My project recovers the centrality of sentimentalism to American popular music and culture and rethinks our understandings of the relationships between music and the public sphere. Their critics notwithstanding, sentimental songs have remained at the forefront of popular music production in the United States, where, as my project demonstrates, they have provided some of the country’s most visible and challenging constructions of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and morality. My dissertation examines the relationship between American popular song and “sentimentality.” While eighteenth-century discussions of sentimentality took it as a positive attribute in which feelings, “refined or elevated,” motivated the actions or dispositions of people, later texts often describe it pejoratively, as an “indulgence in superficial emotion.” This has led an entire corpus of nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural production to be bracketed as “schmaltz” and derided as irrelevant by the academy.

1970s soft rock