The past decade has seen a spate of books about country music. Following in the footsteps of classic work by Bill Malone, a number of these recent works are outstanding, but even the best among them (Peterson 1999; Tichi 1994, 1998; Jensen 1998) have taken a Nashville-centric perspective (or, in the case of Ching 2003, anti-Nashville-centrism), exploring and interrogating the development of country as a commercial genre. Aaron Fox's Real country, by contrast, is distinctive in its detailed ethnographic exploration of country as a lived working-class reality expressed in linguistic and musical discourse forms.
Fox treats country not simply as an indexical musical genre but as a trope, a “reflexive and deeply felt construction … a class-specific and cultural response to changes in the regional, national, and global economy in which American blue-collar manual workers have experienced a loss of both cultural identity and economic security” (p. 21). To be sure, Fox's sense of real country overlaps strongly with country music as a commercial category, but he traces the trope through landscape, interior decoration, bodily habitus, and especially forms of everyday interaction and verbal art in the honky-tonks in which he did his fieldwork. Fox is especially focused on the voice, and how the vocality of the embodied speaking or singing voice creates a striving for (and recognition of) crystallized moments of authentic working-class identity.
This striving for authentic voice is complicated in Fox's treatment by its immediate, always already commoditized status in the form of Nashville recording studios, Wal-Mart undevelopment, and the “visual and aesthetic disruption” (75) of the peri-urban margin. The alterity of country is complex and ambivalent. As Fox writes, “Many of the people who appear in this book would happily describe themselves as ‘rednecks,’ though they might resent being described that way by me” (24). In this shifting and haunted context, real country is a cultivated “art of memory” (49), an “affective archaeology” (91), consisting of moments of “feeling” and “relating” made manifest in heightened poeticity, and “pervasively keyed to musical signifiers” (97). For Fox, art “is not an exceptional domain of culture; it is the very heart of culture” (36). The barstools, tables, dance floor, and bandstand at Ann's Other Place in Lockhart, Texas are filled with organic intellectuals, artists whose everyday talk is shot through with poeticity and whose very voices embody working-class sociability. Fox's intimate knowledge of the people and places of his project, coupled with the depth of his analysis, make this book extremely special.
The book is divided into nine chapters grouped in three broad sections. In the first, Fox traces for the reader the working-class framework of Lockhart and a town in central Illinois that he dubs “Parkville.” The second section explores and unpeels the intertextual and affective connections between country song lyrics and melodies, and between country singing and everyday speaking (these being, as Fox notes, distinctions of only limited value). The third section of the book focuses more directly on the voice as a locus of authentic country identity.
The book opens with an evocative “Prelude” in which Fox introduces his readers to some of the main characters in his story, especially Hoppy and his “house of mem'ries.” Chap. 1 then takes the reader through Fox's major ethnographic and theoretical concerns: the importance of art, the importance of class, and the central role of the voice in expressing cultural identity. In chap. 2 Fox brings us into Lockhart in two ways: through a narrative of his own introduction to and growing familiarity with the community, and through a presentation of the community's economic, demographic, and geographic contexts. Chap. 3 extends this analysis of the intimate relationship between semiotics and materiality by exploring how “working-class social experience is sensuously modeled in the production of self and sociability in place and time” (81). Chap. 4 pushes this exploration even further with a powerful evocation of “the fool in the mirror,” a character whom Fox figures as a split subject, teetering between a sense of the individual as a “social person” and the individual as an autonomous “psychological self” (125). Honky-tonk discourse consistently pulls between these two aspects, as individuals continually push against sociability through an “aesthetics of eccentricity” (113) and are at the same time pulled back into sociability through feelingful talk and song. Here, Fox uses his intimate knowledge of the community and his acute understanding of the intellectual histories of language and culture to demonstrate how pronominalization (“the split subject emerges in a juxtaposition of poetically resonant pronouns” [149]), direct and quasi-direct reported speech, double-voiced utterances, and intertextuality are artfully layered by interlocutors in creating real country sociability around the talk and song circulating in the honky-tonk.
Sherry Ortner's blurb on the back of the book says that “the chapter on ‘The Fool in the Mirror’ alone is worth the price of the book.” For me, the two subsequent chapters fill that bill. They are quite simply the best work on the relationship between words and music, musical semantics and poetics, lyrics, melodies, arrangements, and performances – what ethnomusicologists often call “text and tune” – that I have seen. Chap. 5 covers Fox's discussion of “feeling” and “relating.” Feeling is an “inchoate quality” (155) of country songs, involving both verbal cleverness and a sense of embodied movement. That is, feeling “is simultaneously about sound and meaning” (169), and paired with “relating,” accounts for a great deal of country music's affective and “mnemonic power” (172). Chap. 6 then carries through this discussion in noting the pervasive similarities between speech and song.
Chap. 7 enters into an exploration of the gendered nature of discourse forms in working-class culture as a means of unpacking what is at stake in the effective command of verbal/vocal expressions. Fox centers on the “reverse,” a carnivalesque performance in which command of gendered discourse genres is put on display. The final two chapters bring together the preceding in an extended colloquy on the voice – singing in country music performances, and on “the character of the voice” (chap. 9), the ways in which the skillful vocal embodiment of a single word in a Johnny Cash song can create lyrical moments in which a “long life of grueling labor and … veiled pain [are] laid out before us in the flash of a single line” (314).
A few caveats about the book. Teaching it at the undergraduate level can be somewhat challenging, in part because students may already feel a sense of familiarity with much of the musical material that Fox discusses: Who doesn't know who Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline are? Fox is aware of this, often warning the reader, for example, that “Against a background of apparent familiarity, subtle differences have a way of appearing transparent” (108), and he covers it more fully in the “Coda” that ends the book. Still, I sometimes wished for more.
There is a tension in the book that contributes to this sense, which has to do with the various levels at which the author's claims operate, between Ann's Other Place; Lockhart; Texas; Illinois; working-class; and perhaps the United States most generally. Fox tacks between celebrating the distinctiveness of his interlocutors at Ann's and arguing for a wider applicability of his observations to working-class culture. This is intensified by Fox's skilled ear for extremely subtle and complex examples, for instance how Mstislav Rostropovich's televised return to the Soviet Union was an instance of real country. Fox's examples work deftly to reveal the polyphonic nature of “redneck” consciousness, but I found in teaching the book that students needed to figure out how Ann's in Texas was any different from their local bar at home in New Jersey. In his analysis of country song texts and honky-tonk verbal interaction, Fox demonstrates how these are constructed by alternating between epic and lyric modalities. That is, lyrical moments arrest the everyday narrativity of the passage of time, stories repetitively capped by indelible, crystallizing images. My sense is that Fox emulates this aesthetic in his own writing, but his more complex examples are not always up to that task.
These small caveats aside, this book should be read carefully by anyone interested in language and poetics, emotion, social class, music, interaction, and indexicality. Fox's work brings an important and much-needed sense of a truly materialist ideology to the study of language. It is, as well, perhaps the finest ethnographic work on music and class to have been published in the past 20 years.
