Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture Review

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Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture ReviewIf you read one book about country music, this is the one you should read. Fox's brilliant analysis sidesteps the whole Nashville-Dollywood-Branson commericial thing to explore how working class people in rural Texas and Illinois use country music to express their senses of self and their aesthetic and cultural values. The way he writes about the singing voice and the way he incorporates the character of the people he studied with into his presentation is about the best I've seen. Why only four stars, you ask? Well.....It can get a little dense sometimes - he has a theoretical point to make about music and culture, and he is after all a scholar (teaches in the music department at Columbia University). But bear with that and you'll be very happy you did. If you love country music, read this book.Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture OverviewIn Lockhart, Texas, a rural working-class town just south of Austin, country music is a way of life. Conversation slips easily into song, and the songs are full of conversation. Anthropologist and musician Aaron A. Fox spent years in Lockhart making research notes, music, and friends. In Real Country, he provides an intimate, in-depth ethnography of the community and its music. Showing that country music is deeply embedded in the textures of working-class life, Fox argues that it is the cultural and intellectual property of working-class people and not only of the Nashville-based music industry or the stars whose lives figure so prominently in popular and scholarly writing about the genre.Fox spent hundreds of hours observing, recording, and participating in talk and music-making in homes, beer joints, and garage jam sessions. He renders the everyday life of Lockhart's working-class community in detail, right down to the ice cold beer, the battered guitars, and the technical skills of such local musical legends as Randy Meyer and Larry "Hoppy" Hopkins. Throughout, Fox focuses on the human voice. His analyses of conversations, interviews, songs, and vocal techniques show how feeling and experience are expressed, and how local understandings of place, memory, musical aesthetics, working-class social history, race, and gender are shared. In Real Country, working-class Texans re-imagine their past and give voice to the struggles and satisfactions of their lives in the present through music.

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