Sweet Air: Modernism, Regionalism, and American Popular Song by Edward P. Comentale (review)

In his ambitious study of popular music and modernity, Edward P. Comentale looks at blues, country, folk, and rockabilly, and traces “how earlier musical forms generated new attitudes and stances that allowed people to engage and cope with the experiences of being or becoming modern” (6). Sweet Air challenges both a romantic embrace of authenticity of these musical styles (such as Greil Marcus’ notion of an “old, weird America”) as well as the critique of the culture industry by the Frankfurt School and stretches the concept of modernity to include poor rural communities. Individual chapters of the book depict some much-discussed performers, but Comentale manages to present them in a different light through his reading of music as “affective” and through his focus on modern technologies like the radio and the phonograph. By connecting them to literature, music, and art of the avant-garde, Comentale exposes modernist aesthetics in the works of Charley Patton, the Carter Family, Woody Guthrie, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly.

Sweet Air’s fresh perspective on old music is commendable but somewhat dehistoricized. Choosing a time frame that roughly stretches from 1910 to 1960 might have been a bit too broad, and the “airiness” of the argument does not always hold up to historical data, for instance, when Bessie Smith is discussed as a representative of the Delta blues. The last chapter of the book, “a mash-up of Buddy Holly, John Cage and Jacques Derrida,” is the most daring but also the most confusing (26). Holly certainly was more than a sentimental singer but to read his lyrics as avant-garde poetry does seem like a bit of a stretch. In other chapters, Comentale’s emphasis of modernist alienation tends to completely erase the spirituality that plays an important part particularly in blues and country music. Finally, the book suffers by focusing on almost exclusively male performers and by ignoring any transnational dimensions of modernity.

All this is not to say that Sweet Air is without merit. Studies of popular music genres of the first half of the twentieth century oftentimes are indeed marred by an uncritical belief in a supposedly premodern authenticity of poor Southerners, and Comentale’s book can help to understand the fallacy of such thinking. In addition, accounts of modernity tend to focus on urban elites and exclude rural communities, and Sweet Air corrects this misconception. Connecting the provocative push of the text’s dense arguments with a more specific historic analysis and more varied representations of gender and national identity could lead to a significant reshaping of popular music scholarship.