Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music is an excellent new contribution to the study of both African American music and country music. One of aims of this book is to address many of the underrepresented contributions that African Americans have made to country music, rather than merely acknowledging (as is often the case) that African Americans were influential to the genre in a foundational way. The authors in this text make up for this underrepresentation by writing against the commonly-held assumption that country music reflects an authentically white style of music. Those included here seem to have reached a consensus that the racialization of country music is not a reflection of country music’s actual whiteness, but rather a site in which racial difference is manufactured.

The chapters by Patrick Huber and Diane Pecknold both examine ways in which this assumed whiteness was consciously constituted. Huber examines the rise of the “hillbilly” and “race” categories in the American music industry through the lens of what were often interracial recording sessions that produced the music in question, arguing that the industry marketing-strategies actually divided musics along racial lines in spite of the on-the-ground overlap of black and white musical practices and musicians. Pecknold traces the reception of Ray Charles’ studio album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music as a site in which country’s racial politics were negotiated, a process which she argues largely took place through a shift from a racial to a class-oriented discourse that allowed Charles’ black country music to become widely acceptable and commercially viable.

One of this book’s stated aims is to deconstruct the ways in which country music has been defined as an authentically white musical form through its juxtaposition with black musics. Focusing on a number of apocryphal origin stories about the guitar style of thumb-picking in western Kentucky, Erika Brady finds that the black/white dichotomy does not adequately explain the contested origins of old-time music as exemplified by Arnold Schultz in western Kentucky. Similarly, Jeffrey A. Keith chronicles a shift in the way Fiddlin’ Bill Livers was represented throughout his career as an old-time musician in western Kentucky, connecting the various positions Livers played in the various groups in which he played—from a “fiddlin’ idiot” to a seemingly token member of a hippie ensemble, to leader of his own group—to the state of race relations in western Kentucky during these respective eras. In these chapters, the borders of country music’s black-and-white musical origins effectively become blurred in favor of a discussion of the role that racial politics, rather than racial music, had upon these musicians and their music.

Some authors utilize country music to explore degrees of ambiguity that actually inform black participation in country music, considering a number of messy relationships between country music and styles that tend to be associated more with African Americans. Tony Thomas challenges a long-accepted narrative that African Americans stopped playing banjo due to the instrument’s racist associations. He argues that the banjo was rather dropped due to an impulse for evolution in African American musics that resulted in musics which were better suited for guitar accompaniment, thereby crediting aesthetic ideals rather than racial politics as the reason for this shift. Reminiscing about his own experiences from the early years of his research, Kip Lornell considers the complexity of what the phrase “old time country music” may actually mean, noting that rural southern music does not always fall into neatly racialized categories. This muddies the waters with regard to essentialized notions of black and white musical styles by tracing a number of southern black musics that defy facile categories such as “blues,” “gospel,” or “country.”

Michael Awkward and Jerry Wever consider the impact of place upon how country music and its associated identities are configured. In his study of Al Green’s The Belle Album, Michael Awkward examines how Green’s emphasis on the South throughout the record is achieved through incorporating sounds from country music. He argues that this regional identification served as a way for Green to mediate conflicting representations of masculinity in his music, allowing Green to change his sound in the later period of his career, thereby articulating his southern musical roots and his spiritual roots. Jerry Wever removes country from the context of the United States, considering its presence in St. Lucia as a diasporic phenomenon. He argues that country is a Creole music that has much in common with the Habanera and other musics of the African diaspora, and may therefore be heard throughout the diaspora as representative of this kind of diasporic identity.

Adam Gussow and Barbara Ching each chronicle the complexity of what happens when gendered black identities and country music-based identities collide. Gussow considers the complexities of Cowboy Troy’s contrasting self-representations as transgressive and threatening alongside Troy’s argument that his “hick-hop” is a run-of-the-mill example of musical fusion. Similarly, Ching examines the songwriting and fiction of Alice Randall, highlighting the ways that Randall frames racial integration throughout her work. Ching compares Randall’s work with that of earlier black country-songwriters, arguing that the most important feature of Randall’s work is her facility in dealing with the complex intersection of race, sexuality, and history in her writing.

Charles L. Hughes and David Sanjek both deal with the complexity of musical crossover in country music by tracing the personal circumstances that shape the way musical crossovers take place. Hughes considers the importance of soul music’s influence on country by tracing the Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals triangle of musical production in the 1960s and 1970s. Hughes notes that the interpersonal networks that created a flow of musicians between these three sites impacted both soul and country by thoroughly incorporating mutual musical influences that were accomplished through a network of musicians who moved among these sites. Similarly, David Sanjek traces the personal and professional relationship of King Records’ white founder Syd Nathan with the label’s black house arranger, Henry Glover. Sanjek argues that King Records represented a fundamentally integrated approach to operating in the segregated record business of its day, and he notes that this led the label to make a number of significant crossover recordings. Sanjek uses this as a point of departure from which to discuss the difference between a cover, an intentionally appropriative act, and a crossover, arguing that the latter is somehow imbued with the social significance of the music that it crosses over with. These authors convincingly argue that crossovers do complex political work through personal relationships.

This volume is well-constructed, and is arranged in such a way that the themes addressed by the various authors bleed into one another. The quality of the scholarship presented here makes this an important book that addresses a variety of complex contingencies in the racial negotiations that have defined and redefined country music. Hidden in the Mix is full of essays that effectively deconstruct the presumed whiteness that Pecknold argues is taken for granted in the discourses surrounding country music (1). The authors in this volume tease out a number of complex ways that racial difference has been constructed, represented, and contested in country music. They convincingly argue that African American musical practices constitute more than influences on the development of country music, and that the historical and continuing presence of African Americans in country music is an essential and overlooked element of the genre’s historical and contemporary configurations.

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[Review length: 1232 words • Review posted on May 6, 2014]