Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class

Western Folklore, Fall 2003 by Killam, Rosemary N

Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class. By Bill C. Malone. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. xvi + 392, preface, introduction, photographs, notes, bibliography, discography, indices. $35.95 cloth)

This is a wonderfully nostalgic and grounded book. In the introduction, the author, a well-beloved writer about country music for four decades, contextualizes himself, describing how and when and why he learned country music in his own childhood. In the preface he specifies that the chief focus of this book is on "the music made by southern working people." The book's historical sweep is wide-it reaches back to eighteenth-century dance instruction books (152) and forward to such recent songs as Steve Earl's 1996 "Christmas Time in Washington" (247). The book's chapters center on work, home, church, love and its heartaches, dance, and patriotism, particularly within the transmission media of radio and recordings. The photo images range from Pappy O'Daniel with his Hill-Billy Flour Band (1938) through Willie Nelson at MerleFest (2000). The book's argument is supported by approximately 650 footnotes covering 71 pages. Malone augments the narrative with a useful bibliography, discography, and index of song titles in addition to the extensive general index.

For all its nostalgia, though, some readers will find this book disappointing. Malone uolcs in the preface that readers should not expect an intensive exploration of song lyrics (viii). He leaves to others any exploration of the uses made of southern working-class music in primary-school music books, as well as the sale of song-lyric collections and of sheet music, often including guitar tablature and piano accompaniments. (As a group, southern working-class song writers and singers have learned to read music in multiple ways-through regular instruction in school, in the process acquiring such songs as "This Land is Your Land" and "The Boll Weevil Song;" through shape-note singing in church; and through adult evening music classes, at one time offered everywhere in the South, that combined music instruction with socializing among neighbors and flirting and courtship among the marriageable young. The effects of these multiple and deeply culturally contextualized sources of learning on working-class music cry out to be studied but are not explored in this book.)

As noted above, the book provides a wide-ranging historical and cultural outline of the development of the repertoire central to southern working class country music. In his conclusion, Malone posits that "No demographic study has ever accurately measured the country music audience, but I suspect that most fans are suburban-dwelling Middle Americans." Yet in light of the market research routinely conducted nowadays by media conglomerates to maximize the exposure of new releases, this conclusion may well be incomplete. In fact, Malone's range of research provides a background for future studies of marginalized working-class musics of groups such as the migrant workers of Florida, the dock workers at ports from the Carolinas down to Mexico, and the complex musical developments important to southern African Americans who identify as working class, but these matters are not studied here.

More study remains to be done on why southern working class music became a primary vehicle for the perpetuation of white male supremacy. Malone docs not elucidate the significance of contributions made by Rose Maddox and by early twentieth-century women blues artists to the music of later women singers. He does not expound on the fate of Vernon Dalhart and Charley Pride and Johnny Rodriguez, musicians featured in his 1975 volume, &ar$ q/"CoMM(ry MMiic (co-edited by Judith McCulloh) and mentioned in the present volume. Vemon Dalhart and the Carter Family were equally popular initially, yet Dalhart fell into obscurity while the Carters' visibility has continued unabated to the present day, apparently due to changes in these artists' respective public images. Charley Pride and Johnny Rodriguez were both "minority." No forthright explanation of why these artists have dropped out of sight is provided. Malone does acknowledge the undertones of racism and sexism found in some of this music, but again, serious analysis of the music in this light is absent.

Many oi us have used Bill C. Malone's achievements as justification for our own work. Most of us have quoted one of his publications in our work. We are indebted to his lifetime devotion to research and publication and now have another reason for gratitude to him in his production of this book. But we must await the publication of a book that focuses (to borrow Malone's phrasing) on the music made by southern female and African American and Hispanic working people.

[Editor's note: Bill C. Malone's Don't Get Above Your Raisin'was awarded the 2003 Chicago Folklore Prize.]

WORKS CITED

Malone, Bill C., and Judith McCulloh, eds. 1975. Stars of Country Music: Uncle Dave Macon to Johnny Rodriguez. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.