6
“Let’s All Get Dixie Fried”

Rockabilly, Masculinity, and Homosociality

PATRICK B. MULLEN

Rockabilly music originated as a blending of African American rhythm and blues and Anglo-American country music in the early to mid-1950s and was a significant factor in the development of rock ’n’ roll. A major starting point for rockabilly was Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, where producer Sam Phillips made the original records by Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and others that helped define the sound and style of rockabilly and emerging rock ’n’ roll. Some of these records became regional hits and later spread to other parts of the United States and Canada, and eventually to the rest of the world. An early Carl Perkins’s song contains a phrase that expresses some of the essential traits of the rockabilly ethos. The setting is a southern honky-tonk bar where a group of men are urged by their hero Dan to join him in getting violently drunk. He does this by yelling out in their in-group language, “Let’s all get Dixie fried.” This song and other seminal rockabilly songs about drinking and fighting describe communal behavior that reflects and helps maintain a masculine regional culture.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of homosocial desire as defined in her 1985 book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire is relevant to understanding these rockabilly lyrics. This might seem like a huge stretch from Sedgwick’s focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, but I think there is a basic similarity in the representations of masculine behavior in literary works and vernacular lyrics. There are also significant differences, and I tried to keep Sedgwick’s warning in mind: “Any attempt to treat [her formulations] as cross-cultural or . . . as universal ought to involve the most searching and particular analysis” (19). A lot of what Sedgwick has to say does not fit rockabilly masculinity, and I have expanded and altered her theory to some degree, but many of her primary theoretical points do fit when they are adapted to the specific context of mid-twentieth-century American vernacular and popular culture.

She starts with the fundamental social science definition of homosocial as “social bonds between persons of the same sex . . . obviously meant to be distinguished from ‘homosexual’ ” (1985, 1). She calls this bond “homosocial desire,” which means not just sexual attraction or love but more broadly the “social force, the glue . . . that shapes an important relationship . . . even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred” (2). This applies equally to women’s relationships with other women and those of men with other men. Relevant examples would include a women’s book club or softball team, and a men’s bible study group or touch football game. The easiest way to express the concept for men in everyday terms is male bonding, but Sedgwick’s analysis is much more complex and multilayered than that term expresses. Her theory is based on a social structure that she describes as a “continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society is radically disrupted” and marked by what she calls an “invisible line” (1–2).

Men in Euro-North American society tend to deny the existence of this continuum because they make a sharp distinction, represented by the invisible line, between their all-male social relationships in politics, sports, and business, and male homosexual relationships, a stance that is rooted in homophobia and based on what Sedgwick calls “obligatory heterosexuality” (1985, 2–3) and earlier what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality” (1980). It’s important to keep in mind that the invisible line between all-male social relations and homosexual relations is a social construct, an imagined distinction, albeit one with very real consequences.

Some masculine homosocial behaviors can be perceived as homosexual; a football team holding hands in the huddle or patting each other on the behind is part of a broad cultural pattern that crosses race, class, and regional lines. Male displays of camaraderie and physical affection take place not only at football games but also at fraternity parties, bachelor parties (C. N. Williams 1994), bars and honky-tonks, and in buddy movies and on television. Folklorist Alan Dundes, in his 1978 article “Into the Endzone for a Touchdown: A Psychoanalytic Consideration of American Football,” explained such behaviors in football as repressed homosexuality, but Sedgwick’s theory of a homosocial continuum provides a more intricate and sophisticated explanation of the relationship of hetero- and homosexual. She implies that Freudian explanations such as Dundes’s are oversimplified when she says, “The fact that [these cultural enactments] can look, with only a slight shift of optic, quite startlingly ‘homosexual,’ is not most importantly an expression of the psychic origin of these institutions in a repressed or sublimated homosexual genitality. Instead it is the coming to visibility of the normally implicit terms of a coercive double bind . . . For a man to be a man’s man is separated only by an invisible, carefully blurred, always-already-crossed line from being ‘interested in men’ [in a sexual way]” (1985, 89). Masculine homosocial behavior reflects this “coercive double bind” or “obligatory heterosexuality”—terms that suggest the cultural force behind homophobia.

