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Reviews
| The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry, by Diane Pecknold. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 294 pages. $22.95, paper.
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| Situating commercialism within the country music industry as "cultural text," historian Diane Pecknold chronicles the remarkable rise of "hillbilly" music since 1920. Rather than emphasizing artists and their songs, The Selling Sound explores radio broadcasting, advertising, fan clubs, and the creation of the Country Music Association to emphasize an industry centered, paradoxically, on both nostalgic authenticity and the social construction of a new populist country music validated by modern commercial success. Pecknold, in contrast to scholars who stress the role of commercial interests in simply manipulating a passive country music audience to the detriment of the music, contends that persistent tensions over social class in the twentieth century led performers, deejays, and even country music fans to embrace commercialism as an empowering democratic challenge to existing cultural hierarchies. From the marginalization of hillbilly music by New York's Tin Pan Alley in the twenties to Richard Nixon's appeal to a "Silent Majority" through country music in the 1972 presidential campaign, the evolution of country music has long reflected and shaped the larger contested terrain of American culture. |
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While others frame discussions of country music in terms of either preserving or distorting a seemingly static and authentic American music, Pecknold demonstrates the ongoing creation of country music. As a result, The Selling Sound takes the reader far from the rural South and instead explores the importance of early radio shows such as Chicago's National Barn Dance and KXLA in Los Angeles, one of the first full-time country radio stations in the nation. Moving beyond musical legends and the Grand Ole Opry, the author finds the origins of today's popular country music in such decidedly modern phenomena as meetings between country radio promoters and skeptical advertising executives in New York in the fifties, congressional hearings investigating conflicts between broadcasters and composers, the tireless efforts of fan club presidents sprinkled throughout the nation, and the more recent creation of the Country Music Association's Hall of Fame and Museum. Indeed, the author's account of the National Barn Dance suggests that efforts to promote and reject hillbilly music in the wake of substantial internal migration belong in analyses of the cultural conflicts over modernity during the Jazz Age. Despite continual interest in what the author describes as the "constructed naturalness" of country music, The Selling Sound reminds us that the evolution of country music, as well as the historical agency of its many fans, has always been embedded in larger forces emblematic of the rise of modern America such as urbanization, technology, the centralizing forces of corporate power, and consumerism. |
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Unfortunately, Pecknold's emphasis on the importance of social class marginalizes issues of race. Although Pecknold briefly touches on the appropriation of country music by George Wallace and the racial politics of the New Right, The Selling Sound fails to examine the shift from hillbilly to country music as an overwhelmingly white racialized phenomenon. The fact that African Americans were also working-class, rural southerners, or recent migrants to the North who also shaped much of country music hints at a more complex relationship between race, class, and American commercialism. The creation of a modern yet nostalgic country music industry at the precise time of significant racial change suggests that the social transformation of a marginalized and often denigrated hillbilly music required the construction of a white, working-class populism that transcended region and excluded people of color from what one supporter described as the "laboring and rural people of this country." |
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Although The Selling Sound lacks the drama and colorful characters more typical of accounts of country music, Pecknold's analysis of music and business provides students with a unique opportunity to think critically about the role of class in recent American history. The rise of country music in the postwar period coincided with the demise of organized labor in the United States, and country music's nexus of class politics and popular culture encourages students to move beyond typical labor issues. Instead of class conflicts centered on production and wages which inform more traditional historical narratives, the book illuminates the role of class in shaping consumerism, American culture, and collective memory in subtle ways that will undoubtedly prove useful in making sense of American society in the twenty-first century. Historical narratives will be richer when they include, alongside dramatic stories of striking industrial workers, accounts of how thousands of country music fans flocked to the first annual Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Day celebration in 1953 to make sense of postwar America and their identity within it. |
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| Illinois State University |
Richard Hughes |
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