Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class.

By Bill C. Malone. Music in American Life Series. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. [xviii], 392. $34.95, ISBN 0-252-02678-0.)

When itinerant visiting assistant professor of history Bill C. Malone submitted an application for a permanent position within academia in the early 1970s, friends advised him that it would be wise to abandon, at least temporarily, his country music scholarship. They encouraged him to embrace a "legitimate" field of study to demonstrate that he was a "serious" scholar. The son of an East Texas tenant-farm family and a passionate fan of the genre who had already seen his dissertation published to favorable reviews as Country Music, U.S.A. (Austin, Tex., 1968), Malone did not take the advice. Despite this seeming waywardness, he received a tenured appointment and spent the next twenty-five years delving deeper into the music's past, fastidiously contemplating its relationship to southern culture and history. It represented both a personal journey to explore his own roots and a professional quest to legitimize his interests within the academic community. The fruits of his nearly lifelong commitment to studying the music of the region's plain folk can be found in the long-awaited Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class.

Not a narrative history of country music (see his twice-revised and expanded Country Music, U.S.A., a virtual encyclopedia on the subject), Don't Get Above Your Raisin' is instead an insightful examination of the process by which a people, a place, and the past interacted to create and sustain a culture. The music, of course, takes center stage, but mainly as a vehicle that allows Malone to probe the attitudes and behavior of a southern rural white working class confronting a century of incessant upheaval. Well aware that their response to social change was more often than not informed by conservatism, nescience, racism, and bigotry, Malone nevertheless brings sensitivity to his treatment of the region's embattled white working folk. The result is a comprehensive portrait that underscores the complex and dynamic nature of southern culture.

The book is divided into thematic chapters that seek to verify country music's historic southern character while exploring internal tensions that grant the music a universal appeal. Like Wilbur J. Cash more than half a century earlier, Malone focuses on the contradictions of piety and hedonism seemingly inherent within the southern white male lifestyle. He views this dichotomy as the product of a post-Civil War rural-urban dialogue, after which modernity's increasing encroachment (and the inextricable and impersonal middle-class world it heralded) instilled a longing for both moral stability (mother and church) and individual autonomy (overt masculinity). For Malone, the story of country music from the 1920s through the 1970s is indeed the chronicle of a working class in transition, attempting to make sense of the new order and its place within it. At times nostalgic, comical, quixotic, and escapist, country music revealed how many southerners defined themselves in relation to the mainstream. Though generally couched in personal rather than political terms, the songs expressed the innermost desires and frustrations of alienated performers and listeners coping with the uncertainties of everyday life. As Malone cogently argues, to understand those feelings is to comprehend the relationship between history and the people who are its actors.

While the book will not completely satisfy everyone (the insights gained from recent scholarship on gender and race are conspicuously absent), Malone has nevertheless forged a sound interpretation of the southern past that accounts for and incorporates commercial music. He has established a methodological framework that will help broaden and deepen a traditional historical narrative rarely cognizant of the popular arts. Invigorated by a working-class perspective that navigates new and innovative paths in the study of history and culture, Don't Get Above Your Raisin' is an instant classic destined to become a standard in modern southern historiography.

MICHAEL T. BERTRAND

Oxford, Mississippi