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Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History . By Jocelyn R. Neal . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2013.
Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Scene . By Travis Stimeling . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2011.
Country music has not been a predominant topic of study within musicological circles. Linked to the white, southern working class, the music has not been central to serious analysis, especially within a discipline that values the aesthetic complexity so important to the understanding of Western art music. Nevertheless, country music studies has developed into an interdisciplinary field, drawing academics from the social sciences and humanities since the 1968 publication of Bill Malone's seminal Country Music U.S.A.: A Fifty Year History.1It wasn't until critical musicology pushed for a serious engagement with vernacular musics that music scholars started to use the analytical tools of their discipline to address the musical and social significance of popular music genres, including country music. Following a handful of important articles and book chapters from the 1980s and 1990s, a literature finally began to coalesce in the 2000s. 2Jocelyn Neal's Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History (2013) and Travis Stimeling's Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Scene (2011) are welcome additions to this growing body of scholarship that provides a musicological perspective on the meaning of country music in relation to the ever-changing dynamics of U.S. culture.
Neal's Country Music, a textbook aimed at undergraduate courses on country music, draws upon her expertise in the field. Her first book, The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Legacy in Country Music, illuminates the centrality of Rodgers's music within a variety of country styles from the 1920s to the 2000s, and her essays have covered a range of topics, including Faith Hill's authorial voice, Shania Twain's country-pop song style, line dancing in country music, and race in country music's fan culture. 3In addition, she co-authored with Bill Malone the third edition of Country Music U.S.A.4
It can still be a hard sell to teach country music to college students. Students often explain their aesthetic preferences for popular music by stipulating, "I like everything but country...