Performing Country

If there's one thing you learn in country music, it's that you'll always have a family. Country music is a family. It is a set of shared lives, shared memories, accumulations of experiences of events collected through various angles and perspectives. But there are other types of families too. There are families constructed for the production of children if not childhoods. These are the families of husband and wife with good, old, American “family values."

I'm not entirely sure that, if someone were to meet me on off-chance, not in the country scene, not performing country, they would ever assume my connection with that world. Unless playing country, I don't present many of the traits of a country musician. In fact, I've had big-wig Nashville country types tell me post performance that they were perplexed by my presence until I began to play at which point they "got it". My country traits are inherited. I grew up on the prairies, my mother's family all farmers.

The first time I ever drove a vehicle was on the family farm just outside of Pense, Saskatchewan. My grandpa let me sit on his knee and "steer" that John Deere combine (although, I must admit, my steering wasn't much required, he had to handle the corners). On a later date, when we were both much older, I took the corners, this time in an old Chevy pick-up. Grandpa was past the age where it was a very good idea for him to be driving, so he sat in the passenger seat and shared his childhood memories with me. Just off the side of the road, a gnarled tree hung from the Earth like it had lost faith in gravity. On the flat prairies, it was driftwood in that great blue sea/sky, a fragment of the wreckage of some forgotten, ocean-faring Ark. Grandpa pointed at it and said, "you see that tree? I was born under that tree." Out on the prairies, grandpas, childhoods, crops, and families are pulled straight from God's flaxen Earth.

Despite the prevalence of country music in my life at that time (I believe Grandpa's 90th birthday featured three different live country bands), I wasn't much interested in it. It was something which attached itself to someone else's life, not to my private dreamings of life to come. Grandpa passed away, and the next year I moved to Toronto to attend school. During my degree, I began to find my own personal attachment to country music clinging to my affection for my family like those roots still clinging to the Earth outside of Pense. I started to get some country and bluegrass gigs around Toronto and eventually landed a big gig with a new country band, touring the world with them for a number of years. We were a funny, dysfunctional family. They had grown up in a gospel and bluegrass family band. Their family and their music, like mine, were so deeply intertwined.

Music is many things, but without acknowledging that it only comes into being in performance would be to miss what music really is and does. Performing music means that we convoke in ourselves the various affects of music in order to evoke a musical experience in another. Whether music is performed poorly or not is evaluated depending on the proper ordering and articulation of these affects; from many angles and perspectives. In order to believe the music is real, the audience must feel the authenticity of the performance through these articulations. For anyone even remotely familiar with country music, the country affects are easy to recognize. An incomplete list: banjo, pedal steel guitar, cowboy hat, leather boots, John Deere belt buckles, whiskey, ice-cold beer, guns, pick-up truck, miles of open highway. It is the formation of these affects, plus the more generic performance and musical affects, which are indicative of a country music performance. But this list carries a secondary, perhaps more veiled, significance: the wreckage of middle-class American life and the fantasy of the American dream. The signifiers of constitutional rights and their associated, gendered family values. Values which may have been meant to produce children, but also come to produce childhoods now floating aimlessly on this sea of abandonment. When country music is performed, these things come together to conjure in the listener the hope not that parts of the wreckage might still be salvageable, but that there is no wreckage at all. The Ark yet sails, carrying all of humanity and creation to a fictional, utopian shore.

Sometimes in my family, we sit in the back of the tour bus, a genuine Silver Eagle, and play NHL 2019 on the PS4. When we are seen pulling into venues, this bus signifies a deep tie to country history. This is THE country music tour bus, not just any old vessel which gets us from place to place. It is our home. It is where our family lives, where country music dwells, embedded in its Detroit diesel engine, faux-wood interior panelling, and navy-style bunks. The Ark of the country band. It's a tight game of "chel." We're down by two late in the 3rd in game 6 of a playoff series against Dallas (appropriate because we're in Texas). We manage to come back and eke out a win in overtime. Elation…. … And then an exclamation rings through the home, which moments ago felt like my home, my family. An expression of elation and a performance of masculinity… "BOYS, I’m fired up! Let's go buy some GUNS!"

