Content area
Full Text
Country Boys and Redneck Women: New Essays in Gender and Country Music. Edited by Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. 280 pp.
Country Boys and Redneck Women further develops conversations about gender in country music that have taken place over the last two decades. The book is a sequel to Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker's initial edited essay collection, A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (2004), which helped to direct critical inquiries into the understanding of gendered metaphors in country music. With its interdisciplinary focus, Country Boys and Redneck Women examines the ways gender has been a driving force in the creative process and opportunities of specific artists, the production and marketing of particular country styles and performers, and the circulation and reception of the genre in a variety of historical contexts, including postcolonial settings. Yet in this new collection, the tendency to reproduce gendered binaries is in tension with methodologies that complicate those dualisms. The strongest essays in this uneven collection challenge existing gendered concepts and assumptions, such as the masculinization of authenticity and the role of domesticity, and offer intersectional approaches to the ways gender, sexuality, race, and class shape country performance and commercial strategies in a genre often imagined devoid of such subtleties.
The insights of Georgia Christgau on Kitty Wells and those of Travis Stimeling on Taylor Swift highlight the gendered biases coming from country music criticism that have littered the historiography and reception of both artists and argue that country music studies needs to work harder in questioning journalistic accounts of female country artists. Instead of applying the usual domestic stereotypes to Wells, Christgau draws upon new research to resist the tired notion that Wells was simply a devoted wife and mother who stumbled upon commercial success with her first big hit, "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels" (1952). She sheds light on how Wells developed an aesthetic of restraint and modesty that enabled her to trespass into honky-tonk territory and talk back to a generation of men, in addition to performing the balancing act required of women with public careers.
Stimeling interrogates the concept of authenticity through a study of Taylor Swift's vocal performances and her appeal to her...