Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 27, Issue 4, Pages 518–532

BOOK REVIEWS

Diane Pecknold. Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence

in Country Music. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 392 pp.
Charles L. Hughes. Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the
American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
280 pp.
Nadine Hubbs. Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2014. 240 pp.

Reviewed by Pamela Fox

Georgetown University

Country radio’s recent phenomenon—that auto-tuned, pseudo-rapping fra-

ternity of white male artists known as “bro country” (cf. Jason Aldean, Luke
Bryan)—serves as only the latest instantiation of an established tradition
within the genre: white musicians and performers crossing “the musical
color line” (to borrow Karl Hagstrom Miller’s phrase) by adopting select
arrangements, vocal styles, instruments, and/or iconography from “black”
musical forms such as early blues, 1960s soul, and now contemporary hip
hop (Miller 3). Depending on the context, these racialized encounters within
and along the margins of the country industry have been interpreted as
cultural theft, homage, sociopolitical progressivism, or the benign product
of artistic “influence” or “exchange.” But three new interdisciplinary studies
of country music considerably deepen and in some cases entirely upend
this strain of commentary—which, despite its myriad critiques of racial
crossover, tends to reiterate the truism that country was and remains an
inherently “white” cultural form.
A wide-ranging volume of essays by historians, musicologists,
anthropologists, and literary/cultural studies scholars, Hidden in the Mix:
The African-American Presence in Country Music has helped engineer the
recent sea change in critical approaches to this topic. Diane Pecknold’s
introductory essay lays out the grounds for intervention on several
conceptual fronts. Arguing that much prior scholarship reduces African
American musical participation to mere “influence” on white performers,
she welcomes contemporary research that establishes “the presence of a
series of rich, varied, and geographically diffuse black country traditions”

C 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Book Reviews 519

(1). Dismayed that the former perception persists, however, she asks us
to consider “[w]hat ideological work does the erasure of country music’s
multiracial origins and history accomplish?” (2). At the same time, drawing
on critical race studies scholarship informing the recent work of Hagstrom
Miller, Geoff Mann, and Ronald Radano, along with Toni Morrison’s seminal
Playing in the Dark, she pushes against essentialist theories of both racial
identity and musical authenticity. Instead, Pecknold rightly calls on scholars
to “address the shifting . . . ways in which resilient black identities are
fashioned through musical production, whether . . . construed as ‘black’ or
not” (7, my emphasis), urging a delicate balance of recognizing, within
the context of everyday racism, different racial groups’ contributions to
country’s evolving sound while resisting the impulse to link that sound to an
originary position or embodiment of “blackness.”
Her contributors handily achieve this aim. Their essays lean toward
meticulous historical recovery of relatively unknown African American
musicianship and interracial collaboration on vernacular as well as “modern”
recordings across a wide swath of the twentieth century, including: black
fiddlers joining white string bands during the late 1920s and 1930s,
when such partnerships defied the early racially segregated marketing
of “race” and “hillbilly” records; emergence of African American “old-
time country music” in the southeastern US during the 1940s and 1950s;
superstar Ray Charles’s explosive incursion into country with his 1962 album
Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music; the fraught formulation of
“country-soul” in the 1960s–1970s; and African American country rapper
Cowboy Troy’s recent “hick-hop” take on pop country in the mid-2000s.
All construct-rich conceptual frameworks that frequently incorporate class
analysis and, on occasion, gender critique to complicate popular narratives
foundational to country’s status as a “white” working-class genre. In these
instances, “blackness” is mediated by particular dynamics of intersectional
differences in specific historical moments that elucidate surprising nodes
of potential cross-racial solidarity as well as more anticipated (yet no
less significant) revelations of racial essentialism that preserved unequal
power relations between African American and white performers. (See,
for just two examples, the essays on black bluegrass guitarist Arnold
Schultz and contemporary song and fiction writer Alice Randall.) Hidden
in the Mix accomplishes far more than documenting, as its subtitle
suggests, “the African American presence in country music”; it lays down
a marker challenging the next generation of researchers to conduct more
flexible investigations of country’s variegated borderlines, which will require
520 Book Reviews

increasing participation in their own methodological version of “crossover”

