"Anything but country" is a common answer to the question "What music do you listen to?", reflecting not just a musical taste but a class bias against the audience for country music. Dean Hubbs, Professor of Music and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, is the author of Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, a book that challenges the conventional images of working people and especially the people called "rednecks," images that define them as ignorant, racist, sexist, homophobic, and thoroughly inferior to the middle class. It asks how musical sounds and practices give a very different picture.
In this discussion with the Old Mole's Bill Resnick, she describes how she came to write the book and to study and reevaluate the music that surrounded her as a child in a working class family before she moved into the middle class herself.
There are clips from several songs included in the first part of the interview which Bill and Dean return to discuss in more detain in the second part.
- KBOO