Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture [Paperback]

Aaron A. Fox (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0822333481 | ISBN-13: 979-0822333486 | Publication Date: October 6, 2004

In Lockhart, Texas, a rural working-class town just south of Austin, country music is a way of life. Conversation slips easily into song, and the songs are full of conversation. Anthropologist and musician Aaron A. Fox spent years in Lockhart making research notes, music, and friends. In Real Country, he provides an intimate, in-depth ethnography of the community and its music. Showing that country music is deeply embedded in the textures of working-class life, Fox argues that it is the cultural and intellectual property of working-class people and not only of the Nashville-based music industry or the stars whose lives figure so prominently in popular and scholarly writing about the genre.

Fox spent hundreds of hours observing, recording, and participating in talk and music-making in homes, beer joints, and garage jam sessions. He renders the everyday life of Lockhart’s working-class community in detail, right down to the ice cold beer, the battered guitars, and the technical skills of such local musical legends as Randy Meyer and Larry “Hoppy” Hopkins. Throughout, Fox focuses on the human voice. His analyses of conversations, interviews, songs, and vocal techniques show how feeling and experience are expressed, and how local understandings of place, memory, musical aesthetics, working-class social history, race, and gender are shared. In Real Country, working-class Texans re-imagine their past and give voice to the struggles and satisfactions of their lives in the present through music.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Real Country is by far the best book on Texas country music and working-class culture since Manuel Peña’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

“Aaron A. Fox’s Real Country gets to the heart and drama that fuels the cigarette smoke, music, talk, and beer of a honky tonk Saturday night.”—Peter Wolf, musician

“Aaron A. Fox’s Real Country is a powerful and moving study of Texas working class culture (including an articulate defense of the now heavily criticized notion of ‘culture’ itself). Combining the tools of linguistic anthropology, ethnomusicology, and sensitive ethnography, Fox performs a series of brilliant interpretations of ‘vocal practices’—country music and all kinds of talk, mostly in bars—as these actively shape personal subjectivities and interpersonal relationships. The chapter on ‘The Fool in the Mirror’ alone is worth the price of the book.”—Sherry B. Ortner, author of New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ‘58

About the Author

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (October 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822333481
• ISBN-13: 979-0822333486
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #395,400 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Buy this book!, November 2, 2006

By 

Ignatz - See all my reviews

This review is from: Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Paperback)

If you read one book about country music, this is the one you should read. Fox's brilliant analysis sidesteps the whole Nashville-Dollywood-Branson commericial thing to explore how working class people in rural Texas and Illinois use country music to express their senses of self and their aesthetic and cultural values. The way he writes about the singing voice and the way he incorporates the character of the people he studied with into his presentation is about the best I've seen. Why only four stars, you ask? Well.....It can get a little dense sometimes - he has a theoretical point to make about music and culture, and he is after all a scholar (teaches in the music department at Columbia University). But bear with that and you'll be very happy you did. If you love country music, read this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Real County is the real thing, September 29, 2011

By 

Bonney Hill - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Paperback)

This is first of all a scholarly work. Since I have no college background in the social sciences, it took some dictionary work to get through the more densely-written anthropological prose, but part of the charm of this book is that the subjects Fox studied are blue-collar Texans who love county music. There is a lively alternation between his use of the $10 dollar words they abhor, their own speech, and the language it takes to analyze it. Aaron Fox looks at the way they talk to each other and the way country music fits into their lives and outlook. The author's personal involvement in playing music in honkytonks doesn't hurt matters. His analysis of how George Jones sings "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is worth the cover charge.