Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (review)

Abstract

Aaron A. Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Duke University Press, 2004. 363 pp. In Real Country, Aaron Fox has produced a theoretically sophisticated and beautifully written ethnography, giving readers a lyrical depiction of working class Texan barroom life, while developing a theory of speaking and singing voice as central to working class culture. In a place where and risk of poverty (31) are pervasive, and work is alienated, body-wrecking, and mind-numbing (32), people construct unique selves and create spaces of warm through music and other verbal art forms. Working in zone where linguistic anthropology and ethnomusicology overlap, building on and contributing to both disciplines (not to mention cultural studies), Fox makes a persuasive case for importance of song in constitution of particular social and cultural worlds, and of selves who inhabit those worlds. Linguistic anthropologists have long produced sensitive analyses of a wide range of verbal art forms, including stories, jokes, praise, oratory, and song. Real Country is no exception, and has a depth that comes from many years of fieldwork; crucially, Fox also became known as a musician and a friend, in ways that both strengthened and complicated his ability to carry out his research. The resulting product is especially valuable, because he does much more than write about music lyrics and performances. Instead, he situates song within a broader discursive field, showing how it grows out of and is incorporated into other genres of speaking. In presentation of ethnographic evidence throughout book, song lyrics and performances are intertwined with conversations, stories, and jokes about music, emotions, and relationships as they are in bars themselves. Fox describes honky-tonk bar in chapter one as a public institution where music performance and other verbal art forms take center stage; this is a critical site for reproduction of working class culture, a theme he develops in more detail in chapter six. Neither church nor home, bar nevertheless contains elements of sacred and domestic. Most of patrons identify as redneck-a particular class-positioned way of being white (25), but more importantly, they identify as country, defining themselves both by place they live and music they love. Chapter three focuses on cultural construction of country as a specific kind of place, a liminal industrial-agricultural wasteland (74) with occasional hints of older pastoral landscapes. This place is peopled with wellknown characters, who work to establish public personalities marked by interesting imperfections even as they protect themselves from too much small-town scrutiny. The country's iconic sounds are meandering conversational talkin' shit and slow, sad song, though some auditory moments are more intense in their pacing and poetry, just as certain physical places are more densely layered with meanings and memories. Chapter four explores linguistic and musical construction of the social person and psychological (125), as exemplified in imperfect but valued character and potentially disruptive tore up fool. Where character contributes his or her unique qualities to ongoing discourse of community, endangers by withdrawing in despair or exploding in anger. In music, this type is figured as the fool in mirror, who experiences a disconnect between interior self and exterior person constructed or mirrored in discourse. It requires some careful linguistic work to repair this disconnect, to draw out from self-obsession into sociability. The analysis of self and person, subjectivity and sociability (126), in this chapter is particularly insightful theoretically, and serves to ground chapters which follow. …