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Many Zimbabweans, old and young, rich and poor, urban and rural, love country western music. Though this might at first seem to be extraordinary, it is rather a commonplace experience in people's everyday lives. In fact, Dolly Parton, Jim Reeves, and Don Williams are amongst the most commonly sought-after records in the rural areas of Zimbabwe and have been for some time.(1) As an anthropologist I felt compelled to consider this popularity of American country music in Zimbabwe as this phenomenon has as of yet not received any attention in the extensive literature on Zimbabwe. During fieldwork, I found a ubiquitous and striking knowledge of country artists and their songs, for example of "Wild Flowers Don't Care Where They Grow" by Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colors," Sissy Chapman's "Frontier Justice," and Slim Whitman's "Rosemary," to name a few of the more notable songs that I came to know whilst in Zimbabwe. While many Americans, particularly African-Americans in Northern rather than Southern cities, find this surprising, as they commonly associate country music in America with stereotypes of conservative, white Southern culture, country music, and Dolly Parton, in particular, are deeply inculcated in the multiplex Zimbabwean imagination.
The history of this affection for country music and world popular culture in general is eloquently captured in two provocative descriptions of urban life in what was then Rhodesia in the 1960s. In Harvest of Thoms Shimmer Chinodya, a local author, writes:
Those were the days when there loudspeakers at the centre of the township which were tuned to the radio station and you didn't have a radio in your home unless your father was a businessman or a fireman or, maybe, a teacher. Yes, those were the days of the mobile biscope, when the nights belonged to Matuka and Zuze and the Three Stooges and cinema was so alive you could smell gunpowder off the big white screen.
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As we grew up, things changed, slowly. We had scorned the poverty we did not see in our ignorance of it, wearing our clothes till our bodies showed through, but we began to notice clothes that stole our souls. We saw bell-bottom trousers, 'Satan' denim jeans, platform shoes, bold, bright shirts with large, raised collars, checked jackets,...