Pop Conference 2025

Music memoirs use first-person narration to print or revise artistic legacies by aestheticizing
intimate proximities between author and reader. As members of a book club dedicated to music
biographies, we are compelled by the construction of these mythologies as well as by our own
engagement, recirculation, or disavowal of them. Public School is a consortium of music
scholars, cultural critics, and journalists who convene every month over Zoom to talk about
various works of musical non-fiction. In our monthly conversations, we have identified several
stylistic conventions associated with music memoirs that merit critical interrogation. We have
also noticed efforts from authors and publishers to make music memoirs more interactive and
multisensorial in recent years in order to turn reading into an immersive experience.

In this roundtable, we focus our attention on four motifs that make the music memoir legible as a
distinct non-fictional genre. First, we consider the dominance of portraiture in music memoir
cover art and pay particular attention toward how memoirists like Lucinda Williams and Margo
Price use portraits to foreground their authority and legacy not only as musicians detailing their
lived experiences, but also as writers translating their virtuosity as songwriters into a different
literary form. Next, we interrogate how memoirs like Flea’s Acid for the Children and Prince’s
The Beautiful Ones use photographic inserts and unorthodox prose to reframe archival footage
of artists’ childhood photographs, promotional materials, and candids as scrapbook material that
strengthens readers’ emotional connections through nostalgia. Then, we examine the genre’s
associations with first-person address and reminiscence as articulations of authorial voice by
considering how divas like Mariah Carey and Barbra Streisand, and actors like Michelle
Williams who interpret Britney Spears’ recollections, have transformed the memoir as a listening
experience by showcasing their singular voices as narrators and recording artists. Finally,
building from Carey and Streisand’s innovative approaches to audiobooks, we consider how
memoirs like Hua Hsu’s Stay True and Dante Ross’ Son of the City enhance life-writing in the
digital age with supplements like zines and playlists.

Memoirs are also reflexive and adaptive to technological change. Thus, we conclude by
contemplating our own gathering practices. Since we are scattered across the United States,
Public School exists entirely online. Zoom’s interface affords us a particular type of mediated
intimacy during our conversations and interviews with invited guests that let us see each other’s
homes, even if we have never actually occupied shared space together offline. Furthermore, we
use Zoom’s chat function to distribute additional reading, screening, and listening material
related to our conversations, which we have archived in a shared Notes app list that we update
after each meeting. Historically, in-person book clubs have enforced a formalized mode of
decorum that is gendered, classed, and raced. However, the intimate proximities of the
mediated domesticated space via Zoom illuminate an aesthetics of reflexivity about our own
living spaces and dwelling practices. In this roundtable, we wonder what the remediation of
book clubs as digital salons reveals about the anti-aesthetic potentialities of virtual communal
engagement.

In the video for his blockbuster debut single “Old Town Road,” Lil Nas X sparkles in an eye-
popping multicolored cowboy suit, with macho side-kick Billy Ray Cyrus crushing it in
shocking- pink buckaroo style. Since then, Beyonce, Orville Peck, Brandi Carlile, and Post
Malone have also joined previous generations of artists going back to Hank Williams, George
Jones, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Janis Joplin, Elton John, and Jack White who’ve worn
custom-made embroidered and fringe-flying finery to personify their music and their image. The
original name for such attire? The Nudie Suit. Where did that name come from? How were such
stage clothes used to define an artist’s image, background, and song catalogue? And how did
such a distinctive sartorial style evolve from the look of white male singing cowboys and C&W
stars to adorn a diversity of today’s artists? Those are the topics of our proposed roundtable
discussion, “The Nudie Suit: Past, Present, and Future.”

We’ll start with Nutya Kotlyrenko (1902-1984), the son of a Jewish bootmaker who immigrated
from the Ukraine to New York in 1913 – renamed “Nudie” Cohn at Ellis Island. Nudie spent
decades hustling on show-biz margins (vaudevillian Eddie Cantor’s errand boy, featherweight
boxer, B-movie extra) and the garment business – opening Nudie’s for the Ladies, where Times
Square burlesque queens ordered their rhinestone G-strings. In 1949, Nudie established a North
Hollywood shop where singing cowboys and country & western stars congregated and ordered
custom finery. Nudie’s designs reflected the American melting pot, including elements from
Eastern European/Slavic, Mexican, North African, and Native American traditions, combined to
create unique folk-art masterpieces. One of three eastern European immigrants who helped shape
our notion of fancy western attire, Nudie took the trend for elaborately decorated western
garments to new heights, utilizing the rhinestones he first encountered in burlesque. From 1949
to 1983, Nudie designed hundreds of eye-catching suits, including Elvis Presley’s gold lamé
tuxedo with rhinestone-studded lapels. Embellished with figurative embroidery, gems, and
metallic threads, Nudie’s flamboyant costumes became de rigueur among Grand Ole Opry stars
and celluloid cowboys like Gene Autry. Nudie’s head designer in the late ‘50s, Manuel Cuevas,
was followed by fellow Mexican immigrant Jaime Castaneda. Behind the scenes, women such as

Rose Clements and Nudie’s wife Bobbie were also responsible for much of the imaginative
embroidery.

In effect, Nudie Suits were the precursor of the music video, with clever embroidery illustrating
a hit song - like Webb Pierce’s “In the Jailhouse Now” outfit, decorated with a buckaroo behind
bars - or a performer’s personal symbols - such as Opry star Porter Wagoner’s embroidered
wagon wheels - or Gram Parsons’ provocative sex, drugs & rock & roll imagery. Parsons’ “Sin
City” suit, embroidered with cannabis leaves and pharmaceuticals, as well as outfits made for
Elton John, the Byrds’ Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn, Janis Joplin, and members of the
Rolling Stones, ZZ Top, and Grateful Dead took the suits to a new audience. “A Nudie Suit was
a walking canvas,” says Chris Hillman. Janis wrote to a friend, “I’m getting a pants and vest
outfit. Purple w/flowers & scroll work, encrusted w/all sorts of colored rhinestones. Real flashy
colored rhinestones!” Though the suits fell out of fashion in Nashville, they were brought back in
the ‘80s by upstarts Marty Stuart, Dwight Yoakam, and Chris Hillman and his Desert Rose Band,
who began ordering custom gear from Manuel and Jaime. Yet another generation’s embrace was
hinted at in 2018, when Grammy-nominated Kesha wore a vintage Nudie suit on the Red Carpet
and in 2019 when Gillian Welch and David Rawlings performed at the Oscars in matching
vintage Nudies. Today artists like Beyonce, Post Malone and Orville Peck have embraced their
own Nudie suit style.

Our lively roundtable discussion will include appropriately attired experts on Nudie suits and
those who wear them. We’ll hear behind-the-scenes stories about the evolution of the Nudie suit
and how it’s been used to convey diverse messaging from performers. We will present dazzling
images of Nudie suits from the 1950s to today.