In 2004 Gretchen Wilson exploded onto the country music scene with “Redneck Woman.” The blockbuster single led to the early release of her first CD, Here for the Party, and propelled it to triple platinum sales that year, the highest for a debut in any musical category. “Redneck Woman” shot to No. 1 faster than any country track in the previous decade and held the top spot for five weeks. Wilson garnered a raft of distinctions, including a Grammy for best country song and best female vocalist honors from both the Country Music and American Music Awards.

The record was a milestone in country music and in the career of Wilson, who went in a few weeks from struggling Nashville unknown to top-selling Nashville star. In the process, the “Redneck Woman” she had created with co-writer and MuzikMafia crewmate John Rich became not only her signature song but her star persona. Redneck Woman was the tag line that served to introduce Wilson in public appearances and media features. The neck of her guitar even proclaimed “REDNECK” in mother of pearl inlay. More than a nickname, the handle keyed to a network of images, attributes, and attitudes that Wilson represented and that, for fans, represented her in an essential way. Loretta Lynn was the Coal Miner’s Daughter, Johnny Cash the Man in Black, and now Gretchen Wilson was the Redneck Woman. Anyone curious about the meaning of any of these monikers could simply listen to the eponymous song.

All three songs have served as identity totems for their singers and the fans who have embraced them. All are first-person narrations on themes that have been prevalent in postwar country music, including an identification with humble folk—both the materially impoverished and the socially scorned. “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (#1 1970) poignantly chronicles the singer’s hardscrabble family origins in a Kentucky holler. Its message is familiar to country fans: We were poor, but we had love—of God and each other.¹ The narrator in “Man in Black” (#3 1971) explains that he shuns color in his dress to protest poverty, hopelessness, and lives lost to war and imprisonment. That song’s lyrics invoke another champion of the downtrodden, Jesus. The persona in “Redneck Woman” acknowledges her own scorned status but frames it with neither poignancy nor righteous protest. Her statement is a defiant apologia for herself and her redneck sisters and their “trashy” social position.

Wilson’s breakthrough single and its extraordinary reception remakes white working-class female identity through language, sound, and images and in relation to middle-class/working-class, male/female, and individual/communal affiliations. It is an identity bereft of cachet, or “cultural exchange-value,” according to Beverley Skeggs, a British sociologist whose work powerfully illuminates the cultural terrain on which the song is produced and received.

Skeggs offers a theory on the workings of the contemporary Western political and symbolic economy—a cultural system that elevates stories of individual “subjects” and rewards those who can access, use, and display the right identity attributes. The winners here are those who are positioned to access other subjects’ “properties.” These powerful actors can “use the classifications and characteristics of race, sexuality, class, and gender as resources” by borrowing them, fluidly and according to the circumstances, from the subject positions to which they are seen to belong. Such self-resourcing takes place in a modern neoliberal context of “propertized personhood.” Here, exchange-value attaches, not only to objects or the labor that transforms them into possessions (as in Marx), but to “the cultures, experiences, and affects of others” that entitled subjects use as resources for middle-class self-construction.

Less entitled subjects, however, are limited in their ability to trade and convert their characteristics and classifications “because they are positioned as those classifications and are fixed by them.” So, while the cool (among other characteristics) that attaches to black working-class males and the criminality that attaches to their white counterparts can be detached and deployed as resources by white middle-class men to enhance their cultural power, the source-subjects are pathologized and essentialized by their cool and criminality. In the workplace, straight male managers who perform feminine caring enhance their symbolic value and power, but women in the same role are essentialized, perceived as simply “being themselves,” and derive no special rewards. Indeed, they may be penalized for their (presumed) tendency to caring when toughness or another quality is called for. Certain selves are fixed in place so others can be mobile.²

An ethnographic study of white working-class women by Skeggs found the women’s position to be severely limited in this symbolic economy. They are inscribed with certain cultural dispositions, but none that inspire borrowing by others. Their subject-resources are assessed as fixed and worthless, having only use-value to themselves and no exchange-value in the cultural marketplace. Consequently, the women face restrictions on their economic value and their sense of individual value. Skeggs writes of her research subjects that a “daily struggle for value was central to their ability to operate in the world and their sense of subjectivity and self-worth.”³ Her analysis offers a frame for understanding the phenomenal popularity of “Redneck Woman,” particularly among fans its chorus calls out as “redneck girls” (“Let me get a big hell yeah from the redneck girls like me”).

