Book Review: "Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity" by Richard A. Peterson

How country music authenticity is a product of contrivance and negotiation

Authentic country music

I.

Occasionally on this blog I’ll be reviewing books that aren’t bad but aren’t especially mind-blowing, either. This is one such book. I first learned about Richard A. Peterson because of a sociology paper he co-authored arguing that straightforward snobbery is no longer a feature of urban sophisticates. That is, instead of saying, “I hate rap” or “I hate country,” thus dismissing entire genres of music (or whatever) as a feature of their cultivated aesthetic persona, the wealthy and educated instead show off their sophistication by indicating that they can distinguish between the artificial and commercialized version of something and its more “authentic,” artistically valid version. Though Peterson does not explicitly mention this point in his book Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (which came out a year after the study), there’s clearly a relationship between the concerns that prompted that study and those that prompted this book. We’re dealing here with the sociology of taste.

Peterson’s main interest regarding country music is how the “authenticity” of a good country musician is established and understood by his fans, and although it came out in 1997, it remains an interesting question today. Why, for instance, would someone say that Chris Janson is an inauthentic country singer while Merle Haggard is the real deal? And does everyone agree? Do today’s wealthy and educated country music fans perceive authenticity the same way as blue collar Americans? Is Eric Church authentic? Luke Bryan? The point of Creating Country Music isn’t to answer specific questions like that but rather to provide a historic and theoretical framework for how they might be answered.

Creating Country Music traces the history of country from the 1920s, when songs first started being recorded for 78 RPM releases, up to around the 1950s shortly after the untimely death of Hank Williams. Peterson takes us through the history of the first country music producers such as Polk Brockman and Ralph Peer to the first country music radio shows like the “The Grand Ole Opry” and “National Barn Dance,” all the way to the country music boom from the 1940s to the mid-50s before rock music surpassed it in popularity. By tracing the history of country, Peterson demonstrates a few things about the genre that should probably be taken into consideration today when considering the question of authenticity.

One is that country music has never been untainted by commerce and the necessities of the marketplace. In fact, commerce helped to invent the recognized style of country, because early record producers and A&R men urged the hillbilly folk musicians to write their own original songs so they could be copyrighted. It’s undeniable that capitalism spurred on originality and innovation in these musicians who would have otherwise been content playing recognized folk songs and may have not necessarily seen the value of originality.

Another is that the dress and visual presentation of country musicians has never been an innocent, unplanned phenomenon. The earliest bona fide country star, Jimmie Rodgers, would typically dress himself up in a tuxedo and bowler hat for promotional photos and vaudeville performances, but he also would dress up as a railroad worker to promote railroad songs. He had worked on railroads in real life, so the clothes were a reflection of what he actually had done, but he generally preferred to dress as sharp as possible. And in fact, many of the early “old time” fiddler groups would also dress as well as they could. Today, dressing up like they did would be perceived as inauthentic, as would wearing overalls and a floppy hat, the way real hillbillies would dress. Essentially, all wardrobe choices indicate a deliberate and conscious choice of how one presents oneself.

The last broad takeaway is that any performer’s perceived authenticity has always been an ongoing negotiation between the performer, the industry as a whole, and the fans. Peterson recognizes three distinct country star types that came out of the 20s and 30s: the “hillbilly,” the “old timer,” and the “cowboy.” All of these types relied on some contrivance (especially the “cowboy”), but their representatives fit into them well enough to pass among the listening public. For instance, Fiddlin’ John Carson was presented as a rough-hewn mountain man playing old-time tunes, but in reality he spent most of his life in Atlanta working for the city’s most technologically sophisticated cotton mill. Moreover, the “old time” style of music he and others played was itself undergoing rapid stylistic shifts with the advent of both phonograph records and the radio. But, again, it was all good enough to pass.

Eventually, Peterson gets to the subject of Hank Williams, who came to be the icon and archetypal representative of what real country musicians should be. For Peterson, Williams resembles an amalgamation of the various country musician archetypes that had been forged through the early days of recording and radio performance – a bit of a cowboy (i.e., he dressed like one despite being unable to ride a horse due to his herniated spine), a bit of a hillbilly, and even something of an old timer despite dying so young, and yet still uniquely himself all the while. His lyrics were sometimes from the perspective of other people, but they also could be quite personal to him, and most of his songs were originals with their own defining Williams-isms. Even his intentionally silly novelty songs were this way. He also died at the perfect time, since he didn’t grow old enough to tarnish his own legacy. After his death, he became an iconic representative for what country music ought to be, and a more unified industry was formed partly in his image, fusing country with pop and holding him as the implicit exemplar of its ethos, which sought to blend “originality” with “authenticity.” After this section, Peterson concludes with a theoretical discussion on what it means to be authentic, which I’ll discuss in a bit.

II.

Given that I know very little about country and never listen to it, there were some amusing things I learned from this book. Here are some of them.

