DeFord Bailey (1899–1982), an African American harmonica virtuoso, performed regularly on the Grand Ole Opry radio program from 1926 to 1941 and afterward fell into obscurity. Decades later, however, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame (2005), overseen by the Country Music Association (CMA), amid calls to diversify a predominantly white country music canon. Motivated by racially progressive ideals and seeking to rehabilitate the genre's image, many fans and industry advocates misrepresented Bailey's achievements in the surrounding conversations, or they relied upon essentializing notions of black music in their advocacy on his behalf. Resistance to his candidacy for the Hall was cited as evidence of the industry's institutionalized racism. While his eventual induction allowed the CMA some room in which to refute that charge and promote a multiracial narrative for the genre's history, consistent with its long-standing desire to cultivate middle-class respectability, that same multiracial narrative obscured Bailey's role in the production of a distinctly white image for country music in the 1920s and 1930s. Highlighting this discrepancy, this article compares the historical and contemporary reception of Bailey's music and legacy, drawing upon newspaper accounts, Opry promotional materials, archival interviews, and commercial recordings. Opry broadcasts played host to blues, blackface, and other racially coded repertoires; Bailey's blues-based style did not distinguish him from his white Opry peers. Opry marketing worked assiduously to present a singular white image for the show and its repertoire, marginalizing or obscuring Bailey's racial identity in its programming and publicity. In this manner, Bailey's career has paradoxically been made to serve narratives asserting both the whiteness and the multiracialism of country music.
Men with high voices often stand accused. They are regarded as adolescent, effeminate, gay-as not quite men. The gender queering of pop icons like Michael Jackson and myriad "boy bands" bears this out. In Real Men Don't Sing: Crooning in American Culture, American studies scholar Allison McCracken locates the origins of our current vocal essentialism in the crooning pop idols of the 1920s and 1930s. "Crooning" in this era applied primarily to white male singers performing sentimental, romantic repertory in a soft, usually high, voice. The crooner's rise and subsequent fall, McCracken argues, depended upon a confluence of technological and social factors. Early microphones and electronic amplification were particularly amenable to high voices, and the nascent radio, recording, and film industries made possible a national audience. An expanding urban middle class combined with the easing of Victorian sexual mores empowered female consumers to assert a greater influence over this new national culture. Threatened by women's rising power and the economic instability of the Depression, male cultural authorities used popular media to denounce crooners as effeminate and sexually deviant. This backlash formed part of a white, masculinist cultural nationalism beginning in the 1930s that is still very much alive today; as McCracken explains, "the popularity of early crooners instigated the imposition, for the first time, of masculine norms for voices on a mass scale in American society" (4). Analyzing sheet music, recordings, films, and publicity materials through the lens of media and gender studies, McCracken's book offers the first nuanced account of crooning's heyday and its continued legacy in pop vocal performance. 1 Like so many other forms of twentieth-century popular entertainment, crooning has its roots in blackface minstrelsy. The early chapters of Real Men Don't Sing trace crooning's transition from the racialized genre of minstrelsy to a white, female-coded style. Sheet music in the late 1800s used the word "croon" to describe the voice of the black "mammy" stereotype. White men typically sang the earliest of these nostalgic "mammy songs," emphasizing their sentimental affect. By 1910, female minstrels and black composers were adapting crooning to other ends, undercutting its racialized origins while leaving its emotionalism intact. The word "crooning" began appearing in romantic Tin Pan Alley ballads to refer to tender speech whispered between lovers. This coincided with the entry of female audiences into vaudeville theaters and other formerly homosocial male spaces; seeking greater respectability and profitability, theater managers increasingly preferred romantic balladry to crass minstrelsy. McCracken concludes that "women's
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