Country music is white music. Its performers are white; its repertoire is white; its audience is white. That’s the genre’s image, anyway. But it’s largely a myth, debunked decisively in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, a new collection of scholarly essays. The book finds African-Americans throughout country’s history, from early black musicians like DeFord Bailey, on 1920s and ’30s hillbilly records, to Ray Charles’s massive 1962 hit (and the first million-selling country record) Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Country has drawn on African-American styles like banjo and blues; it’s contributed to the musical amalgamations of Muscle Shoals and King Records. There’s nothing innate in country music that makes its audiences automatically be white. As one fascinating essay by Jerry Wever points out, in the Caribbean nation of Saint Lucia, country music from George Jones to Jim Reeves is a passion of long standing.
The issue here isn’t theft. The issue is segregation, in the context of which the frame of “theft” is itself part of the problem, suggesting there was a black music to steal in the first place—and a white music to steal it. Pecknold gets at this in her introductory essay when she writes that “music helps to constitute race rather than expressing an essence that precedes it.” It’s also what other contributors get at when they quote from Geoff Mann’s important 2008 essay on country and whiteness. Mann argues that country does deliberate ideological work in creating whiteness—that as a genre its purpose is in part to “recruit white people to their ‘whiteness.’”
Ed. Diane Pecknold (Duke University Press)
