THE SINS OF THE SON

Abstract

Masculine sentimentality played an important role in Australian culture in the 1930s and 1940s, as in other places where plaintive country music songs attracted a passionate following. Using ‘Australia's Singing Cowboy’ Tex Morton as a case study, we show that this sentimentality became part of both the bush tradition and country music in Depression- and Second World War-era Australia, associated with the bushworker or rugged ‘lone hand’. This sentimentality was deeply problematic from a feminist perspective, as indeed was Morton's personal life. It romanticised what he called ‘the sins of the son’; that is, the lone hand's inability to do right by those he loved. It also glamorised his tears and self-pity, treating them as signs of his hardy masculinity. Given the significance of this form of sentimentality both in Australia and elsewhere over the rest of the twentieth century, feminist scholars of popular culture and historians of gender and the emotions need to pay more attention to country music songs about errant sons and lovers from the 1930s and 1940s.

Notes

1. John Whiteoak's excellent 2005 discussion of hillbilly and cowboy music as urban popular entertainment in 1930–1940s Australia is an exception to this. So is work on early Aboriginal Australian country music (see Ryan 2003; Walker 2000, 26–35).

2. Unless otherwise specified, all biographical information on Morton in this article is drawn from A. Smith (2005).

3. An example of Morton performing in New Zealand vaudeville shows was his appearance at the Majestic Cabaret in 1938: Evening Post (1938).

4. These figures are based on our perusal of EMI Sales Cards, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra. For instance, G23064 Tex Morton: ‘You Only Have One Mother/The Black Sheep’; G23674 Davidson and Orchestra, ‘Penny Serenade/The Chestnut Tree’; Y5788 Bing Crosby, ‘White Christmas/Let's Start the New Year Right’.

5. We have heard anecdotal reports that Morton also performed for Allied troops in the jungles of New Guinea in the same period, but as yet have found no evidence to support this.

6. All our references to Morton's songs are from the Tex Morton Regal Zonophone Collection, a double album containing his commercially released recordings between 1936 and 1943. We have also considered the additional songs appearing in his songbooks: for example, Morton (1938, c.1939a, c.1939b). Although we do not discuss them in this article, Morton recorded other songs for the Tasman/Rodeo label in 1949 and 1950, a few for Okeh (Columbia) in the USA in 1953 and others for Festival Records in the 1960s and early 1970s (A. Smith 2005, 78–9, 82, 85–7).

7. Sedgwick does not use the term ‘hard country’ in her discussion, but she refers to the lyrics of a Willie Nelson song and other expressions of male self-pity in contemporary American country music (1990, 141).

8. See, for example, the following works on masculine sentimentality in American culture: Chapman and Hendler (1999), Shamir and Travis (2002), Fox (2004). Consider also this interesting discussion of sentimentality in Brazilian country music: Dent (2009).