Yeehaw.

It appears that I have begun my annual springtime Sad Cowboy phase, in which I listen to a lot of Depressed Bastard Country Music with Lots of Pedal Steel in it (Justin Rutledge, Oh Susanna), absorb various forms of Cowboy-related media (Deadwood) and spend a lot of time roaming around alone thinking about the southwest. (Please note that this annual phenomenon is a relatively recent development that dates back to the summer after my first year of university – before then, I went through an annual springtime King Arthur phase, which mainly involved reading The Mists of Avalon and thinking a lot about foggy British islands. I have now moved from that fixation for my current cowboy fixation, which I like to think shows some kind of personal evolution towards, well, something, I hope. I’m not entirely sure what, but something. I’m sure that on some obscure level King Arthur to cowboys is somehow a logical progression, maybe.)

Anyhow. My point. Last night I checked out Justin Rutledge at the Starlight and he was lovely and there was lots of pedal steel and heart-on-sleeveness which is exactly what my Sad Cowboy phase demands. Amy Millan was the headliner and was not quite as lovely, largely because she is kind of staggeringly boring, although she does get some props for use of musical saw.

I was kind of put off, though, by how few women there were on stage. Amy Millan had one other woman in her backup band, and they were the only women performing the entire night, when there were probably at least ten different musicians on stage over the course of the evening. The lack of women instrumentalists points to constructions of femininity that discourage women from taking on particular roles in popular music production – see Mavis Bayton’s article on women and the electric guitar in Sexing the Groove, for instance, for an analysis of how dominant discourses of femininity that encourage women to be silent or to only express themselves in specific (feminine-gendered) ways and lack of community and learning opportunities prevent women from taking up the electric guitar. (When Women Play the Bass: Instrument Specialization and Gender Interpretation by Mary Ann Clawson and Just Me and the Boys: Women in Local Level Rock and Roll by Stephen Groce and Margaret Cooper (both JSTOR links) are also great analyses of the role of women instrumentalists in pop music production.) I’m interested in the phenomenon of the female singer-songwriter with an all-male or mostly male backing band (which I’ve seen a lot of at concerts and music festivals) and how this both subverts constructions of femininity (the woman is in charge and leads the band) while also reinscribing acceptable roles for women as musicians (the woman sings largely non-confrontational songs about feelings and plays acoustic guitar). Probably there is a nerdy paper in there that I can write when I’m at that terrifying school in California.