Peterson — Creating Country Music

Author: Richard A. Peterson
Title: Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity
Year: 1997
Type: Academic book (University of Chicago Press)

Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity is a book by the sociologist Richard A. Peterson, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1997. It argues that authenticity is “a socially agreed-upon construct in which the past is to a degree misremembered,” and it traces how country music’s authenticity was made, from Fiddlin’ John Carson’s first records, cut in Atlanta in 1923, to the fame Hank Williams found after his death. Its evidence is the work of the promoters and radio stations that built the early business, and the images of authenticity the music presented (the old-timer, the hillbilly, the cowboy). It distinguishes hard-core from soft-shell country through two acts on the Grand Ole Opry in the 1930s. Reviewers praised it, among them Timothy White in Billboard, and it received an honorable mention for the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Award.

Peterson, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University, published the book with the University of Chicago Press in 1997.¹ In the book he writes that the ironic phrase “fabricating authenticity” highlights “the fact that authenticity is not inherent in the object or event that is designated authentic but is a socially agreed-upon construct in which the past is to a degree misremembered.”² The publisher’s description follows the book from Carson’s first records to Williams’s success after his death, credits it with a close account of the promoters who gave the early music its shape, and presents it as the first book on what authenticity means in popular culture.¹

The book is in five parts, on making the music commercial, on fabricating the image of authenticity, on radio-made country music in the 1930s, on making country reproducible, and on authenticity and the future of country music. Its second part has a chapter each on the old-timer, hillbilly and cowboy images of authenticity, and its fourth has chapters on the honky-tonk, on Hank Williams “as the Personification of Country Music” and on the creation of a field called country.¹ A chapter titled “Soft Shell vs. Hard Core: The Vagabonds vs. Roy Acuff” compares two Grand Ole Opry acts of the 1930s, the Vagabonds and Roy Acuff.² In an essay for the press’s website, Peterson wrote that “the hard-edged Roy Acuff displaced the slick, smooth-sounding, crooning Vagabonds as the hit act on the Grand Ole Opry,” and that “it’s not true that country music has gone from more down-home to more cosmopolitan.”³ Peterson writes that “while hard core and soft shell are always present, one is usually predominant.”² The book’s section on authenticity work opens, “Maintaining the sense of authenticity takes work,” and its thirteenth chapter treats authenticity as a renewable resource.^{2, 1}

The essay also describes the automaker Henry Ford’s backing of country music and the managing of Hank Williams’s image. Ford, Peterson wrote, “put more money into promoting country music in the 1920s than anyone else.” Dismayed by the jazz dances couples did in the cities, he “organized fiddling contests and promoted square dances across the country to encourage what he saw as the older, more wholesome forms of entertainment.” Williams drank heavily and chased women, but his fans were not told while he lived, because “the facts were carefully kept from the public,” and he was “dropped from the Grand Ole Opry cast for being too far gone to keep up the clean-cut facade.”³

Reviewers praised the book. The University of Chicago Press’s page quotes Timothy White, in Billboard, calling it “one of the most important books ever written about a popular music form,” and Robert Crowley, in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology, calling it “a triumphal history and theory” of the country music industry from 1920 to 1953.¹ The Association of American Publishers gave it an honorable mention for its PROSE Award.¹

Key contributions

• Fabricating authenticity: authenticity as “a socially agreed-upon construct in which the past is to a degree misremembered.”
• The images of authenticity country music presented: the old-timer, the hillbilly and the cowboy.
• The distinction between hard-core and soft-shell country, one of which is usually predominant.
• An account of how country music was institutionalized, from Carson’s 1923 recordings to Hank Williams’s posthumous success.

See also

• Romancing the Folk — Benjamin Filene’s 2000 history of the folk revival’s search for authenticity
• Reconsidering Rock — Keir Keightley’s 2001 essay on authenticity in rock
• Segregating Sound — Karl Hagstrom Miller’s 2010 history of the sorting of Southern music by race
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music
• Cultural omnivorousness — Peterson’s idea of omnivorous taste