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Aaron A. Fox, Real country: Music and language in working-class culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2006

David Samuels
David Samuels
Affiliation:
Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, samuels@anthro.umass.edu
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Extract

Aaron A. Fox, Real country: Music and language in working-class culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp., 363. Hb $79.95, Pb $22.95.

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.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Information
Language in Society , Volume 35 , Issue 5 , November 2006 , pp. 792 - 795
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCES

Ching, Barbara. (2003). Wrong's what I do best: Hard country music and contemporary culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Jensen, Joli. (1998). The Nashville sound: Authenticity, commercialism, and country music. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Peterson, Richard A. (1999). Creating country music: Fabricating authenticity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tichi, Cecilia. (1994). High lonesome: The American culture of country music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Tichi, Cecilia (ed.) (1998). Reading country music: Steel guitars, Opry stars, and honky-tonk bars. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.