As with rhythm and blues (R&B), country was smaller as a market than rock or the middle that Carson represented. And as with R&B, country ultimately found the rock audience less receptive than it appeared, instead expanding into its own mainstream category—too big to ignore and too commercial for some whose identities it built upon. In many ways they are bookends. Yet country has been felt to look backward, while R&B dreamed forward. James Gregory’s history dispels stereotypes of backwoods white southerners foundering in the North, but finds they elected to remain apart, building areas of
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