Description
Book SynopsisAn ethnographic study of country music, and the bars, life, and everyday speech of its rural fans.
Trade Review“
Real Country is by far the best book on Texas country music and working-class culture since Manuel Peña’s
The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music was published in 1985. As opened to us by Aaron A. Fox, the working-class world of Lockhart, Texas, is complex and richly textured, and country music is its most characteristic and expressive voice. Grounded both in the most sophisticated recent scholarship and in Fox’s longtime involvement as performer and observer,
Real Country extends to the music the full measure of respect it deserves. In so doing, it carries country music scholarship to a new level that will challenge and guide all subsequent commentators.”—David E. Whisnant, author of
Rascally Signs in Sacred Places and
All That Is Native and Fine“Aaron A. Fox’s
Real Country gets to the heart and drama that fuels the cigarette smoke, music, talk, and beer of a honky tonk Saturday night.”—Peter Wolf, musician
“Aaron A. Fox’s
Real Country is a powerful and moving study of Texas working class culture (including an articulate defense of the now heavily criticized notion of ‘culture’ itself). Combining the tools of linguistic anthropology, ethnomusicology, and sensitive ethnography, Fox performs a series of brilliant interpretations of ‘vocal practices’—country music and all kinds of talk, mostly in bars—as these actively shape personal subjectivities and interpersonal relationships. The chapter on ‘The Fool in the Mirror’ alone is worth the price of the book.”—Sherry B. Ortner, author of
New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ‘58Table of ContentsPreface ix
A Note on Transcription Conventions xiii
Prelude: “Turns” 1
1. Voicing Working-Class Culture 20
2. Knowing Lockhart: Two Perspectives 46
3. “Out on the Country”: Space, Time, and Stereotype 74
4. “The Fool in the Mirror”: Self, Person, and Subjectivity 107
5. “Feeling” and “Relating”: Speech, Song, Story, and Emotion 152
Interlude: Photo Essay 193
6. “Bring Me Up in a Beer Joint”: The Poetics of Speech and Song 214
7. “The Women Take Care of That”: Engendering Working-Class Culture 249
8. The Art of Singing: Speech and Song in Performance 272
9. “I Hang My Head and Cry”: The Character of the Voice 300
Coda: Indigenous to Modernity 317
Notes 323
Appendix 357
Index 359