Masculinity scholar Trent Watts, though he does not refer to the invisible line, does offer further evidence of the cultural determination to maintain the distinction between hetero- and homosexual behavior: “[There is] an argument about sexuality that most southern white men have traditionally understood: that some instances of same-sex contact—depending upon one’s role in the encounter—do not compromise one’s manhood. Showering together in gym, and patting butts and holding hands on the football field, for instance, are viewed as wholesome rites of passage, and anyone noting the homosocial elements of these encounters invites condemnation as a troublemaker” (2008, 12–13). The label of “troublemaker” would probably include the authors of scholarly articles who examine homosocial behavior. Dundes did not use the term homosocial, but the fact that his article about latent homosexuality was met with indignant outrage by football players and fans could itself be seen as evidence of the invisible line, a public denial of the homosocial/homosexual continuum.

Sedgwick’s study of homosociality emphasizes the intrinsic roles of homophobia and misogyny, especially the idea that “homophobia directed by men against men is misogynistic, and perhaps transhistorically so.” She adds, “(By ‘misogynistic’ I mean not only that it is oppressive of the so-called feminine in men, but that it is oppressive of women)” (1985, 20). Sedgwick uses the homosocial/homosexual continuum as a means of exploring “historical power relationships,” especially the domination of men over women in patriarchal societies (2). This is a concept that gender scholars term “hegemonic masculinity,” “the maintenance of practices that institutionalize men’s dominance over women” (Connell 1987, 185); and, an even more relevant point for my study, “homosocial interaction, among heterosexual men, contributes to the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity” (Bird 1996, 121).

Michael A. Robidoux’s research on a specific homosocial group provides ethnographic evidence: “The shared male experience of professional hockey not only promotes segregation between men and women, it also segregates and devalues other men that do not fit within this hegemonic structure” (2001, 142). But Sedgwick’s writing established these principles even earlier, and my study, like hers, is based on a “structural paradigm” of “the isolation” and “subordination . . . of women.” This underlying structure “is a distortion that necessarily fails to do justice to women’s own powers, bonds, and struggles” (1985, 18).

Homosocial desire can be seen in the rhythm and blues, country, and rockabilly lyrics under consideration here, especially in the drinking and fighting that is described in two songs. This behavior can be seen as a performance of masculinity, a social display that has an audience. Actual masculine social behavior at honky-tonks and bars provides contextual evidence to reinforce this setting as conducive to getting drunk and fighting; as country music historian Bill Malone says, “The honky-tonk was essentially a masculine retreat . . . a place to aggressively assert one’s manhood” (1998, 246). Fighting among drunken men also fits Sedgwick’s point about homosocial desire sometimes being expressed through “hostility” and “hatred.” But what are they fighting about? Sedgwick cites an intriguing theory that helps explain masculine aggression as homosocial desire. She borrows a concept from René Girard (1965), Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, to provide a more specific relational structure within the homosocial context, an idea she refers to as “the folk wisdom of erotic triangles”: “Girard traced a calculus of power that was structured by the relation of rivalry between the two active members of an erotic triangle. What is most interesting for our purposes in his study is its insistence that, in any erotic rivalry, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved: that the bonds of ‘rivalry’ and ‘love,’ differently as they are experienced, are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent” (1985, 21).

I see evidence of Sedgwick’s homosocial structure and Girard’s erotic triangle in the descriptions of fighting in several rockabilly songs. The rivalry between men is clear in the songs’ focus on their drunken fighting, but the lyrics of these particular songs leave out any references to women. How can there be a triangle? Women are not explicitly mentioned, but the circumstances of the behavior and the context in which the songs are performed imply the presence of women and an erotic triangle between a woman and two men. The rivalry between the two men is apparent, but the erotic connections between the men and the woman are hidden because, as Sedgwick would suggest, they exist on a subconscious level.

Contextual and textual evidence for the erotic triangle can be found in actual behaviors at honky-tonks and in cheating songs of this period, but pre-rockabilly country songs configure the triangle in several different ways and usually lack physical altercations between men. Country music scholar Dorothy Horstman says that cheating songs at the time omitted “any admission of damaged manhood” (1986, 199), which explains the lack of references to rivalry between a husband and his wife’s lover in the songs. This could also be the explanation of why rockabilly songs about fighting don’t give the reason for fighting; to do so might reveal at least one man’s “damaged manhood” and undermine the very masculinity he is trying to project by fighting.

Cheating songs often concentrate on the hurt felt by the one who is being cheated on or the regrets of the cheater. For example, Floyd Tillman’s “Slipping Around” (1949) is from the perspective of a married man and addressed to the woman he is having an affair with; the only reference to the other man in the song is when the married man says to his lover, “You’re tied up with someone else.” He is also “tied up with someone else,” so there is an implied square instead of a triangle. Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart” (1952) admonishes the woman who is cheating on him without ever referring to the man (or men) she is cheating with (for other examples of cheating songs, see Horstman 1986, 197–210, 217–218, 224, 228–229).