The record uses self-resourcing techniques and song craft to affirm the distinctiveness and legitimacy of the Redneck Woman, and does so in solidarity with redneck men. Indeed, the track trades on the only exchange-value Skeggs locates in white working-class identity, male criminality, through allusions to hardcore rock and country icons. “Redneck Woman” positions itself on the “hard” side of a hard/soft duality identified by sociologist Richard Peterson as a perennial dialectic in commercial country music, with gendered roots in earlier male public instrumental (barn dance) performance and female domestic vocal (parlor) performance, respectively. The song invites comparison with postwar hard country, which literary and cultural critic Barbara Ching analyzes as a “burlesque abjection” of culturally low, ineffectual white masculinity defiantly enacted against the foil of “women and conventionally successful men.”⁴

“Redneck Woman” is also defiant but directs its defiance exclusively at the dominant middle-class culture. It offers moments of burlesque in lyrics touting the narrator’s unrepentant year-round Christmas displays, barefoot baby-toting, and preference for cheap Walmart lingerie. But it stakes serious claims for her resourcefulness, country affiliations and tastes, desirability, and, especially, agency. Indeed, the song de-essentializes and thus remakes a subjectivity long disowned and devalued in the dominant culture and once labeled the “Virile Female”—by proclaiming it deliberately chosen. This remaking calls upon popular music’s capacity to model and create social identity.⁵ And it begins at the song’s title, with its juxtaposition of clashing identities.

Framing the Redneck

The first of these identities, “redneck,” is conspicuously classed, but its working-class valence is also marked in terms of race—white; locale—provincial; and sex—the “redneck” label conventionally attaching to maleness and connoting a rough style of masculinity, often, but not exclusively, southern.⁶

Several scholars have noted the emergence in the 1970s of a “redneck pride” phenomenon in the United States, with roots in country music. Peterson documents an early redneck pride moment beginning in 1973, and involving a spate of country songs over the next few years, that helped to redefine the word redneck and make it into a label voluntarily claimed and positively associated with “an anti-bourgeois attitude and lifestyle.” Country music historian Bill Malone sees in Jimmy Carter’s 1976 election the dawn of a more “benign” view of the South, accompanied by a shift in meanings: “‘Redneck’ seemed somehow to be overcoming the association with racial bigotry from which it suffered in the early 1960s, and instead was now being used to describe white working-class males. It became a proud self-designation for many white southerners and by the early eighties was appearing frequently in country songs.” In fact, these changes extended beyond the South, at the least to the industrial Midwest and other destinations of the many white southerners who migrated north in the twentieth century. Thus cultural anthropologist John Hartigan notes in connection with his ethnographic work in Detroit that by the late 1980s terms like redneck, hillbilly, and country boy were claimed with pride and used almost interchangeably to connote “working-class lifestyle and consciousness.”⁷

By the early 1990s the comedian Jeff Foxworthy had taken up the torch of redneck pride. Foxworthy launched a thriving redneck comedy industry in U.S. popular culture and in 2000 with three fellow comedians brought the phenomenon to its apex in the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. At the core of Foxworthy’s franchise is an ever-growing list of jokes in the form, “If ——, you might be a redneck.” In live performance Foxworthy’s redneck-revealer lines elicit enthusiastic response from his nearly all-white audience, who appear to be, like Foxworthy himself, at least once removed from redneck identity. His stand-up comedy expanded the visibility of redneck reclamation and advanced a commercial and cultural redneck pride movement that inspired identification, however ironic, with a persona elsewhere despised and unfashionable.