practices.
One essayist in the above collection, Charles Hughes, models just
such an approach in his book-length study of the “country-soul triangle”
(2)—the nexus of celebrated recording studios in Memphis, Nashville, and
Muscle Shoals that crafted a phenomenally successful racially hybrid sound
for both African American and white artists during the 1960s and 1970s.
Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South
contests prevalent discourses that have bifurcated country and soul/R&B
into two distinctly racialized genres by exposing those discourses’ shifting
ideological investments during a period of notorious political upheaval. As
Hughes puts it, the “triangle”—encompassing local business/labor practices,
a confluence of white and black musicians, and a monumental song catalog—
came to function as a striking “metaphor for the contested state of the South,”
posing as an encouraging symbol of interracial progress but also, when it
suited, as separate “white” and “black” musical styles emblematic of “racial
authenticity and political purity” (2). The former, utopian narrative was
particularly useful to white southerners eager to overturn the region’s “ugly
legacy of white supremacy” (4), but African American commentators also
seized on it to validate soul music’s increasing centrality as a commercial as
well as political force.
Hughes charges that this strategic figuring of country soul, exploited
by both sets of players, “fundamentally misrepresents how race worked” (5)
in the triangle. Employing a “labor-based analysis” (6), he focuses on the
often demeaning daily experiences of African American studio musicians
to counter the persistent fantasy of an anodyne, “post-racial” workplace.
This research is invaluable, definitively establishing that the black and white
“community” in these spaces was in fact “fundamentally unequal” (6). It also
discredits the accompanying axiom that frequently cast white musicians as
“visionary” and their black counterparts as increasingly “divisive” when the
mythology began to fray. The book proceeds to explore each geographic and
stylistic “point” on the triangle, with stops in Memphis, Muscle Shoals, and
Nashville bringing to life key figures—artists such as Booker T and the MGs,
Arthur Alexander, Charlie Pride, Millie Jackson, and producers/promoters
like Rick Hall (FAME Studios) and Al Bell (Stax)—while illuminating
growing tensions amidst a backdrop of Black Power and Nixonian New
Right rhetoric. Throughout, Hughes notes, the white country establishment
continued to rely on African American “soul power” to gain legitimacy for
its brands by adopting various, often conflicting stratagems (cf. Charley
Pride, the Outlaws movement, and Disco, to name but a few).
Book Reviews 521

Most disturbingly, perhaps, the triangle’s legacy as an “ahistorical

interracial dreamland” (191) persists, with even Barack Obama recently
lauding Memphis studios such as Sun, Hi, and Stax for their efforts during
a “‘turbulent time . . . to create a little harmony with harmony’” (191).
Country Soul demurs: “Nothing mattered more to these musicians than race.
Nothing structured their work more than the racial divisions and disparities
that structured life and music making in the South and the rest of the United
States. And African Americans did not share equally in the benefits of the
music that is now routinely heralded as a demonstration of racial progress”
(191).
One jarring absence in an otherwise impressive book is the gendering
and sexualization of “blackness” within this music and its iconography.
Hughes offers sparse analysis of how gender differences helped to determine
the ways in which African American performers and musicians were
treated and marketed, not to mention white rockabilly artists’ sexualized
appropriation of “black” embodied performance styles. (We hear of the
latter’s “low-class” valences within conservative Southern circles but not
how that class register is conveyed through gender and sexuality in
conjunction with race.) And women artists suffer noticeable neglect, treated
largely as footnotes.
A brief glance at white country singer–songwriter Bobbie Gentry
(of “Ode to Billie Joe” fame), for instance, becomes a missed opportunity.
Although noting that Gentry’s music represented the 1960s/1970s proverbial
mix of country, soul, and pop and that she recorded her follow-up single
“Fancy” at Muscle Shoals’ FAME studio, Hughes fails to connect the song’s
narrative content to its R&B sound. A peculiarly triumphant rags-to-riches
tale of one poor rural girl’s induction into prostitution by her mother,
“Fancy” became a chart-topping wonder (that has since been covered by a
panoply of female artists). The album’s promotional material, including what
Hughes calls a “seductive” photo of Gentry, clearly reinscribes a well-worn
set of associations among women, hypersexuality, and blackness: “What
happens when a country girl goes to Muscle Shoals? . . . She gets Fancy.
. . . and gets her biggest hit yet” (110). He incorporates this anecdote to
indict Capitol Records for idolizing white FAME producer Rick Hall but
appears uninterested in its equally problematic version of gendered racial
politics. Hughes does, however, seem more cognizant of how R&B female
vocalists such as Bettye LaVette and Millie Jackson experienced racial
gate-keeping in the country crossover market due to their respectively
“gritty” and “salacious” performance styles (111, 138). For the record,
522 Book Reviews

