Status Updates From Don't Get Above Your Raisin...

The incident of Johnny Cash refusing to play songs requested by Nixon, instead singing songs of an alternate political perspective, is framed differently in this book. The author provides good explanation for why Cash didn't sing them - he didn't know them (I'd heard that) - and the author says liberal analysts have tried to make a conflict where there wasn't any. But I want to research Cash's replacement songs more

Glad this got mentioned. It's oft forgotten: "Despite the pervasive racism of the South, surprisingly few such songs appear in either the folk music heritage or in early commercial country music... [M]ost [racist songs] had their origins in northern minstrel and ragtime music and were absorbed by rural southerners along with other forms of popular music. Gross stereotypes created in the North resonated in the South."

Malone is well-read, so maybe his word should be taken over mine, but this section on the presence of anti-Catholic and antisemitic songs seems to portray the white Southerner side a little rosily. Saying these songs were rare or that Carson's Ballad of Mary Phagan could have been an anti-capitalist tract might be true, but his phrasing holds subtle bias, esp. considering an example song has "gypsy" replace "Jew."

The chapters on women + home, the church, and bad men have all been engaging and informative. Not sure which I like the best. If you twisted my arm, maybe they're ranked 1-3 in the order I wrote.

Bluegrass treating itself as its own form of religion even made its way into this book.... in the religion chapter. Incredible. I keep intending to collect all the quotes I've read that bring out the nature of bluegrass treating itself "religiously" (Bill Monroe as a savior-esque figure, first gen performers like apostles, festivals like devotees practicing faith, etc.). Here's another reminder to myself to do that.

The chapter connecting country music to values of mother and home was splendid.

Lester McFarland and Robert Gardner (Mac and Bob) of the Chicago National Barn Dance, were the first influential mandolin and guitar duo of early country music. They met and began playing with each other as students at the Kentucky School for the Blind.

Very academic, one of those books with an enormous notes section in the back. Informative and pleasantly easy to follow.

The best-known farm song of the twenties, "Eleven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat," expressed one of the most crucial problems of American agriculture in its title and queried, "How in the heck can a poor man eat?" Blind Alfred Reed asked the same question for all working people in "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?"

In short, the rockabillies were the first white [country] musicians to put their whole bodies into their musical expression.

When we listen to [Iris] Dement, [Merle] Haggard, and other country entertainers sing gospel songs, we may not be borne away to the realm of the old country church, either real or imagined, but we are often transported to an otherwise unarticulated place of innocence or spiritual yearning where we are free from preoccupation with the daily concerns of life. That special quality of religious music, which connects us..