Foxworthy and company’s runaway popularity lent “redneck” a brand currency that undoubtedly helped set the stage for “Redneck Woman.” Here, however, redneck identity was decidedly male. All four comedians on the 2000 Blue Collar tour were male, and their humor centered on a male redneck subject. Foxworthy’s “you might be a redneck” gags often hinge on a reference to “the redneck”’s wife or girlfriend or otherwise conjure a male subject implicitly via compulsory heterosexuality (“If you go to the family reunion to meet women, you might be a redneck”). The redneck’s maleness is also explicit in the Carter-era context described by Malone and in some late–twentieth-century literary examples given in the Oxford English Dictionary under the term redneck:

1978 J. UPDIKE Coup v. 192 Her momma’s a washrag and her daddy’s a redneck.
1974 New Yorker 25 Feb. 102/3 He seems Southern redneck—a common man who works outdoors in the sun—to the soul.

Prior to the 2004 release of “Redneck Woman,” a turn-of-the-millennium redneck craze had brought to a head three decades of redneck pride. It created an audience for representations of redneck identity perceived as funny or telling while retrenching its male image. Gender is thus foregrounded in “Redneck Woman” beginning at the title, where cross-paired identities create a stereotype-jolting effect like that of “female surgeon” or “lady plumber.” Here begins too the foregrounding of class, and its entanglement with gender. Listeners are likely to be drawn into “Redneck Woman” by the implications of the title, including the implication that the song might shed some light on its gender- and class-freighted contradictions. And it does, through both music and lyrics, in ways that we will examine in some detail. Before opening that examination involving interlinked issues of gender, class, and country music, it will be useful to engage some existing dialogues around and within these three domains, as found in scholarship and in country songs themselves.

Class (un)consciousness and Country Music

Denial of class difference runs high in American society. Several decades’ sociological research has documented a tendency “for all but the very rich and very poor to define themselves as middle class.”⁸ The cultural anthropologist Sherry Ortner traces the emergence of this tendency to a postwar “national project” she calls the “middle-classing of (white) America.” Directed at improving working-class minds, skills, and consumerism through the G.I. Bill and other programs, its rationales included defense of capitalism against communist encroachment, defense (in the wake of Nazism) of the populace against ideological vulnerability, and deflection of “the class consciousness and incipient class warfare” that had arisen during the Great Depression.

Results of this middle-classing project included “obscuring the older middle class/working-class boundary, especially among white people” and the transformation of class, with its linkages to communism, into “a kind of dirty word.” Within the national discourse, Ortner notes, the class boundary was “largely replaced with a race boundary; and everyone white—with a few virtually invisible ‘exceptions’ at both ends—became, or imagined themselves to have become, middle class.” One might add that race and class became conflated, such that people of color were assumed to be poor and working class, and white people middle and upper class.⁹ These notions persist in the United States generally. But should we not expect things to be different in country music, given its legendary links to the white working class?

Peterson addressed this question in his 1992 essay “Class Unconsciousness in Country Music.” He contends that country music engages with and celebrates working-class topics but does so, across all its thematic genres, in a way that is politically regressive and fosters “class unconsciousness.” Describing the latter as a “fatalistic state in which people bemoan their fate, yet accept it,” Peterson echoes countless critiques of country music as impotently whiny and self-pitying. Reading fatalistic acceptance and hence class unconsciousness in songs that fail to call for collective action against the capitalist owners, Peterson aligns his analysis of country music with the classical Marxist notion of working-class consciousness, a recognition of one’s group membership and economic interests that finds its definitive expression in proletarian uprising.