Hidden in the Mix could also grant more attention to this implicit dynamic,
though the essays on Cowboy Troy and Al Green thoughtfully address
constructions of black masculinity and sexuality.
Nadine Hubbs’ Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music may be
the first monograph-length study that directly tackles the imbrications of
sexuality, race, gender, and class embedded within country music texts,
conducting its inquiry along somewhat askew lines. As denoted by her book’s
title, Hubbs principally investigates the presumed antithetical, indeed hostile,
relationship between one racialized and classed positionality—the Southern
white “redneck” often viewed as the archetypal country music fan—and one
sexual positionality: queerness. She thus departs from the heteronormative
methodology of much country music scholarship, and perhaps even more
strikingly, unlike briefer studies by queer musicologists and sociologists, her
work draws on earlier class analyses of this genre and its audience to offer
a radically different interpretation of its sexual coding. Contesting popular
depictions of the US white working class as an exceptionally noxious “bigot
class” promulgating racism, sexism, and homophobia, the book argues that
in fact “sex-gender deviance” was historically equated with that class: “the
two disreputable groups,” Hubbs writes, “shared conceptual and, often,
physical space while enduring abjection from middle-class moralism, social
norms, and institutions” (5, 6). In this account, the mainstreaming of LGBTQ
populations in the early 1980s—the “gradual middle-classing of the queer”
(6, original emphasis)—proves to be the culprit engineering the perceived
gulf between these two communities.
This is a daring but also formidable project to undertake. At times
it proceeds haltingly along a number of fronts while jostling together
theories from a variety of disciplines. Hubbs needs to solidify a number
of suppositions and claims, including: the links between “redneck” culture,
white working-class subjectivity, and country music; the buried alliances
among working-class and queer communities from the 1920s through the
late 1970s; the dominant class animus that abjected both groups via media
representations and everyday modes of social violence; the middle and
elite classes’ eventual embracement of upwardly mobile gays and lesbians;
and the revamped vilification of “redneck” identity as anti-queer. Readers
who are well-versed in classic as well as more recent cultural studies
theories of class subjectivity, ethnomusicologists’ demographic studies of
Southern white rural country music fandom, gay/lesbian histories of US
working-class same-sex communities, and popular cultural representa-
tions of the white working class—from The Beverly Hillbillies to The
Book Reviews 523

Help—should be able to follow Hubbs’ through-line from beginning to

end. But as with most studies of such scope and ambition, some connections
remain dim or become momentarily buried; one relies on faith (along with
intense interest) in the project as a whole to bring all of its pieces together.
Although Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music briefly references
close to 100 songs from the mainstream charts, it showcases two particular
texts by white self-proclaimed “Outlaw” artists of different generations
and sexes: Gretchen Wilson’s 2004 breakout hit “Redneck Woman” and
David Allan Coe’s 1978 underground recording, “Fuck Aneta Briant” [sic].
Together, these tracks serve as divergent set pieces illustrating specific
“working-class repertoires and values” (5) inscribed within country music
that also challenge gendered and/or sexual conventions. “Redneck Woman”
may have reached a saturation point in previous critical commentary, but
Hubbs offers a fresh take by viewing the song and video versions as a
response to, as well as embodiment of, R. J. Reynolds’s 1989 “Virile
Female” ad campaign, which depicted the young white working-class female
as hypersexual and “excessively or inappropriately gendered” (122). In
this intricate reading, Wilson’s persona “appropriates cultural resources
from her class, racial, geographic, and vocational peers across the gender
line—from working-class and rural-identified white male rock and country
icons—while reaffirming her heteronormativity” (128) within that same
realm as a sexy woman clad in Walmart lingerie (128). And in a brilliant
stroke of recovery work, Hubbs casts Coe’s protest anthem against Christian
conservative singer Anita Bryant’s 1977 anti-gay crusade as a “lost strain of
antihomophobic rebellion that is simultaneously, inextricably antibourgeois”
(7). Despite the song’s thematic and political tensions (including use of the
term “faggots”), Hubbs contends that “Fuck Aneta Briant” proudly affirms
linkages between Coe’s own “disreputable” redneck identity—denoted in
part by the title’s misspellings—and marginalized sexual identities. The two
extensive examples thus make space for deeper, more nuanced analysis, but
they are still forced to bear quite a bit of this study’s comprehensive weight.
Finally, when examined within the shadow of the above two
monographs, Hubbs’ book may initially appear to be reinscribing country
as “white” music, its focus on “redneck” performers and texts potentially
“erasing,” as Pecknold warns of much work in this field, the genre’s
“multiracial” production (Hidden in the Mix 2). Yet the project is clearly
informed by the same spirit and theoretical concepts driving these other
significant contributions to critical race scholarship on country music.
Hubbs recognizes country’s “glaring racialization” (55), from the recording
524 Book Reviews

