The Rural Masquerades of Gender

Abstract

Chapter 2 focuses on Lulu Belle’s 1930s radio career on WLS’s National Barn Dance as the first female radio star to embody the parodies of southern culture and early country music. Connecting her theatrics and vocal styling to a history of vaudevillian comediennes, this chapter explores Lulu Belle’s early radio performances of unruly hillbilly characters, such as the naive country girl or the man-hungry gal. In her highly publicized marriage to Scotty Wiseman, Lulu Belle’s rustic domestic image was easily conflated with notions of nostalgia, sentimentality, and romance. However, this did not prevent her from slipping in and out of roles to play the part of the demanding, comic wench or the flirtatious mountain gal. Her protean transformations persisted throughout her radio career and into film, helping give shape to historic performative models for women in country music.