| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 56

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Aaron A. Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Durham: Duke University Press 2004)

LOCKHART, TEXAS, is just south of Austin. It is, like many other peri-urban towns in North America, an affordable, working-class, not-quite-suburban place within driving distance of a rapidly expanding urban centre, and the rurality of its past may prove out of rhythm with its future. But the increasing spatial encroachment of city upon country is not matched in the realms of social life in central Texas. Indeed, Aaron Fox's wonderful book about music, talk, and class in Lockhart paints a vivid, detailed, and moving portrait of the material and symbolic particularity of rural Texan white working-class life. The everyday weave of this life consists, he says, in "emplacement, embodiment, the organization of temporal experience and memory, and normative local understandings of emotion, subjectivity, and proper sociality," (21) an ensemble he bravely and convincingly labels "culture" (Fox is an anthropologist, writing from the discipline most haunted by the concept's demons). This "culture" is far from the strictly bounded, static and naturalized social substance that has justifiably given it a bad name. Rather, Real Country is built on what could only be called an intimate elaboration of regional white working-class culture, marked by empathy, but sensitive to unsaid and unthought resonances and contradictions. It is the product of almost 15 years of ethnomusicological and ethnographic research, during which time Fox talked with and listened to the participants in the local country music community, and gradually became musically and personally enmeshed in that very community.

The book is staged, for the most part, in a Lockhart "beer joint" called Ann's Place during the 1990s. Populated with a range of local characters, some of whom the reader comes to know well, Ann's Place is known in the region as a venue and haven for "real" country music, what Fox calls the "evaluative index" of a locally prized style of "feelingful," "authentic" (non-Top 40) country music. (103) (The reader can fortunately hear some of this music at Fox's website, www.aaronfox.com.) Yet the cast members are themselves as much setting as they are players, for the real focus of Real Country is working-class "voice" in its dominant expressive modes: talk and song. Voice, Fox argues, "is a privileged medium for the construction of meaning and identity, and thus for the production of a distinctive 'class culture'," one through which working-class Texans construct and preserve "a self-consciously rustic, "redneck," "ordinary," and "country" ethos in their everyday life." (20) This is not to say that Fox strips away the particularity of the community organized around Ann's Place — and the music that is played and danced to and listened to there — to reveal some kernel of pure working-class expressivity. He is keen to underscore the individuality of each of the book's main figures, and he has an almost novelistic approach to character development. An ethnomusicologist and professional guitarist, he spent his time at Ann's Place playing and listening to music, recording conversations, and getting to know the idiosyncracies of many of the performers, staff, listeners, and other "regulars."

To say, then, that "voice" — not voices — is the subject of this book is to say that Real Country is intended to bring ethnography, musicology, and linguistic anthropology into conversation with social theory in a manner that is theoretically and politically relevant far beyond Lockhart or Texas. And to the extent that this intention is realized, Real Country is a book about class, and about a critical aesthetics of working-class culture that cannot help but problematize the naturalized separation of the aesthetic and the political economic in labour and working-class studies more generally. It is also intellectually ambitious and sometimes technically complex: the nine chapters consider the voice as a site of the production and reproduction of time, subjectivity, emotion, gender, and performativity within the rural white working class, and Fox not infrequently calls upon the descriptive vocabulary of linguistics for precision. While this is of course justifiable — the book is about voice, after all — and rarely overwhelms, it does demand an unusual commitment from the non-disciplinary reader (and access to a very good dictionary). Like all good books, then, there is much to discuss here. But with the interests of Labour/Le Travail readers in mind, I want to focus the rest of the review on the question of class, and on what Fox calls "working class verbal art." (229)

Any readers familiar with the work of Antonio Gramsci (or, more historiographically, E.P. Thompson) will recognize their legacies in Fox's description of class as a "culturally mediated phenomenon." (108) Indeed, although Fox only cites Gramsci once — and then in the context of a discussion of the organic intellectual (35) — the Gramscian vein that runs the length of Real Country can hardly be accidental. For Gramsci and Fox, culture is the precipitate of history; it encrusts all facets of everyday life, determining in its apparent "naturalness" the sense we make of our places and times, and of the trajectories of change. As Gramsci wrote in Prison Notebooks, "common sense creates the folklore of the future as a relatively rigid phase of popular knowledge at a given place and time" (New York 1971, 326). Culture as it emerges for Fox – summed up for him in an appropriately messy form in the adjective "country"(31) — is "a grammar of human response to experience." (34) Voice materializes a discursive common sense that is embodied and enacted in the "polemical delineation of a class community." (103)

Gramsci was interested in the construction of a theory of culture that would illuminate the politics of the very terrain of sense-making, one that would consistently denaturalize common sense, allowing the working class to construct new cultural spaces beyond the reach of bourgeois hegemony. In the contemporary US, however, this political strategy is turned on its head. In Lockhart, the cultural spaces in question are not new, but are instead those that are traditional and "authentic," those that are, according to the "evaluative index," "real": real feelings, real people, real country. As such, the working-class culture of rural white Texans is not instantiated, according to Fox, in a critique of capital, but in a critique of neoliberalism and post-Fordism in the "key of nostalgia." (91, 319) Inextricably bound to this critique, the "poetic obsession with loss and the looming presence of the past" shapes the regional working-class aesthetic, and its dominant forms and modes of expression. In Lock-hart, Fox suggests, the voice as "privileged medium" blurs the bounds between class art, class culture, and class politics.

I do not think this is an argument scholars of labour and working-class studies can hear too often. Indeed, if I have one substantial critique of Real Country, it is that while this inseparability is illuminated, the political-economic dimensions of working-class critique and agency —of what Fox is forthright in calling "class struggle" (253) — are given relatively very short shrift. If the "nostalgic, sometimes obsessive working-class gaze is precisely archeological," (91) then the power-laden, often exploitative productive material conditions in which it and its constitutive critical rural voice emerged merit as close attention as does that which is called "aesthetic" and that which is called "cultural."

That said, this is a creative, sophisticated, and beautifully written contribution to contemporary scholarship — best suited to graduate courses, if it is taught — and I enthusiastically suggest reading it and talking about it, if not singing about it (that may be warranted; I liked it that much, but not many want to hear me sing).


Geoff Mann University of California, Santa Barbara

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