VERA LYNN IN NASHVILLE (1977): White Working-Class Femininity and Transatlantic Affinities

The 1977 album Vera Lynn in Nashville could be dismissed as country crossover gone too far. But what if, drawing on notions of the musical middlebrow, we take Vera Lynn at her word and treat the album as a sincere expression of musical affinity? The album grew out of postwar popular music genres that were shaped by middlebrow values-both what Keir Keightley calls “easy listening” and country music’s Nashville Sound. It also emerged from the transnational flows of popular music influence, marketing, and exchange. Rooted in the 1970s, a messy decade for middlebrow studies, this chapter explores how transatlantic country crossover can both complicate narratives of “blue-eyed soul” appropriation and highlight themes of white working-class affinity. It reveals how Vera Lynn in Nashville was animated by the uneasy relation between performances of white, working-class femininity and notions of respectability, musical authenticity, and nationalism.