Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music

Abstract

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Edited by Diane Pecknold. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2013. Pp. [vi], 383. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-5163-4; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-5149-8.) This is a useful collection with an engaging interdisciplinary balance of focus and imagination. The book features twelve essays, averaging between twenty and thirty pages each, with the exception of one short thirteen-page chapter and a longer opening piece on old-time hillbilly records that sets a foundation from which to move forward through the collection (p. 39). The contributing scholars include editor Diane Pecknold, and their fields include women's and gender studies, history, African American studies, music, southern studies, anthropology, and English. The collected essays can stand alone for readers who want to pick and choose within, but the volume also coheres nicely in its overall effect. Though individual chapters may be more or less valuable depending on a reader's orientation, the book is on the whole accessible, fresh, and contemporary in its tone and synthesis. The non-music specialist as well as the music history insider should find much to appreciate. New fields of inquiry seem to follow a common course. There is the initial recovery stage, wherein an unacknowledged historical community or cultural force--African Americans in country music, past and present, in this case--is recovered in the public record by scholars committed to taking it seriously. In this initial stage, a historical gap is redressed with a flush of ground-level research that is new and important. Next, there is a subsequent stage, wherein the essential first body of scholarship is tempered, reexamined, or complicated. Country music studies can be traced back to Bill C. Malone's seminal Country Music, U.S.A. (Austin, 1968). Pecknold is among a school of contemporary revisionists working in recent decades to take the field to a next level of complication and sophistication. The editor, for instance, highlights Pamela E. Foster for her important interventions, moving past just acknowledging influences in the background of white country music (My Country: The African Diaspora's Country Music Heritage [Nashville, 1998] and My Country, Too: The Other Black Music [Nashville, 2000]). Pecknold also credits Karl Hagstrom Miller for his lucid recent book deconstructing the very notion of black and white in southern U.S. vernacular music (Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow [Durham, N.C., 2010]). Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music is a next positive step in this revision stage of country music scholarship. …