Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (review)

Look not to the "old cabin on the hill" as the fountainhead of early-twentieth-century "hillbilly" music; look instead, Patrick Huber convincingly argues, to the industrial textile mills of the Piedmont South. Even the seemingly archaic sounds of early hillbilly legend "Fiddlin'" John Carson's short-bowed fiddle, according to Huber, owe more to Carson's decades-long stint as a weaver and foreman in Atlanta textile factories than to his apocryphal claims to be a moonshiner fresh off the mountaintop farm. Like the biographies of other musicians Huber carefully contextualizes in this well-researched and truly enlightening book, Carson's life opens a window onto the tight relationship between southern industrialization and the rise of commercial country music.

Huber's thesis is argued most forcefully in the book's long introduction. Here he broadly explores early country music history within a backdrop of "social dislocation, mass migration, class formation, urban life, industrial work, race relations, and labor strife" (p. 18) in the mill cities of the Piedmont region stretching from Virginia to Alabama. He demonstrates that early commercial country music was "as thoroughly modern in its origins and evolution as its quintessentially modern counterpart, jazz" (p. xiv).

The bulk of the book uses biographical studies to track two related themes: first, how southern urban mill life shaped the commercialization of "hillbilly" music from the 1920s to the 1940s, and second, how musicians who were also textile workers contributed to the genre and its later incarnations as country and western, bluegrass, and western swing. The first theme shines through most clearly in Huber's chapters on "Fiddlin'" John Carson and Dave McCarn. Carson, the first musician to gain widespread fame for recording mass-marketed "old time" fiddle tunes, is often seen by music historians as a preindustrial holdover from the nineteenth century. He is recontextualized by Huber, however, as a skillful self-promoter firmly planted in the twentieth century who masked his urban-industrial identity for commercial gain. Dave McCarn is less well-known to historians, although students of folk music have long been acquainted with his 1930 protest song, "Cotton Mill Colic." Huber uses McCarn's biography to explore workers' frustrations with the time-discipline and paternalism of the cotton mill—discontentment that fueled a wave of strikes during the Great Depression. Importantly, Huber demonstrates that this dissatisfaction centered not on a critique of industrial capitalism, but instead emerged from frustration at low wages that prevented full enjoyment of the standard of living promised by modern mass consumer culture.

The second central theme of the book—the jazz-like modernity of early country music—is explored most clearly in a biographical chapter on Charlie Poole. Poole was an accomplished banjoist who, with his North Carolina Ramblers, married the string-band sounds of traditional rural southern music to the jazzier sounds of interwar popular music. Using a three-fingered picking style, Poole transformed the banjo from a vaudevillian rhythm instrument into a tool for precise delivery of complex melodies and counterpoints. Variations on Poole's technique would pave the way for the post–World War II emergence of bluegrass—itself a thoroughly modern musical genre that too many casual listeners have interpreted as a throwback to a mythic preindustrial past.

Less effectively, Huber's book promises to offer "historians a means of understanding how southern white workers experienced, negotiated, and responded to far-reaching economic and social revolutions" (p. xvi). Certainly, Huber demonstrates how a handful of individuals responded to industrialization, as in his carefully researched study of Dorsey Dixon, who penned the song "Wreck on the Highway" popularized by country star Roy Acuff in 1942. A prolific but underappreciated songwriter, Dixon bemoaned what he saw as the secularization and atomization of southern society attendant on industrialization. Huber's analysis of Dixon's musical preaching of the gospel of community life and familial devotion is insightful and interesting, but it is never clear to...