A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music.

A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music. Edited by Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold. American Made Music Series. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, c. 2004. Pp. xxiv, 232. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 1-57806-678-6; cloth, $50.00, ISBN 1-57806-677-8.)

More than Precious Memories: The Rhetoric of Southern Gospel Music. Edited by Michael P. Graves and David Fillingim. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2004. Pp. [x], 310. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-86554-955-9; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-86554-857-9.)

A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music is a sparkling set of nine essays that investigate "how gender operates throughout the whole constellation of images, attitudes, and operations attendant to country music" (p. xiv). The essays range widely, and as a collection they suggest that country music studies is heading into a very exciting period.

Kristine M. McCusker bats leadoff, demonstrating how the producers of WLS Chicago's National Barn Dance took an Indiana juvenile delinquent and sometime lounge singer and fashioned her into Linda Parker, the perfect embodiment of Appalachian femininity. Her transformation helped tone down the raucous world of hillbilly entertainment, and by appealing to middle-class standards of female comportment, Parker expanded country music's audience into a lucrative new market. Peter La Chapelle, focusing on the country scene in Cold War-era southern California, demonstrates how industry publications did their part to bolster reigning domestic ideologies "by repeatedly portraying women's homemaking abilities as the key to their star husbands' successful careers" (p. 25). Yet the avidity with which female fans supported women singers reveals that country music was "a site of active dialogue over competing notions of acceptable women's behavior" (p. 43). Emily C. Neely suggests in her survey of Charline Arthur's busted career that "the domestic ideal disillusioned women who listened to country music, but they were not looking for a fundamental reconsideration of gender" (p. 57). The rapid decline of Arthur's popularity came not so much from a hostile industry, Neely indicates, but from put-off listeners.

Elvis and the rise of rockabilly cause Michael Bertrand to reflect on how young, white, working-class, southern men of the postwar period "discovered that they and African Americans shared common ground" (p. 81). Namely, they were both attracted to a masculine style that is best described not racially but "as a product of working-class regional culture" (p. 75). In a particularly insightful essay, Diane Pecknold examines how industry executives in the late 1950s and through the 1960s eagerly shed their hillbilly image in favor of Cold War domestic masculine paradigms that compared country musicians with corporate male breadwinners. Joli Jensen provides a first-person account of how her attempts to understand the "real" Patsy Cline symbolically mirror the culture's tangled efforts to make sense of Cline's melange of brass and lace.

In an essay that turns from the music to the dance, Jocelyn R. Neal's ethnographic investigation of country dance halls in North Carolina and Tennessee allows us to see how local communities act out gender relations through touch and display in the various kinds of dances available. For those convinced that feminism has (repeatedly) passed country by, Beverly Keel points out the insistent ways that contemporary acts like Shania Twain, Faith Hill, and Gretchen Wilson have contributed to "a slowly evolving feminist movement" within the confines of a conservative industry and fan base (p. 156). In a final, terrifically stimulating essay, Barbara Ching examines No Depression, the self-described alt.country magazine, and how its "portrayal of genre rules, masculinity, authenticity, and nostalgia shapes the experience and creation of other aspects of alt.country discourse, including the music itself' (p. 179). Through the career of Robbie Fulks, she demonstrates how "the mainstream-versus-alternative conflict often plays out as a battle of the sexes" (p. 186).

A number of essays in this collection are first-rate. A few seem to shoehorn themselves into using gender as the leading interpretive device, but, on the whole, as Charles Wolfe suggests in a brief postlude, they offer up intriguing possibilities for moving the field's inquiries into new areas.

Tragically, More than Precious Memories: The Rhetoric of Southern Gospel Music hits an iceberg just as it sets sail. In a brief prelude, Don Cusic writes that southern gospel music (SGM) "is a music of simple emotions and straightforward religion," best described as "a Norman Rockwell painting in song" (pp. [ix, x]). The book never really recovers from these startlingly simplistic pronouncements. The contributors valiantly aim to understand something of gospel's meaning and import among contemporary white evangelicals and to "help legitimize the study of this significant cultural phenomenon" (p. 6). But with Cusic lining out the text, the congregation of authors follows him into a muddled series of disparate, often mundane observations that ultimately do little to advance our understanding of gospel or of its relationship to the South's history and religious culture.

Divided into an introduction and ten chapters, the book attempts to provide different angles of vision into the word of SGM. Scott Tucker examines how gospel lyrics construct a rhetorical vision of a place--heaven--from which we have, as yet, no definitive travelogues. David Fillingim concludes that gospel's "otherworldly focus" and its trust in God's wisdom help alleviate the confusion and pain of this world (p. 50). The contrast between gospel's "exclusivist theology of orthodox evangelicalism" and contemporary Christian music's accommodationist, pluralistic appeal forms the subject of Robert McManus's essay (p. 58). Keeping gospel's orthodoxy alive, writes Darlene Graves in another chapter, requires the "loving service and maternal dedication of the family matriarch," and Graves's extended observations and interviews with those matriarchs establish their centrality to the tradition (p. 91). Other essays examine the popularity of Thomas A. Dorsey's gospel songs within the largely white world of SGM; ways in which backsliding singers are reintroduced to the SGM family; approaches to balancing the secular world of entertaining with the sanctified world of singing; what motivates "the most devoted followers of Southern Gospel Music to use this form of music in their lives" (p. 230); how fans create websites to memorialize the genre's deceased legends; and in a final essay, how SGM studies can negotiate a way through the current paradigms governing popular music studies.

The book is repeatedly frustrating. The authors, for example, never explain the basic premises upon which they base the volume. What holes in our understanding does studying gospel music fill? Who is this book addressing? Why study rhetoric when, as one of the book's informants observes, "A preacher can talk, but Gospel music goes deep to my soul in a way that words do not" (p. 225)? What is SGM's relationship to the South? Indeed, the essays are strangely disengaged with even the most landmark works in the field of southern history or of southern religious culture. Moreover, the theoretical apparatus is clunky. Although the editors rather proudly proclaim that they "do not hold to the theory that it is necessary to kill the 'specimen' under the microscope in the name of anyone's scholarly discipline" (and one wonders who does hold to this particular injunction), the authors nevertheless dutifully hunker over their microscopes (p. 5). Fantasy theme analysis, the theory of constitutive rhetoric, rhetorical criticism, "Image Restoration Theory," and a sprinkling of "postmodern rhetorical discourse" are all pressed onto slides, and yet what holds these perspectives together remains elusive (p. 184). Indeed, when the results are so spartan as to leave us with conclusions that "the rhetoric of heaven portrays a place that is far away" and that SGM fans "desire to maintain and strengthen a personal relationship with God," one doubts the explanatory power of these theories (pp. 40, 218). Finally, the authors repeatedly call us to witness their lonely stand against the sneering disdain of some ghostly academic enemies who are never really identified. It is a needless stance that unfortunately detracts attention from SGM to the authors.

GAVIN JAMES CAMPBELL

Doshisha University