My illusion is twice shattered. I've never owned a gun before. I held one a couple times when I was a kid back on the farm, but my grandfather had always taught me to fear and respect firearms. He had survived the war. Guns are not toys, they are not fun, they don't express elation, they are certainly not to be associated with family. Guns are good for ripping worlds apart, they are no good at holding them together.

My second shattered illusion: am I a boy or have I fallen into boyness only as a result of belonging in this family? Does being a boy, as implied in this expression, mean that elation is contained in guns? And with those questions come further questions: am I really a part of this family or only performing my part in this family? What is this family but a hierarchy telling me the way to "the good life"? Telling me who I am and what I do; producing my childhood for me.

When I was a child, I remember dreaming of waking up as a girl. I remember being excited thinking about what it would be like to be a girl, but these kinds of dreams were invariably extinguished by the staunch practicality of the conservative family. There were times when I would don my sister's dresses and clothes, to which I only remember being met with my parents' confused anger, an expression perhaps not of displeasure, but insecurity. It must be fucking terrifying trying to bring such a small and vulnerable being into the world, and I can't imagine that those prairies would have been a very safe place to grow up trans. My mother's misdirected anger (perhaps with herself) and my desire for her love impossibilized wearing tights and heels. The "women's" clothing came to feel like her anger manifested shamefully upon my disembodied skin, painfully articulating the borders between my dreamed world and the "real" world. My parents, I suppose, hoped that these feelings would pass with the implied impossibility of their realization, but they didn't. They continued to crop up here and there in seemingly disconnected ways. Family, for me, has always attached itself to this disconnected realness, to lived contradiction. Why would I ever expect that a country music family would be any different?

This is probably why I turned to punk rock in teenagerhood. Its aesthetic facilitated an androgyny in which I could perform a type of masculinity while maintaining for myself a more private femininity. I could hang out with the other "f*gs" behind the hockey rink and smoke cigarettes while listening to our favourite crust, goth, and dis bands. When we took a family trip to the east coast, my dad bought me the "punk" issue of a guitar magazine which featured Jade Puget on the cover. I read that magazine probably 50 times top to bottom. Jade Puget became my guitar hero. He wore make-up and girl jeans and painted his nails and maybe even was bisexual! Sometimes, I wasn't really sure he even was a boy, I wasn't even sure what really made a boy a boy, and it didn't matter.

The following Halloween, I dressed up as one of these andro-heroes. I also brought a fake guitar prop my dad had made from plywood for me when I was still too young to learn real guitar. In the hallway at lunch that day, I was surrounded by a group of boys who knocked me down and kicked me while I was on the ground. They called me "f*g" and “boy-girl” and accused me of not being a "real punk." What the fuck does that even mean? What does it matter anyways?! It was Hallo-fucking-ween! The one day where a kid could be whatever they wanted. Where before I couldn't be a real girl, now I couldn't even be a real punk. (Won't someone please think of the children!) They tore the guitar my dad had made from my hands and ran off with it. My dad, childhood, and music all were so bound up in that splintered plywood, it was more than just part of a performance. I wanted to tell a teacher and try to get it back, but my friends just told me to forget about it, and they were probably right. Apparently, this is how a boy should perform in such scenes. Boyhood is learning to surrender to stoicism. When I tried getting in my mom's car after school one day after a beating, I cringed and winced because it was painful to sit. She was visibly upset. "What's wrong? Did something happen?! Did someone do something?!" No, Mom, nothing's wrong, it's nothing, I'm fine. Eventually, when she uncovered why I couldn’t walk properly, she would go to the vice principal (basketball coach) and he would go on to say “boys will be boys”.

