Reviews for Workin' man blues

The average rating for Workin' man blues based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-09 00:00:00 Garry Stutsel Nashville has not always been the home of country music. Following migrations westward from the South and Dust Bowl states during the 1930s and 1940s, country music flourished in California, where it thrived in Hollywood, throughout the agricultural interior valleys and around the war-related industries in Los Angeles. And it continued in the post-war years, peaking in creative output one final time in the 1960s. Author Gerald Haslam's history of country music in California tells a story full of rich appreciation for its many musical styles, from hillbilly (the Crockett Family, seen on the cover), to the singing cowboys (Gene Autry), to the heyday of western swing (Bob Wills and Spade Cooley), to Tennessee Ernie Ford, and the Bakersfield music scene, centered around Buck Owens in the 1960s. Haslam then tracks its story since those golden years in the careers of Californians who made it big in the Nashville years, such as Merle Haggard. Haslam's sympathies are clearly with performers who have bucked the homogenizing trends of Nashville and the dominance of a music today that calls itself country but has largely lost contact with its roots. He praises the musical mavericks and outlaws who keep traditional and "hard" country alive in California, giving special attention to Dwight Yoakum, who stubbornly and fiercely chose Los Angeles as a base to launch a career that got national attention in the 1980s. You may or may not love the author's blue-collar bias. He notes the frequent theme of discontent in traditional country music, characterizing it as the music of the hard-working men and women who labor not always successfully in pursuit of an American dream. Their yearning for simpler times and rural values is a sensibility mostly absent from today's country play lists, with only rare exceptions like Alan Jackson. It's a sentiment that finds its parallel in the traditionalist's dislike for the urban market-driven output of Nashville's lucrative music industry. This is a highly readable book, with over 50 photographs of performers, and it's also a reference based on a good deal of scholarship. There's a 22-page bibliography and both a song title index and a subject index covering another 24 pages. Readers interested in western swing will especially appreciate the author's extensive study of this subject. As a companion volume, I'd also recommend "The Rough Guide to Country Music."

Review # 2 was written on 2007-05-31 00:00:00 Alexis` Hines This book focuses on what Country music meant to the history of the state by tracing the development of several prominent bands (Maddox Bros. and Rose, Buck Owens, etc.)--some homegrown, some not--into national acts. But WMB is a huge bore for those wanting a cultural and socio-political bent on how the music cam via the "Okies" who migrated here through the first half of the 20th C. Haslam is much too fond of trumping bands for their resistance to Nashville, and he does so frequently while indelicately ignoring many interesting things that have nothing to do with the music industry. Another book could be written on the subject of Bakersfield vs. Nashville, but aside from the occasional deferral to Capitol Records, I personally care very little about it. In fact, being an East Bayer all my life, I felt somewhat slighted. For one thing, seeing how Richmond, Vallejo and Oakland are within less than 50 miles of each other, all war towns in the 40's and 50's, supplying thousands of jobs to recent arrivals from the South and Midwest, you'd think a great deal more of the book would devote itself to this area. But no. Haslam devotes about three quarters of his book to Bakersfield and Southern California, and the rest is pretty much devoted to bands' staunch refusal to move to Nashville. The occasional passing comments on Oakland are total revelations, which are of course gold to the people who write these books. I was fucking stunned to learn that Bob Wills recorded his Tiffany Transcriptions somewhere on Telegraph Avenue. Come to Oakland today and you won't see a trace of Hank or Buck or anyone else. It is these exhumations of history that writing on subjects that are commonly ignored is all about. Decent read, well written, but I was disappointed with Haslam's approach.