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Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class. By Bill C. Malone. Music in American Life Series. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. [xviii], 392. $34.95, ISBN 0-252-02678-0.)
When itinerant visiting assistant professor of history Bill C. Malone submitted an application for a permanent position within academia in the early 1970s, friends advised him that it would be wise to abandon, at least temporarily, his country music scholarship. They encouraged him to embrace a "legitimate" field of study to demonstrate that he was a "serious" scholar. The son of an East Texas tenant-farm family and a passionate fan of the genre who had already seen his dissertation published to favorable reviews as Country Music, U.S.A. (Austin, Tex., 1968), Malone did not take the advice. Despite this seeming waywardness, he received a tenured appointment and spent the next twenty-five years delving deeper into the music's past, fastidiously contemplating its relationship to southern culture and history. It represented both a...