A Country of One's Own:
"Canada" and "Culture" with Rita MacNeil

by Bram Abramson

Rita's music is a music of hope, it's a music of overcoming problems, and it's a music of joy. And people everywhere in the world will relate to that.

-- Lyman MacInnis, Managing Director, Balmur Management Ltd.

In the ever-elusive search for that strange canard called "Canadian identity", it was perhaps predictable that we be visited by a flurry of postmodern readings of the Dominion.1 Like elsewhere, though, the project of decentring the State is a controversial one in Canada, and if it is met by competing visions for a country with "the centre -- distinct and firm and recognisably Canadian -- we so desperately need", as Neil Bissoondath puts it in his book against multiculturalism. This has much to do with a federal nationalism for which a strong Canadian identity has been a policy goal to be realised through communications and cultural institutions, among others. Here, though, I want to suggest some of the ways in which a "Canada" and a "culture" can still be useful to us even as the production of a homogenising, centralising identity gives way to a diversity of cultural identities cross-cut by various factors. I want to do this by examining a popular music genre: Canadian country music.

Specifically, I want to connect up our inquiry with my surprise last summer when, while flipping channels on late-night TV, I stumbled upon an infomercial for Rita MacNeil, of all people. Surprise, because Rita MacNeil is a well-respected and well-known entertainer in Canada -- a reason for and result of her Juno and Canadian Country Music Association awards, her television specials and programme, and so forth. Infomercials, for me, had always been something that languished, with the Home Shopping Network, among the lowest of `low culture', trash TV, where products nobody had ever heard of (weight-loss methods, car shine, automatic hair trimmers) screamed out directly to home viewers: buy me. Both in terms of her critical success, and in terms of the respect she commands, Rita MacNeil was not someone whose infomercial I would have guessed I'd be watching on television late one night -- not even when, afterwards, I realised that I had seen something similar before: a commercial for a Stompin' Tom Connors compilation, Proud To Be Canadian.

What is common to the infomercial and the commercial is, of course, that they stand both inside and outside of country music: both televisual texts are selling country music, but the music they're selling is not quite country. It's this not quite that I want to interrogate, because it reveals much about the institutional sites through which Canadian "country music" is articulated. Buying air time on television is an institutional short cut, in that it bypasses other, more usual channels of circulation and other, more dominant discursive formations: for country music, radio airplay and television airplay and hit charts. The infomercial that Rita MacNeil used to sell her music to Canadians, and that she used one, demonstrates how Canadian cultural producers have to articulate their product through the complex web of institutions which comprise cultural industries -- here, the transnational flow of popular music -- and, ultimately, the market-bound institutional locations of cultural production in Canada. For Rita MacNeil and other Maritime performers, this has meant being recast as country musicians, "the too-familiar predicament Maritime artists find themselves in and many have complained of: their music is fine, even outstanding, but what is it -- country, pop, adult contemporary, roots, traditional?"2. At bottom, then, our inquiry is one into how culture in Canada is always a product of institution-bound practices (businesses, organisations, agencies; privately run, state-run, "public") that overlay the national space but that extend beyond borders and over other spaces and places; into how the local is interpellated into this transnational configuration of institutions; and into how this interpellation of Canadian cultural producers resigns them to a marginal role in a larger industry. That means thinking about "Canada" not as a difference-subsuming identitary formation, but rather as precisely the governmental space that Jody Berland talks about when she notes that

[w]hether Canadian culture can be identified as a unitary `national subject' in this picture is of little theoretical interest to a community of musicians and cultural producers who recognise a working oppression which affects them and which they discuss, in contexts related to music-industry issues, in terms of their Canadian nationality.3

Late Night with Rita MacNeil

In this sense, the first thing we have to understand is that the infomercial was originally produced for and run on American television; the decision to rebroadcast the infomercial in a slightly modified version for the much smaller Canadian market is based on the number of orders for a double-album and video of Rita's music which were placed by Canadians watching the original infomercial on cross-border television. As Canadians watch the infomercial, then, a production encoded to interpellate American subjectivities is recirculated on Canadian television and in Canadian homes. In particular, it is the articulation of a country "sensibility" that marks the infomercial: Rita MacNeil's music is being sold as country music in terms of its "affective states and meanings"-- not in terms of its reproduction of the sounds of country music: the music we hear on the infomercial is not "country".

