PROTO-COUNTRYPOLITANS

Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South
by Patrick Huber (North Carolina)
A new, canny take on Old, Weird America, this colorful, contrarian book does much to dispel a spate of antediluvian tropes, musical and otherwise. The myth holds that prewar country music was a grassroots phenomenon, made and popularized by pickin’-and-grinnin’ farmhands. But Huber, a history professor and co-author of The 1920s: American Popular Culture Through History, argues that it was Piedmont cities and mill towns and their industrial workforce that disseminated the region’s rich sounds. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources and recordings, he asserts that country music circa 1922 to 1942 was, “in fact, as thoroughly modern in its origins and evolution as its quintessentially modern counterpart, jazz.” Turning a welcome spotlight on talented oddballs such as Charlie Poole, Fiddlin’ John Carson, and the Dixon Brothers, he elucidates the experiences, equally civilizing and compromising, of millhands in a rapidly industrializing South. And he contextualizes the give-and-take of the music and its makers–how, exactly, new social identities emerged, regional allegiances congealed, and a proto-countrypolitan sensibility took root and flourished in times both culturally and economically turbulent. (unsigned Atlantic review)