Like “Slipping Around” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” rockabilly fighting songs and numerous other cheating songs express the erotic triangle incompletely, not laying it out explicitly but implicitly suggesting it. Some cheating songs concentrate on the emotions of the husband or wife whose spouse is cheating, and some on the man or woman who is cheating. It’s as if you have to look at the corpus of country cheating and rockabilly fighting songs to discern all the complex variations of the erotic triangle or square. There are, of course, other reasons besides the erotic triangle that men fight at bars, such as any perceived insult or slight, but even here there may be a woman as intended audience for the homosocial performance of masculinity.

Scholars in masculinity studies have considered male bonding at least since Lionel Tiger’s 1969 book, Men in Groups. He sees male bonding as biologically based behaviors that can be expressed through aggression and at times escalate to violence (158). He does not use the term homosocial, but later studies of male bonding use it extensively. Tiger’s emphasis on male aggression and violence relates to the centrality of fighting in country and rockabilly lyrics and also fits certain categories of American masculinity identified by later gender scholars.

E. Anthony Rotundo calls one category “passionate manhood” (1993, 2–6), “the essence of which,” according to Craig Thompson Friend, “was celebration of male emotions through acts of competition, aggression, force, sexuality, [and] self-fulfillment” (2009; ix, also see Bederman 1995, 22–23). These broad categories have been applied more specifically to southern manhood; for instance, Trent Watts establishes the persistence of the image of “hell-raising young men” in White southern masculinity. He speaks of a “period of wandering, especially among women, beer, and cars,” as part of “the transition from boyhood to manhood” in southern culture (2008, 2). This could also describe the masculine behavior in country and rockabilly lyrics in the 1940s and 1950s.

Feminist approaches to masculinity such as Sedgwick’s have been a significant part of the scholarship since the 1960s and 1970s; however, some recent scholarship downplays the power dynamic of feminist theories and focuses more on male fears and anxieties about their masculine identities. For instance, Michael Kimmel in Manhood in America: A Cultural History says, “Manhood is less about the drive for domination and more about the fear of others dominating us, having power or control over us. Throughout American history American men have been afraid that others will see us as less manly, as weak, timid, frightened” (2006, 4). Simon Bronner also emphasizes this masculine perspective and attaches less importance to feminist approaches in his introduction and opening essay in Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinities (2005). I think both feminist and masculinist interpretations are relevant, but my own focus will be on the gender power differential in homosociality.

In addition to the homosocial continuum, the theoretical frame for this essay draws upon my background as a folklorist who uses reflexive ethnography and autoethnography, especially their concern with the influence of subjective position on field research. Since my knowledge of rockabilly, rhythm and blues, and country music includes, in addition to research in published scholarship, personal experience as a youthful fan from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, I will incorporate into the analysis my subjective position in relation to American vernacular music during this period. Subjectivity in this case includes aesthetic judgments about music based on personal opinions that combine what I remember feeling then with what I’ve learned since. Specifically, my experiences include homosocial behavior as a teenager in junior high and high school and as a young adult in southern bars and dance halls similar to those described in the songs that are the subject of this chapter.

The song lyrics and my experiences can both be considered cultural representations, one composed and performed by singer/songwriters based on their experiences at the time and the other orally told or written by me based on memories of events that happened contemporaneous with theirs fifty to sixty years ago. My recollections can be classified as the traditional genre of personal experience narrative or life story which, as Jeff Todd Titon points out, are subject to the process of “fictionalizing,” that is, artistically enhanced in order to engage a listener (1980). Interpreting homosociality involves the interaction between these performed cultural representations and the social behavior they are based on.

The homosocial power dynamic can be identified on several levels, including in rockabilly song lyrics, in behaviors at the bars and honky-tonks where the music was played, and in the music industry itself. As pop music scholar Sheila Whiteley points out, “The bonds which produce particular [musical] cultures (whether rock or rockabilly) are primarily homosocial, and that knowledge is highly male-centered and serves to reinforce gender boundaries” (1997, xxv). As a result, talented women rockabilly singers such as Wanda Jackson, Janis Martin, and Barbara Pittman did not receive the attention that male rockabilly performers did. They were relegated to a secondary position in rockabilly and several had to develop alternate careers in country music or gospel. Consequently, the scholarship on rockabilly has not dealt with women singers as extensively as it has with men. According to popular-music writer David Sanjek, “The milieu the predominantly Caucasian male [rockabilly] performers inhabited routinely rejected the presence of women other than as the objects of sexual appetite” (1997, 139). Even though women were left out of some song lyrics and, to a certain extent, the rockabilly music business, gender difference is essential to analyzing both.

