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Flannery O'Connor and Fats Domino are kin. Each was among the best at his craft, and neither had many variations up his sleeve.
Books concerned with race and culture frequently have little variation either. First, they exalt the creativity of the suffering, without speculating as to why it flourished. Second, they claim that the aggressors were good critics. They could tell a good tune when they heard it, and they imitated it.
The somewhat scholarly Southern Music/American Music pursues the truth more aggressively than most. Its major flaw is that it frequently precedes an assertion with the word "may" or "might". It also never speculates in reverse. Whereas blacks might have brought the banjo from Africa, the book asserts that there's evidence that the banjo's drone, or fifth, string may have not been introduced by Joel Walker Sweeney (10). They don't provide the evidence, they just declare it.
Political correctness might be one of the problems here, but brevity is another. The book has long been applauded for being just the right length, but this revised and extended edition, like the original, is too short. Even ignoring the final chapters, in which great modern artists like Iris Dement and Lucinda Williams receive mere paragraphs of summary praise, you get a lot of historical research that provides speculative conclusions, but offers little of the evidence behind them.
If the authors have actual anecdotal evidence, there are people, myself included, who are interested in hearing it. Malone and Stricken do a great a job stating the influence of German music and Irish composer Thomas Moore upon Stephen Foster's songs, but they don't offer examples; apparently you're supposed to take their word for it. Maybe you should.
Maybe I came to this book with the wrong aspirations, but here are the questions I wanted addressed. If black writers' work suffered from lack of education and resources, why didn't the same thing happen to black musicians? And why couldn't white slave owners, on the porch all day with their fiddles, ever come up with a good, original tune? If money and security benefit art, as the Future of Music Coalition always argues, why didn't one slave owner write a humdinger of a tune? Isn't there at least speculative proof, somewhere, of a slave guiltily shaking his ass to an owner's tune?
Perhaps there's not, and perhaps culture just can't be studied without certain inarguable half-truths. Southern Music/American Music's agenda can certainly live with them, as the book is basically a study of Southern culture: its marketing, not its making. The work shows how minstrelsy popularized certain images of the South, and how the British Invasion gave us Rosie Flores; in the case of the more revelatory latter comment, it's because the Beatles and Kinks and Stones helped popularize regional music once again. They did it less by their covers than by making their own lives worth singing about. And when Le Tigre rocked their naked hearts out on Carson Daly's late-night show the other night, they helped regional music too.
The book's coverage of music from the Great Depression through the early sixties is the most fact-based and fulfilling. There was blues, jazz and a lot of quintessential Southern music that not only had "proof of existence", courtesy of the recorded music itself, but that tried to really sell the vision of the South. As perceptions of the South are the book's primary academic preoccupation, its writers also invest more effort with these pages. They take discussions beyond simple assertions, even stating specifics as to why, for example, gospel quartets failed to enter the mainstream in the twenties. Not only could these rural groups not afford to play the big venues, they were just too unique. They played any instrument you handed them.
By and large, though, Southern Music/American Music inspires thought far less than it simply provides lists of great performers. Page after page, you're given countless artists whose names the authors wanted to drop, and they're all good. They're all worth namedropping. That's what makes this book with problems an essential book with problems: it may not bring clarity to your childhood hatred of Southern music, or explain why you don't hate it anymore, but it mentions an amazing range of artists worth hearing, without ever appearing to slant the discussion toward the authors' own tastes. As a result, you trust them more.
Once this total trust is established, the book's brevity has a sort of charm. You don't mind going without dozens of pages discussing the propagation of the hymnody -- I mean, did I really want that? -- and you can more comfortably accept the authors' assertions. It's hard not to want a well-researched book to go like the Allman Brothers Band and show its cards, even if it disrupts the work's flow, commercial appeal, and your tolerance for guitar jams, but it's also hard to let my final word on the book be anything but praise. I will definitely go back to it, again and again, to decide which great Georgia band to buy from the devil next.
-- Theodore Defosse
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About the Publisher:
The University Press of Kentucky's editorial program focuses on the humanities and the social sciences. Its commitment to film, music and military studies has earned it a national reputation in recent years. Since the formation of the consortium, the press has broadened its appeal to readers in Kentucky and Appalachia with publications of special regional interest. In the 1970s it produced the Kentucky Nature Series and the forty-seven-volume Kentucky Bicentennial Bookshelf.
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