Picture Book: Musicians with Mustaches
The mustache had a specific cultural career in rock and country music in the 1970s. A picture book entry on what it meant in the photographs.
The mustache reached peak cultural saturation in American male culture sometime around 1973 and retained its prominence until roughly 1982. In photographs of musicians from this period, it appears with a frequency that now reads as period signifier: you can date a photograph by the mustache alone if the subject is a male musician working in country, folk, or rock.
This picture book entry is about what the facial hair was doing in the visual culture of the era and what the photographs from that period carry as a result.
The mustache as visual marker
In the 1960s, the clean-shaven face was the default for mainstream male performers. The counterculture produced beards and longer hair. The mustache occupied a specific middle ground: slightly transgressive relative to the clean-shaven norm, less dramatic than the full beard, and available to a wider range of performers including those who occupied the country and country-rock space.
By 1973, the mustache had moved out of transgressive territory and into a general visual language of American masculinity that crossed genre lines. Country performers wore it. Rock performers wore it. Session musicians wore it. The result is a visual consistency across a lot of 1970s music photography that is now inseparable from the era's aesthetic.
The photographs
Music photography of the 1970s — press shots, tour photographs, album sleeve photography — shows the mustache in abundance. The artists who define the country-rock and Americana sound of the period are frequently mustachioed in their visual record.
Gram Parsons wore one in certain periods. Willie Nelson has maintained one continuously since the mid-1970s. The Band's various members were photographed with and without at different times. The mustache becomes a way of tracking the visual history of a decade.
What the photographs say now
Looking at this visual record now produces a specific kind of period recognition. The era is legible from the faces. This is not true of all periods in photography — contemporary faces are harder to date — but the 1970s mustache is a reliable timestamp.
The picture book entries at this site use photographs as entry points into the history they document. The Musicians with Mustaches entry is an excuse to look at a lot of 1970s music photography from a particular angle.
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