Another essential element in understanding masculinity in vernacular music is the socioeconomic class context in which the music was played. Bill Malone refers to honky-tonk music of this period as evoking “the ambience and flavor of the working-class beer and dancing clubs where the style was born” (1998, 245). The violence that took place among men at these bars and dance halls has long been associated with their lower socioeconomic status. All of the singers and songwriters cited here (with one exception, Red Foley), both White and Black, came from hardscrabble rural working-class backgrounds and played in bars with audiences from the same class culture. I don’t have enough space to go into much depth on class dimensions of the homosocial/homosexual continuum but will consider one issue—the perception of social class difference by young men within a homosocial southern dance hall context in the early 1960s.

Finally, masculinity in American vernacular music cannot be analyzed without considering the emulation by White singers, musicians, and song writers of Black masculine performance style, a historical process that can be traced back to nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy and continues to the present (Gubar 1997; Lott 1993; Roediger 1991). As Eric Lott points out in his book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class: “What appears in fact to have been appropriated were certain kinds of masculinity. To put on the cultural forms of ‘blackness’ was to engage in a complex affair of manly mimicry . . . to wear or even enjoy blackface was literally, for a time, to become black, to inherit the cool, virility, humility, abandon, or gaité de Coeur that were the prime components of black manhood” (1993, 52). He is describing nineteenth-century behavior, but this also is true of White male singers’ emulation of Black performers in the twentieth century, especially during the period we are considering here. Examples of White male mimicry in the twentieth century would include country singer Jimmie Rodgers’s emulation of African American blues singers in the 1920s and 1930s, Elvis Presley’s blending of rhythm and blues and country in the 1950s, Mick Jagger’s mimicry of blues and soul music in the 1960s, and White rapper Eminem taking on the cultural and musical style of Black rappers starting in the late 1990s. In all these cases and with the rockabilly singers we are focusing on, this is more than imitating a musical style; it is also assuming a Black masculine persona that White men imagined as both cool and more primitively sexual.

Like rockabilly singers, the White teenage boys who were an important fan base for rockabilly and emerging rock ’n’ roll were also attracted to African American rhythm and blues. In the early 1950s, when I was thirteen, I was listening to R & B on Black radio stations in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Baytown, Texas, before I had even heard of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, or any of the other White inventors of rock ’n’ roll. I was aware of racial difference in the music and preferred Ray Charles, Big Joe Turner, the Penguins, Lavern Baker, and Johnny Ace to the White pop music on the radio at the time or the imitative covers of Black recordings by the Crew Cuts, Pat Boone, and Georgia Gibbs that soon followed. As a White boy who grew up in the segregated South, I associated R & B music with Black sexuality and on some level I understood that the “dirty bop,” the most popular dance at Horace Mann Junior High School in Baytown, was outlawed because it was clearly based on African American dance styles. Rock ’n’ roll was condemned by White southern adults as “nigger music” which, of course, made it more appealing to our rebellious instincts.

At twelve and thirteen, boys’ social behavior was also rigidly homosocial; I didn’t drive and was too shy to ask a girl for a date anyway, so that meant going to movies and dances with male friends. We bonded with other boys around our favorite R & B, rockabilly, and rock ’n’ roll music: we collected records, got together to listen to music, and talked about new music we heard on the radio the night before. At the time, I wasn’t aware of girls bonding over their interest in popular music, but later in high school and college, I knew girls who were huge fans and socially bonded with other girls over music. In the early 1950s, an audience of White teenagers hearing R & B on Black radio was already primed for rockabilly, at that point in time the latest in a long line of musical borrowings from African Americans by European Americans.

Following in this at least century-old American cross-racial tradition, in the early to mid-1950s record producer Sam Phillips and singers Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and other White inventors of rockabilly and rock ’n’ roll based their hybrid music on White country music, especially Hank Williams and other honky-tonk singers, and direct borrowings of Black R & B hit records of the late 1940s and early 1950s (Escott and Hawkins 1980; Morrison 1996; Mullen 1984). There were White country songs from the 1930s and 1940s that were about drinking and fighting that established this as a traditional theme for rockabilly songs.

