“I Remember when The Beatles Came": A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study of Women’s Musical Oral Histories

Combining corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, this article examines the language used by American women of the Boomer generation to describe what it meant to listen to rock music in the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on their first-hand accounts, the study focuses on the realisation of stance through which participants construct meaning and negotiate their positioning within a historically male-dominated cultural space. The findings reveal that they employ emotionally rich and evaluative language. This stance not only shapes their musical experiences but also serves as a means of resisting dominant, often stereotypical, models of fandom by foregrounding reflective, critical, and culturally significant forms of engagement. The study further demonstrates that incorporating corpus methods into oral history research can uncover specific linguistic patterns that might remain unnoticed in purely qualitative analyses. The article is relevant to the field of linguistics and may also be of interest to scholars in cultural studies, music studies, and memory studies.