Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls: Women's Country Music, 1930–1960

In Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls, Stephanie Vander Wel examines the role of women during the first decades of the country music era, 1930–60, as country music migrated beyond the South into the Midwest and California and ultimately became a national phenomenon centered in Nashville. By focusing on the careers of five well-known singers during this formative era, Vander Wel sets out to show the significant and diverse ways women contributed to the popularity of the early country music genre. Vander Wel examines country music's roots in theatrical performance, especially vaudeville, demonstrating how women navigated the politics of marketing to attract larger and more diverse audiences, all the while situating women's careers within the historical processes of Depression-era migration, class, and the concomitant social changes that challenged gender norms.The book is divided into three parts that move chronologically and regionally. Part 1 examines the origins of this genre in the Midwest, especially the role of Chicago's radio station WLS in the 1930s. The station used southern, or country, music to build an audience of midwesterners and white southerners who migrated to regional cities after World War I. Vander Wel uses the popular WLS program National Barn Dance and the performances of singer/comedian LuLu Bell to demonstrate the “vocal mask,” a purposefully strident, nasal timbre that both challenged and adhered to stereotypes of southern working-class women. Vander Wel then explores the burgeoning popularity of “Western songs” through the career of Patsy Montana, arguing that Montana used her vocalizations and lyrics to protest women's subservient role in society.Part 2 examines country music during the 1940s and its arrival in California with Depression-era migrants. Singers Carolina Cotton and Rose Maddox are featured, demonstrating country music's shift from being embarrassed by the southern working class to radical identity with it. During this phase of the genre's development, Vender Wel shows how the women performers combined an emphasis on glamour with their singing voices, vocal techniques, and musical styles to build commercial success, especially in honky-tonks and juke joints, the places and music that “articulated the complexities and paradoxes of gendered and class dynamics” (158).Part 3 examines country music's return to its roots in the South during the late 1940s. Nashville invented itself as the center of the country music genre, distancing itself from its tawdry honky-tonk reputation by “emphasizing middle-class virtues of artists yet without alienating white, southern working-class music” (179). Kitty Wells and Goldie Hill are featured to show how the post–World War II ideology of feminism factored into song lyrics and vocal strategies. “Call and response” songs like Well's “It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” exemplify working-class women's struggles to balance domesticity with working-class realities.True to her intention, Vande Wel highlights the significance of women during the early years of country music through an interdisciplinary weaving together of history, gender and class formation, and the politics of marketing in the relatively new formats of radio and film, and by examining women's artistic agency. One challenge of using an interdisciplinary approach, though, is that it requires a firm understanding of all the disciplinary parts. While Vander Wel clearly understands musicology, occasionally her grasp of historical and gender studies scholarship is incomplete. For example, she misses the opportunity to discuss how the New Woman phenomenon that emerged during the late nineteenth century set the stage for women to engage in the performance industry. Similarly, glamour and the marketing of country artists as respectably middle-class were film industry strategies that predated the country music industry. It would also be helpful for readers to have some familiarity with musicology, as each chapter features erudite discussions on the physical methods singers used in constructing sounds, such as the nasal twang and yodels, as well as references to musical genres, histories, and music theory.Critiques aside, Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls provides a welcome addition to the small body of work on women in country music. The book is well organized, with extensive use of primary sources in the form of interviews and music lyrics, as well as a firm grounding in secondary sources. Readers will find new insights in how women used music, theatrics, and vocal techniques to navigate and elevate working-class women's experiences and traditions in this male-dominated genre as a rapidly changing society increasingly privileged middle-class expressions of femininity.