The
American South has long had a complex musical heritage. From the
days of Scotch-Irish ballads, slave 
spirituals,
and minstrelsy, to the more recent advent of rhythm and blues, country
and western, and rock ‘n’ roll, the region has been set apart by its rich
vernacular idioms. Not surprisingly, scholarship on southern music
tends to trace Dixie’s contribution from the local and regional, to the
national and international. Itinerant tune-smiths, a kind of inverted
revivalist preacher, carried jazz and blues from Louisiana and Mississippi
to the gritty urban North. Similarly, country music--originally locked
below the Mason-Dixon and once referred to as “hillbilly music”--slowly
became popular throughout the entire U. S. Its fan-base eventually
extended to Michigan, California, Maryland, and Minnesota. Even more
important than these various migrations, southern music also crossed racial
boundaries and formed new styles that combined a myriad of ethnic, racial,
and religious influences.
In
this revision of Southern Music / American Music (a classic study, first
published in 1979) Bill Malone and David Stricklin follow the evolution
of regional southern music to the national scene. Their argument
is as clear as it is provocative: the South gave rise to almost every form
of popular music in America. Wielding impressive evidence, they look
at the widespread interplay of racial and ethnic forms that helped shape
the contours of the region’s music. The focus here is primarily on
the folk roots of southern music and an emergent popular style. The
authors ditch the old notion that “good” music is pristine, well contained
within the confines of genre, and hence “authentic.” 
Instead
they suggest that southern musicians always borrowed and combined styles.
For instance, both blacks and whites in the Antebellum South borrowed heavily
from each others’ repertoires. Nothing so illustrates this better
than the minstrelsy music of black-face performers who adopted and skewered
black folk culture. Moreover, popular entertainers of both races
performed ballads, love songs, and a variety of tunes from any number of
genres. That combination would remain basic to the southern tradition
well through the twentieth century.
Folk
musicologists in the 1920s, indicate Malone and Stricklin, did much to
promote the myth of isolated, homogenous folk music. (This is a fascinating
theme that Benjamin Filene has also explored in his Romancing the Folk.)
Scholars posited two general types of southern folk music: Negro spirituals
and mountain ballads. This model of oversimplified genres excluded
more popular and syncretic forms. Such elementary theories degraded
blues and jazz as well as country music as inauthentic, tainted styles.
Malone and Stricklin do not withhold judgement on all stylistic borrowing.
In the case of white southerners’ coopting black jazz they lament that
a black-derived folk art was hijacked by whites and moved away from its
original folk moorings. Obviously. The all-white Original Dixieland
Jazz Band was neither “original” nor “jazz.” But as whites replicated
the sounds of black 
ragtime
and jazz, the music, through white recordings and radio play, reached greater
audiences (this chain of events would repeat itself over and over in the
South). Southern music was also moving out of the South through both
northern migration and the rising commercial music industry.
Generally
critical of the homogenization of American music, Malone and Striclin find
rock ‘n’ roll the most powerful de-regionalizing force in American popular
music. The irony is that rock (quintessentially southern in its earliest
incarnation: Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard...)
became the agent of ultimate homogenization. The book is updated
to include latter day developments from alt-country movements, zydeco,
to the funda-mentally retarded young country popular among Nascar moms
and dads. The mass marketing and melding of styles that all this
bred, filtered into other genres. Producers of white gospel music
turned to rock’s mass-appeal model in an effort to make gospel more palatable
to the largest possible audience, or maybe more accurately, to the lowest
common denominator. Up tempo feel-good gospel replaced the heavier,
blood and iron Calvinism so basic to evangelical hymnody. The rise
of the Oak Ridge Boys, The Imperials, and any number of current CCM groups
ushered in a kitsched-out, soft-rock gospel that was both overtly sentimental
and incredibly soulless. That is still surely at the heart of the
music various Nash-Vegas songsters belch out. Nevertheless, state
the authors “away from the beaten jaded paths of professional entertainment,
older expressions of the folk South still 
persist.”
Indeed, regional folk music persisted in the resurgence of folk through
the urban folk scene, the revival of bluegrass music (newgrass), and the
ubiquitous honky-tonk of the post-WW II years.
More
than any other scholars, Malone and Stricklin realize the powerful contribution
southern music has made to American music as a whole. Southern music
may be, as they emphatically contend, the most vital element of the South’s
artistic heritage. But the authors might be guilty of overstating
the case for regionalism, and, thus, neglecting the impact of other regions
on the American musical landscape. What they occasionally ignore
is the extent to which northern, urban, and western forms also influenced
American popular music. Blues and jazz, not just outposts of the
South in the North, developed distinctive sounds in their northern variety.
Gospel music, no less, in Chicago, Kansas City, and New York was not solely
a transplanted southern phenomenon. From the 1930s forward western
swing made an indelible imprint on country music. And soul music,
as it developed in Detroit and Chicago, was no less uniquely regional as
soul music in Memphis and Atlanta. That said, Malone and Stricklin
are right to stress the importance of southern folk music on the U. S.
scene. Overall, this work represents an astounding contribution to
the history of popular culture and, more importantly, to the story of one
region’s impact on the country as a whole.
