Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubadour, and: Go Cat Go!: Rockabilly Music and Its Makers (review)

discovered the benefits of maintaining a low profile. Attempts to influence politics or to participate significantly in the local community are not well received. Nor have communities absorbed muchJapanese culture. Sushi has a long way to go before it replaces barbecue. The book illuminates important aspects ofthe much-heralded globalization of business through examining the complicated interaction and mutual adaptation oftwo different cultures both within several companies and in the broader community . The types of change that a foreign economic presence can bring to a community and the limits ofthat change both become clear. In the process, Kim raises significant issues about the role and malleability of culture in business. Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubadour By Ronnie Pugh Duke University Press, 1996 437 pp. Cloth, $29.95 Go Cat Go!: Rockabilly Music and Its Makers By Craig Morrison University of Illinois Press, 1996 300 pp. Cloth, $29.95 Reviewed by Bill C. MalonO, professor emeritus of history at Tulane University, New Orleans, now living in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the author of Country Music, USA and Southern Music/American Music. Ronnie Pugh's biography of Ernest Tubb and Craig Morrison's study ofthe rockabillies are more than worthy additions to the growing list ofbooks on southern musicians; they are also contributions to the history ofthe southern working class. Although they chronicle the lives and careers of very different types of musicians, they nevertheless tell us much about the transformation of working-class culture in the thirty years beginning with the Great Depression and about the ways in which working people coped with those dramatic changes. White working-class southerners don't 118 Reviews often get books written about them unless they become a public nuisance, as did Pretty Boy Floyd or Larry Flynt, or unless they excel in some area of public approval such as sports, military service, the ministry, or music. Musical excellence, as a matter of fact, didn't begin to inspire much in the way of academic scholarship until about thirty years ago, even though people like Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Bob Wills, Hank Williams, and Elvis Presley had long been demonstrating the veneration that southern folk have for their musical heroes. Since that time there has been an avalanche ofwriting on country musicians and related stylists. The quality and style of this material are of course highly uneven, ranging from nothing more than fan adulation and breezy journalistic prose to serious, analytic discourses such as Robert Cantwell's Bluegrass Breakdown and Greil Marcus's Mystery Train. Whether aimed at an academic audience, or at those who get their intellectual sustenance from drugstore magazine racks, this literature should command the attention of anyone who is interested in the history of southern working people. Country-music books often reveal little more than the perceptions of their writers, but with some exceptions, they also tell us much about the way working folk dealt with the powerful forces that have transformed their region and culture in this century. Music has accompanied every successive transformation of southern life, providing a sense of identity, community, and emotional release for people who were being relentlessly removed from their older social moorings. Like most of us who have written on southern music, the authors of the two books reviewed here began as fans of their subjects. Few writers, though, have been as refreshingly candid as Ronnie Pugh is when he talks about his relationship to Ernest Tubb. With no apparent desire to sample any other kind of experience , Pugh grew up in a comfortable, religiously devout, and ardently Republican home in Marshall, Texas, far removed from the working-class environment that spawned Ernest Tubb. He tells us, for example, that he "wouldn't dream of going" to the famous Reo Palm Isle dance hall, only thirty miles away in Longview . He first heard Ernest Tubb on his television show in 1966, long after the Texas Troubadour's peak years of stardom had passed. Pugh nevertheless writes with remarkable objectivity about his musical hero, convincingly describes the beer-joint milieu that first nourished Tubb's honky-tonk style of music, and persuasively argues that he was central to most of the significant innovations that...