A good example is “Tennessee Saturday Night” by Red Foley, which was a big hit in 1948. It describes a small rural town in Tennessee where people drink moonshine whiskey, or as the song puts it, “Get their kicks from an old fruit jar,” and then “Somebody takes his brogan knocks out the light,” and finally, “They all know the other fellow packs a gun / Ev’rybody does his best to act just right / ’Cause there’s gonna be funeral if you start a fight.” The repeated refrain is “Civilized people live there alright / But they all go native on Saturday night” with the word native suggesting primitivism and stereotypes of African Americans. There were similarly themed songs from the African American R & B tradition of the same period. “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-dee-o-dee” is about wild drinking and fighting, and it was originally an R & B hit in 1949 that became a rockabilly hit in the 1950s.

I am using just two major examples of rockabilly songs in this essay, but there are others that reflect the same kind of wild behavior associated with excessive drinking including “Ubangi Stomp” and “Jungle Rock” (with the suggestion of primitivism again), “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” “Let’s Get Wild,” “Have Myself a Ball,” “We Wanna Boogie,” and “Tear It Up.” Not all these songs are in homosocial settings, but many at least suggest the importance of masculine social relationships, and “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-dee-o-dee” emphasizes an all-male social environment. Jerry Lee Lewis first heard Stick McGhee’s R & B version of the song in 1949 when he was fourteen, and he played it at his first public performance that same year. He later recorded it and continued to play it throughout his career (Tosches 1982, 64–65). The song was widely popular among early rockabilly bands; besides Lewis it was recorded by the Rock n Roll Trio, Malcolm Yelvington, and Sid King and the Five Strings. The title refers to an African American drinking custom of the 1940s that involved taking a shot of port wine, followed by a shot of whiskey, then another shot of port. “Nice sweet jacket for all that bad whiskey,” as one Black character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road says (1957, 68).

Stick McGhee’s version of the song reveals some of its appeal for rockabilly performers and their fans. It opens:

The version continues by indicating the cats’ “delight / When they gets drunk, start singing all night,” but they soon get to “fighting all night / Knocking down windows and tearin’ out doors.” McGhee enumerates their wine choices, including elderberry, port, sherry, blackberry, half ’n’ half, as well as the prodigious amounts: pints, fifths, quarts, and even half a gallon. Further, the song enjoins a communal ethic:

Rockabilly versions of the song changed the lyrics slightly and in the case of Sid King and the Five Strings radically enough that it sounds like a different song. Jerry Lee Lewis’s version (released in 1959) is close to the original but makes one significant change. McGhee says, “singing all night” in the first stanza, but in the second he sings, “fighting all night” and adds “Knocking down windows and tearin’ out doors,” emphasizing the violence. Jerry Lee drops all mentions of fighting, using “singing all night” instead, and he omits “Knocking down windows and tearin’ out doors” entirely. This seems out of character for Jerry Lee Lewis, given his reputation as a wild man onstage and in his personal life. I suspect producers made the change since Lewis loved Stick McGhee’s recording and had been singing the song since he was fourteen.

Two previously released recordings, Malcolm Yelvington’s in 1954 and Johnny Burnette’s Rock n Roll Trio in 1957, keep McGhee’s reference to “fighting.” Johnny Burnette sings, “They start fightin’ all night,” and Yelvington’s goes a step beyond Stick McGhee’s original with “Then they start fuckin’ and fightin’ all night.” I think these uncleaned-up recordings capture rockabilly’s masculine cultural attitude in a way that Lewis’s doesn’t, as rockin’ as his music and vocals are. The rockabilly fighting lyrics had been around for five years before Lewis’s version of the song was released, influencing and reflecting southern country masculinity.

African American dance music with lyrics that described wild drinking and partying appealed to rockabilly musicians and their audience, and reinforced their stereotyped images of Blacks as primitive, more natural and uninhibited than Whites (for more on race in vernacular music, see Mullen 1984, 2008, 117–130). The lyrics of the versions by Stick McGhee and the White rockabilly singers are similar, but the meanings could be very different with the shift from an African American to an Anglo-American context. My emphasis is on White perceptions of Black masculinity, not masculinity as Black men would define it but as White men emulated what they imagined it to be.