Writing about what he calls the "ideology of folk" and the value of authenticity in music4, Simon Frith refers to the notion "that folk music was a music made directly, spontaneously, by the rural communities themselves; it was the music of working people and expressed their communal experience of work"; folk songs are thought of as "real, raw, rank and file music"5. This concern with authenticity is at the heart of country music sensibilities.6 Thus, the infomercial starts with a clip of Garth Brooks, one of country music's biggest stars, at the Canadian Country Music Awards, explaining that country music's greatest asset is that it's real -- stitching together Rita MacNeil, authenticity, and country music. As the 30-minute infomercial continues, the "ideology of folk" and its construction of "the people" and working life are articulated in various ways: interviews with working people; accounts of Rita's working-class past and her battle against adversity -- her handicaps of a cleft palate, shyness, a "weight problem", and a working class background are enumerated on more than one occasion; shots of Rita's Tea Room, a tea room where Rita can meet personally with her fans, because the tea is always on in Cape Breton; her daughter's revelation that Rita's first concern when she returns from a tour is her mail, because she answers "ninety-nine per cent of her mail" herself (including that of soldiers in the Gulf War); the male off-camera announcer's reassuring voice offering us a free video when we order the double-album as "Rita's gift to you"; and a sequence where she talks about, and where we are shown, Rita MacNeil's "most memorable night": when she performed her song about coal miners, `Working Man', with a "choir made up of real coal miners"; and so on. As Canadian musician Chuck Angus puts it, "To be successful in country you have to convince your audience that underneath all the rhinestone and tack you're as simple and ordinary as they are."7 Through her infomercial, Rita MacNeil is presented as a country star, both "ordinary and extraordinary."8

In fact, from beginning to end, the infomercial's task is one of presenting Rita MacNeil not simply as a country singer, but as someone who is part of the country world. Popular music is a transnational industry; it is produced and reproduced, distributed, and consumed inside of a complexly structured alliance of industrial and governmental institutions which make use of genres to establish market distinctions through which their products can be sold. MacNeil's infomercial, then, articulates her to the country genre through sensibility, and not sound: in "fitting" her music into transnational popular music, music plays second fiddle. What I am suggesting here, then, is that if the cultural production of popular music is shaped by the institutions in which it is produced, it is not only music that is being shaped, and sometimes hardly music at all. This means moving beyond understanding popular music as an industrialised process, to understanding it as also part of a larger process in which popular culture itself is constantly circulating and being struggled over, within and across borders: if Americans and Canadians are able to "fit" the taste formations articulated in the infomercial with country music, it is the result of decades of country music's embeddedness in American popular culture and its audiences -- in movies, novels, magazines, and, yes, music, among many others.

If the Rita MacNeil infomercial presents a resolutely country Rita, though, to Canadian viewers something is absent -- the "Canada" in Rita. In Canada, Rita MacNeil has very much been constructed as a figure of "Canadianness", and specifically a Maritimer; her Order of Canada award, honorary university degrees, and above all, high visibility on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Christmas specials for the last several years and, now, her own weekly musical variety show) bear witness to that. Indeed, for a music critic at an Australian newspaper she is transformed into a sort of transcendental signifier for Canada: "part of Canada can be found in Rita's music, which is part of her attraction: Canadians are fiercely obstinate, fellow battlers and survivors, intensely committed to lack of compromise and unswerving integrity."9 Rather than take this assertion as reassurance that outside of the United States Rita doesn't have to "be country" and is recognised for some essential Canadianness, though, we might rather look to how the Australian critic's characterisation of Canadianness mirrors the characteristics usually ascribed to country music in the first place -- lack of compromise, unswerving integrity, authentic -- and realise that, like generic distinctions, the "Canadianness" which an Australian music critic heard in Rita MacNeil is produced within the space of the transnational. "Canada" becomes a distinguishing signifier which circulates and acquires value inside the world market: analogue (but not identical) to the infomercial's mobilisation of Rita MacNeil's "Cape Breton-ness" or "Maritimeness". Simon Frith characterises this transnational-local relationship:

one's sense of musical locality depends both on the immediate material circumstances (venues, audiences, etc.) and also on `reference' groups, on identities and fantasies that are themselves mediated globally. `Locality' is produced as our sense of difference from the global -- it is not a spontaneous expression of given, hard-held local traditions.10

Frith's account is useful in his conception of the local as something musicians and fans try

to articulate against and through transnationally circulating genres; at the same time, though, we have to be careful to preserve the specificity of country music within his formulation. That is, country music's privileging of notions of `folk' and `rural' has always accorded it a close relationship with folk and traditional musics -- exactly those "given, hard-held local traditions" -- producing `hybrid' local music which mediate between country-as-transnational-genre and traditional-as-local-genre: thus, regional countries and `countrified' folks.11 Rita MacNeil, in particular, is an example of this tension between the local and the transnational that marks the contested terrain of Canadian country music, as the infomercial's broadcast in Canada demonstrates eloquently: as we have seen, it mobilises the local of Cape Breton as a marker of authenticity to articulate Rita with the transnational genre through which, she hopes, Americans and Canadians will buy her music -- country music. Indeed, what we didn't see in the infomercial -- the "Canadianness" that Rita stands for around the world and in Canadian living rooms every Friday night -- might seem to confirm the increasingly popular suspicion that nations are quietly withering away.

