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

Fox, Aaron A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822333368 ISBN 13: 9780822333364

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

In 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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Aaron A. Fox is Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. He is a guitarist and singer who has played with many bands in Texas. He has hosted country music radio programs on several stations in New York City and continues to guest-host shows on a regular basis.
To visit Aaron A. Fox's website and blog, please click here.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

""Real Country" is by far the best book on Texas country music and working-class culture since Manuel Pena'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"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Real Country

Music and Language in Working-Class CultureBy Aaron A. Fox

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2004 Aaron A. Fox
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822333364

Chapter One

Voicing Working-Class Culture

[It is] ... a contingent consciousness, burdened with matter which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men ... Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. -Karl Marx, Capital

This is a study of country music as working-class culture, ethnographically observed in the small town of Lockhart, Texas. My basic argument is that, for working-class Texans, the voice is a privileged medium for the construction of meaning and identity, and thus for the production of a distinctive "class culture." Song and singing comprise the expressive apotheosis of this valued vocality, and song, in turn, is locally understood as a consciously elaborated discourse about (the) voice. Through song and its attendant forms of expressive, technical, critical, and playful talk (especially narrative and humor), working-class Texans construct and preserve a self-consciously rustic, "redneck," "ordinary," and "country" ethos in their everyday life.

I interpret this reflexive and deeply felt construction, in its contemporary form, as a class-specific 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. These recent changes are set against a longer history of tenuous gains and devastating losses of social power and prestige, and especially the era of the "postwar class compromise" (roughly 1950-75) during which many of the people who appear in these pages formed their social identities and their musical habits and tastes. In the face of hard and confusing times, and in an era in which mass-mediated culture has penetrated every corner of American life, speaking and singing artfully, improvisationally, and with minimal reference to exchange value have remained essential to the social construction of history, identity, and sociability for these Texans, and for a significant number of other working-class Americans who live in similar peri-urban and small-town communities.

For the people who appear in these pages, country music is a vital cultural tradition, and a specific kind of intellectual property. Country music is, in Texas, an essential resource for the preservation of community and the expression of white (but not only white, as I explain below) working-class identity. It is also, of course, a canon of songs known through commercial recordings, a pantheon of mass-mediated "stars," and a suite of institutionalized forms of consumption. A reading of country music as working-class culture cannot be isolated from considerations of ideological hegemony working through figures of reified "authenticity" and the commodity form. (Such a perspective has become deeply naturalized in cultural studies, and more recently in country music scholarship, specifically.) But working-class country music is also the expressive, stylized, ritualized surface of a deep ocean of popular social experience. I view the significance of country music in Texas working-class culture as complexly shaped by-but ultimately theoretically distinct from-the logics of the music industry or histories of recorded musical style.

I approach this significance here through an exploration of the cultural processes, phenomenologies, and logics in which country music is embedded for a blue-collar community in Texas. Under the rubric of "culture," I emphasize themes of emplacement, embodiment, the organization of temporal experience and memory, and normative local understandings of emotion, subjectivity, and proper sociality. I examine the way these themes emerge within local expressive economies that conjoin referential language with poetics, music, movement, and visual art. My focus thus alternates between the discourses and practices of everyday Texas working-class life, and the rhetoric, poetics, and techniques of country music performance. Ultimately, I view performance as both a commentary on and a vital resource for ordinary social life.

More exactly, I examine how vocal expression (including verbal art, ordinary "talk," and song, as well as intersections and movements between these modalities) is used by working-class Texans to construct, interpret, and remake their own theories, models, understandings, and experiences of space and emplacement, of time and memory, of personhood and the self, of emotion and reason, and, especially, of sociability, social obligation, and class, gender, generational, and ethnic identity. I focus on the particular content of these cultural categories by, first, representing vocal expressions empirically (largely through transcriptions and descriptions of naturally occurring verbal and musical discourse), and then by analyzing the characteristic rhetorical, poetic, and grammatical tropes that recur in these sounding expressions. I describe-but also narratively evoke-the linguistic and musical practices that do the important work of symbolizing, interpreting, criticizing, reproducing, and synthesizing these tropes. I present metacultural arguments encountered in ordinary talk, in elicited discussions, and in dialogues about my own project and my own role in the community described here. And I trace the force of these arguments (as well as their limits and contradictions) through less theoretical, more practical forms of competence and consciousness-the "common sense" skills and orientations of working-class Texans.

Ritual and Sociability in the Honky-Tonk

While I document these voiced tropes and practices in a wide range of contexts characterized by voluntary social interaction between working-class people in Lockhart, my ethnography emphasizes the setting in which my interlocutors there cultivate live musical performance, dance, heightened sociability, and artful talk: the local tavern, "beer joint," or "honky-tonk" bar. The defining feature of a working-class honky-tonk bar in Texas is the nearly constant aural presence of what working-class Texans call, with a very complex and elusive sense of irony, "real country music." This phrase refers to live performance, usually by professional or semiprofessional musicians, of a defined canon of songs in a clearly delimited (though evolving) musical style. Such performance typically occurs in ritually framed events called "dances," and in more informal jam sessions or parties. The availability of the same musical canon in the form of recordings on a jukebox, performed by a set of venerated country music stars, is also essential for honky-tonk sociability. So, too, is the possibility of more informal live performance at any time by less gifted or polished local and amateur musicians, and the spontaneous emergence of artful, musical expression from the dense textures of "ordinary" social discourse.

Besides these musical characteristics, honky-tonks are defined by the presence of highly polished verbal artists of various...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822333368
• ISBN 13: 9780822333364
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar