Summary: Collaborations: creative partnerships in music | Graeme Smith <strong>Singers and Songwriters in Australian Country Music</strong> According to sociologist Howard Becker music is best seen as the result of “what of a lot of people have done jointly”. Yet at the same time, the figure of the autonomous singer-songwriter is seen as an ideal creative agent in popular music. It has been noted that Country music and its antecedent genres, through such figures as Jimmie Rodgers, established many of the features of the performance role of the singer-songwriter as the authentic, autobiographically informed projection of self-in-music. At the same time, in country music in particular, collaborative authorship, (“co-writes”) and non-performing songwriters are still prominent in the genre, in comparison with other popular music genres. In Australian country music performers frequently negotiate relationships between singer songwriter, while creating the performance persona projected in the song. These collaborations may sometimes be disguised or accommodated against an ideal of ideal authorship, but are always treated as potentially relevant to the authenticity of utterance of the song. This paper will examine a number of relationships between country performers, producer and songwriters, including Lee Kernaghan, Garth Porter, Shane Nicholson, Kasey Chambers and Troy Cassar Daley to establish a typology of collaboration in the genre. It will be argued that collaboration and its accommodation to creative ideals of creativity is a central feature of the construction of the performing subject within this genre.
