Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music

Abstract

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Ed. by Diane Pecknold. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 383 pp, includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 987-0-8223-5149-8 Over the past several years, the making of southern American vernacular and commercial musics, and the sinews of their composition over the previous century, has fallen under intense scrutiny by academics and musicians alike. Their efforts challenge the naturalization of the idea that southern music genres developed, more or less, within the lines of a stringently enforced, bifurcated, and segregated racial landscape. Recent historical scholarship has sought to reveal a far more multi-cultural twentieth century South, composed of a much more agile, mobile, and culturally fluid population than the black and white lens of the Jim Crow South or the contemporary media would admit to acknowledge. Scholars such as Karl Hagstrom Miller, for example, have demonstrated how record companies in the 1920s strategically created the racialized categories of "race" and "hillbilly" (or "old time") records, for example, in order more effectively to hock their wares to southern black and white consumers, respectively. Building upon the earlier practice of marketing international and domestic recordings of "ethnic" music to corresponding pools of ethnic consumers, he demonstrates how the industry's imagining of southern black and white consumers ultimately reinforced white hegemony and the bipartite matrix of the Jim Crow South's social order. Meanwhile, niche market musicians such as the members of the Carolina Chocolate Drops have celebrated the longstanding involvement of African-Americans in string band traditions, typically now associated with white southerners, that predate the creation of the industry's bipartite marketing strategies. Attracting far more attention, today we also find hip hop stars occasionally collaborating on major label country albums, most infamously, perhaps, as demonstrated by Brad Paisley and L.L. Cool J's recording of "Accidental Racist." Critics, however, consistently ghettoize, if not lampoon, such collaborations for their novelty or attempted "crossover" appeal, which tends to reify the whiteness of country by proving the rule rather than acknowledging the fault lines. Indeed, despite such forays, scholarly or musically, that might otherwise denaturalize the mono-racial identities of southern music genres, the whiteness of country music remains nearly unassailable. In a new anthology, ably curated by editor Diane Pecknold, contributors to Hidden in the Mix seek both to further illuminate the making of country's whiteness, and challenge the premises upon which it is constructed. As Pecknold's authoritative introduction reveals, "one aim of this volume is thus to examine how the genre's whiteness was produced and is maintained, to imagine country music not merely as a cultural reflection of a preexisting racial identity but as one of the processes by which race is constituted"(p.2). The contributors consider the whiteness of country through a variety of approaches, from studies of "crossover" albums by individual, nationally recognized artists such as Ray Charles and Al Green, to Tony Thomas's ruminations on the banjo as technological innovation and abandonment by African-Americans, to essays on the cultural heterogeneity of vernacular music as practiced in quite local and intimate settings. Patrick Huber's exceptional essay on the participation of African-Americans in the making of "old-time" commercial records lends historical foundation to the collection through his examination of early commercial recordings. "The truth," he argues, "is that much of the music found on the hillbilly records of the 1920s and early 1930s was the product of decades or even centuries of dynamic cultural interplay between white and black musicians, and many of the songs and tunes issued on these records were of black origin or borrowed from black tradition"(p. …