The turn of the Millennium seems as good a time as any to release this sort of book, and a better time than any in the past two decades. Country music has been in a transition period since the early Nineties, but no new trends have emerged since “young country” and “alt.country” both appeared about the same time. So now seems a good time to take a deep breath and take stock of this seminal American music form.
Country music is more a set of related genres than one single style. It grew out of old-time “hillbilly” music and Tin Pan Alley, but it has been influenced by everything from jazz to blues to rock to modern pop, and in turn has influenced many of those branches of American music as well.
This Rough Guide to country music is more of a history of the music than are some similar compendiums, which tend to be organized alphabetically by artist. This book covers the major historic periods and trends in country music, more or less chronologically, in 14 chapters. The chapters cover hillbilly, cowboy, western swing, honky-tonk, the Bakersfield sound, bluegrass, rockabilly, the Nashville “countrypolitan” sound, the “outlaw” era, country-rock, “urban cowboy” country, neo-traditionalism, “young country” in the Nineties, and “alt.country” in the Nineties.
Each chapter includes an overview of the period, its major figures and how it fit into the wider picture of country music; and a series of short biographies of the major figures in each period, with discussion of their major albums and an overview of the artist’s catalog. There is no attempt at a comprehensive discography, just thumbnail reviews of what’s generally available on CD, with an occasional mention of a classic vinyl disc worth tracking down if you’re so inclined.
At first, I was prepared to not like the book’s format, and especially the truncated discographies. But as I got into the book, the format made more and more sense, as did the selective listing of the artists’ most representative works — except in the case of acts that are purely Nineties stars and available only on CD, full discographies are mostly an academic exercise anyway. It’s only the die-hard collectors who are interested in full discographies, which often comprise mainly hard-to-find vinyl editions.
And that’s the key to this book. It really is aimed at the casual fan, not the died-in-the-wool collector or fanatic. The author hopes to pique the interest of some fans of today’s country music in that music’s roots, and point them toward the best and most representative examples of more traditional country.
Wolff has generally done a good job within the parameters he set for this book. He didn’t write all of it, but he did oversee the whole project, and it’s a lot of information to get in one voice. His writing style is generally clean and concise, but a little more variety in the styles might have livened it up.
He doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to music or artists he feels are sub-standard, which includes most mainstream country music made from the Seventies through the Nineties. I was especially impressed with his venomous review of Lee Greenwood:
“In many ways, Lee Greenwood represents the worst elements of the country music industry’s infatuation with glitzy showmanship — synthesized, syrupy instrumentation and cheap flourishes of soft-rock melodrama. … The success Greenwood has achieved is frightening, but it’s also a clear example of just how far into the abyss of adult-contemporary pop country singers (and listeners) were capable of wandering.”
You have to read a little more between the lines to devine Wolff’s feelings about today’s stars, like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain. While it’s clear he doesn’t think much of their music as country music per se, he seems leery of offending their fans, since the aim of the book seems to be to convert at least some of them into fans of actual traditional country. It’s a tight rope to walk.
Each chapter contains one or more sidebars, listing the best anthologies of the period’s works, or giving more information on major sub-trends within each period. The “New Traditionalists” chapter, for example, has a sidebar on road songs, and another on the lively Lubbock, Texas, scene. The book thankfully relegates the various music associations and their ever-multiplying awards to these sidebars.
The country-rock chapter has a sidebar on artists and groups who weren’t generally considered part of the country-rock scene, but who contributed to it nonetheless: Neil Young, Chip Taylor, Leon Russell, The Grateful Dead, The Band, and even Ringo Starr are included.
I could quarrel with the categorization of some of the artists, but most of them are the ones who are hard to categorize, like Johnny Cash. Cash started out in the rockabilly scene in Memphis but quickly became more established as a country singer, although he has always defied labels. I don’t think he belongs in the “Nashville Sound” chapter, but I’m not sure where I’d put him. Likewise the Everly Brothers, seminal Fifties rock ‘n’ rollers with a strong country bent, who show up in the country-rock chapter alongside The Eagles and Gram Parsons. That’s one of the problems with setting up such categories — they’re bound to be arbitrary, at least in some cases.
The Rough Guides are an English series, published in London. Some of the style and usage is bound to be jarring to American readers, such as listing dates by day-month-year, rather than month-day-year. And some of the artists get much more coverage than warranted by their stateside popularity and influence. Slim Whitman, for instance, has always been much more popular with English and European audiences than American. Who could ever forget the scene of The Beatles goofing on Whitman’s “Besame Mucho” in their *Let It Be* documentary? But most Americans remember him only from cheesy TV commercials for “greatest hits” collections “not available in stores,” and his influence on country music as a whole is debatable.
Overall, however, this is a timely and useful book for the fan of country music who wants to know more about the music, its history and artists, and who may want some guidance in deciding which recordings to buy.
(Rough Guides, 2000)