And, of course, if that means that the nation is no longer the unquestioned pole of identity around which we all rally then it's hard to disagree; the field of culture in which national identities are constituted has always been criss-crossed by other identitary projects which take up gender, ethnicity, and of course class, and if these seem to be commanding a greater pull than some nations these days, then perhaps the nation is wasting away. But by connecting Rita MacNeil and her infomercial with the institutional alignment of that piece of what Gramsci called the national-popular called "Canadian country music", I think we can tease out other, more useful ways to think the nation. "Canadian country music", then, as a genre through which the ensemble of governmental and industrial institutions articulate popular music produced within Canadian space to Canadians, and which is intimately linked to the larger transnational popular music genre of "country music". Rita MacNeil's infomercial demonstrates how those whose music is articulated as "Canadian country music" are involved in a struggle between the local and the transnational -- between the kinds of music they make and the kinds of music that will `fit' with the institutional logics of transnational music industry.

What I want to argue is that Canadian country music's embeddedness in the transnational music industry is one which relegates this struggle to the margin -- that is to say, it marginalises the efforts of Canadian musicians to refigure popular music genres as terrains of contestation which not only structure but also are structured by musicians and music producers. This means problematising, for example, the assertion in a CRTC report on country music that "[the] history of Canadian country music . . . generally parallels that of country music in the United States"12 -- why parallel? Perhaps, rather than the histories of two separate "national genres", Canadian country music is embedded in the country music of the United States itself. By way of illustration, I have identified two specific conjunctures in this "parallel history" which demonstrate how the generic codes and sensibilities of country music are articulated within the transnational.

The first is country music's initial industrialisation as popular music genre, in which one, local form of folk music played in the southern United States -- one of hundreds of articulations of Anglo-Celtic folk music in North America -- was taken up by the music industry in the guise of record companies, looking for material to record and sell, and radio stations, looking for listeners. This happenstance industrialisation of one particular regional folk tradition meant its passing from a primarily interpersonal form of articulation to a primarily institutional one, and its codification into a genre of popular music with certain codes, conventions, and sensibilities, and consumed within certain "systems of expectation and hypothesis": for, as Steve Neale states, popular culture needs to be articulated through genre, "ruled as it is by market pressures to differentiate to a limited degree in order to cater to various sectors of consumers, and to repeat commercially successful pattterns."13 Country music, then, began to circulate through the transnational industrial alignment of music, which was itself undergoing change as music publishers gave way to record producers and radio stations; Canada was embedded in this transnational flow from the very beginning, with two Maritimers -- Wilf Carter and Hank Snow -- moving to the United States and becoming part of country music's `star system' there. Already, then, Canada had been respatialised as part of a country music diaspora, and for Canadian producers, the place of country music's definition was within the industrial and within the transnational -- usually, a place called Nashville.

Little surprise, then, that the second conjuncture I want to identify was rooted in Nashville, when in the 1970s the Country Music Association (CMA), an industry lobby group, succeeded in rearticulating country music as a more upscale, urban, sophisticated music, and when a group of high-profile Nashville country musicians formed their own lobby group to fight this rearticulation of `their' music.14 The result was the fracturing of country between the "new country" of the CMA, and the "traditional country" extolled by the country stars; what I want to get out of that is how by waging a war of position upon the very institutions which articulated country music, and by mobilising the support of communities of fans around North America, the generic properties of country music were successfully contested. Significantly, this contestation makes its way into the Canadian country music apparatus; for example, in the Toronto market, where CISS-FM is a `new country' station which draws one of the largest audience shares of country stations anywhere in North America, much to the chagrin of `traditional country' radio.15 If the codification of country music as popular music genre in the 1920s demonstrates how industrialisation remaps both markets and scenes, then, the split within country music in the 1970s shows how challenges to the content of country are themselves produced within the transnational. This, of course, begs Jody Berland's question on the "working oppression" that affects Canadian musicians and cultural producers; it is to this that I want to now turn.

