Sweet Dreams: The World of Patsy Cline ed. by Warren R. Hofstra (review)

Few country singers are as well-known outside country music fan circles as Patsy Cline. Her crossover hits, tragic death in a plane crash, and revival through a biopic and a postage stamp have made her an iconic figure in American popular culture. Cline’s hit recordings (especially “Crazy” and “I Fall to Pieces”) are prime examples of the “Nashville Sound,” a production aesthetic that eschewed fiddles and nasal vocals for a sophisticated soundscape of soft backing vocals and piano. It was this pop-oriented sound, often augmented by string arrangements, that opened the doors for Cline and others to cross over onto the pop charts during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Since a revival of her music beginning in the late 1970s, Cline has held an unshakable position in the pantheon of “classic” country stars while her songs stand as an antithesis to the music of newer “inauthentic” artists. Cline was also arguably the first female country star who launched her career without being a sidekick to a male star, being a member of a professional musical family, or singing an “answer song.”

In the history of country music scholarship, histories and topical studies dominate over close readings of single artists or the songs they produce. Projects that remedy the imbalance include work by Jocelyn R. Neal (The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Legacy in Country Music [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009]), Jonathan Silverman (Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010]), and Marcus Eli Desmond Harmon (“Harris/Cash: Identity, Loss, and Mourning at the Borders of Country Music” [Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011]). In this new volume on Cline, a focused analysis of one artist’s career again reaps rewards. Warren Hofstra’s edited collection Sweet Dreams: The World of Patsy Cline lifts the veil of stardom to reveal the social forces that made Cline a success. The topic of the book is not so much Cline’s music as the transformation of working-class Southerners into middle-class American consumers. This transformation changed how country musicians became stars and the way that country audiences interacted with their music. Cline took advantage of growing television ownership and the nationalization of popular culture to stake her claim on a middle-class lifestyle. Unlike collections whose contributions gather loosely around a common theme, Sweet Dreams advances a unified argument throughout, that “Cline’s own dreams for success and material comfort evolved side by side with the emergent American dream of middle-class society” (p. 3).

The authors of Sweet Dreams hail from a variety of disciplines, but what they have produced is an accessible work of social and cultural history, albeit lacking in critical theory. The book presents 1940s and 1950s America through detailed analyses of several spheres of society that tracked with Cline’s own experiences. After an editor’s introduction, the book opens with a short statement by Bill C. Malone that lays out one of the main presumptions of the rest of the book, that commercial country music depended upon modernization, especially in the South. With chapters on the geography of class in Cline’s hometown of Winchester, Virginia, the importance of “respectability” to one’s acceptance by middle-class America, and television’s popularity in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, the book outlines the terms on which Cline could begin her music career. The authors do not take the position that class and gender lines are rigid, however, but that the postwar economy provided a great opportunity for fluctuation that could complicate an identity like Cline’s at every turn. Kristine M. McCusker’s chapter on “Cultural Scripts and Patsy Cline’s Career in the 1950s” disputes the notion that Cline was a proto-feminist, a narrative advanced by stories of...