Singer/songwriter Florence Dore is stoked to be riding the rough-and-tumble roads of a band on tour, winding her way to Memphis, in no small part because of who’s backing her up. “The band is really good,” she says. “I’ve got the dB’s rhythm section. That’s my husband Will Rigby [drums] and Gene Holder [bass], who was pulled out of never touring again to do this, plus Mark Spencer [guitar] from Son Volt. They’re so good. It’s a little ridiculous, actually.”
Here’s something even more ridiculous: “We just played at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge for AmericanaFest in Nashville, and afterwards these two university librarians came up and said, ‘Wow, this is the first time I’ve ever seen university press books at a merch table!’” laughs Dore. Yet that’s just part of the touring life for Dore, who’s also a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina. And she seems to relish wearing both her academic and musical hats at once.
“This is a traveling public humanities program,” she avers. “So I’m giving talks, like the one at the University of Memphis with Robert Gordon, and also performances, like our gig at Bar DKDC. It’s funny, the gigs are starting to resemble the public talks. I can’t help that I’m a lecturer! So I’m talking a little bit about this book that I have coming out on Cornell University Press, called The Ink in the Grooves: Conversations on Literature and Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s about the history of the relations between literature and rock, and people are incredibly interested.”
Being back on the road underscores ideas Dore has pondered through much of her academic career, such as the importance of humans simply showing up for one another. “In my last book, Novel Sounds: Southern Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll, I describe how John Lomax brought Lead Belly to the Modern Language Association meeting, the biggest language professor meeting in the country, in 1934. Lomax presented him as an example of living literature, on a panel called ‘Popular Literature.’ So this body of a folk singer was presented as somehow a magical conduit to the idea of poetry. And that is something you can track through the institutionalization of literature in American English departments since at least the ’30s. That’s the historical link that interests me. One thing about being out on tour and back in classrooms after Covid is, it does make a difference. Presence is something. Something happens in a room with bodies, with people, that actually cannot happen in other ways.”
And yet, even as she ponders the power of such communion and what it signifies, Dore is loath to dissect the music she loves in such terms. “I have an aversion to academic pop music studies generally,” she says. “I don’t want to overanalyze songs. I wouldn’t want to have to say what ‘Frankie and Johnny’ means. I’d rather talk about the fact that Lead Belly was at the MLA and just ponder that. The only way I could make it work for Novel Sounds was to observe the history of it.”
To be sure, there’s a sympathetic vibration between Dore’s two hats. “I wrote something kind of pretty, that sounded kind of traditional, and then the words ended up being about technology,” she says. “It’s a love ballad, ‘WiFi Heart,’ and it directly encapsulates some of these ideas from my books because it’s about bodies:
“‘At the end of our days/When we’re cold in our graves/And our love lives in voltage on high/In the wireless sea/Without you and me/I’ll sing to you out of the void.’
“The ‘wireless sea’ in that last verse is from Jeffrey Sconce’s book called Haunted Media about people’s experience of radio when it first happened in history. People thought, ‘Oh, that’s what a voice separate from a body is!’ It made people feel like they were being haunted, like they could talk to the dead. One person in the book talked about ‘swimming in a wireless sea.’ I think that’s such a beautiful line, so I stole it.”
Florence Dore will speak on Modernism, Music, and Memphis on Thursday, October 6th, at the Maxine Smith University Center Bluff Room, University of Memphis, 5:30 p.m. She and her band perform Friday, October 7th, at Bar DKDC.