Exploring Roots Music: Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly (review)

The John Edwards Memorial Foundation (JEMF) was established in 1962 by Eugene Earle, Ed Kahn, Fred Hoeptner, D. K. Wilgus, and Archie Green to find a permanent location for the record collection of Australian country music enthusiast and journalist John Edwards and to commemorate his life and work. Beginning in 1965, Kahn and Norm Cohen began publishing a newsletter to appear “several times a year at irregular intervals” (p. xviii), which would feature reports on the status of the organization, announcements of new work in the field of early country music, bibliographies, discographies, reprints, and correspondence. By the spring of 1969, the JEMF Newsletter was transformed into JEMF Quarterly, a publication that subsumed the work of the Newsletter and expanded it by including new work on other styles of roots music, including blues, jazz, and rock and roll.

Nolan Porterfield’s Exploring Roots Music: Twenty Years of the “JEMF Quarterly” is a masterfully edited collection of articles spanning the entire run of these publications. It documents the important figures and institutions of hillbilly and other roots musics, the contentious debates that consumed the organization’s energies, and the passion of a group of individual enthusiasts who continue to shape the direction of country music research. Faced with the task of paring down the nearly 250 articles published during the JEMF Quarterly’s two decades into a manageable volume, Porterfield selects those pieces that resonate most with today’s readers, choosing to omit those articles that may have been of importance to contemporaneous readers (including most review essays, correspondence, and articles “with a short shelf life” [p. xxvi]) as well as work that had been superseded by later scholarship that is more complete or more readily accessible to modern readers.

The twenty-seven articles included in this volume can be divided into five general types: (1) oral histories of persons involved in early country music, (2) detailed studies of the history and business practices of radio stations and record companies, (3) explorations of the sources of early country songs and performance practices, (4) examinations of country music scenes and fan communities that exist outside the Southeast, and (5) position pieces on the definition of hillbilly music and the role of the music industry in shaping those definitions. Because the JEMF was established during the final days of many of the early pioneers of country music, many of the articles betray the sense of urgency—found throughout the various folk music revivals of the 1950s and 1960s—to collect any available information, to preserve the voices of even the most obscure figures before they disappeared, and to prevent the dilution and destruction of the music through commercial influences.

One significant article, Robert Cogswell’s “‘We Made Our Name in the Days of Radio’: A Look at the Career of Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper” (first published in the summer 1975 issue), is a nuanced study of an important early country music act that also captures some of the anxieties prevalent in much of the work appearing in JEMF Quarterly. Relying primarily on a series of interviews he did during 1974 with the Coopers, Cogswell refrains from merely summarizing these conversations and instead dedicates the majority of his article to extended quotations, which allow his consultants’ voices to speak. In addition, Cogswell does not limit his questions to the Coopers’ biographies and accomplishments; instead, he works to contextualize their career within the histories of the fledgling radio and recording industries. In this study, Cogswell treats a number of issues that have since become central to our understanding of the early country music industry, including song transmission and constructions of artist identity, and indicates that hillbilly music was created as the result of a multitude of industrial and cultural forces. Moreover, and perhaps most instructive to modern readers, Cogswell’s multifocal study skillfully avoids ideological debates over the origins of the music, in turn...