Both the R & B and rockabilly versions of “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-dee-o-dee” are celebrations of homosocial male bonding through getting drunk and fighting. This hell-raising behavior is described as exclusively masculine. Jerry Lee addresses his “honey” once, but women aren’t mentioned at all on Stick McGhee’s, Malcolm Yelvington’s, and Johnny Burnette’s recordings. This might suggest that for men to really let loose, women as a civilizing influence must not be present. The drunken fighting is represented as pleasurable, even referred to as “their delight.” This kind of masculine behavior as related to men’s oppositional construction of the feminine is cited often in gender studies. For example, Elizabeth Lunbeck in The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender and Power in Modern America says that drinking asserts “a glorious manhood unfettered by the nagging demands of women who would, had they their way, ensconce men at home, squander their wages, forbid them to drink—in short emasculate them” (1994, 245). Men are celebrating their freedom from women’s control and at the same time expressing their masculinity within a homosocial setting.

There were, of course, women in the actual world of bars and honky-tonks, and there must have been fighting over women, but these rockabilly and R & B lyrics imagine a world that leaves women out, suggesting the men are completely self-sustaining—to have a good time all you need are your buddies and plenty of wine. The absence of women in the lyrics expresses a manifestation of power over them by exclusion from the social scene in which they are present in reality. As I said earlier in the chapter, women aren’t referred to explicitly, but their presence is implied in the songs. As Sedgwick informs us, “The status of women, and the whole question of arrangements between genders, is deeply and inescapably inscribed in the structure even of relationships that seem to exclude women—even in male homosocial/homosexual relationships” (1985, 25).

Even though the songs seem to be all about men, women are there on a subconscious level that is necessary for maintaining misogynistic attitudes. Leaving women out of the song on an explicit level also means one corner of the erotic triangle is missing; this in itself indicates an exercise of power, removing the woman as necessary to the triangle, putting all the emphasis on the relationship between men, perhaps in some cases consciously or subconsciously moving from homosocial to homoerotic. The actual honky-tonks and bars represented in these song lyrics were, I’m sure, not limited to homosocial behavior. In spite of the invisible line, homosexual interactions must have taken place, with the participants risking homophobic violence and death.

Rockabilly covers of African American rhythm and blues songs like “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-dee-o-dee,” Elvis’s version of Roy Brown’s and Wynonie Harris’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” and Billy Lee Riley’s take on Billy “The Kid” Emerson’s “Red Hot” were the standard at first, but it was inevitable that White rockabilly performers would write their own versions of uninhibited drinking songs. Carl Perkins was one of the first rockabilly performers to write songs that were influenced by African American music and reflected a White perception of wild Black Saturday nights in a homosocial setting. His most famous song was “Blue Suede Shoes,” but he wrote another hit, “Dixie Fried,” that captured the essence of the crazy drunken hillbilly rocker. It begins:

Dan “flash[es] a quart” and “hollers . . . ‘Rave on cats . . . It’s almost dawn and the cops are gone. / And let’s all get Dixie fried.’” Again, fighting starts; Dan pulls a razor, “but he wasn’t shaving.” The cops return and lead him away, but “Dan was the bravest man that we ever saw. / He let us all know he wasn’t scared of the law.” He leaves a note for his “hon” saying, “‘It ain’t my fault . . . that I’m in here.’”

As with the other song we looked at, this one, imaginary as it is, is still grounded in a real time and a place. In an interview Carl Perkins described the violent behavior he had observed in southern honky-tonks: “I’m talking about rough places, where half the people went there to fight . . . And a lot of these places had chicken wire around the juke box and us to keep the bottles from hitting” (quoted in Weiser 1978, 6). The interviewer asked him, “Are these the kind of clubs that inspired you to write your kind of songs?” Perkins replied, “Yep, there’s no doubt about it. Yes sir.” He must have had “Dixie Fried” in mind.

Like Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Drinkin Wine Spo-dee-o-dee,” Carl Perkins’s sound is as raucous as the activities being described. To me his voice sounds especially rough and dirty when he switches from his narrator role to play Dan in the first person and his singing suggests that his raving is truly crazed. Also similar to “Drinkin Wine Spo-dee-o-dee” is the way “Dixie Fried” puts the emphasis on drinking and fighting as homosocial behavior. Women aren’t mentioned in the song except for the “hon” whom Dan tosses a note to through the jailhouse bars. She isn’t placed at the honky-tonk but only in the outside world where women and police could be co-conspirators to keep men under control. The lack of women and dancing in the song again places the emphasis on male bonding. There are no direct sexual references in “Dixie Fried,” but plenty of alcohol and violence, perhaps indicating displaced sexuality. And again, the erotic triangle is never explicit but implied by the drinking and fighting of the male rivals.

