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Earl Eugene Scruggs (1924-2012) came from the hills of North Carolina and learned the banjo from the days he was too small to hold it properly. While still a schoolboy in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, he developed the high-powered three-finger picking method that both him and the banjo famous. At age 21, he joined the founder of bluegrass music, Bill Monroe, on the Grand Ole Opry, completing a sound that Monroe had worked to conceive. Leaving Monroe in 1948, Scruggs and guitarist Lester Flatt started their own group and made recordings including “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” The lightning-fast banjo instrumental cut a swath through American music, inspiring countless pickers and becoming the “voice” of the business-disrupting 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. During a long career in music, Scruggs had many famous friends and collaborators. His influence also meant that his Gibson Granada banjo became an icon of American music

Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathias Queered Pop Music examines the way four popular male musicians who emerged in the 1950s, Johnnie Ray, Little Richard, Johnny Mathis, and Liberace challenged post-World War II masculine conventions. Rocking is a critical close reading that fuses queer literary theory, musicology, and popular music studies frameworks to develop its argument. Recent scholarship in queer theory and literary history constitutes a key strand of the book’s discussion of queer ambivalence regarding identity. Notably, the book explores how the four artists challenged male gender and sexual conventions without overtly identifying their respective sexual orientations or necessarily affiliating with gay activism, identity politics, or community tropes. The book outlines the emergence of postwar social expectations of male figures and employs these expectations to define a unique a set of five “queering” tools the four musicians employed in various combinations, to develop their public personae and build audiences. These tools include self-neutering, self-domesticating, spectacularizing, playing the “freak,” and playing the race card. Despite the prevalence of postwar gender norms, their deft use of these tools enabled each artist to develop sexually ambiguous personae and capitalize on the postwar audiences’ attraction to novelty and difference. These “queering” tools endure among contemporary musicians who challenge masculine conventions in popular music.