My Saga

I became a singer when I was eight or nine years old. It was the day I sang solo to an audience of around 200 of my primary school peers in my home town in southeast England. I recall that all the other children at this end-of-year show told jokes, or mimed to popular songs on 45rpm gramophone records – a strangely popular performance mode at this time in the late 1960s. I clearly remember feeling special just by virtue of actually singing a song. It was called ‘I’m Just a Country Boy’. The event is reminiscent of Baldur’s singing songs from an Icelandic musical at school in north-east Iceland. But even if singing came to occupy a similar kind of space at the core of both our respective identities, my own saga reveals that the events and conscious life that formed my vocal identity were very different indeed. Key experiences, like this first ‘public’ vocal performance, resonate strongly with Baldur and other Icelandic men’s accounts. The impact of that vocal epiphany, and the subsequent and continuing influence that my vocality has had throughout my life and on all aspects of my Self, is something which I have thought about from time to time, but come to a particular view of as I have been reflecting upon the role singing plays in other people’s everyday lives. I am attempting to revisit some of these personal experiences now in the light of the Icelandic vocal sagas we have already heard. Autoethnography like this attempts to merge autobiography with ethnography and Reed-Danahay ¹ and Buzard ² illustrate the embarrassment that is often associated with such personal disclosure. Nevertheless, this book’s focus on a psychology of individuality, my implication in the symbolic interactionist paradigms and interpretative phenomenological analysis adopted in it, recent reflexive trends in ethnomusicology generally, and my own experience of the phenomena we are examining, suggest that a fairly detailed account of my personal story might have something to offer to an understanding of men singing. In this reflexive turn, I hope to ensure a transparency through which my own subjectivity or identity might be recognized. My recollection of childhood vocal incidents and many other memories of vocal experiences since then, are relevant to my position in this study as ethnographer, researcher and interpreter of other people’s vocal experiences. They raise important epistemological questions that 162have come to the fore in recent ethnographical discourse and in phenomenological research theories.