Red, White, Yellow, and Bluegrass: Music, Trauma, and Amerika in the Swedish Imagination

Abstract

This dissertation explores the overlapping bluegrass, old time, and country music scenes in Sweden. Tethered by shared musical histories as well as musicians and enthusiasts who regularly cross genre boundaries, these scenes boast events, festivals, and jams where Swedish imaginings of Amerika come to life in the form of music, costumes, and general rules of prosocial engagement. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and rules of comportment differ inside the bounds of these music scenes as compared both to similar scenes in the US or other non-musical Swedish spaces. Simultaneously, detail-oriented anachronisms present a nostalgic representation of Amerika that bolster Swedish ties to American history and iconography in everything from “singing cowboys” to “rebel flags.” I argue that the Amerika that exists in the Swedish imagination broadly, and in these music scenes specifically, is rooted in the trauma of mass migration from Sweden to North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ideas of Amerika grew in the Swedish imagination as a way to fill in the gaps left by the devastating effects of mass migration on the separation of families. This familial trauma was widespread and is regularly encapsulated in a description of Sweden as the lillebror (“little brother”) of the United States, a reference that maintains a sense of familial ties across the Swedish American borderlands. With the application of polyvagal theory, and an understanding of how connections between the body and the brain impact the physical sensations of emotions as well as an individual’s interpretations of external cues of safety and danger, I argue that trauma suffered by our ancestors can influence which communities we chose to join or music scenes in which we chose to participate. From the perspective of polyvagal theory, it becomes clear that there are physiological reasons why music is soothing, why we might choose one music scene over another, and why playing music with others who like that same music is invigorating. Through the lens of trauma studies, this dissertation explores the collective impact of trauma across a community as well as trauma’s impact on the body of the individual. I show how many individual traumatic events across communities within a single country came to shape Sweden’s national imagination. I also demonstrate the process through which ideas of Amerika have been passed down through generations, distilled through family stories and media depictions of the past, and created two conflicting, yet harmoniously coexisting stories that have come to shape bluegrass, old time, and country music scenes in Sweden. Drawing on scholarship in neuroscience, psychiatry, and music therapy, this dissertation outlines how collective music making can engage the body’s social engagement system and have a calming effect on a nervous system that has been activated or dysregulated by trauma. Swedish bluegrass, old time, and country music scenes are used as an example of how intergenerational trauma can be a part of what unconsciously binds a music community together and how that trauma can evolve over generations of storytelling. The transfer of unconscious narratives, reconstructions, and intentional silences shape traumatic memories into nostalgic yearning for a past that never, quite, was.