Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake: Shuffle Along Music of the United States Volume 29. Recent Researches in American Music Volume 85. Edited by Lyn Schenbeck and Lawrence Schenbeck. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2018.

Abstract

ship, which tends to disassociate country music (and especially rockabilly) from its roots in the musical practices of Black Americans. Part 3 turns to Nashville in the 1940s and 1950s, focusing on Kitty Wells and the rise of women’s honky-tonk. Chapter 6 details how performers such as Wells, Goldie Hill, and Jean Shepard musically “destabilized the ideals of the private sphere” and voiced “the yearnings of working-class women,” thus contending with class prejudice against the dominant framework of domesticity (154). Vander Wel draws attention to ideological divisions between the masculine honky-tonk and feminine home, framing narratives about women in honky-tonk and emphasizing that Wells and her peers “complicated the constraints of working-class womanhood” by leveraging performances of feminine identity with agency (163–64). Chapter 7 focuses on marketing in country music, fleshing out how the industry’s ongoing “pursuit of respectability” was shaped by female musicians beginning in the 1950s (175). The country music industry has continually strived for commercial acceptance, and the women who participate have required what Vander Wel describes as a “model of propriety” to succeed (179). Kitty Wells’s publicity materials serve as an example of this, portraying her both as a “good woman” and a good musician (180). Vander Wel chronicles how the industry began selling itself to a white middle-class audience through these marketing practices, shifting away from the poor, working-class, low-brow status it had gained from its days of barn dance radio programming and honky-tonk styles in the 1930s and 1940s. The book concludes by outlining country music’s attachment to female domesticity and propriety in the present day, describing how the vocal parodies of Lulu Belle, Maddox, and even Kitty Wells have continued with performers like Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, The Chicks, Miranda Lambert, and Gretchen Wilson. Vander Wel indicates that women in country music today use their voices to offer audiences insight into the contested spheres of class and gender that shape the “shifting demographics of the twentieth-first century” (197). Well written and deeply insightful, Vander Wel’s study sheds light on how women in country music have used their voices to represent the intricate relationships between class, gender, and region in the United States.