Striking a remarkable balance between academic rigor, engaging storytelling, and an almost encyclopedic treatment of a wide range of source materials, Bill C. Malone’s Don’t Get above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class provides an excellent resource and compelling read for almost any country music fan or scholar. One of the most widely-read writers (scholarly or otherwise) on country music since the publication of his seminal work, Country Music, USA (University of Texas Press, 1968), Malone draws on his remarkable breadth of experience in country music culture and performance to present a work that is neither a dull academic treatment of this artistic and social movement nor an impassioned but shallow examination of the genre and its stars. Instead, he manages to provide both productive academic insights and rich historical and cultural contexts that complement each other to create a uniquely informative and compelling text.
Despite the book’s academic orientation and title, scholars expecting a distinct linear argument regarding a particular stance on the role of geography and class in the production of country music will be disappointed to find such specific organizational principles to be elusive in this book. Following an introduction that highlights Malone’s own life experiences with country music and the working class South, the first two chapters of this book establish the broad historical connections between country music as a form of cultural expression and the South and “working people” as culturally identifiable communities. Each subsequent chapter explores these connections as they relate to one of the six areas that Malone sees as the major themes found in country music-home, religion, rambling, frolic, humor, and politics. These chapters trace the roles of each of these themes in the changing landscape of country music over the recent centuries, following them from the pre-commercial era up until the present day. This loose structure allows Malone to fill each chapter with a huge range of fascinating and colorful information and insights on the history, politics, economics, and music-making of the artists, consumers, industry, and social contexts that have impacted country music throughout its long and varied history. By presenting his views in such a manner, Malone allows those looking for a scholarly approach to follow his arguments through both chronological and thematic progressions while still providing space to relate the stories and ideas that many more casual readers will be interested in reading.
Even though this work is certainly highly accessible to those outside academia, it also fills a need in academic country music scholarship for a work that approaches such issues from a broad critical standpoint. Although issues related to Southern and working class culture are often seen by country music scholars as being intrinsically intertwined with the study of popular country music, no other recent work on this topic is as broadly ambitious and intimately personal as this one. In this work, Malone both tells the story of his own relationship to country music throughout his life and also examines the history of country music’s relationship to the Southern working class over the long history of the genre. It is this compelling combination that makes this work a welcome addition to the growing field of country music scholarship across a wide range of academic disciplines as well as to the bookshelf of any serious country music fan.
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[Review length: 552 words • Review posted on December 15, 2006]