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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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McCracken, Allison. "Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning and American Culture, 1928-1933," American Studies, University of Iowa, September 2000.
While music and cultural historians have dismissed early crooners as freak feminized attractions who represent a conservative shift in popular music, this dissertation argues that these first microphone singers were in fact controversial figures who played an important and neglected role in cultural history. They are the link between live and canned entertainment, between the embodied and the disembodied voice, between Al Jolson-the stigmatized blackface performer-and “American’s Crooner”-the “naturalized” white singer Bing Crosby came to represent. Their huge popularity among radio’s female listeners precipitated a strong reaction from cultural authorities, resonating beyond popular music and necessitating the re-imagination of white masculinity in terms of sound. My approach to cultural history relies on American and Cultural Studies scholars who view culture as contested and conflict rather than monolithic, and who assume that attention to the participation of non-dominant groups in the creation of culture will result in richer. Thus, while histories of popular crooning’s story-privileging film over radio, masculinist aesthetics over fan activity, and issues of cultural homogenization and nationalization over those of gender difference-this narrative reverses those hierarchies by privileging the role of radio and radio fans and foregrounding gender considerations. In doing so, this dissertation reveals how crooning’s performance threatened to establish new feminized standards of male performance thereby requiring the development of new rhetorical strategies to diffuse the power of crooners and their audiences. While the exercise of cultural hegemony eventually enabled the naturalization of the crooner through the career of Bing Crosby, my examination both exposes the masculinist construction of this ideal and reveals the cultural appropriations, contractions, and social controls upon which it rests. Early crooners are important, therefore, because they represent the period before the naturalization of the “American” classic pop male sound, because they show us very specifically how this transition took place and because they help us understand how deeply gender hierarchies are imbedded in what we know and how we think about popular singing and gender identity.
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