonstrating the breadth, diversity and depth of country music as a cultural phenomenon, this collection delves into which popular cultures becomes globalized and the types of stories we can tell through looking at them - about colonialism, about Indigenous cultures, about cultural adaptation, about commodification and about the co-opting of musical genres for political aims. As well as representing country music outside America in a geographic sense, these chapters also reveal country music 'outside' America in a conceptual sense.
Uniting scholars of popular music, history, Indigenous studies and gender studies, this book shows the ways in which country music is a thoroughly transnational and transcultural phenomenon and can no longer be considered purely 'American music.'

Inhalt

'Introduction' - Toby Martin (University of Sydney)

'Country Music in Samoa' - Luka Amber Leleiga Bunnin (University of Oxford)

'The music of Erny Belle and the country inflections in contemporary Maori music' - (Kimberly Cannady, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington)

'Singing Cowboys of Empire' - Peter Doyle (Macquarie University)

'Aboriginal Australians and love of country' - Bronwyn Carslon (University of Wollongong)

'Black Allan Barker and the nexus between political radicalism and country music in 1960s Australia' - Darren Hanlon (unaffiliated)

'The satirical hillbilly: Chad Morgan' - Toby Martin (University of Sydney)

'Aboriginal Women and country music in the Kimberly' - (Brigitta Scarfe, Western Australian Academy of the Performing Arts)

'Iranian cowboys' - MohammadReza Beladi (University of Huddersfield)

'The country scene in Japan' (Kenichi Yamaguchi, Unaffiliated)

'Bluegrass in the Czech Republic' - Lee Bidgood (East Tennessee State University)

'Country music in Austria and Hungary' - Chris Goetzen (University of Southern Mississippi)

'The Red Elvis: Dean Read and country music in the Eastern bloc' (Toby Martin)

'The connection between country music and schlager in Germany' - (Padraic Paghurst, University of Melbourne)

'The wild west of Liverpool: Country music, the Beatles, and 1960s England' (author TBC)

'Country music in Latin America' (Chelsea Burns, University of Texas)

'Country Music in Canada/Turtle Island' (Jada Watson, University of Ottawa)

Country Music in Ireland (Stan Erraught, University of Leeds)

Country Music in Scandinavia (Thomas Bossius, University of Gothenburg. Sweden)

Country Music in West Africa (TBD)