Stringbean: The Life and Murder of a Country Music Legend by Taylor Hagood (review)

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• Stringbean: The Life and Murder of a Country Music Legend by Taylor Hagood
• Sara K. Eskridge

Stringbean: The Life and Murder of a Country Music Legend. By Taylor Hagood. Music in American Life. (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2023. Pp. [xii], 241. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-252-08711-0; cloth, $110.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04498-4.)

In the rural South, Hee Haw (1969–1992) was once a fixture of television. Get past the corny jokes—literally, characters popped up out of a cornfield to tell jokes—and the hayseed costumes, and viewers were treated to top-notch bluegrass performances from multiple generations of talent. Among those performers was David Akeman, a banjo player and comic performer professionally known as Stringbean. It is his life and tragic end that Taylor Hagood shares in Stringbean: The Life and Murder of a Country Music Legend, taking us from Akeman’s humble beginnings in rural Kentucky through his brutal murder and the subsequent trial of his killers. Hagood depicts Stringbean as an exceptional talent preserving old-fashioned banjo music in a time of sweeping musical innovation. Stringbean helped develop the bluegrass sound, went out of fashion with rock and roll, and was then reborn as a musical icon of folk musicians in the 1960s. Hagood presents Stringbean as a laconic man with simple pleasures, a man with no enemies and many friends, whose death rocked the foundations of the Nashville country music community.

Hagood, whose previous books include Faulkner, Writer of Disability (Baton Rouge, 2014), Secrecy, Magic, and the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers (Columbus, Ohio, 2010), and others, gives us a cursory examination of Stringbean’s youth before delving into his early years as a musician and the evolution of his performance style. The sources for this section are a bit thin—Stringbean did not give many interviews, and, as a result, the author is sometimes left to guess on some of the major events of his subject’s life. For example, Hagood is on shaky footing discussing Stringbean’s time with Bill Monroe’s band and his eventual replacement by Earl Scruggs, although he does demonstrate that it was Stringbean’s time with the band, not Scruggs’s, that solidified the banjo as part of the burgeoning bluegrass sound.

The book’s second half is stronger, tracing Stringbean’s navigation of the rock and roll craze of the mid-1950s. As country music fell out of favor, he pressed on, playing schoolhouses at a fraction of his previous price just to make ends meet. After more than a decade of struggling, a new generation of folk musicians discovered him. By the late 1960s, he was in high demand, a [End Page 462] regular on the Grand Ole Opry. An invitation to join the cast of Hee Haw in 1969 cemented his status as a country legend. As his star grew, so did his wallet, and Hagood can only guess why Stringbean started to flaunt his wealth in a more conspicuous way, driving a Cadillac and carrying a large wad of cash. These behaviors concerned his friends, who worried he would draw the wrong kind of attention.

Those fears were realized most horrifically on November 10, 1973, when men broke into the Akeman home and killed both Stringbean and his wife as they returned from an evening at the Opry. Stringbean’s murder and the subsequent investigation and trial are the focus the last third of the book, and this portion is the best sourced, drawing on the police reports and news coverage as well as interviews with Stringbean’s contemporaries. The result is engrossing, if overly detailed. Hagood demonstrates the paranoia that pervaded the Nashville community in the weeks and months after the murders, as musicians mourned their friend while wondering if they were the next target. As stars opted for more security measures and became more insular, the author notes, it marked a loss of innocence for country music’s home.

This book is a worthy addition to the University of Illinois Press’s long-standing Music in American Life series, which illuminates lesser-known figures and movements in...