This article analyzes the Nashville-based country music industry's marketing practices and targeted audience between 1969 and 1978, an exciting period of racial and political diversification among country listeners and artists. During this era, growing numbers of non-white fans appeared at country concerts (drawn in large part by a previously unprecedented number of non-white artists who had earned commercial success during this period), and musicians such as Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings—the “Outlaws”—attracted listeners who identified with the counterculture. These new fans differed from the white and conservative listeners that the country music industry had branded as the quintessential country music fan by the early 1970s. But despite the potential to target increasing numbers of non-white fans, by 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan, the industry remained more committed than ever before to defining the music as a product for an affluent, white, and predominantly conservative audience only. The industry's efforts to target a large white and affluent audience came at the expense of not only non-white listeners, but also actual Southerners and low-income whites, who were harmed by the stereotypes and widespread appropriations perpetuated by the trend of “redneck chic.”

This article considers questions of authenticity in two versions of Doug Sahm's “Chicano”: Sahm's original, recorded with the Sir Douglas Band in 1973, and Rumel Fuentes's 1976 cover version. Some critics and listeners considered Sahm's original, written from a first-person Chicano perspective, a gaffe, since Sahm was in fact not Chicano; however, employing Allan Moore's notion of authenticity as authentication, I argue that Fuentes's cover version is at once an endorsement of Sahm's original and an authentication of it. To do so, I begin by elaborating Moore's three-part typology of authenticity, and how this typology recasts authenticity as authentication. I then place Sahm's appropriation of a Chicano identity within a longer history of racial crossing in American popular music before providing historical context for each artist, and for each version of the song. Finally, by discussing the two versions in terms of Moore's typology, I argue that the cover authenticates the original through what Moore calls second-person authenticity, which he describes as a validation of the listener's experience.

This paper examines how Mexican immigrant custodians at a public California university claim space, make themselves visible, and assert their dignity through their music and sound. A Latino Cultural Citizenship framework is utilized to connect listening practices to a wider socio-cultural context. As one of the fastest growing media formats in the U.S., Spanish-language radio can be heard as both a symbol of a changing America and a contested site of cultural exchange where Latinos negotiate an audible presence. Through in-depth interviews and ethnographic data collection, respondents addressed how listening to Spanish-language radio impacted their work life and their sense of belonging in their local communities. Workers gave testimonies on navigating the “sonic color line” at work and home that policed their bodies and sounds.