Reviews for Watermelon wine

The average rating for Watermelon wine based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-06 00:00:00 Nadia Ramirez Moreno I grew up listening to the Nashville Sound, unaware it was a category by which musicologists and country music fans understood their musical tradition. By way of my dad, it was mainly stuff like Jim Reeves, Elvis, The Browns, and the Everly Brothers (who I especially took to in my high school years). My mom liked Dolly Parton and I myself developed a particular taste for Patsy Cline’s music in my later undergraduate years. My parents have always been strangely enthralled with country music, maybe because it’s been so closely associated with the sort of conservative American evangelicalism that resonated with them. It might also be that my parents are weirdly obsessed with The Cracker Barrel. We’ve eaten there literally every time we’ve roadtripped through the US. Yet I never quite thought of the Everly Brothers or early Elvis as country music, and so it made some sense as I read this book that lots of country music fans never quite thought of them as country either, even though they are certainly a part of what has historically come to be categorized as ‘country music’. In this book, I thought Jensen did a great job approaching the question of authenticity by challenging the common presumption that contemporary country is not as ‘authentic’ as something recorded by say Patsy Cline, when in fact, Patsy Cline’s music in her own time was of questionable authenticity to those within the Opry establishment. The stuff coming out of RCA and a couple other labels, especially the stuff Chet Atkins and a handful of other producers and session artists were recording, were beginning to conform to the smooth orchestration of Tin Pan Alley pop and the exciting sounds of rock n’ roll as it was emerging within the mainstream milieu. The ‘twang’ and ‘down home’ touch of rural American folk barn dances was being traded in for what was once pejoratively termed as ‘up town’ (i.e. affluent and cosmopolitan). The class dimensions behind the pervasive cosmopolitan scorn for country music is something I never quite realized until reading this book. It’s something that makes Trump’s electoral performance a bit more comprehensible to me, and I really do think the cultural gap between the so-called ‘coastal elites’ and rural America is unbelievably wide, with very little interaction occurring between these very different worlds, and I think country music presents itself as a fascinatingly strategic site for bridging gaps, and a chance for coastal Americans who had particular educational and economic opportunities in life to gain a better understanding of the people that live in America’s heartland. It's a place where we can mutually learn from each other. Nashville represents one of these interesting bridging sites, because it has had such a mixed history. On the one hand, it was home to Andrew Jackson’s hermitage plantation, worked by slaves, and even in the 21st Century there are still things there that unsettle me. I caught a show at the Opry on July 4th of all days, haha, and stuff like the militaristic patriotism still gets me I must confess, but it's actually not that different even in Canada sometimes. At the same time, it’s a surprisingly cosmopolitan place, and has this fascinating classical history behind it, even hosting a full-scale Acropolis in one of its public parks. Vanderbilt is a neat place, and the food in Nashville is actually quite remarkable (the phone-less communal dining experience at Monell’s was particularly memorable for me, and while I don’t even really eat meat, lol, I loved this episode on hot chicken by The Sporkful). I loved the RCA Studio tour and the Country Music Hall of Fame was actually really fun. They had a remarkable exhibit exploring the relationship between Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan when I was there, that was especially impressive to me. The Station Inn was also a favourite, it's a cozy venue that has hosted the likes of Gillian Welch. I had the chance to hear a singer named Bradley Walker perform there before he debuted a few months later at the Opry. Anyways, this was the context in which I began reading this book, as a way to learn about some of the music history of Nashville before finding myself there for a couple days last summer. I took some long breaks from it and only now finally got around to finishing it. The brief history of country music Jensen provided was quite a bit more interesting than I expected, especially its connection to rural folk music and so-called race music, though I found Jensen’s reflections on authenticity and commercialization fairly repetitive across the middle section of the book. I found her engagement with theorists like Arendt and Adorno particularly interesting, though I still came out on their side rather than Jensen’s. I think commercialization at least to the extent it exists today does pose a threat to music, in that it threatens its democratization to some extent and leaves less room for some people’s voices who don’t have the same sort of capital behind them or don’t happen to capitulate to a particular fashion of the market’s taste at any given time. Jensen is a lot less concerned with capitalism than I happen to be, and I don’t think that it’s a purely Romantic thing about returning to some idyllic past paradise as she claims it is. I think it deserves the critique it has received. I think she’s right to critique the snobbery of academia and its closely guarded canon of ‘intellectually important’ music, and the attitudes she saw fellow Marxist graduate students show towards the honky tonk she worked in as a grad student, but I also think her laissez-faire attitude towards mass media and mass culture is fairly different from the way I see it. I think Arendt saw that just because masses hold an opinion does not mean there must be something to it, as the Holocaust made very evident. There are good sorts of populism and some really dangerous and destructive sorts of populism, as has become obvious more recently. I think Jensen’s strongest chapters were on the front and back end of the book. I really liked her exploration of music as a sort of relational ritual between performer and audience that participates in the task of world-making and the constructing of narratives in which people can mutually inhabit. Some of my favourite sorts of theology also traffic in similar ideas, and I really derive a lot of pleasure from that sort of stuff. I also picked up quite a few artists as new favourites because of this book. Artists like Lefty Frizzell, Merle Haggard and Bill Monroe (who has a statue outside the Ryman Auditorium, the original home of the Grand Ole Opry). I recently found out Monroe was fairly influential for John Fahey, a folk guitarist I deeply admire. In conclusion, I appreciated this book, but if I do get around to reading more about country music in the future, I hope to read something on MacArthur genius Rhiannon Gidden’s list of books to check out, like Diane Pecknold’s book “Hidden in The Mix”. I also had a yearning to visit Memphis while in Tennessee, but didn't have the time when I was there. I’ve always wanted to visit it after watching Jim Jarmusch’s film “Mystery Train”.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-06-03 00:00:00 John Dillow A really fascinating look at authenticity and genres. In fact, I would recommend that anyone struggling with the idea of authenticity and indie rock read this book -- the examples aren't quite the same but the overall idea and questions Jensen raises are. Her accounting of the history of the development of the Nashville Sound is riveting, but her examples could have been a bit more in depth especially when it came to behind the scenes songwriters. The questions she raises in the debate between cultural groups and authenticity are worth reading the book alone.