Why does country music sound white? Race and the voice of nostalgia

Abstract

Since American country music has historical ties to musics of many different regions and racial groups, the answer to the question ‘Why does country music sound white?’ is by no means obvious. This article asks how country became white, and how it stays white. To inquire into why country music sounds white is to wonder what whiteness sounds like, and how it is heard. This article considers the meaning of the sounds of country in the making of a pose of historically ‘innocent’ and ‘besieged’ American whiteness. Focusing on the cultural politics of nostalgia, I argue that in the construction of an idealized past-ness, or ‘used to’, country music not only ‘talks white’, but it is whites who hear it, and whose whiteness is produced and reproduced by what they hear.

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