The Country in Canada

In the complexly structured apparatus of country music in Canada -- and its various and varied institutions, including radio stations, record companies, awards shows, industry associations, television, etc. -- the Canadian music that is circulated and rearticulated derives from various musical styles, which run the gamut between the tensions of the transnational and the local, but in which those approaching the sound of transnational `country music' have long been privileged. This can be understood only by recognising the intricate nature of the alliance of industrial and governmental institutions which, as the music and entertainment industries, actively reproduce musical culture as cultural industry -- and, hence, as part of the transnational flows of both capital and music.

Thus, for example, country music radio, whose existence on the FM band is regulated by the CRTC's 1975 FM radio policy which divided FM popular music radio into four distinct formats borrowed from American market research specialists: softer music, rock, country music, and other kinds of popular music (folk-oriented, jazz-oriented, etc.). The rationale behind the policy was to "allow for the expansion of audiences as well as for the rationalisation of a rapidly growing corporate radio industry. Format could also provide and ensure a musical diversity that would answer the [consumer] needs of the diversified social communities in Canada."16 As Grenier points out, though, such a rationale ignores radio's role in the construction of taste and mapping of taste onto similarly-constructed social groups; rather, it assumes already-existing musical taste groups which map directly onto social communities, and constructs diversity as the opportunity for each social/taste group to listen to the kind of music it always already likes. The FM radio policy was seen as "something that could allow the broadcasting system to express even better pan-Canadian national characteristics as well as regional specificities"17; if anything, though, its privileging of industrial over music scene concerns by importing American (and hence transnational) formats helped it to `fit' radio within the transnational music industry as it, too, adopts the formats from which Billboard writes its weekly copy, and it is perhaps significant that the Country format, in the CRTC's definition, "ranges from `country and western' and `bluegrass' to `Nashville' and `country-pop' styles and other music forms generally characterised as country."18

This mapping of the CRTC's FM radio policy is just one of the institutional sites which articulate and organise the sounds of music in Canada; others include television shows like the Tommy Hunter Show, Canada's most successful ever country show, where Mississauga native Hunter actually speaks with a Southern drawl19; awards ceremonies held by the Canadian Country Music Association and RPM, among others; magazines like the Country Music News, whose own textual codes, rooted in country sensibilities, culminate in the Ponderosa-style lettering of the masthead; and so forth. What I have been trying to show, then, is how the Canadian country music apparatus itself is a "branch plant" of transnational country music.

And that, I think, speaks eloquently of how what we call "culture" is always articulated institutionally, is always located -- which means that to think about "Canadian culture" is necessarily to engage both with the web of institutions which articulate "Canadian culture" and with the articulations themselves. It also means understanding this "Canadian culture" as a smaller part of larger processes bound up in the transnational: a smaller part demarcated, to be sure, by the governance of the Canadian state, but a transnational field nonetheless. I am arguing, then, that we need to think more about the relations between the national and the transnational, and that we need to rethink the "nation" as a State in which the goal is to ensure a space in which cultural producers' relationships with these instituttions are not only structured but also structuring.

Commercial in-roads made in the last few years by Maritime performers such as Rita MacNeil and the Rankin Family have underlined the leaky nature of the Canadian country music apparatus, whose shared sensibilites -- and Anglo-Celtic harmonic structure20 -- allow a certain space to be opened inside the genre. MacNeil's achievement of a position of certain magnitude within Canadian country is part of the contradictions with which the music industry is shot through, and especially the interaction of private and State broadcasting which allow MacNeil to be taken up as Canadian `hero'; her infomercial's broadcast on Canadian television, though, bears witness to how this space outside of the hegemony of transnational country (and inside another) is closed down again. Writing about Canadian country music's need for a `sense of place', John Lehr talks about strategies for State and policy intervention as a way to resist the pull of the United States for Canadian country music, and although I am wary of his unproblematic use of "Canadianness" as the pole to which identity politics in country music should be tethered, his use of the title "As Canadian as Possible . . . Under the Circumstances"21 is one from which we can learn: for we are always `under the circumstances', and if "the history of Canadian country music ... generally parallels that of country music in the United States"22, then surely it's worth wondering why.

This is the text of a paper presented at the `Cultural Institutions/Instituting Culture' Conference, McGill University, 18 March 1995.

2 Virginia Beaton and Stephen Pederson, Maritime Music Greats: Fifty Years of Hits and Heartbreak (Halifax: Nimbus Publishing, 1992), p. 170.

3 Jody Berland, "Free trade and Canadian music: Level playing field or scorched earth?", Cultural Studies 5:3 (1991), p. 324.

