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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.
Fox treats country not simply as an indexical musical genre but as a trope, a "reflexive and deeply felt construction ... a class-specific and 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" (p. 21). To be sure, Fox's sense of real country overlaps strongly with country music as a commercial category, but he traces the trope through landscape, interior decoration, bodily habitus, and especially forms of everyday interaction and verbal art in the honky-tonks in which he did his fieldwork. Fox is especially focused on the voice, and how the vocality of the embodied speaking or singing voice creates a striving for (and recognition of) crystallized moments of authentic working-class identity.
This striving for authentic voice is complicated in Fox's treatment by its immediate, always already commoditized status in the form of Nashville recording studios, Wal-Mart undevelopment, and the "visual and aesthetic disruption" (75) of the peri-urban margin. The alterity of country is complex and ambivalent. As Fox writes, "Many of the people who appear in this book would happily describe themselves as 'rednecks,' though they might resent being described that way by me" (24). In this shifting and haunted context, real country is a cultivated "art of memory" (49), an "affective archaeology" (91), consisting of moments of "feeling" and "relating" made manifest in heightened poeticity, and "pervasively keyed to musical signifiers" (97). For Fox, art "is not an exceptional domain of culture; it is the very heart of culture" (36). The barstools, tables, dance floor, and bandstand at Ann's Other Place in Lockhart, Texas are filled with organic...