Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Music Scene (review)

The role of popular music in the definition, articulation, and actualization of individual and collective identities is an accepted paradigm. How a particular style of popular music, its performance context, or its various functions manifests identity is largely determined on a case-by-case basis, shaped in no small part by the theoretical framework of the analyst. For Travis D. Stimeling, in Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Music Scene, the focus of his work is the "music itself," composed, performed, recorded, broadcasted via radio and television, marketed, and commented upon by the musicians, both headliners and sidemen, recording engineers, radio disc jockeys, television and record producers, and journalists—all in an effort to explore the progressive country music scene in Austin, Texas, covering primarily the years 1972-78. He draws from and expands on a nearly forty-year history of secondary literature on the Austin music scene, offering for the first time a musicologist's perspective. Indeed, what distinguishes Stimeling's work on the topic is the attention he gives to the music. Informing his analysis are discussions of specific compositions, performance practices, and styles, bringing "into relief the important role that music, as a sonic artifact with culturally specific meanings, plays in the construction of individual and collective identity and the political, cultural, and social work that music accomplishes within scenes more generally" (p. xi). To that end, Stimeling's chapters include a number of case studies, the first two on the emergence of folk singing as a distinctly countercultural act at such venues as Threadgill's (Austin's oldest honky tonk) in the early 1960s and the development of the "progressive country" radio format at Austin radio station KOKE-FM in the early 1970s. Here Stimeling draws from standard secondary sources including Jan Reid (The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, rev. ed. [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004], Bill Malone (Country Music U.S.A., rev. ed. [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002], and Barry Shank (Dissonant Identities: The Rock 'n' Roll Scene In Austin, Texas [Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994]), all arguing for the significance of Threadgill's in the emergence of the Austin music scene in the early 1960s. Stimeling shows not only how owner Kenneth Threadgill served as the patriarch of counterculture, but also how, with his love for and performance of the music of adopted Texan Jimmie Rodgers, he was a conduit to the "presumably unmediated golden age of Texan music" (p. 24). Stimeling highlights the efforts of Austin musicians and audiences "to reshape Threadgill into a symbol of idealized Texan past," allowing participants to "position themselves as heirs of a distinctly Texan musical heritage" (p. 24). His take on the significance of Austin's progressive country radio format at KOKE-FM is informed by recent e-mail communication with disc jockey Joe Gracey, just one of numerous interviews of participants of this scene that support the author's arguments. Throughout the book, Stimeling makes use of sources that include oral histories—interviews with such figures and musicians who participated in the progressive country music scene as Marcia Ball, Ray Benson, Guy Clark, Bob Livingston, Michael Martin Murphey, to name only a few—as well as archival research.

In chapters 2 and 3 Stimeling provides a detailed study of the musical construction of the cosmic cowboy and the redneck—two of the progressive country music scene's most prominent icons. While his analyses provide further support to his overall thesis, the attention he affords to the critics of the music and movement marks a particularly significant contribution to our understanding of the Austin music scene. Not everyone saw the commodification of the cosmic cowboy image and the national attention ultimately afforded to the progressive country movement as a positive, and Stimeling offers the...