Spring 2023: MUS-202 Country Music with Professor Mark Laver took students on a road trip to Saint Louis, Nashville, Memphis, and Pidgeon Forge to learn about the roots of country music, as well as its political legacy and reputation.
Course Description: Country music is often imagined to be an essential, authentic representation of the spirit of rural, white America – “three chords and the truth,” as the songwriter Harlan Howard put it. Any phenomenon that seems as tidy as country music is made to seem, that discursively clings so fiercely to its claim to a kind of truth and authenticity, is worthy of careful, critical scrutiny. And that’s the work that we’ll be doing in this class. With close attention to icons ranging from Jimmy Rodgers and the Carter Family to Hank Williams and Johnny Cash to Brandi Carlile and Lil Nas X, we’ll consider the different ways that country music is enmeshed in what bell hooks calls “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” whether as a sustaining force for the status quo, a critical tool for artistic insurgency, or something in the middle. By uncovering country music’s surprising histories with respect to race, gender, sexuality, class, and nationalism through our work with historical and contemporary music and scholarship, we’ll seek to better understand how those and other aspects of human identity are woven into the fabric of music-making, and into the fabric of the United States. This class includes a travel component: a ten-day trip through Missouri and Tennessee during spring break where we’ll visit museums, go to concerts, meet with artists and other industry figures, and even cut our own record on Music Row.
Explore some of Libby Eggert’s ’25 favorite memories from the trip.
One day on our trip, we went to a shop that records live music to be immediately made into a record. Frannie Crego ’25 and Emma Kieran Schaefer ’23 sang a song and it was turned into a record, which I got to take home, and that was the coolest part of the trip.
We didn’t take many pictures this day, but we got to meet with Cameo Carlson ’93 who runs mtheory: a manager services company providing global marketing and strategic support for artist managers. She told us about her experience at Grinnell, her professional career, and then we got to meet three of the artists that she worked with.
Our entire trip took place on a coach bus (Frannie Crego ’25) with a tour guide. We moved locations almost every day, so this cozy bus and our awesome tour guide really made the trip great!
We spent a lot of time exploring new cities and going to local shops, and got some awesome souvenirs! Including this one that flew back to Grinnell with us.
We of course went to lots of museums, historic sites, and saw lots of live music!