industry’s opening decades to the early twenty-first century, and sketches

out striking parallels between country and rap: two musical styles and
markets plagued by “reductive, literalizing portrayals of the cultural other
and the fixity . . . that is imposed on lower-status social identities in the
dominant culture” (56). She also proceeds to acknowledge that class and
race impact these genres in a reversed fashion—country racialized through
its foregrounded class markings, and rap classed through its hyper visible
“blackness” (44). These are complex, charged dynamics requiring further
probing and intermingling, though her later explorations of “Redneck
Woman” as a mode of “Mack” rap, or Kid Rock’s “Son of Detroit” as
a “hybrid” text blending “white” country and African American hip hop,
begin to signal that effort. Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music serves as
a worthy and instructive companion to Pecknold’s and Hughes’ volumes,
posing innovative challenges to country’s status as white, heterosexual, and
male.

Work Cited
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the
Age of Jim Crow. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010.

Banning Eyre. Lion Songs: Thomas Mapfumo and the Songs that Made
Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. 416 pp.

Reviewed by Eric Weisbard

University of Alabama

Three decades ago, I often played on my college station “Nyoka Musango,”

the first song off the second side of Thomas Mapfumo’s Ndangariro LP.
The groove still sounds urgent, like postpunk: an electrified guitar version
of an instrument that I knew even back then to be mbira, or Zimbabwean
“thumb piano,” gives a chicka-chicka knifing; the beats are more claps and
shakers than drums; and Mapfumo and his group’s chanted Shona adds to
the feeling of ritual menace.
But Ndangariro came without a lyric sheet or even musician credits.
Banning Eyre speculates in his long awaited biography of Mapfumo that the
Western record company, happy to translate earlier verses on a collection
of singles that were part of the “chimurenga”–struggle–against Rhodesian
Book Reviews 525

racism, knew it unhelpful to showcase words supporting despot Robert

Mugabe. Eyre is under no such constraint. “There are snakes in the forest,
they must be eliminated,” this minor-key masterpiece of transmuted folk
melody demands. The reference is to supporters of Mugabe’s rival, Joshua
Nkomo, from Zimbabwe’s major non-Shona grouping: the Ndebele. Mugabe
showed Nkomo the bodies of his faithful, shoved in heaps into a train car.
Food aid he kept from the Ndebele led to mass starvation. And though
Mapfumo ultimately became one of Mugabe’s most vocal critics, Eyre
writes: “this mesmerizing call to arms broke on the Zimbabwean airwaves
just as the Fifth Brigade swept into Matabeleland. The snakes must be
eliminated.”
To reckon with Mapfumo, chimurenga music, and Zimbabwe entails
a hundred such compacted instances of amplified folk music, revolutionary
sound in capitalist and post-colonial context. Ethnomusicologist Thomas
Turino’s 2000 Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe
categorized how different elites, “modernist reformists,” reworked indige-
nous sources. The concert tradition that emerged in the 1930s spiffed-up
blackness like US models the Mills Brothers; Mugabe and his ZANU allies
in the freedom struggle created chimurenga as “references to machine guns
and ancestors set to church hymns.” Mbira was not prominent yet. That came
when copycat young rock, rumba (Congo), and jive (South Africa) bands,
needing a local hook, found mbira, and the popular response, informed
by nationalism, proved overwhelming. Politicians, like pop singers, prefer
a mass audience. Mapfumo affected a tribal medium look and appealed
across age lines. His pivotal guitarists, Joshua Dube and Jonah Sithole,
were not native to mbira. They were professionals, like Mapfumo, who
preached originality and copyrighted folk compositions. As world beat grew
prominent in the 1980s, Mapfumo brought actual mbira players into his band
and courted Europe and America.
Turino’s anticapitalist disdain for a commodified culture he views
as antiparticipatory (David Hesmondhalgh critiques this side of Turino’s
work in Why Music Matters), impacts his study, which Eyre repeatedly
questions in the margins of Lion Songs. Eyre has different issues: he pays
for amazing journalistic access by becoming a too-invested observer. Part of
the world beat scene since the 1980s through the NPR radio program Afropop
World Wide, Eyre is also a guitarist whose writing method in his books is
to capitalize on his media status to create contexts where he spends long
periods of time living with and playing with his subjects. His earlier book, In
Griot Time: The Adventures of an American Guitarist in Mali demonstrated
526 Book Reviews

