Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South by Charles L. Hughes (review)

In terms of debunking myths and challenging dominant popular narratives, historians of southern music have certainly been busy in recent years. In Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South, Charles L. Hughes adds to this literature by challenging the often simplistic representations of black and white music made in the American South from the post–World War II era to the early 1980s. Covering the emergence of what Hughes terms the “country-soul triangle” of Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Country Soul considers the interconnected careers of numerous artists and record labels such as Stax Records and FAME Studios, now iconic names in the realms of popular music history (p. 2). For Hughes, stories of southern music making are all too often shrouded in myths of interracial harmony, placing the history of southern soul outside the dominant narratives of American race relations. Black and white musicians, artists, and producers in the “triangle” are often depicted as working effortlessly side by side to provide an example of the possibilities of integration during the charged era of civil rights protest and mass resistance.

Using a “labor-based” approach that focuses on the working practices of musicians and producers, Hughes seeks to adequately account for the role of race in these narratives by examining the construction and deconstruction of musical color lines (p. 6). Black and white musicians, he argues, helped create the racial definitions of country and soul but, at the same time, challenged those definitions because their experiences as musicians meant they were conversant across both genres and racial boundaries. Even when this “interracial dreamland” was seemingly reversed by the oppositional racial politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s—when soul became “blacker” and country became “whiter”—musicians of both races continued to collaborate (p. 191). However, while this collaboration was certainly a dominant feature of the music industry, Hughes highlights how more often than not black musicians did not benefit as much as their white counterparts did from these endeavors. For whites, acknowledging and making use of black musicians and influences allowed them to validate their art, while at the same time demonstrating the redemptive power of white southern music. This process was much more problematic for black artists, as in the case of Arthur Alexander and Joe Tex, who struggled to successfully cross over into the “white” territory of country music.

Country Soul provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the apparent spaces of racial harmony in the country-soul triangle. Interviews with musicians and producers, alongside an analysis of press responses to music making in the South, allow intriguing insights into the attitudes and ambitions of figures such as Rick Hall, Jerry Wexler, Billy Sherrill, Steve Cropper, Carla Thomas, Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams, Joe South, and many more. These artists are carefully contextualized by a considered appreciation of the changing social and political context of the civil rights era and the emergence of Black Power and the New Right after 1968. The strength of Hughes’s thesis is that by focusing on the processes of music production, rather than using the music itself as a reflection of wider realities, it provides a persuasive counternarrative to popular histories provided by authors such as Peter Guralnick. The book thus follows in the footsteps of the enlightening and counterfactual scholarship on southern music by Karl Hagstrom Miller and Elijah Wald. Some music historians may struggle with Hughes’s assumption that the reader is conversant in the various black/white and country/soul genre distinctions and aesthetics. However, this omission actually favors the objective of Country Soul, demonstrating the processes and contradictions that conditioned the actual production of those genres and how they were much more intertwined with the wider racial politics of the South.