Book Review

Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class. By Bill C. Malone. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. ISBN 0-252-02678-0 (cloth). Pp. xvi, 392. $34.95

In Don't Get Above Your Raisin', Bill Malone, the preeminent figure among country music scholars, demonstrates that country music has been "an art form made and sustained by working people" (vii), particularly (white) southerners. Malone believes that the music expresses its southern working-class identity most clearly in the themes of home, religion, male rambling, rowdiness, folksy humor, and political commentary. A chapter devoted to each theme provides a chronology of its treatment in country song.