7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
an entertaining review of California's Valley and its music, September 28, 1999
This review is from: Workin' Man Blues: Country Music in California (Hardcover)
As one who was born and reared in California's Great Central Valley, and is old enough to remember the country music of the 30's and 40's, I very much enjoyed this book. Haslam not only brought back lots of memories, but he also skillfully told the story of the rise and fall of country music in California. Clearly, he's been there and he "talks the talk". As an admitted liberal, he unfortunately litters the landscape with some superfluous "social commentary". Nonethe less, it's a fine book, deserving of reading by all who like country music and/or the Central valley.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Country music in California, May 10, 2005
This review is from: Workin' Man Blues: Country Music in California (Hardcover)
Nobody doubts the importance of Texas and Tennessee in the development of country music, yet the substantial contribution of California to country music is often ignored. At first glance, this is understandable, since the Californian music scene is generally dominated by the major cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. However, these two cities are several hundred miles apart and much of the territory in between is deeply rural, populated by people displaced from other states, who took their music with them when they migrated. In particular, Bakersfield and its surrounding area became a hotbed of country music. This is the area from which the author comes, but in this book he covers all aspects of the California country music scene including Hollywood's contribution.
Whole chapters are devoted to the Crockett family, Gene Autry, Bob Wills, Spade Cooley, Rose Maddox and her brothers, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard and Dwight Yoakam. These are clearly the artists that the author regards as the most important to the development of Californian country music and I'm certainly not going to argue with him. While very few people these days know about the Crockett family, they were California's first country stars even if (as it seems) their appeal did not extend beyond their home state.
Between the chapters devoted to individual artists, there are chapters devoted to particular decades. These chapters describe all the remaining significant artists. Early on, the author attempts to define country music but, as we all know, it is impossible to define. Being unable to clearly define the music, the author covers the music in all its aspects from traditional to contemporary singers but focuses mainly on tradition. Thus, Glen Campbell (born in Arkansas but who made his career in California) and Barbara Mandrell (born in Texas but raised in California from an early age) are given due coverage, their achievements being far too important to ignore. Although I love their music, I know as much as I want to from elsewhere. It is important that they are covered but they are not the reason to buy this book.
Apart from the chapters on the selected major traditional artists, this book serves as a reminder of many great but obscure performers such as Kate Wolf, who seemed set to make a major commercial breakthrough with her brand of folk-country music but died of leukaemia before she could capitalize on her growing popularity.
Country-rock is covered too - there is a page devoted to a family tree showing how various performers switched between various groups - the Byrds, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills and Nash, Poco and a few others. It's not complete (no Dillard and Clark Expedition, no Desert Rose Band) but it covers all the line-ups that most people are interested in. A truly comprehensive family tree would take too much space to make it easy to follow.
This book is a real treasure trove of information about country music in California but if it whets your appetite for more reading, there is a selected bibliography that runs to over twenty pages.
Every country music fan can learn much about the history of the music from this book, which proves that California has played a major role in the development of country music - maybe not quite as important as Tennessee and Texas, but far more important than most people realize.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Country music before Nashville . . ., December 4, 2004
This review is from: Workin' Man Blues: Country Music in California (Hardcover)
Nashville has not always been the home of country music. Following migrations westward from the South and Dust Bowl states during the 1930s and 1940s, country music flourished in California, where it thrived in Hollywood, throughout the agricultural interior valleys and around the war-related industries in Los Angeles. And it continued in the post-war years, peaking in creative output one final time in the 1960s.
Author Gerald Haslam's history of country music in California tells a story full of rich appreciation for its many musical styles, from hillbilly (the Crockett Family, seen on the cover), to the singing cowboys (Gene Autry), to the heyday of western swing (Bob Wills and Spade Cooley), to Tennessee Ernie Ford, and the Bakersfield music scene, centered around Buck Owens in the 1960s. Haslam then tracks its story since those golden years in the careers of Californians who made it big in the Nashville years, such as Merle Haggard.
Haslam's sympathies are clearly with performers who have bucked the homogenizing trends of Nashville and the dominance of a music today that calls itself country but has largely lost contact with its roots. He praises the musical mavericks and outlaws who keep traditional and "hard" country alive in California, giving special attention to Dwight Yoakum, who stubbornly and fiercely chose Los Angeles as a base to launch a career that got national attention in the 1980s.
You may or may not love the author's blue-collar bias. He notes the frequent theme of discontent in traditional country music, characterizing it as the music of the hard-working men and women who labor not always successfully in pursuit of an American dream. Their yearning for simpler times and rural values is a sensibility mostly absent from today's country play lists, with only rare exceptions like Alan Jackson. It's a sentiment that finds its parallel in the traditionalist's dislike for the urban market-driven output of Nashville's lucrative music industry.
This is a highly readable book, with over 50 photographs of performers, and it's also a reference based on a good deal of scholarship. There's a 22-page bibliography and both a song title index and a subject index covering another 24 pages. Readers interested in western swing will especially appreciate the author's extensive study of this subject. As a companion volume, I'd also recommend "The Rough Guide to Country Music."
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