1. In the early days of hillbilly music, it was typical for the popular press and music industry at large to talk major shit about it. Here is a fun little excerpt from a 1926 issue of Variety magazine:

The “hillbilly” is a North Carolina or Tennessee and adjacent mountaineer type of illiterate white whose creed and allegiance are to the Bible, the Chautauqua, and the phonograph. [...] The mountaineer is of “poor white trash” genera. The great majority, probably 95 percent, can neither read nor write English. Theirs is a community all to themselves. Illiterate and ignorant, with the intelligence of morons, the sing-song, nasal-twanging vocalizing of a Vernon Dalhart or a Carson Robison on the disks, reciting the banal lyrics of a “Prisoner’s Song” or “The Death of Floyd Collins,” biggest hillbilly song-hit to date, intrigues their interest.

At the time, the Tin Pan Alley releases coming from New York formed the industry pop standard, and most of the music insiders and critics genuinely found country music baffling. Plus, back then, you were allowed to just say stuff like this and get away with it. Although the same prejudice still exists towards backwoods redneck types, you rarely see it expressed so openly in the media nowadays.

2. Although public fiddling contests had been going on for quite a while, they increasingly became fixed during the 1930s, much like professional wrestling matches, with a staged “showdown” at the end to increase the excitement. Sometimes the scenario would involve a visiting team of fiddlers against the hometown players. Other times, there would be a clear good guy and bad guy, with the bad guy using underhanded tricks to try and secure a victory.

3. From around 1925 to 1940, Henry Ford funneled money into an old-time dancing and fiddling revival, even publishing a book entitled ‘Good Morning’: After a Sleep of Twenty-Five Years Old-Fashioned Dancing Is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford. He sponsored this type of music because he wanted to save the American population from the degenerate influence of jazz. The revival massively caught on for about two years, but by the 1930s it was clear that “old time” music was on the wane – which probably explains why fiddling contests became increasingly staged.

4. The “singing cowboy” media phenomenon, like e.g. Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, was a pure invention of Hollywood. John Wayne was actually one of these “singing cowboys” early in his career, as he played a character in several films known as Singin’ Sandy and was booked to do various public appearances in character. Eventually, he got sick of the whole thing and told Herbert Yates, the owner of his employer Republic Pictures, “I’ve had it. I’m a goddamned action star, you son-of-a-bitch. I’m not a singer. Get yourself another cowboy singer!”

5. Polk Brockman, one of the major early producers of country/folk music in Atlanta during the 1920s, was entirely open about his lack of aesthetic interest in the music. He was 100% interested in exploiting it for cash. Peterson speculates that this was the attitude of most if not all of country’s early producers, but Brockman was merely more honest about it. One can see parallels here between Brockman and the producers of “golden age” cartoons like Leon Schlesinger, who told his Looney Tunes animators they can do whatever they want as long as it makes money, and Paul Terry, who told one of his animators, “We do shit here, compared to the rest of the business, but it makes me a lot of money. If you don’t like to do shit, don’t ask for a job.”

6. The original audience of George Hay’s “Grand Ole Opry” live radio show was not just a bunch of rednecks and hillbillies. Instead, it was a mix of people from different class backgrounds living in Nashville, and they probably had a median above-average income. The reason Hay decided to accentuate the show’s “hillbilly” image was most likely because “hillbilly” was a recognized character type from vaudeville theater, and it fit the music best. Once the hillbilly gimmick was fully established, the audiences became more rural and working class.

7. When the Great Depression happened, people stopped buying so many records, so the country musicians had to make their money via radio appearances. After a few years, companies started purchasing advertising and live endorsements on the radio, and this led to the musicians having to play only wholesome songs that the companies would approve of. After this point, country music became mostly a G-Rated affair. It’s especially interesting to me that the wholesomeness of country music lyrics was directly tied to the marketplace, because that connection still persists today, even though major brands have become more comfortable with transgression. Much of the newer country music I hear seems to function as a sort of morality manual for young men and fathers, and it shamelessly shoves product placement for various trucks and clothing brands into the music videos.

8. “Country” music got its genre name mostly because of Senator Joseph McCarthy. For quite some time, people would use “folk,” “country,” “hillbilly,” and other such terms interchangeably. But McCarthy targeted the folk music being popularized by men such as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie as vehicles for communist subversion. Once the accusations were made and the lines were drawn, country fans had no trouble distinguishing between their music and folk music, settling on “country” as the official name.

III.

There are two reasons I decided to read this book. One is that I’m interested in lowbrow art forms, and country definitely belongs to that category. I think that there’s a “deep grammar” to the lowbrow arts, and this book did nothing to challenge my view, quite the contrary. The second reason is that I’m interested in how “authenticity” is perceived, particularly in the age of internet socializing, a time in which people are increasingly viewing themselves as brands to advertise through various online services. And although this study was somewhat limited (by design), I found its remarks on authenticity better than most of what I’ve seen recently from some ambitious theorists of the subject.

