Real Country , livre ebook

383

pages

English

Ebooks

2004

Écrit par
Fox Aaron A. Fox

Publié par
Duke University Press

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383

pages

English

Ebooks

2004

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

06 octobre 2004

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822385998

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

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.

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

06 octobre 2004

EAN13

9780822385998

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

Social group

Real Country

Aaron A. Fox

Real Country

Music and Language in Working-Class Culture

Duke University Press Durham & London



©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by C H Westmoreland Typeset in Minion with Cooper Black display by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. nd printing, 

In memory of

Randall O.‘‘Randy’’Meyer (–),

and for all the kids.

Contents

Preface ix A Note on Transcription Conventions

xiii

Prelude: ‘‘Turns’’  1Voicing Working-Class Culture 2Knowing Lockhart: Two Perspectives 3‘‘Out the Country’’: Space, Time, and Stereotype 4‘‘The Fool in the Mirror’’: Self, Person, and Subjectivity 5‘‘Feeling’’ and ‘‘Relating’’: Speech, Song, Story, and Emotion  Interlude: Photo Essay  6‘‘Bring Me Up in a Beer Joint’’: The Poetics of Speech and Song 7‘‘The Women Take Care of That’’: Engendering Working-Class Culture 8The Art of Singing: Speech and Song in Performance  9‘‘I Hang My Head and Cry’’: The Character of the Voice Coda: Indigenous to Modernity 

Notes  References  Appendix  Index 

Preface

In this book, I describe country music as working-class culture, approached ethnographically and with broad attention to the expressive practices of talk and verbal art as well as musical performance and interpretation. I aim to show here how complex, dense, and mediated the relationship is between country music and working-class social experience, and how rich and com-pellingly ‘‘cultural’’ class-based expressive and artistic practices can be. My central assertion—that country music is an authentic working-class art of enormous value to its blue-collar constituency—is straightforward and per-haps obvious, though it is an argument of a kind currently out of fashion in popular music scholarship. I hope this book is a convincing critique of such fashions. Some parts of this book are relatively dense and technical, reﬂecting my approach to the subject through linguistics, anthropology, and ethnomusi-cology. The complexity of my analyses reﬂects the essence of my argument. Country music is, populist ideology notwithstanding, not simple stuﬀ; nor is working-class experience uncomplicated. I treat country music and working-class oral discourse seriously as art forms here, and working-class practice and experience seriously as culture. To do so adequately entails deploying some complex theoretical frameworks. But most of this book consists of stories and transcriptions of recorded talk, and I hope most readers ﬁnd most of this vol-ume engaging and readable as a portrait of a community and its music and verbal art, whether or not they care about my academic agendas. Because I am primarily concerned with the cultural life ofsoundhere, the mute volume in your hands is an incomplete representation of the reality it de-

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