Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (review)

As a relatively young field of academic inquiry, country music benefits from a wide range of scholarly paradigms and passions, and from the refreshing sense that its agendas have yet to be fully articulated. Indeed, the parameters of its study are in constant flux, and it is little wonder. Country music contains multitudes: it invites us to examine a music born at the intersection of folk and commercial practices with a history of navigating back and forth across both. It points to a dialectic interplay of class and identity, as music projecting working-class ethos while simultaneously appealing to a much broader cross-section of society. It demands a consideration of race, particularly the implied and lived implications of our society's segregated commercial musical categories, and how country music's stamp of "whiteness" refracts the past and future relationship of blacks and whites in the southern United States. It speaks to aspects of gender identity, trends toward and away from political conservatism, and intersections of religion with contemporary mass culture. And it begs for an interdisciplinary approach like that brought by Aaron Fox to his exploration of commercial country music as a viable source of meaning in a working-class South Texas community.

Fox spent several years in regular association with a group of people in the small town of Lockhart, playing music, drinking beer, and, in the local vernacular, "talkin' shit." As an ethnographer, Fox approached his topic simultaneously as both insider (fellow American, Texas resident, musician fluid and knowledgeable about country music styles) and outsider (native of the northeastern United States, self-professed liberal, product of an economically stable, middle-class, urban, academic family). Fox describes the challenges of navigating this dual status early in the book, reflecting both his own humanity and that of the people he writes about; thus, establishing the boundaries—and, to his credit, exposing the limits—of his own ethnographic authority.

Fox's main point is that the human voice is the locus of cultural meaning in working class Texas culture. In this community, which places high value on oral communication, both singers and speakers strive for the artful use of words and of verbal expression's non-referential (and often more significant) aspects like repetition, intonation, and intensity. The mastery of these verbal arts celebrated in country music's iconic stars (George Jones, Hank Williams, or Johnny Cash, for example) is the same mastery that makes local figures like Randy Meyer, Larry "Hoppy" Hopkins, and Big Judy Laughlin crucial representatives of continuity and musical identity in a community centered around a Lockhart beer joint called "Ann's Other Place" during the early 1990s.

The centrality of verbal exchange marks both song and speech in this country music-oriented culture. It confers upon some non-musicians, for example, heightened status as good conversationalists or as people gifted at defusing tense social moments; its absence accounts for the shaky social standing of others, individuals whose presence is seen as socially disruptive ("foolish," in Fox's word), or otherwise unwelcome. But in working-class Texas culture as Fox presents it, speech and song blend into one another constantly—speech is a more mundane yet vital resource for song, while song is a special "denaturalized" expression whose authenticity is measured by how effectively it crystallizes the ordinary sense of everyday speech. The fluctuation between these two ends of a verbal spectrum finds its apotheosis in the figure of a celebrated local musician in Lockhart, whose verbal skill and vocal artistry generate powerful personal charisma both onstage and off. The broader significance of these local singers lies in their ability to carry a sense of communal identity. In the fleeting moments of a formal stage performance or an intimate jam session, they connect meaningfully with the lives of local people, publicly voicing the interior struggles and triumphs of a room full of individuals.

Fox brings to...