Part of why this book works as a contribution to the topic is its lack of pretense. When Peterson starts his final section on authenticity and what it might mean vis-à-vis country music, he gives us six definitions of “authenticity” from the Oxford English Dictionary, and then argues the last two are the most important. This might seem sophomoric to some, but it’s a simple and effective way of grounding the discussion. We’re not starting off with Heidegger, Charles Taylor, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Just the dictionary. Of course, Peterson does cite some more sophisticated social theorists, but he’s committed to an assessment of authenticity that takes into consideration what actual, regular people say about it. By contrast, in Byung-Chul Han’s The Disappearance of Rituals (2019), Han quotes Charles Taylor’s flawed but thoughtful work on authenticity, asserts that Taylor’s optimistic view of authenticity is wrong, and then further asserts that the culture of authenticity is bad, relying on a ham-fisted and reductive definition of the word that completely misses how people understand it today. All nuance is thrown out the window in favor of hapless sermonizing.

The two definitions of authenticity that Peterson likes best are: A) “credible according to the contemporary general observer,” and B) “real as opposed to imitative;” or, to use some other synonyms, “genuine as opposed to artifactual.” There are a few theoretical issues with definition A that Peterson doesn’t quite resolve, and I’m not sure why he endorses it. For one thing, it is almost circular: it seems to say something like, “authenticity is whatever the general observer deems authentic,” which takes away any need for a motivated connection between a representation and what it’s representing. But there is almost always a motivated connection between an “authentic” country song and the style it’s trying to conform to, or the “authentic” country artist’s persona and the lifestyle he really had growing up, or whatever. We don’t need to descend into pure Saussurean structuralist nonsense in order to seriously analyze this subject. Another problem is that very few people use the word “authenticity” in such a way that grants authoritative power to the common observer. In fact, quite often when someone says a work of art is inauthentic, they make their declaration in defiance of the masses. So this is a definition that social theorists might favor because it betrays an inherent distrust of the concept itself, but it is hardly ever implied in everyday conversation. Luckily, Peterson doesn’t spend much time with it.

Definition B, on the other hand, is better, and Peterson does a good job of explaining how the perception of being real and non-imitative is formed. His strongest point is that the “authentic” country performer will appear effortless, even though such an appearance requires some deal of effort and curation. Country music has a constellation of related visual and aural styles available for a performer to affix himself to, and yet the performer’s task is to make it seem like he’s just naturally that way. As if even though his style weren’t already established, he’d choose to do the same thing anyhow, just ‘cause that’s him. As Peterson puts it,

In popular culture, where experts and authorities do not control the particulars of the word’s meaning, the definition centers on being believable relative to a more or less explicit model, and at the same time being original, that is not being an imitation of the model. Thus what is taken to be authentic does not remain static but is continually renewed over the years.

Since Peterson has written this book, I’d argue that this definition has become dominant not just in pop culture but in how we judge other individuals. In a recent long essay, I wrote that authenticity is a process in which an individual negotiates between his own innate characteristics and a recognized cliché to which he can affix himself. It has virtually nothing to do with Rousseau or Heidegger’s highly individualistic understandings of the term, and this less individualized understanding explains why the concern for authenticity is now greater than ever, even while people seem to think everything around them is becoming faker. But, and this appears to be a newer development, young people are becoming aware of the clichéd, corporate, and tribal nature of how we attain authenticity, as they increasingly find their “true selves” in predetermined categories. These include not only pop-culture-based tribes, but also DSM pathologies, Meyers-Briggs personality types, political orientations, or even deviant sexual identities. This means that the “more or less explicit model” to which Peterson refers is increasingly becoming more rather than less explicit, and lack of imitation is becoming less of a concern than simple believability, or verisimilitude. In other words, you can imitate a model self-consciously, but you’d better fit with it well enough to pass.

Peterson’s book is about a quarter-century old, but it bolsters my view that the way we approach authenticity has been shaped by electronic media during its development throughout the twentieth century, and what he describes of authenticity in 1997, before the internet became widespread in the general populace, is even truer today. Compare his analysis to that of Hans-Georg Moeller, who argues that the age of authenticity is finished, and we’re now in the age of “profilicity.” His actual observations aren’t altogether wrong, but why stay so committed to what is clearly an outdated, archaic definition of the word in favor of a neologism that has a near-zero chance of sticking?

I’m digressing. Richard Peterson’s book is a solid exploration of how authenticity is determined, using country music as its main object of study. There are, I think, a few theoretical gaps that he leaves unfilled, like for instance the fact that people often perceive transgression or animalistic behavior as a sign of authenticity, and indeed, some feel that “outlaw country” is the most authentic form of country music there is. But these gaps are not much of a problem. It’s a short and sweet book. Check it out if you’re into the subject.