I did later find that guitar, shattered to bits in a garbage barrel sitting forlornly on the edge of the high school parking lot's crumbling asphalt. It was torn to pieces on a border of high school life and whatever life lay outside, like pieces of a wrecked ark. It represented for me the same degrees of bordering between my skin and those tights which made me feel so real, between my true self and my performative self, trying so desperately to find a version of me which could live both in grandpa's truck and behind the hockey rink. Where family could mean a set of connected lives in which I am really seen.

In the country scene, I was often enough reminded of the dangers of performing masculinity inadequately. As previously mentioned, I have no idea what makes real masculinity. There were times when I was sure that I was keeping up the performance only to discover that I was being disturbingly non-masculine. These discoveries come in various forms: half-baked invocations of biology, advice on why I can’t find a girlfriend, and when all else fails the violence of the hetero-patriarchy arrives to secure the borders of their homes from the threats to the "American family". (For God's sake, won't you think of the children!)

One thing that might indicate a poor performance, I've found, is to point out the glaring flaws in superhero figures, whether real or fictional. I'm sure the reason is because they embody this lost masculine illusion, the Oedipal illusion. Attractive, dark, handsome, powerful, trying to build a "better world"... But have you ever actually watched Ironman or Captain America? Who actually thinks that's how the world works? Who actually thinks those would be good people in any realistic circumstance?! Apparently, boys do…

Performing country music so easily slips into being this performance of a superhero masculinity. The kind where you hide your emotions behind your costume: belt buckle, pick-up truck, and a good helping of whiskey. After all, as Dierks Bentley reminds us: It's different for girls when their hearts get broke, they can't tape 'em back together with a whiskey and coke. In that superhero costume, you have the strength to bear the traumas of the world, or pretend they're not really there. If they are there, it's only until you can come home to your family, remove your costume, to become "man in his own home".

My dad loved whiskey. He loved whiskey because his dad loved whiskey. Whiskey embodied some aspect of masculine performance for him, and was rooted to the memory he shared with his dad going back to our Scottish heritage. Dad liked to remind us "how the Scots invented the modern world." How property law and constitutional law came from Scottish political philosophers. American values could be traced, along with the whiskey, back through a lineage of dead European men. Men who were archetypes we should aspire to be. To be one of those men, he drank whiskey every day when he came home from work and took off his superhero costume. He loved whiskey so much that it grew a tumour in his gut which ate his insides until he crumbled like asphalt or plywood. Country music often becomes this same performance of a dream, it is the dream of the "American dream". It dreams the kind of independence that would rather drown in a sea of whiskey than wake up into the really real crumbling asphalt and smashed childhood guitars drifting in isolation in that pale blue sea/sky. You see, family is not that which produces childhood even when it can produce children. Childhood happens autonomously. Children come to have families because family is a list of shared affects and memories like smashed plywood heirlooms, gnarled trees, and punk rock behind hockey rinks.

The country music family is a family like this, but those heirlooms can also include the second amendment, confederate statues, and the smell of burning fossil fuels. Where blood and bullets could fray the Las Vegas asphalt, consuming childhoods and families, but we won't really talk about it. Where expressing the trauma thereby experienced is tantamount to heresy, just ask Eric Church. "Real" men don't go whining about gun lobby groups, they know that every man should have the freedom to own a firearm. They perform their role as dictated by those family values. They recognize that there's a difference between a man and a woman and that that difference is the only border protecting these families and childhoods from the erosion of the American way of life.

I quit the band after being assaulted by one of my bandmates in our hotel room. I didn't want to go to the casino, or get wasted and fuck girls like he wanted me to with him. I tried telling the other guys in the band, and they accused me of making it all up (because I was jealous?), one of them saw it first hand and vouched for me, but rather than the other guy getting the boot (this was far from his first time acting out), I was simply told "boys will be boys." It was hard. The band had become another family, and my main source of income. But, like my grandpa's family, it was yet another family of disconnection, where somehow a gun was be capable of holding a world together while a "f*g" was something that could tear it apart.