his ability to write (“His voice had a quality I associate with 1940s ribbon
microphones”), capture detail (a jelimuso singing through a guitar amplifier
with the “chorus” effect turned on), and put that detail in context–bajourou,
meaning big string, was a metaphor for Mali, “where people’s attitudes and
presentation suggested wealth, even though theirs was one of the poorest
countries in the world.” Reifications Turino might labor over, Eyre viewed
pragmatically: “Bands did not have to abandon the Western sounds they had
been busily commandeering before independence, but they had to play them
in a new way, informed by local traditions. Active support for a pro-African
social policy became a precondition for commercial viability as a musician,
and Mali’s music would never be the same.” He relished how the music
accommodated both impulses. But he couldn’t remain as nuanced when
his mentor and main focus, patriarchal guitarist Djelimady Tounkara, beat
up his wife. He was also bothered, in his own way, by things Turino would
have bemoaned: “Singing stars backed by computer-driven keyboards, drum
machines, and freelance instrumentalists have replaced the old regional
orchestras.” At one point in the book, Eyre contemplates whether he should
haggle in Bamako and seem a white exploiter or accept acting the rube.
Money and anxieties over cultural decline are equally present in
this biography, which begins with Eyre angsting over whether his cab
bill in Harare is too high, includes many tough scenes about musicians
feeling cheated by their maestro’s spending choices, and ends with the great
Zimbabwean bandleader in exile in Oregon, making peace with AutoTune.
But because Thomas Mapfumo is such an important subject, and because
Eyre has spent decades around him, the legacy outweighs the failures.
Mapfumo has created a huge body of meaningful work and Eyre has stuck it
out—an independent scholar on a university press non-advance—to get his
story. Graceful sentences, acute observation, heroic amounts of research,
self-consciousness about subject position and other contextual issues, a
working musician’s aesthetic appreciation—it’s all here, and nobody else
could have done it.
We begin in Harare, late 1990s, Mapfumo still playing joints every
weekend like Muddy Waters did in Chicago, for a similarly rough and tumble
crowd, Zimbabwe not quite yet fully doomed by Mugabe’s tyranny. Then it’s
back to Rhodesia, and the rural/urban dichotomies of Mapfumo’s upbringing
in the era from Elvis to Hendrix, playing in bands with names as totemic as
Cosmic Four Dots and Hallelujah Chicken Run Band. The latter, employed
by a mining company, was where in 1973 Mapfumo and Dube set down
“Ngoma Yarira,” a song that felt like militance, ambiguous lyrics and all.
Book Reviews 527

