Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls: Women's Country Music, 1930–1960 By Stephanie Vander Wel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020.

Abstract

Stephanie Vander Wel ’ s study of women ’ s country music between 1930 and 1960 unpacks how female country performers negotiated the relationship between the politics of class, migration, and regional-ism during the early twentieth century. Vander Wel ’ s study connects “ women ’ s performances in a range of media (radio, film, television, and recordings) to [various] geographic locales ” and “ imagined places and spaces, ” such as the “ symbolic western frontier ” and an idealized southern past (2). Vander Wel addresses how country music shaped these spaces through female musical expression, identifying the home, dance hall, and honky-tonk as part of the “ real or imaged lives of women striving for upward mobility and/or resisting the rigidity of middle-class codes of behavior ” (3). This study thus builds deep connections between class and gender norms, extending the work of prominent historians, feminist scholars, and music scholars on these topics, and offering new insights into the study of female performers in U.S. country music. 1 Although directed toward an academic audience, the book is accessible to general audiences with varying degrees of knowledge about country and U.S. popular music history. Vander Wel ’ s use of interdisciplinary methods ensures the book will appeal to scholars in various fields, including academics in gender and American studies, as well as those interested in the intersections between vocality and demographic markers of race and class. The book is divided into three sections that are organized chronologically and geographically. Each chapter offers a case study focusing on a single artist and relevant peripheral characters and contexts that attend to the roles of gender and class as expressed through female vocal production in country music, broadly defined. Indeed, a key component of Vander Wel ’ s contributions to the study of women in country music is her attention to the female voice and vocality. She weaves deep analysis of female performing voices throughout the text, attending to the styles, techniques, and production qualities that have ’ 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. Phoebe Hughes holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Ohio State University (2022). Her research interests include gender, sexuality, identity, and genre in country and other popular musics. Her dissertation project investigated race, gender, and genre in country music, focusing specifically on female crossover artists from the 1960s to the present day. Hughes also holds degrees in music and history from Northern Arizona University and an M.A. in musicology from West Virginia University.