Anthropological Quarterly

Haugh, Wendi A.
Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (review)
Anthropological Quarterly - Volume 80, Number 4, Fall 2007, pp. 1209-1213

George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research

Wendi A. Haugh - Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (review) - Anthropological Quarterly 80:4 Anthropological Quarterly 80.4 (2007) 1209-1213 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Wendi A. Haugh Williams College Aaron A. Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Duke University Press, 2004. 363 pp. In Real Country, Aaron Fox has produced a theoretically sophisticated and beautifully written ethnography, giving readers a lyrical depiction of working class Texan barroom life, while developing a theory of the speaking and singing voice as central to working class culture. In a place where "poverty and the risk of poverty" (31) are pervasive, and work is "alienated, body-wrecking, and mind-numbing" (32), people construct unique selves and create spaces of warm sociability through country music and other verbal art forms. Working in the zone where linguistic anthropology and ethnomusicology overlap, building on and contributing to both disciplines (not to mention cultural studies), Fox makes a persuasive case for the importance of song in the constitution of particular social and cultural worlds, and of the selves who inhabit those worlds. Linguistic anthropologists have long produced sensitive analyses of a wide range of verbal art forms, including stories, jokes, praise, oratory, and song. Real Country is no exception, and has a depth that comes from many years of fieldwork; crucially, Fox also...