Eyre pauses for a chapter to consider the mbira itself, buzzing when played
like a proto-electric instrument, and the mythologies around its players over
multiple generations, such as Ephat Mujuru and his grandfather Muchatera
Mujuru, murdered by ZANU forces who thought him a collaborator even as
they adapted his cultural nationalism. This is probably the moment to note
that Eyre has created a CD to go along with the book—you can also access
it on streaming sites and read the liner notes on Eyre’s website. It chronicles
Mapfumo from “Nogoma Yarira” to the 2010s, the only real career overview
in circulation.
That’s a 40-year march, more draining to read than skim on record,
and Eyre never sugarcoats Mapfumo’s flaws: poor management, sexism,
using ambiguity both artistically and professionally to avoid conflict.
Mapfumo was embraced as a culture hero in the late 1970s, tainted
when deployed by Mugabe’s moderate rival Bishop Muzorewa, revived
by his willingness to embrace Mugabe, and then, on the basis of his one
successful English lyric, the regime-challenging “Corruption,” thrust onto
the world stage as “Africa’s Bob Marley,” a role his Shona lyricism and
personal reticence—he characteristically performs in an audience-shunning
crouch—hardly allowed for. Throughout the book, characters are drawn into
Mapfumo’s orbit, drained of funds and energy, then leave or, sadly, too often
die, as AIDS ravages nation and scene. That Zimbabwe, overall, is doing
even worse, makes the role of music in creating an unachievable vision that
much more tragic.
Thomas Mapfumo hasn’t been able to set foot in Zimbabwe since
2004. His bands have been increasingly reduced to western acolytes like
Eyre, though his family, and to a partial extent his marriage, survived the
transition. Yet there is no doubt that, even now, if Mugabe’s regime ended,
he could return and play to an arena audience, possibly have songs on the
radio, too. His appeal, in those 20 pivotal years from the late 1970s to
late 1990s, was rooted in his weekly appearances in front of essentially
honkytonk audiences: rural transplants to city realities, they bought his
records, boomed his hits on cars and in the streets. The participatory ritual
that Turino values was there all along, in the call-and-response between
Mapfumo and a nation he could summon, though never lead. It’s the rock
and roll story, the James Brown story, the George Jones story, and it also
isn’t. That’s why we need to hear it, and so many other kindred stories, as we
work to understand the unequally distributed big bang event of amplified
music and identity arriving worldwide. Banning Eyre deserves tremendous
528 Book Reviews

accolades for taking the long road to document and interpret this fascinating
chapter.

David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, eds. Keywords in Sound. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2015. 272 pp.

Reviewed by Brian Kane

Yale University

Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, is an

attractive and slim volume. The editors commissioned 20 well-known
authors to write entries on keywords relevant to both their research and
the field at large. Each entry traces the meaning of a central term in
sound studies—terms such as Acoustemology, Acoustics, Echo, Hearing,
Noise, Phonography, Resonance, Synthesis, Transduction, and Voice—
across changes in its definition, use, and application. The editors describe
the volume as a “lexicon of specific keywords that cut across the material
and metaphorical lives of sound.” (2) In bolder language, “we have adopted
the keyword format in an attempt to directly lay out the foundational terms
of debate and map the shared ground of sound studies.” (3)
The idea that there is a “shared ground” in sound studies raises
the question as to whether sounds studies is a discipline or a field? If
sound studies is something more than an interdisciplinary field—that is,
a collection of work by scholars from different home disciplines working
on sound, each from their own perspective—then there must be something
distinctive that sets the study of sound apart and makes it into a discipline
of its own. The idea that there is a “shared ground” or set of “foundational
terms” for sound studies is attractive one; if true, then the articulation of
these terms, and the ground mapped by them, would be invaluable for
future research in sound studies. Whether there is a shared ground or set of
foundational terms of sound studies is not something that can be adequately
considered in the small space of a review. But regardless of the answer,
Keywords in Sound posits such a claim as its basic wager.
In the introduction, the editors claim inspiration from Raymond
Williams’s Keywords and other volumes of that ilk. Yet the entries in
Keywords in Sound tend to be longer than Williams’s short interventions and
histories, around ten pages apiece including bibliography. Where a reader
of Williams’ Keywords learns as much about the field of cultural studies as
they do about Williams’s personal way of constructing that field, Keywords
Book Reviews 529

