Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-Tonk Angels: The Women of Barn Dance Radio (review)

Kristine McCusker’s first monograph continues her efforts to establish gender as a key component in country music’s identity, a task begun in A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (2004), an essay collection co-edited with Diane Pecknold. McCusker believes it is not enough to add women’s stories to country music history. Instead, understanding how historical actors constructed and continually negotiated gender requires a rethinking of some basic assumptions about the genre.

Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-Tonk Angels asserts the importance of women in barn dance radio, a phenomenon that established some of country music’s most important practices and themes. McCusker breaks from those who claim that women were important only because they succeeded in a male-dominated industry, arguing instead that these women were crucial in shaping it. The themes she sees emerging out of barn dance radio that became embedded in country music are, first, that barn dance radio inherited vaudeville’s view that in order to be commercially successful it needed to be respectable, and therefore the industry needed women on stage and in the audience. Second, rural images and performance styles in barn dance radio belied the performers’ modern business practices, and female performers walked a tightrope between the two poles. Finally, women’s performance of old-time music served multiple purposes beyond building a music industry, including, for example, rejuvenating a national culture some believed undermined by commercial media in the 1920s. In a collective biography approach, she uses the lives of seven women – and their own voices, whenever possible – to discuss these themes. She draws on a variety of sources, including new material like oral history and an unpublished autobiography as well as archival research at institutions as diverse as Armed Forces Radio, the Grand Ole Opry, and the Bayer Corporation.

The book’s seven chapters follow her subject’s lives and progress chronologically. The first chapter establishes one of McCusker’s key ideas: barn dance radio’s vaudeville roots and how these influences translated to radio. Drawing on work by scholars like M. Allison Kibler and Susan Glenn, McCusker argues that theatrical traditions from vaudeville, “a belief in a national theater that required women both as moral characters and as something pretty to consume – formed the core of the barn dance radio genre” (13). More specifically, vaudeville offered stock characters that became central in barn dance radio: the comedienne, the sentimental mother, and the cowgirl. Early-twentieth-century local-color writers like Emma Bell Miles and their romantic view of southern life provided the time and place for these characters to blossom. The favorite locale was Appalachia, where a “pure” folk culture thrived because generations of women protected it from commercial culture’s corrupting influences. Although inspired in part by vaudeville, radio executives found further reason to hire women. Execs, nervous about beaming directly into the sacrosanct private sphere, liked the idea of female moral stewardship.

By tracing the careers of Linda Parker, Lulu Belle Wiseman, the Girls of the Gold West, Lily May Ledford, Minnie Pearl, and Rose Lee Maphis, the succeeding chapters track barn dance radio’s development ca. 1932–1960 and the undeniable role women had in shaping it. Linda Parker (nee Jeanne Muenich), who performed on WLS’s National Barn Dance 1932–1935, and her manager, John Lair, created an archetype of the mountain woman/sentimental mother, becoming “the first solo Southern female image that combined vaudeville, ideas about Appalachia, and radio technology” (29). Parker offered Chicago’s diverse rural migrants an image of feminine stability in era seemingly defined by chaos and (masculine) economic crisis. Lulu Belle Wiseman, who built on and modified Parker’s archetype, embodied a paradox. Her guise of old-time authenticity – because it was self-consciously crafted and maintained – highlighted the genre’s growing professionalism and modernity. Her persona emerged from a nexus created by sponsors who paid...