Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music by Nadine Hubbs (review)

The uncouth words in the title of Nadine Hubbs’s fascinating new monograph, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, are provocative because they do not seem to belong together. If you feel puzzled about how to connect “rednecks” and “queers” in a logical way, then Hubbs has already made her first point without us even opening the book: much of what we think we know about rednecks and queers and how they relate is false. This is a clever trick, but in grabbing our attention, Hubbs has also obscured what I would say is the principal topic of the book, which is a shame because it is so neglected, so important, and so challenging. While it does refer to rednecks, queers, and country music throughout, the book uses these as seductive hooks to talk about class—more specifically, to show the myriad ways in which the dominant middle class misunderstands and misrepresents working-class culture, and to rectify this by explaining the actual contours of working-class life, including its values, its aesthetics, its politics, its identity, and its social functioning. To do this, Hubbs draws on a wide range of supporting material from history, sociology, cultural studies, and yes, country music.

Country music, as it turns out, is a surprisingly effective entryway into discussions of class, since it not only has its roots in the white working-class community, but is also seen as a symbol of the redneck by the dominant middle class. Hubbs opens the first chapter by asking why it is that when someone from the middle class is asked about their music tastes they will so often respond with the phrase “anything but country,” exhibiting a curious openness to musical diversity that stops abruptly short of country music. She argues convincingly that this conspicuous dismissal of country is a rejection of working-class identity that acts as a means through which people can affirm their “good” middle-class status while rejecting the various “bad” social attributes associated with the redneck culture. As she puts it, “the moral suspicion attaching to country music is the moral suspicion attaching to the white working class as (purported) ground zero for America’s most virulent social ills: racism, sexism, and homophobia” (p. 42). Furthermore, as she goes on to point out, in the early decades of the twentieth century, the views we today call racism, sexism, and homophobia were considered acceptable by the dominant middle class; while members of the working class were judged for having lenient views on race, gender, and sexuality that were considered backwards and morally lax. The pattern that emerges is that the culturally-dominant bourgeoisie constructs the less-powerful working class as a negative foil for themselves, in a handily constructed binary similar to “Occident vs. Orient,” and “man vs. woman,” in which the construction of the other has much more to do with perceptions of the self than facts “on the ground.”

With this basic lens of suspicion in regard to middle-class prejudice established, Hubbs moves on in the second chapter, “Sounding the Working-Class Subject,” to explore the contours of working-class life through an exploration of country music. In this discussion she rejects the common impulse to construct rednecks as a negative foil for bourgeoisie, insisting that “working-class culture is a culture in its own right” (p. 51). This chapter, which comprises a full third of the book and draws heavily on sociological studies of working-class culture, offers a convincing critique of the trend in both popular culture and scholarship to universalize middle-class values, norms, and modes of expression.

She explains, for example, how the impulse in country music to highlight its class difference in lyrics, emphasizing the artists’ humble origins and celebrating “being country,” (e.g., Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places”), should not be understood as...