4 Simon Frith, " `The magic that can set you free': The ideology of folk and the myth of the rock community", in R. Middleton and D. Horn (eds) Popular Music 1: Folk or Popular? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and "Anglo-America and its discontents", Cultural Studies 5:3 (1991).

5 Frith, "The magic that can set you free", p. 160.

6 Charles Conrad, "Work songs, hegemony, and illusions of self", Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5:3 (September 1988).

7 Chuck Angus, "Country music: honest music", Canadian Composer (Winter 1993), p. 15.

8 John Ellis, Visible Fictions (New York: Routledge, 1982), p. 97.

9 Dennis Passa, "Australia takes liking to MacNeil", Globe and Mail (12 March 1992), p. C3.

10 Frith, "Anglo-America and its discontents", p. 268.

11Neil V. Rosenberg, " `Folk' and `country' music in the Canadian Maritimes: a regional model", Journal of Country Music 5:2 (Summer 1974); and Roderick J. Roberts, "An introduction to the study of northern country music", Journal of Country Music 7:1 (January 1978).

12 Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, The country music industry in Canada (Ottawa: CRTC, 1986).

13 Steve Neale, "Questions of Genre", Screen 31:1 (Spring 1990), p. 63.

14 Richard A. Peterson, "The production of cultural change: the case of contemporary country music", Social Research 45:2 (Summer 1978).

15 Ted Davis, "Country confirmation", Broadcaster (October 1993).

16 Line Grenier, "Radio broadcasting in Canada: the case of `transformat' music", Popular Music 9:2 (1990), p. 222.

17 ibid., p. 223.

18 Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Public Notice 1984-84, FM radio in Canada: A policy to ensure a varied and comprehensive radio service (Ottawa: CRTC, 1984), p. ii-iii

19 Greg Marquis, "Country music: the folk music of Canada", Queen's Quarterly 95:2 (Summer 1988).

20 Roberts, "An introduction to the study of northern country music".

21 winning entry from a contest in Maclean's to complete the phrase "As Canadian as . . ."

22 CRTC, The country music industry in Canada, p. 10.

Angus, Chuck. (1993) "Country Music: Honest Music", in Canadian Composer 4: 1 (Winter).

Beaton, Virginia, and Stephen Pederson. (1992) Maritime Music Greats: Fifty Years of Hits and Heartbreak. Halifax: Nimbus Publishing.

Berland, Jody. (1991) "Free Trade and Canadian Music: Level Playing Field or Scorched Earth?", in Cultural Studies 5: 3.

Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission. (1984) Public Notice 1984-84, FM Radio in Canada: A Policy To Ensure A Varied and Comprehensive Radio Service. Ottawa: CRTC.

_____. (1986) The Country Music Industry in Canada. Ottawa: CRTC.

Conrad, Charles. (1988) "Work Songs, Hegemony, and Illusions of Self", in Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5: 3 (September).

Davis, Ted. (1993) "Country Confirmation", in Broadcaster (October).

Ellis, John. (1982) Visible Fictions. London: Routledge.

Frith, Simon. (1982) " `The Magic That Can Set You Free': The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community", in R. Middleton and D. Horn (eds) Popular Music 1: Folk or Popular? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

_____. (1991) "Anglo-America and its Discontents", in Cultural Studies 5: 3.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. (1994) "Goodbye, Columbus? Notes on the Culture of Criticism", in Goldberg (ed), pp. 203-217.

Grenier, Line. (1990) "Radio Broadcasting in Canada: The Case of `Transformat' Music", in Popular Music 9: 2.

Lehr, John C. (1985) "As Canadian as Possible . . . Under the Circumstances: Regional Myths of Place and National Identity in Canadian Country Music", in Border/lines (Spring).

Marquis, Greg. (1988) "Country Music: The Folk Music of Canada", in Queen's Quarterly 95: 2 (Summer).

Neale, Steve. (1990) "Questions of Genre", in Screen 31: 1 (Spring).

Passa, Dennis. (1992) "Australia Takes Liking to MacNeil", in The Globe and Mail 12 March: C3.

Peterson, Richard A. (1978) "The Production of Cultural Change: The Case of Contemporary Country Music", in Social Research 45: 2 (Summer).

Roberts, Roderick J. (1978) "An Introduction to the Study of Northern Country Music", in Journal of Country Music 7: 1 (January).

Rosenberg, Neil V. (1979) " `Folk' and `Country' Music in the Canadian Maritimes: A Regional Model", in Journal of Country Music 5: 2 (Summer).

Schecter, Stephen. (1993) Zen and the Art of Post-modern Canada: Does the Trans-Canada Highway Always Lead to Charlottetown? Montréal: R. Davies Publishing.