in Sound is less idiosyncratic and more representative in its coverage. The

authors come from media studies, cultural studies, science and technology
studies, ethnomusicology, anthropology, musicology, and history. However,
there is a strong emphasis on anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, who
(on a rough count) make up more than half of the contributors. (Both Novak
and Sakakeeny were trained as ethnomusicologists at Columbia University.)
This disciplinary emphasis also subtly shapes the format the volume. As
the editors write in the introduction, each contributor was instructed to:
(i) begin “by addressing the etymology or semantic range of his or her
keyword,” (ii) “reveal how these terms develop conceptual grammars and
organize social, cultural, and political discourses of sound,” and (iii) “to
push further in creative elaborations of their keywords from within their own
work,” often through the use of a “focused analytical example, drawn from
ethnographic, historical, or philosophical research that has the potential to
challenge existing discourses and suggest possibilities for further inquiry.”
(9) Many of the entries in the volume, after broadly defining the relevant
issues marked by their keyword and constellation of related terms, quickly
introduce case studies or summaries of fieldwork. Sometimes the fieldwork
illuminates the keyword in ways that conceptual analysis, etymologies,
and historical shifts in meaning cannot; but oftentimes it narrows the full
significance of the terms, particularizing them to specific cultural situations,
yet without giving authors enough space to elaborate the rich complexity of
those situations.
However, the standard format of each entry gives the volume a
consistency and unity that makes it stand out from other handbooks and
readers in sound studies. Some of the entries are marvelous in their economy
and precision. Ben Steege’s entry on “Acoustics” develops a paradox, that
acoustics both exceeds sound—insofar as the phenomenal manifestation of
sound belongs to only a small part of the genus of acoustics—and falls short
of sound—in the sense that the sonic arrives belatedly at “a moment at which
the energy of oscillating matter suddenly leaps into a new form, which is no
longer just a figure of vibration.” (23) Mara Mills’s entry of “Deafness” reads
like an elegant précis of arguments more fully developed in her numerous
essays. Mark M. Smith’s entry on “Echo”—rather than discuss catacoustics
or rehash Greek mythology—uses the term as an invitation to meditate on the
historiography of sound, sensitively discussing the challenges that historians
face when considering sound. Jonathan Sterne’s entry on “Hearing” develops
the term in relation to “listening,” arguing that the construction of
hearing—in the lab, in technology, in discourse—always relies on “the
530 Book Reviews

subject’s highly cultured acts of listening.” (72). For readers familiar with
Sterne’s other work, his entry binds together many of his key themes in an
illuminating and concise manner. Patrick Feaster’s entry on “phonography”
is a masterful, imaginative, expansive redescription of the term, one that
challenges the association of phonography with the tradition of Edisonian
sound recording technology. Stefan Helmreich’s entry on “transduction”
also offers a critical but balanced assessment of the term’s use in sound
studies, describing both its conceptual efficacy and ontological limitations.
And those are just the highlights.
Readers who are already working in sound studies will likely enjoy
the volume, primarily as summary of research and as a rearticulation of
central concepts. But the real audience for the volume seems to be those just
beginning to explore sound studies or teaching it in universities. The book
would make for a good supplemental text in a seminar if read alongside
primary sources. In fact, the book seems designed for just such an audience.
Each entry is neatly packaged with its own bibliography. While this makes
each keyword easy to detach from the volume as a whole, it also makes for a
lot of redundancy since so many of the central texts in sound studies are cited
multiple times. For a slim book of around 240 pages, bibliographies take up
almost one fourth of the volume. Just think of the additional keywords that
one could have included in that space. Even if imperfect in its execution,
Keywords in Sound is a valuable addition to a growing body of texts in sound
studies.

Jason Bivins. Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015. 392 pp.

Reviewed by Ari Y. Kelman

Stanford University

Jason Bivins’s new book, Spirits Rejoice!, is a wide ranging and enthusiastic
effort that attempts to read jazz against conventional histories that render it
an “outcome” or “product” of the black church. Instead, Bivins asks, “can
we talk in fresh ways about American religious history by attending to jazz’s
sonorities therein?” (14). It is a provocative question, and it follows recent
trends in Religious Studies that have challenged scholars to find religion in
places where they least expect to. Bivins, in this work, turned to post-war,
largely improvisational jazz. “My goal all along,” he writes, “has been to
Book Reviews 531

