Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture

by Barbara Ching

Overview

This is the first study of "hard" country music as well as the first comprehensive application of contemporary cultural theory to country music. Barbara Ching begins by defining the features that make certain country songs and artists "hard." She compares hard country music to "high" American culture, arguing that hard country deliberately focuses on its low position in the American cultural hierarchy, comically singing of failures to live up to American standards of affluence, while mainstream country music focuses on nostalgia, romance, and patriotism of regular folk. With chapters on Hank Williams Sr. and Jr., Merle Haggard, George Jones, David Allan Coe, Buck Owens, Dwight Yoakam, and the Outlaw Movement, this book is written in a jargon-free, engaging style that will interest both academic as well as general readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195355291
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/19/2001
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Barbara Ching is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis. She co-edited Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy (1997).

Editorial Reviews

"Barbara Ching never killed a man in Reno just to watch him die, but there's something about the sentiment behind Johnny Cash's claim that she can identify with...when it comes to the music that matters to her, only the most down-and-out country makes sense deep inside"

Chronicle of Higher Education

"Ching...argues that this feisty, mostly male genre is overdue for cultural analysis, claiming that its focus is 'far wider than barnyards and bars' and that its 'volatile blend of anger, irony, and burlesque abjection'--first cooked up by [Hank] Williams--warrants serious study in the postmodern age."

The New Yorker

A professor of English (Univ. of Memphis) and obvious country music fanatic, Ching offers a study of the basis and social implications of "hard country." She begins by defining her subject as the Southern twang of angry alienation, hard times, and incurable desolation in contrast to the patriotism, nostalgia, and pop romance of mainstream country. She examines the desolate male fatalism of such stars as George Jones, Merle Haggard, and David Allen Coe, then turns to the roots of hard country with pioneer Hank Williams and his son, Hank Jr. Rather unconvincingly, Ching categorizes as "hard" the rock-inflected Bakersfield sound of Hee Haw regular Buck Owens and prot g Dwight Yoakam. She finishes with the rock-tinged, Hank Williams-obsessed outlaw country of the 1970s, discussing such singers as Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, and hints at the uncertain future of the music. Well organized, well researched, and largely free of academic jargon, the book conveys Ching's enthusiasm for the hard country sound and contributes some interesting, though misplaced, new material about Buck Owens. Recommended primarily for fans and scholars of country. Dave Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A scholarly disquisition on an embattled musical genre. Ching (English/Univ. of Memphis) is a true-blue fan of "hard country music," which goes by other names—roots, Americana, alt-country, etc.—on the few radio playlists where it is welcome today. The province of influential artists such as Hank Williams, George Jones, Porter Wagoner, Waylon Jennings, Dwight Yoakam, Willie Nelson, and other performers who "often portray themselves as poor souls condemned to endlessly state the obvious," hard country has been driven from the airwaves by the frothy pop of Garth Brooks and other Perrier-swilling yuppies in boots and Stetsons. To illustrate the "almost existential" differences between hard and pop country, Ching offers a nicely wry deconstruction of Brooks's 1990 anthem "The Dance" and Jones's 1980 lament "He Stopped Loving Her Today," the second of which she characterizes, and not unjustly, as a "wallow in male misery" while recognizing its superiority on every score. The more prevalent the Brooksian, hook-laden, lyrically unchallenging brand of country becomes, Ching notes—and she is far from the first writer to do so—the farther hard country drifts from the mainstream, so much so that it now stands as an angry, countercultural critique of prevailing values. The author's plainspoken appreciation for the merits of the hard-country genre is, unfortunately, surrounded by thickets of postmodern jargon that few other than fellow literary critics will want to enter, as when she observes that "abjection is constantly portrayed by an absurdly unregenerate white man who jokes and suffers while women and conventionally successful men brandish the normative values thatunderscore abjection." In the end, even if it converts one or two of them to the cause of David Allan Coe and Bocephus, Ching's account is for professors—and not for civilian fans of the hard-drinking, lost-highway sound.

Kirkus Reviews

"an engaging account of country's most colorful characters and the acts of self-invention that made them that way."—Reason

From the Publisher