Review: <i>Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions</i>, by Francesca T. Royster

Over the past decade, country music studies have undergone a revision, incorporating more racially and ethnically inclusive narratives that have begun to shift understandings about who has historically played and enjoyed the music. 1 This correction represents a shift in comparison to earlier generations of country music scholarship.The first academic work on the genre, Bill C. Malone's Country Music USA, was released in 1968 and came at a moment when social history that was told "from the bottom up" began to gain traction within academic inquiry.This new field sought to tell the stories of average people, rather than elites.As country music was first placed within this framework, it defined the music as the product of a white, southern working class.As such, it became a subject of classist discrimination for its designation as "hillbilly music."While Malone's identification of country as a type of music associated with a marginalized community was and continues to be not without merit, this narrative has nevertheless wielded unique influence over country music studies.After more than five decades, Country Music USA has never gone out of print.Furthermore, its grip continues to dominate popular understandings about the music.For example, Ken Burns's 2019 Country Music documentary heavily relied on the book in telling the genre's history, and Malone was the only historian consulted for the project.Such staunch understandings of country's associations with a working-class (and implicitly white) identity has made it difficult to begin to understand the ramifications of how its conflation with whiteness has made it a tool of white supremacy at the same time.