Real Country – Music and Language in Working–Class Culture

Aaron A. Fox is Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. He is a guitarist and singer who has played with many bands in Texas. He has hosted country music radio programs on several stations in New York City and continues to guest-host shows on a regular basis.To visit Aaron A. Fox's website and blog, please click here.

""Real Country" is by far the best book on Texas country music and working-class culture since Manuel Pena's "The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music "was published in 1985. As opened to us by Aaron A. Fox, the working-class world of Lockhart, Texas, is complex and richly textured, and country music is its most characteristic and expressive voice. Grounded both in the most sophisticated recent scholarship and in Fox's longtime involvement as performer and observer, "Real Country" extends to the music the full measure of respect it deserves. In so doing, it carries country music scholarship to a new level that will challenge and guide all subsequent commentators."--David E. Whisnant, author of "Rascally Signs in Sacred Places" and "All That Is Native and Fine"

Preface ix
A Note on Transcription Conventions xiii
Prelude: “Turns” 1
1. Voicing Working-Class Culture 20
2. Knowing Lockhart: Two Perspectives 46
3. “Out on the Country”: Space, Time, and Stereotype 74
4. “The Fool in the Mirror”: Self, Person, and Subjectivity 107
5. “Feeling” and “Relating”: Speech, Song, Story, and Emotion 152
Interlude: Photo Essay 193
6. “Bring Me Up in a Beer Joint”: The Poetics of Speech and Song 214
7. “The Women Take Care of That”: Engendering Working-Class Culture 249
8. The Art of Singing: Speech and Song in Performance 272
9. “I Hang My Head and Cry”: The Character of the Voice 300
Coda: Indigenous to Modernity 317
Notes 323
Appendix 357
Index 359