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- Title
Sweet Home Stockholm: The Roles of Radio and the Search for a Swedish Voice in the Making of a Local Blues Scene.
- Authors
Barretta, Scott
- Abstract
This paper examines the dynamics of Swedish expressions of blues revival activity, and notably the important gatekeeper role played by Sveriges Radio (Swedish Radio) producer Olle Helander. His 1964 radio documentary series I Blueskvarter (In the Blues Quarters), based on fieldwork in the United States, served to introduce many Swedes to the blues tradition and shaped the aesthetic orientation of an emergent Swedish blues scene. A comparative focus, using counterexamples from the US and the UK, is employed to address the distinctiveness of the Swedish scene, notably due to the great cultural influence of state-run radio in the absence of commercial media outlets. A second theme is how some Swedish blues musicians negotiated their own unique blues voices in regard to the broader Swedish cultural landscape in the 1960s and 1970s. The emergence of a Swedish blues scene took place in tandem with the "proggrörelse" (progressive movement), a DIY cultural movement that strove to combat cultural imperialism. In the musical field this involved moving away from imitating US and British artists and instead singing in Swedish, often with lyrics that were political in nature. While many Swedish blues musicians would continue to copy US artists, the most popular ones, Peps Persson and Rolf "Roffe" Wikström, both transformed their musical approaches through becoming more explicitly political and singing in the vernacular language and accents of their home regions. Wikström would emphasize his roots in working class south Stockholm and Persson his identification with rural Skåne in the south of Sweden.
- Subjects
SKANE (Sweden); SWEETNESS (Taste); BLUES musicians; RADIO advertising; CULTURAL imperialism; CULTURAL movements; HOME ownership; MUSICAL perception
- Publication
Global South, 2020, Vol 14, Issue 1, p114
- ISSN
1932-8648
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2979/globalsouth.14.1.06