Diane Pecknold makes a significant, lively intervention in the fields of American studies, media studies, and country music studies. She offers a smart, historicized account of how complex the dynamics of commercialism and audience reception were in the formative decades of the country music industry. A valuable case study, her book should excite scholars invested in active audience models. It also demonstrates the effectiveness of media studies models which insist on the importance of analyzing the interrelations among production, consumption, text, and sociohistorical context in shaping meaning.
Her book gives a vivid account of country music fans who have always had complicated, deeply emotional connections to the genre. It fleshes out the role of industry professionals, from DJs to song publishers, who were all fighting for control of the industry's products, profits, and cultural meanings. Covering the 1920s to the 1970s, her book not only illuminates the evolution of country music but also sheds new light on the degree to which production and consumption forces can be deeply nuanced and often surprising in their effects on popular music and popular culture.
Pecknold's real innovation is her analysis of both production and consumption in a way other scholars have not fully done. Critics have traditionally pointed out that country music's construction of authenticity involves a perceived tension between art and the market, between the music's antimodern nostalgia for rural agrarianism versus modernity and the commercialization of the mass media marketplace. Pecknold complicates that picture. As we know, those narratives of authenticity are constructed, stories different cultural actors (from singers and songwriters to record producers and radio programmers) wish to tell about a popular music genre at a particular sociohistorical moment.
Pecknold uncovers what performers, fans, and producers thought about this perceived tension between art and commerce at any given time. What she finds is revelatory. During this period, the industry used commercialism to advance itself, often by creating images of professional musicians and respectable “affluent” working-class fans (even though the genre started out with broader audience appeals), which it used to counterbalance negative stereotypes of “hillbillies.” Meanwhile, the fans used what they understood to be self-consciously theatrical representations of a rural past to create an identity for themselves (many being southern rural-to-urban migrants in the 1920s–1960s).
While traditional histories suggest country fans resisted commercialism, favoring a traditional, past-obsessed culture, Pecknold proves that fans were aware of commercialism and often embraced it because the mass media (especially radio) was precisely what would allow them to engage with a national imagined community formed through appreciation of this music. That paradoxical merger of tradition with modernity is what defines the genre.
Drawing on Country Music Foundation archives, Pecknold covers early fan interest in validating folk traditions, a 1950s ambivalence about the nation's rural past, and 1960s–1970s efforts to make country music a symbol of a right-wing working class. Always attentive to cultural politics and gender dynamics, Pecknold offers a tour de force reception history.
