Desolation Blues: The Gothic Trespass in the life and Songwriting of Tennessee Blues Musician Ray Cashman Public Deposited
- Last Modified
- March 22, 2019
- Creator
-
Bouvéron, Victor
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of American Studies
- Abstract
- This thesis explores the pervading feeling of the Gothic in the life and songwriting of Tennessee blues musician Ray Cashman. I argue that Cashman emotionally responds to the South through the framework of the Gothic to assert his identity as a white southern working-class male. As a reader, writer and performer, he trespasses the lines of race and class. The ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina between 2015 and 2017 led me to reflect on the intriguing relationship between blues, southern Gothic literature and white working-class culture in the South. The songs written by Cashman often express a feeling of desolation, bleakness and decay, invoke a sense of nostalgia for a bygone time, or describe eerie landscapes and supernatural presences. Cashman also retells southern Gothic stories, like “Snake Feast,” inspired by Harry Crews’s A Feast of Snakes.
- Date of publication
- May 2017
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Advisor
- O'Leary-Davidson, Crystal
- Ferris, William
- Hinson, Glenn
- Degree
- Master of Arts
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
- Graduation year
- 2017
- Language
- Parents:
This work has no parents.
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BouvxE9ron_unc_0153M_17063.pdf | 2019-04-08 | Public |
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Ray Cashman, "Desolation," Radio Campus Lille, France, March 2015 | 2019-04-08 | Public |
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