The singer/narrator in this song is someone who was there to observe Dan’s actions firsthand; he admires Dan and seems to express the group’s attitude toward him: “Now, Dan was the bravest man that we ever saw / He let us all know he wasn’t scared of the law.” The attitude of the singer and group makes Dan a rockabilly hero whose drunken behavior, including the flashing of a razor, is to be emulated. He pays for his transgressions by being arrested and thrown in jail, but in the end he is still unrepentant, hollering from his cell, “Rave on cats . . . I’ve been Dixie fried.”

The outsider, on-the-edge masculine hero is at least partially created out of unspoken references to race, such as the use of a widespread stereotype of Black criminal behavior at the time, the razor as weapon. Given traditional performances of “Dixie” in blackface minstrel shows and all the White southern unrepentant Confederate associations of the song, its use in this context could signify southern masculine Whiteness with an implied attempt to make their drunken behavior distinct from that of racial constructions of primitivism, to have it both ways: to behave like the imagined uninhibited Black man but to hold onto their own White identity. The song and especially the word Dixie took on different meanings within shifting historical contexts from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. This racial construction was so prevalent in the 1950s that it became an essential part of the invention of rock ’n’ roll. As rock critic Greil Marcus says, “Rockabilly fixed the crucial image of rock ’n’ roll: the sexy, half-crazed fool standing on stage singing his guts out . . . Rockabilly was the only style of early rock ’n’ roll that proved white boys could do it all—that they could be as strange, as exciting, as scary, and as free as the black men who were suddenly walking America’s airwaves as if they owned them” (1982, 169). I don’t think Marcus meant to describe a homosocial environment, but the elements are certainly here: “white boys could do it all,” they didn’t need women to have a wild, uninhibited good time. There is a kind of narcissism here, with the intended audience of women rendered invisible.

The outsider rockabilly hero can be seen as dependent on the homosocial setting, away from the societal control of women in a free-for-all atmosphere of drinking and fighting. Like all heroes, Dan is to be emulated by those who consider him a hero, reinforcing culturally learned masculine behavior. Other men are attracted to him similar to the way men at a gay bar might be attracted to someone who has attributes they admire and desire except without any acknowledged sexual dimension. This attraction is another indication of the continuum between homosexual and homosocial and of the permeable nature of the invisible line, which as a social construct depends on subjectivity—certain behavior perceived in different ways by gay men and straight men (Thomas Cameron, personal correspondence, 2010).

Both “Dixie Fried” and “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-dee-o-dee” are good examples of upbeat rockabilly dance music, and one of the ironies here is that the songs don’t mention dancing at all. It’s as if fighting has replaced dancing, and this seems appropriate given the implied homosocial meaning of the songs and the social environment in which they are set. Even though it’s usually alright for women to dance with women, men can’t dance with other men because that would be perceived as homosexual; fighting then becomes a violent replacement for dancing. Think of all the movies in which fighting is accompanied by rock music and the connection becomes more apparent. Also, many men who go to honky-tonks without women almost dance with other men while standing around the dance floor watching the dancers. Moving in time with the music with another man is okay as long as you don’t touch him, face him, or dance behind him, but keep your gaze on the dance floor. Homophobia demarcates the invisible line even as men dance inches apart and sometimes accidentally touch. If the touch is perceived as not accidental, that is enough to start a fight.

The homosocial/homosexual continuum can be found across socioeconomic class boundaries, from men’s book discussion groups to pickup basketball games, from college fraternity parties to labor union meetings. But are there different perceptions of homosocial behavior in different social classes? For instance, how is fighting and drinking perceived differently by class? The middle and upper-middle class often perceive lower socioeconomic working-class men as being more violent. Since country and rockabilly music originally came from southern rural working-class people and continue to be associated with them, the drinking and fighting depicted in lyrics still conjure up class images.

To cite a personal example, when I was in college in southeast Texas in the early 1960s, my friends and I would go to a rock ’n’ roll bar in Louisiana on Saturday nights where we could buy liquor at eighteen. It was similar to southern honky-tonks of the 1940s and 1950s in terms of loud dance music played by local bands, excessive drinking, and frequent fighting. Most of the young men there, from whatever class background, came with other men, not with dates; there were some couples but women also came mainly with other women. Some men asked women to dance and on some occasions a woman asked a man to dance, but much of the social interaction was within two groups, one made up of women and the other of men, definitely what we would now call a homosocial gathering.

