Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music ed. by Diane Pecknold (review)

Diane Pecknold’s edited collection acknowledges an African American presence in country music that goes beyond a matter of influence or aesthetic borrowing by arguing that “African American performers and audience members . . . not only lent their blues sensibilities and chord progressions to white country musicians,” they created and perpetuated old-time and country American music over the course of the twentieth century (1). Pecknold’s title, Hidden in the Mix, is slightly misleading since the essays most often reveal the complexity of an American musical complexion and imply that African American old-time and country music is worthy of study beyond its relationship to country music generally.

The essays, although not arranged chronologically and uneven in tone and substance, make up a highly readable volume that should appeal to scholars of American culture, identity, music, and history. Taken in sum, they advance the aesthetic statements of Alabama intellectual Albert Murray, who articulated a similar thesis in The Omni–Americans (New York, 1970): “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite.” American country music, as illustrated by Hidden in the Mix, is a composite churned from a highly American process that amalgamates race, class, and (to a lesser extent) gender.

The myth of whiteness associated with American country music is a matter of racially politicized genres and marketing. The point is best illustrated by Pecknold’s excellent piece on Ray Charles, “Making Country Modern: The Legacy of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.” Charles released the landmark album in 1962, when racialized genre conventions left no context in which its highly amalgamated genius could be interpreted or embraced, since record companies often intentionally reinforced commercial and vernacular divergences among consumers. The amalgamating process inherent in aural production had often been purposefully concealed. The Genius of Soul had long been re-appropriating so-called white interpretations of black styles and exercising the “shared roots and continuous exchange between musics;” he had always “understood popular music as a process of natural cross-racial exchange” (85).

That aural cross-fertilization occurred frequently in country music, which is to say, southern music, has everything to do with proximity. As Michael Awkward points out in his discussion of Al Green, country constitutes a space in which “historically divided peoples, whose cultures and bloody interaction have come to define a region, can come together productively” (202). The point is underscored in Adam Gasgow’s treatment of Cowboy Troy’s “transracial aesthetics.” Cowboy Troy’s flagrant mixing of “black” rap and “white” country music demands “that we understand both musical traditions as already amalgamated” (238). Gasgow interprets “I Play Chicken with the Train” as “a creolized history” of “frontier brag-talk” and “urban rap braggadocio” owing to the influence of “African praise-song, . . . blackface minstrelsy,” and western frontier life before Emancipation calling to mind Constance Rourke’s configuration of the American national character (238).

Particularly interesting is Barbara Ching’s “If Only They Could Read between the Lines: Alice Randall and the Integration of Country Music,” the only essay that explores African American women in country music. Ching explicates Randall’s elision of fiction and lyric, the extensive influence she has had, and a surprising subtext that explores the relationship of country music to the black female understanding of racial ambiguity.

Also interesting as a history of race and marketing is the final essay in the collection, David Sanjek’s “What’s Syd Got to Do with It?: King Records, Henry Glover, and the Complex Achievement of Crossover.” Sanjeck allows the founder of King records, Sydney Nathan, to speak for himself as a Jew who welcomed African Americans to his company. Primarily a salesman, he recognized the talents of Henry Glover in assisting him in selling the products of a musical melting pot that was stoked largely by the phenomenon of recorded music...