Field Notes 4.14.09

Verse Construction/Song writing field notes


Having been told by a favorite guest coach of the team that our team was not as fun as her own, the team decides to take her challenge of its socialing ability head on, and create a song just for her. The following notes come from a team meeting/get together with the express purpose of writing this song.


-Girls text/e-mail one another about meeting time & location
-Meet 5 minutes late, friendly greetings, etc.
-Previously, one of the players had e-mailed a coach to get “dish” about our guest’s rugby days, and to get (embarrassing) stories about her rugging career.
-Know the coach well enough to decide what might be too offensive & what might be funny
-Choose well known song with which to substitute lyrics
-Begin with a chorus, something that isn’t too specific and can be repeated and be funny every time.

**Verses
-Using embarrassing info they create sentences, inversion or rearranging of sentence structure to make it rhyme. Use internet rhyming dictionary to facilitate writing.
-joking and laughing ensues
-stories of past experiences with this guest coach told by older girls to younger girls.
-discussion of what content is appropriate and what isn’t
-Rearrange words and phrases according to agreed upon guidelines
-Type lyrics and email them to one another
**This was interesting difference between this new song and the traditional rugby canon tunes. This one, however, was never sung at a social, it was sung to our guest at the end of practice the day after it was written, which may account for the permissibility of written words. Were this song to become a “regular” during socials, there is no doubt that the written lyrics would discarded and it would be passed on through oral tradition.
-The following day, this song was performed on the pitch for our guest, who received a printed copy of the lyrics so she could better understand them during the production.
-Coach assured us that we were no longer an “unfun” team in her book


Research Notes


-This is a really interesting article that compares men’s rugby songs to women’s rugby songs. Wheatley discusses first the history of rugby as a hyper masculine sport with its own unique culture in which women were marginalized and thought of as cheerleaders or “rugger huggers”. She then discusses the genesis of the women’s culture and how the men’s lyrics and other subcultural capital were transformed to have new meanings for female rugby athletes.

-Points to many reasons for the female rugby social behavior including:

1. Conscientious resistance to mainstream culture
2. Using the drink-up as an escape from society’s norms
3. Varying interpretations of women’s social positioning and ways to change it

-Explanatory passage from Dunning article about gender roles in sport. “…modern sport emerged as part of a ‘civilizing’ transformation one aspect of which was an equalizing shift, however slight, in the balance of power between the sexes.” (169) His article has an interesting section on the macho subculture in rugby, which, in conjunction with Wheatley’s creates a convincing picture of the evolution of the women’s game from the men’s.

(517 words)

References


Dunning, Eric. 1990. “Sport as a Male Preserve: Notes on the Social Sources of Masculine Identity and its Transformations.” In Women, Sport, and Culture, eds. Susan Birrel and Cheryl L. Cole. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. pps. 163-179.


Wheatley, Elizabeth E. 1990. “Subcultural Subversions: Comparing Discourses on Sexuality inn Men’s and Women’s Rugby Songs.” In Women, Sport, and Culture, eds. Susan Birrel and Cheryl L. Cole. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. pps. 193-211.