Styling Authenticity in Country Music

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Brief summary: This study takes up an interesting question in a musical genre that is important internationally: “Country music”.  How are singers “styling authenticity,” in particular in relation to their use of morphosyntactic features of Southern American English?  Whereas they do not examine accent, the researchers use their technological and quantitative expertise to assemble a corpus of songs by different categories of singers and then to search for morphosyntactic features of SAE that have been identified in the sociolinguistic literature. They found patterns indicating that (1) non-Southerners use more of these than native Southerners, (2) negative concord was the only consistent pattern that is actually associated with general vernacular rather than specifically SAE.  And they acknowledge other work that indicates that a Southern accent is essential for authenticity (possibly because it’s more obvious). 

Review:

I believe that this study is highly relevant in the context of the international popularity of CM.  It is very well-written.  I was very impressed with the initial thorough discussion of the theoretical background concerning authenticity, enregisterment, and indexicality, and with the similarly thorough discussion of the relevant literature.  I was also impressed with the explanation of their methodology, the ingenuity of it, and their mention of “exhaustive manual searches” re negative concord (!)  I also really liked they way they provided and discussed examples of each of the morphosyntactic features that they were researching.  I also like their modesty in discussing their results.  I like their suggestion that they could expand the database to provide a diachronic perspective on the evolution of the phenomenon.  In terms of “multimodal” approaches, YES!  I think that would be fascinating, and it brings me to my only real criticism of the paper.  In your review of the literature, you include a discussion of “complementary” methodology with case studies of individual artists (beginning on line 154) that specifically address style-shifting and take an ethnographic perspective.  In the case of Davies with Myrick (2018) you even appear to show that your findings support their “hypothesis that vernacular universals…rather than SAE features are used to style Country authenticity.”  My impression is that these complementary methodologies provided important direction for your research, and yet you don’t include them specifically in your suggestions for future directions, unless “multimodal” is supposed to include them.  I worry that quantitative methodologies will receive too much focus as the most important approach, rather than as an important part (especially with new databases) of multi-faceted approaches that use ethnographic methodologies to pay close attention to sociocultural context.  I appreciated your last sentence highlighting the value of sociolinguistic approaches to language/identity/musical performance. 

Author Response

Thanks for the positive evaluation of the paper!

The point raised on the continuing relevance of qualitative methodologies and ethnography specifically is well taken. The revised version of the manuscript now contains an additional sentence at the end of the concluding Section 5 that emphasizes the usefulness of integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches.

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an excellent article. The research question is well motivated by the existing literature, the methods are meticulously detailed, and the discussion clearly walks the reader through the results. 

I only have two points to make:

1. the authors say that non-Southern artists "out-perform" Southern artists on the basis of these features - isn't this only true for the male artists? If that's the case, this could be a good place to revisit the observation earlier in the paper that Country is largely seen as a white & male genre.

2. The idea that pronunciation features are more easily/readily recognizable to the audience is intriguing, and I wonder if you can say more about this, in terms of the relationship between these various types of features and Southern identity, for example.  

Author Response

Thanks for the positive evaluation of the manuscript and for the constructive criticism! We have adapted the manuscript as follows (reviewer comments in italics):

the authors say that non-Southern artists "out-perform" Southern artists on the basis of these features - isn't this only true for the male artists? If that's the case, this could be a good place to revisit the observation earlier in the paper that Country is largely seen as a white & male genre.

The pattern displayed in Figure 2 shows that both Male White Non-Southerners (MWNS) and Female White Non-Southerners (MWNS) produce higher SAE scores than their Southern counterparts, although the degree is admittedly somewhat higher in the male group. While we didn't want to overinterpret the data here, we've added a short passage at the end of the third para of Section 4 that highlights this fact again and cross-refers back to Section 2.1.

The idea that pronunciation features are more easily/readily recognizable to the audience is intriguing, and I wonder if you can say more about this, in terms of the relationship between these various types of features and Southern identity, for example.

As we did not explore pronunciation features ourselves, we can only provide a hypothesis in Section 4. However, in addition to the work by Duncan and Davies & Myrick, which we already cited, we have added a passage to the second para of Section 4. There we point to Bounds et al. (2021), a recent large-scale study in perceptual dialectology that found that accent actually plays the most important part when assigning labels to various US regions (with the US South consistently emergign as a "unified" entity). We have also added a reference to Montgomery (2008), who highlights the fact that a Southern accent may carry some covert prestige.