Reviewed by: Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls: Women's Country Music, 1930–1960 by Stephanie Vander Wel Leigh H. Edwards Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls: Women's Country Music, 1930–1960. By Stephanie Vander Wel. Music in American Life. (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 250. Paper, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-252-08495-9; cloth, $110.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04308-6.) This study of early women's country music provides an illuminating contribution to scholarship on gender and class in popular music, establishing specifically how white working-class women in country music during the three decades from 1930 to 1960 negotiated classed ideals of femininity through their musical voices and theatrical displays. Stephanie Vander Wel argues that performers such as Patsy Montana, Rose Maddox, and Kitty Wells reveal the contradictions of female performance in the country music industry during this period because while the industry emphasized notions of middle-class respectability, the female artists themselves often performed in ways that exceeded that pressured framing of domestic propriety and instead registered working-class ambivalence about middle-class norms. Using a nuanced model of both identification and disavowal, Vander Wel skillfully establishes how performers could engage with gender and class formations in this period of industrial modernity, and fans from a range of socioeconomic and regional backgrounds could take pleasure in performances that pushed back against or exceeded white middle-class respectability. [End Page 420] Building on important work by scholars such as Kristine M. McCusker, Vander Wel makes a key contribution to studies of women in early country music. Her study is particularly notable for its extensive discussions of vocality and gender. She unpacks how vocal style itself can be interpreted in different sociohistorical contexts in relation to ideas of class, gender, and place. Finding larger cultural tensions around gender and class in performance tropes of the period, Vander Wel examines tropes such as the singing cowgirl, the female hillbilly comedian with burlesque humor, and the honky-tonk angel for how each in different ways embodies ambivalent resistance to middle-class domesticity. Organized chronologically, the book attends to place. Part 1 tackles early country radio in the 1930s and Chicago's WLS National Barn Dance, with case studies of Lulu Belle and Patsy Montana. Part 2 addresses 1940s California and dance hall culture, with studies of Carolina Cotton's performances with western swing bands and in Hollywood films, and of Rose Maddox's use of burlesque humor. In Part 3, the book moves to 1950s Nashville and the evolution of the country music industry, focusing on Kitty Wells and honky-tonk, with studies of Jean Shepherd and Goldie Hill. In her conclusion, Vander Wel traces the ongoing impacts of these earlier dynamics of female performers in the performers of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, as well as recent artists such as the Chicks and Miranda Lambert. Drawing on intersectional approaches to country music studies, Vander Wel discusses recent scholarship on Dolly Parton in particular. As it engages with these larger theoretical questions of gender and class, the book illuminates how musical performances register sociohistorical ideas around these categories, and it thoroughly contextualizes these performances and their cultural reception. Vander Wel analyzes specific vocal performances such as Patsy Montana's and Carolina Cotton's yodeling or Rose Maddox's open-throat singing style. The chapter on Kitty Wells provides an especially convincing argument that Wells combined more traditional southern vernacular elements like a nasal twang with more modern vocal approaches that included more vibrato, and that her singing style conveys the tensions of the honky-tonk angels who express their own sexual desires as well as their own conflicted relationship to notions of middle-class security. That chapter encapsulates the book's strength in combining vocal analysis with larger gendered class themes, as well as thorough historicization of styles like honky-tonk. The book also helpfully brings more attention to less well known performers, such as Carolina Cotton. Throughout, Vander Wel's study demonstrates how these larger theoretical concerns can be seen in the grounded history of musical performance itself. Leigh H. Edwards Florida State University Copyright © 2022...
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May 24, 2024
Francesco Barchi 
Open Access
