Domestic Respectability

Abstract

Chapter 7 positions the commercial success of female country artists and the narratives of honky-tonk music against the marketing strategies of 1950s country music. As the country music industry strove for commercial acceptance in the popular music market, it promoted its male (including Hank Williams and Webb Pierce) and female performers (such as Kitty Wells, Jean Shepard, and Goldie Hill) as examples of middle-class propriety. This chapter argues that the contradictions between the lyrical themes of honky-tonk music and the 1950s tropes of domesticity used in marketing individual country artists spoke of and assuaged the anxieties and tensions of social class and geographical migration for an audience of displaced white southerners.