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Don't Get above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class. By Bill C. Malone. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. VII, 399. Preface, introduction, illustrations, conclusion, notes, index. $34.95.)
Driving across Arkansas, I scroll through all the radio stations, hearing Garth and Faith and Toby but nothing from the best-selling soundtrack to Joel and Ethan Coen's film, O Brother, Where Art Thou-except once. Catching the familiar twang of "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow," I turn it up and find I'm amplifying a carpet commercial. "Forget sorrow!" said the pitchman cheerfully over the music, "Get yourself some new floor coverings!"
What was it that the carpet mogul hoped to evoke? A down-home quality for his store? Success itself? And why couldn't I find the song anywhere else on the radio? The soundtrack album went platinum without radio support, and country music radio still won't touch it. Bill Malone, the Ralph Stanley of country music writers, has written a fascinating new book that explores these issues. Don't Get above Your Raisin' was apparently written largely before O Brother came out, but both book and film offer up country music as the soundtrack for the southern working class, illustrate the many influences shaping that music, and suggest something of its love-hate relationship with the market and the strange history of its popularity.
Malone argues that country music sprang from the contradictions of industrialization in the South, that it expressed those contradictions and helped working people negotiate them. Home and rural life have been central themes of this music precisely because its makers and audience felt those realms to be fragile and threatened. Malone organizes this argument in thematic chapters. In each, he treats the music's central topics as historical practices, making it clear that this music has not been separate from the everyday life of those he calls plain people. Thus, describing songs about dancing, he also tells us how music changed in response to dancers, how musicians could become professionals on the money they made playing for dances, and how dancing persisted as a way of listening to music. Similarly, rambling recurs as a song topic because it has also been a reality, a dream, and a problem of southern working-class life....