There was a perceived class difference between the college boys and the local guys our age. We were in college, and they were already working at local refineries and chemical plants. We saw them as tough and pugnacious, ready to brawl at the slightest provocation. I don’t know how they saw us—perhaps as “wimps”—with good reason, since we fit the stereotype. Fights broke out among the locals every time we went to the Big Oak, but our college group assiduously avoided them. Bouncers threw brawlers out, so most of the altercations took place in the parking lot, and when we college boys went back to our car we carefully walked as far away from the fights as we could. This was so in spite of the fact that most of us came from working-class backgrounds and were the first generation from our families to go to college. Upward mobility and going to college were enough to make us and our working-class age cohorts aware of class difference even though we both behaved in similar ways, getting drunk and running in packs. Both socioeconomic groups were engaged in homosocial behavior, but the working-class guys seemed more likely to fight, at least as we perceived them. Neither group was conscious of any of this as homosocial or homosexual in any way. We both maintained the invisible line; we both were homophobic and misogynistic in our unspoken assumptions. I don’t want to generalize too broadly from this personal subjective example, but I suspect the pattern might be borne out more widely in American social class behavior. More research is needed.

We had fun, we got drunk, we danced on the sidelines, and all with little interaction with women. Not that we didn’t want to be with women, to dance with them or take a woman out to the car to “make out.” Whenever I tell personal stories about going to the Big Oak I mention wanting desperately to dance with one girl from my college who was “cute” and a great dancer—so good that one of the bands named a song after her, “Band Doll,” obviously a sexist term, but that word wasn’t in our vocabulary or our consciousness at the time. I worked up the nerve to ask her to dance only once, and dancing with her was the high point of my Big Oak experiences. Our focus on her presence suggests an underlying erotic triangle, but for college boys one that lacked fighting with another guy over a woman. From my observation, the locals behaved in similar ways—they drank, they hung out together, and periodically they would ask a girl to dance. The big difference was they fought and we didn’t. The masculine behavior of both male groups offers evidence to support Sedgwick’s theory of a homosocial-homosexual continuum with misogynistic and homophobic implications, but this was also, in some ways, an expression of our social isolation from women.

There was a power dynamic in pretending we didn’t need women, but there was also an implicit desire for women we were denying. We were bonding with each other in ways that suggested homosocial desire in Sedgwick’s sense of “the social force, the glue . . . that shapes an important relationship,” and at the same time coping with the lack of women in our lives. Our male bonding sent out a message that we didn’t need women, but of course we did. Viewing women as unnecessary and even antithetical to the masculine urge to get drunk was a means of expressing dominance over them, but the concept of homosocial desire also suggests a need for women that fulfills the man-to-woman connection in the erotic triangle. This would also be true in honky-tonk and rockabilly lyrics that leave women out—implying the ironic nature of homosocial desire, the denial of needing women as an underlying expression of the need for women. Sedgwick’s concept of homosocial desire is a structural pattern, a deeper level of meaning that performers in the social drama are not always conscious of. Performing masculinity often obscures the meaning of the performance from the audience and the performer.

One of the conclusions I can draw from my examination of social class, race, gender, and sexual representations in vernacular music lyrics and male behavior of this period is that all of them exist in continua that are disrupted by artificial constructs that have negative social and cultural consequences. Within the vernacular songs we’ve considered there is homosocial behavior that is part of a continuum that must be denied by heterosexual men because of their homophobia and their need to prove their masculinity. There may be a biological difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals, but that is not what the homosocial/homosexual invisible line is about. It’s about perceptions of difference grounded in homophobia and misogyny maintained culturally over a long historical period. Obviously, imagined differences are also basic to the maintaining of class, gender, and racial divisions. For instance, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. pointed out over twenty-five years ago, “Race, as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction” (1985, 4), and class, gender, and sexual orientation also depend on imagined social constructs for their divisiveness and manifestations of power.

Finally, though, and ironically, American vernacular music itself undermines all the divisions that have been socially constructed to keep us apart because the music ignores the boundaries between class, race, gender, and sexual orientation and produces instead a wonderful mixture of ethnic, regional, class, gender, and racial elements in rock ’n’ roll, country, R & B, jazz, hip-hop, Cajun, zydeco, conjunto, salsa, Latina, and on and on (Spitzer 2003). James Baldwin expressed this idea more eloquently than I ever could: “Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other” (1985, 690).