Baseball and Country Music (review)

"In other words, both baseball and country music are tickets to the American Dream." Don Cusic explores the common threads between two different, but uniquely American, forms of ritual in Baseball and Country Music. For Cusic baseball and country music merit comparison because they are two aspects of American culture that transcend race, class, and gender. If you have exceptional talent in either, society rewards you with opportunities that otherwise would not be open to you. However, baseball and country music are more than boosts up the social ladder. They are democratic forms of expression in that anyone can participate regardless of skill level. Americans have played roles (professional or not) in the evolution of these rituals, and in turn these ritual forms of expression have captured the voice of America.

With Baseball and Country Music, Cusic swings for the fences but ultimately pops up to the pitcher. Cusic's thesis is fascinating but perhaps too lofty of a goal to achieve in 182 pages. Instead of investigating how baseball and country music historically reflected the American ethos, a goal I perhaps misinterpreted by the book's American Studies classification, Cusic gives his reader two side-by-side chronologies, which occasionally intersect (such as at country music legend, Charley Pride, and his failed spring training tryout with the New York Mets). The only time Cusic really grapples with his thesis is when he talks about the two cultural institutions historically in terms of American race relations. In his comparison of professional baseball's and country music's integration histories, Cusic develops a fascinating hypothesis. He does not opt for the elementary, but oft-quoted, argument of geography as explanation for their divergent paths taken on the issue. In other words, he does not hold country music's deep southern roots accountable for its industry's lack of integration, nor does he explain away Major League baseball's integration as a result of its predominately being located in northern urban centers. For Cusic, the integration of Major League Baseball was accepted by 1950s America overall because it was a team sport. A player was only one of nine. You could still root for a team and pay to cross its spinning turnstiles, even if you disliked one of its players. However, Nashville executives were attuned to the fact that the performer is the focal point in country music. If you disliked a performer, you were not going to buy tickets to his or her show.

Cusic runs into problems when he tries to cover a span of history that is too large for his set parameters. As a reader I would have appreciated his work more if he had picked one topic (race, class, or gender) and expounded in depth on it in relation to baseball and country music. When Cusic discusses race relations in Baseball and Country Music, he shows us glimpses of a more thoroughly argued book.

Cusic's theses throughout the book are frustrating to follow because he leaves many of them unproven. Because Cusic held himself to covering almost an entire century of American history in 182 pages, the reader is left with many statements, although provocative, that are not followed by argument or interpretation and with only two pages of endnotes. Four chapters are missing citations entirely. Cusic, a professor of music business at Belmont University and a songwriter out of Nashville, unquestionably knows his history of country music. However, almost all of his baseball sources are secondary, and some of his constructed history of the game is incorrect. For example, Cusic or his publisher has Eddie Miksis playing for the Philadelphia Phillies instead of the Chicago Cubs when he was shot by a fan and became one of many inspirations for Malamud's The Natural. Although these are minor points Cusic comes across as not devoting the same time to the study of baseball that he gave country music.

Don Cusic constructs a fascinating and provocative thesis in Baseball and Country Music. Although...