Don't Get above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class

Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class. By Bill C. Malone. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. xvi + 392, preface, introduction, photographs, notes, bibliography, discography, indices. $35.95 cloth) This is a wonderfully nostalgic and grounded book. In the introduction, the author, a well-beloved writer about country music for four decades, contextualizes himself, describing how and when and why he learned country music in his own childhood. In the preface he specifies that the chief focus of this book is on "the music made by southern working people." The book's historical sweep is wide-it reaches back to eighteenth-century dance instruction books (152) and forward to such recent songs as Steve Earl's 1996 "Christmas Time in Washington" (247). The book's chapters center on work, home, church, love and its heartaches, dance, and patriotism, particularly within the transmission media of radio and recordings. The photo images range from Pappy O'Daniel with his Hill-Billy Flour Band (1938) through Willie Nelson at MerleFest (2000). The book's argument is supported by approximately 650 footnotes covering 71 pages. Malone augments the narrative with a useful bibliography, discography, and index of song titles in addition to the extensive general index. For all its nostalgia, though, some readers will find this book disappointing. Malone uolcs in the preface that readers should not expect an intensive exploration of song lyrics (viii). He leaves to others any exploration of the uses made of southern working-class music in primary-school music books, as well as the sale of song-lyric collections and of sheet music, often including guitar tablature and piano accompaniments. (As a group, southern working-class song writers and singers have learned to read music in multiple ways-through regular instruction in school, in the process acquiring such songs as "This Land is Your Land" and "The Boll Weevil Song;" through shape-note singing in church; and through adult evening music classes, at one time offered everywhere in the South, that combined music instruction with socializing among neighbors and flirting and courtship among the marriageable young. The effects of these multiple and deeply culturally contextualized sources of learning on working-class music cry out to be studied but are not explored in this book.) As noted above, the book provides a wide-ranging historical and cultural outline of the development of the repertoire central to southern working class country music. In his conclusion, Malone posits that "No demographic study has ever accurately measured the country music audience, but I suspect that most fans are suburban-dwelling Middle Americans. …