ask what we are missing in our stories of American religion, what we are
failing to hear” (263). This approach foregrounds jazz as the medium for
understanding the messages of American religion. But the question of what
to listen to in both jazz and religion becomes both the book’s strength as
well as its weakness.
Bivins writes to “legitimize” jazz as both a form of religious
expression and a vehicle for religious experience. Bivins, himself a jazz
musician and a fan as well as a scholar of American religion, approaches
religion and jazz as analogous and intersecting structures for channeling
transcendent experience. “Making music is thus about fittingness and
submission to those powers that bestow the gifts of sound and those patterns
of tonal relations inherent in the religious fabric of things” (218).
What motivates Bivins is a sense that music itself can be transcen-
dent. The ability of jazz musicians to express that transcendence by phi-
losophizing and improvising presaged more recent movements in American
religious life away from institutional structures or denominations and toward
the veracity of individual experience as the ultimate arbiter of religious
experience and even transcendent truth. Religion and improvisational jazz
hold within them the kernels of this dynamic, and their interplay, Bivins
argues, has much to say about the fortitude and frailties of both formations.
For Bivins, religion exists “as both a category and experience” (23),
a definition that he also applies to jazz. This approach is fitting for a
book that focuses on artists like Sun Ra, Horace Tapscott, Cecil Taylor,
and Cannonball Adderly, who were artists dedicated, to making music
that challenged audiences, musicians, and the larger framework of jazz
itself. Bivins does a masterful job of documenting the ways in which their
musical expressions were informed by encounters with a variety of modes of
religious expression and wisdom including various manifestations of African
American Christianity, but also Zen Buddhism, Kabbalah, Hinduism, and
Gnosticism, alongside more esoteric forms of religious knowledge and more
conventional structures of churches, ritual, and prayer. The promiscuous
interplay of religious and spiritual knowledge provides a scattering of
accounts that Bivins gathers in the service of his larger argument.
He is careful to note that labeling something “jazz” or “religion” is
to “miss out on this shifting expanse of multiplicity so integral to the jazz
and the protean nature of American religions, too” (65). But despite making
this qualification with some regularity throughout the book, he nevertheless
attends rather selectively both to religion and jazz, as if acknowledging the
capacious nature of both categories gave him license to hear only small
532 Book Reviews

selections of the full range of expressive possibilities. Why limit an account

of post-war Jazz to this particular approach? Although he explained his
rationale for excluding Frank Sinatra, Stan Getz and Ella Fitzgerald (19),
his book would have been stronger for their inclusion as they too have a claim
on post-war American jazz and its relationship to religion, but for them, it
likely sounded different. Listening only to the music of musicians like Albert
Ayler, Sun Ra, Fred Ho, Cecil Taylor and others of the avant-garde, free
jazz, or otherwise improvisational community of musicians enabled him to
amplify their particular articulations of music and religion, but it constrained
his ability to make good on his research question, which he posed in terms
of the broad and contested categories of “jazz” and “religion.” Though
he acknowledges their porous nature, he nevertheless listens selectively to a
strand of post-war jazz in which it is impossible not to hear the importance of
improvisation. Similarly, leaving the claim of “religion” up to the musicians
themselves offers a highly selective picture of American religion during
the period in which many of them were writing and performing. They may
have been in conversation with “religion,” but it was a religion of their own
creation. It was, in other words, improvised religion.
This suits Bivins’ argument well, allowing him to conclude,
“Improvisation actualizes consciousness of these realities [of the experience
of transcendence] as religious ones, and also transforms this consciousness
through involvement in creative action” (217). But this a kind of selective
listening results in a tautology in which improvisation is privileged because
both religion and jazz are improvised. This, in turn demonstrates that
improvisation is the best mode for the production of both religion and
jazz. What are missing are precisely other voices from both religion and
jazz, whose contributions could have served as useful and informative
counterexamples.
For as fluid a writer and supple a thinker as Bivins, and for one so
preoccupied with the religious nature of improvisation, the book’s inclusion
bias distorts the overall sound of the effort. Instead of taking advantage of
the long traditions in both jazz and religion to resist compartmentalization
and precise definition, Bivins constrains and the range and harmonizes the
voices in his account, ultimately selling short the promise and possibility
of improvisation as a kind of metaphor for religion in American culture.
To use Bivins’ own language, he might have captured the sounds of spirits
rejoicing, but we only heard the ones that he wanted us to hear as rejoicing.
Surely there were others.
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