Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture

by Barbara Ching

This is the first study of "hard" country music as well as the first comprehensive application of contemporary cultural theory to country music. Barbara Ching begins by defining the features that make certain country songs and artists "hard." She compares hard country music to "high" American culture, arguing that hard country deliberately focuses on its low position in the American cultural hierarchy, comically singing of failures to live up to American standards of affluence, while mainstream country music focuses on nostalgia, romance, and patriotism of regular folk.
With chapters on Hank Williams Sr. and Jr., Merle Haggard, George Jones, David Allan Coe, Buck Owens, Dwight Yoakam, and the Outlaw Movement, this book is written in a jargon-free, engaging style that will interest both academic as well as general readers.

Genres: Music

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[East Bay J · Rating 1 out of 5]

Okay, so, my best guess on this book is that Barbara Ching had to write a thesis paper. Being interested in what she thinks of as “hard country,” she chose this as her topic and went for it. She came up with all sorts of ways to discuss and explain this crazy hard country music. She spent all kinds of time on it, dotted her “i’s,” crossed her “t’s” and turned the sucker in. Her professor loved it! “Barbara,” he said, “I’m going to pass this on to a publisher friend of mine at Oxford Press. This book needs to see print!”

Only, it didn’t need to see print. In fact, what this pointless, overly long and longwinded essay needed was to be graded and left in a drawer (or on a hard drive) for all eternity. Ching goes nowhere SLOOOOOOW in trying to define hard country. It’s not even clear that this is her intent. NOTHING is clear in this book, with the possible exception that Ching knows a lot of words and knows how to use ‘em. What she’s no good with is actually using those words to communicate her ideas. She makes a lot of assumptions, comes up with some pretty vague (and far fetched) theories and uses the same examples several times. The text just wanders around all over creation, repeating ideas, concepts and points like the proverbial broken record. A country record, in this case, that keeps skipping on an irritating, nasal voice singin’ somethin’ foolish.

Then I’m on ebay looking for this book (because the used sale price was $45 marked down to $9 and I wanted to know what that was all about) and found it going for up to $75 or so. Really? Why? I figure someone marked my copy at $45, read it, could not with clear conscience sell such mediocrity at such a high price and marked it down to $9. I’d like to think that’s why, anyway.

I wanted to love this book but all I got was a waste of time.