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      University of California Press

      Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

      University of California Press, Ltd.

      London, England

      © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Morris, Mitchell, 1961–

      The persistence of sentiment : display and feeling in popular music of the 1970s / Mitchell Morris.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-520-24285-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

      ISBN 978-0-520-27599-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

      eISBN 9780520955059

      1. Popular music—United States—1971–1980—History and criticism. 2. Singers—United States. I. Title.

      ML3477.M682013

      781.640973’09047—dc23

      2012041528

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on 50-pound Enterprise, a 30% post-consumer-waste, recycled, deinked fiber that is processed chlorine-free. It is acid-free and meets all ANSI/NISO (z 39.48) requirements.

      For my parents, whose memory also persists.

      There is a satrong and very ancient emotion that is rarely mentioned or recognized: it is the anguish we feel for the absence of idols.

      —Roberto Calasso, Literature and the Gods

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      1.Introduction

      2.Black Masculinity and the Sound of Wealth

      Barry White in the Early 1970s

      3.Transport and Interiority in Soft Soul

      4.The Audience and Barry Manilow

      5.The Voice of Karen Carpenter

      6.Cher’s “Dark Ladies”

      Showbiz Liberation

      7.Crossing Over with Dolly Parton

      Notes

      Works Cited

      Index

      Acknowledgments

      A book such as this, with a long and idiosyncratic genesis, puts an author in a dilemma: to thank too much or too little. On the theory that perhaps less sometimes really is more, I will thank those whose support has been constant and crucial. First and foremost, let me thank Susan McClary and Robert Walser whose support has been unceasing—as is my gratitude. Raymond Knapp is, as always, the most exemplary of interlocutors. Elizabeth Upton’s diverting and illuminating discussions of songs and what they mean has informed vast stretches of this book. My old co-conspirators Paul Attinello, Judith Peraino, and Robynn Stilwell know how vast is the range of things I owe to them—many things in this book, not least. Among the many wonderful graduate students whose conversations have enriched this book, I must list Ross Fenimore, Olivia Mather, Louis Niebur, and Holley Replogle-Wong. Stephan Pennington and Desmond Harmon have not only informed and delighted by their conversation—they took on the task of assisting me with technical and clerical matters, a task much much worse than herding the most irascible of cats. Our departmental staff and counselor Barbara Van Nostrand was equally heroic and endlessly patient with my tendency to yowl and hiss at perplexities. Last but certainly not least, I thank Mary Francis, who has displayed superhuman patience and perspicacity.

      I am grateful to you all.

      CHAPTER 1

      Introduction

      I first began looking for ways to write about the artists discussed in this book in the mid-to-late 1990s. The timing matters for a several reasons—a vaguely discernible twenty-year cycle of rubbishing and rehabilitation in much postwar popular culture, for instance; the generational and technological shifts that enabled the appearance of a broader range of values and investments among critics, whether professional, amateur, or somewhere in between; or for that matter, a gradual shift in academic writing about popular music from a largely defensive, morally and aesthetically engagé style of scholarship to one more willing to give itself up to enjoyment.

      All these shifts in critical taste were present in writings about music, but they also covered a lot more ground. The art critic Dave Hickey, for instance, begins his brilliant little book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty with a description of the ills of the academic art world and the potential balm to be found in pleasure and beauty:

      For more than four centuries, the idea of “making it beautiful” has been the keystone of our cultural vernacular—the lover’s machine-gun and the prisoner’s joy—the last redoubt of the disenfranchised and the single direct route from the image to the individual without a detour through church or state. Now, it seems, that lost generosity, like Banquo’s ghost, is doomed to haunt our discourse about contemporary art—no longer required to recommend images to our attention or to insinuate them into the vernacular—and no longer even welcome to try. The route from the image to the beholder now detours through an alternate institution ostensibly distinct from church and state . . . The priests of the new church are not so generous. Beauty, in their domain, is altogether elsewhere, and we are left counting the beads and muttering the texts of academic sincerity.¹

      For Hickey, writing near the beginning of the nineties, only a full-blooded acknowledgment of the pleasure and sociality that intersect in disputatious experiences of beauty could rescue the academic art world from its arid purism. And it is worth noting that, whatever the reservations that greeted his admittedly extravagant claims, his insistence on the recovery of the beautiful gained increasing attention into the first decade of the 2000s.

      The situation has been arguably better and worse with respect to music. I have often noted a disparity between the songs and styles many people seem to love to listen to—those they play in the privacy of their own homes, the ones that send them into paroxysms of delighted recollection, those they remember in remarkably detailed fashion—and the songs and styles that tend to get written about in vigorous, critically engaged terms. Even though popular music has acquired a significant measure of scholarly respectability, it has often seemed that this measure is extremely selective. An extensive section of the pop music repertory still seems resistant to the praise of critics and intellectuals. At best, we may refer to it as “bad” (a kind of scare-quote cowardice), but at the risk of falling into condescension toward the music and its admirers: falling into a serious slough of very bad faith. Among demotic listeners—the folks who haunt the Internet discussion groups, call up radio stations to hear favorites, and populate my university courses—much of this untalked-about music occasions

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