The International Country Music Conference convened in Nashville last month, its 25th annual meeting. I didn’t attend, but I wish I had — most of all because I would love to have attended the panel titled “Country Music, U.S.A.: A Fortieth Anniversary Retrospective And Prospective.” It was a celebration of the book that, four decades on, is still the definitive history of the music–the key volume on a very short shelf of country music books I’d call truly essential.
Of course, the event also honored the man who wrote that book. Bill C. Malone emerged from humble origins–he was born in 1934, the son of an east Texas tenant farmer–to become the sort of historian for which words like “preeminent” and “national treasure” were invented. His 2002 title, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music And The Southern Working Class, not only describes the book’s contents but Malone’s origins, his chief academic interests and his own humble point of view. Malone is soft-spoken but intellectually rigorous, a passionate advocate for his favorite artists (including the Blue Sky Boys!), forever a gentleman, and generous with support and praise of younger writers–for instance, long before I’d met him, he graciously blurbed a book I wrote with Bill Friskics-Warren, Heartaches By The Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles. I wish I’d been present to join the lengthy standing ovation I assume he received. This note will have to suffice.
Remember that when Malone published Country Music, U.S.A. in 1968, there were really no other country music books to speak of, academic or popular. The book grew from his doctoral thesis at the University of Texas at Austin (when he wasn’t in the library, he was playing guitar and singing down at Threadgill’s) at a time when popular culture, let alone hillbilly music, was still deemed inappropriate for serious study. Back then (and I should say that, back then, I was barely 7 years old), if you wanted to read intelligent work on country music, there was basically Archie Green’s groundbreaking Hillbilly Music: Source And Symbol, some important writings by Norm Cohen…and not a whole lot else. Malone changed that for good. Indeed, he basically had to invent a history out of his own knowledge of the music and from his own original research among the (at that time) mostly unknown and still largely unassembled primary and secondary sources. Amazingly, even 40 years of additional study later, Country Music, U.S.A. has had to be updated but has needed only the most cursory revision or correction.
Indeed, everyone and everything in the same vein that has followed — the genre’s key historians, including Richard Peterson and the late Charles Wolfe, from Country Music magazine writers like Patrick Carr and Nick Tosches and Bob Allen to those Rolling Stone critics like Chet Flippo and John Morthland who actually dared to champion country music when that wasn’t necessarily a cool move, on down to No Depression (where Malone himself has written on occasion) — descends from Country Music, U.S.A.
Bill Malone is the Father of Country Music Writing. He is the Jimmie Rodgers of what we do. And I hope that, the next time folks assemble to honor his work, it will be at the ceremeony acknowledging his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