In the course of his discussion Peterson reckons that country music offers fewer songs about American-dream upward mobility than what he calls “poverty pride,” which asserts that it is better to be poor than rich. This message indeed surfaces often in country (e.g., “Coal Miner’s Daughter”), whether the reason offered is that of avoiding emptiness and misery, staying humble and real, or that poverty is better in God’s eyes. Elsewhere, examining representative country songs’ treatment of nation, race, gender, region, rurality, and religion, Peterson concludes of each topic that it is a distraction serving to “deflect . . . considerations of class” and “the emergence of class consciousness.” Similarly, when noting the 1980s advent of a country music trope he dubs the “tribute to working people,” Peterson underscores its failure to “highlight exploitation or identify an exploiter.” Overall he finds that class consciousness in country songs once evoked is “diffused” or “explicitly dissipated.”¹⁰

Operating axiomatically throughout this analysis is the notion that class consciousness should incite the working class to revolution, overthrowing the capitalist system. If Peterson never questions this tenet, others have done so. In the 1920s Max Weber scrutinized the “direct and immediate” link many Marxists then assumed between class and class consciousness, calling it a “pseudo-scientific operation.” Neo-Marxist scholars from the “historical sociology camp” (in Ortner’s terms) have argued that “we should stop looking at what the working class has only infrequently done, which is become conscious of itself as the vehicle for revolutionary social change . . . [and] look at the extraordinary range of ways in which it has formulated and expressed a distinct identity and a distinct relationship to the rest of society.” British class scholars Valerie Walkerdine and Helen Lucey call the expectation for proletarian revolution a projected fantasy of the middle class and charge that the white working class has been abandoned by the popular Left for its failure to realize this fantasy.¹¹

Despite various compelling critiques of the classical Marxist conception of working-class consciousness, Peterson neither defends nor questions its use as his central premise. His thesis that country music demonstrates class unconsciousness can thus be readily dispatched by all but those who hold that a conscious working class would by definition unite to overthrow capitalism. Malone has directly contradicted the assessment of class unconsciousness in country: “Modern country work songs do not dwell exclusively on nostalgia or pride; they sometimes bristle with anger and class consciousness. They express resentment, not radicalism. Although problems abound, the ‘enemy’ remains ill-defined.”¹²

Malone’s phrase “resentment, not radicalism” recalls that “fatalistic state” Peterson calls class unconsciousness, “in which people bemoan their fate, yet accept it.” Malone’s usage, however, neither trivializes nor condemns country expressions of resentment-sans-radicalism but grants them legitimacy. Such expressions are further legitimated by Ortner’s identification of class in the national discourse as “almost entirely a matter of economic gradations of goods and privilege” and “embedded in narratives of snobbery and humiliation” (or “the hidden injuries of class,” as sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb put it). Class formation is fought out not in any “Marxist narrative of irreconcilable difference” between capital and labor (in Skeggs’s words) but rather “at the level of the symbolic.” The focus here—as in “Redneck Woman”—is not on production, but on consumption and symbolic exchange in capitalist society. Sociologist and theorist Pierre Bourdieu emphasizes that social class “is not defined solely by a position in the relations of production, but by the class habitus [an individual’s socially acquired, embodied set of propensities] which is ‘normally’ . . . associated with that position.”¹³

Bourdieu’s writings on class cultures illumine the cultural logic at work in so-called poverty pride songs—and indeed, in the mechanisms of working-class formation. Bourdieu posits that subordinate groups often internalize the limits of their position in society and thus exercise “the choice of the necessary.” They exclude from consideration those aspirations and actions that are improbable for members of their group, “either totally without examination, as unthinkable, or at the cost of the double negation,” which inclines subjects “to refuse what is anyway refused [to them] and to love the inevitable,” a “virtue made of necessity.”¹⁴ Country songs present an endless array of foreshortened working-class tastes and “choices,” a love for “the inevitable” including modest or impoverished life conditions, low-status Walmart wardrobes, and being labeled “redneck.”

The Class of Country

The foregoing discussion of working-class consciousness and culture is not meant to suggest that country music is written, performed, or consumed exclusively by working-class subjects—or, for that matter, southern, rural, white, or heterosexual ones. Characterizations holding that country speaks for or to a narrow constituency defined along such lines are at odds with the long presence in country audiences of Mexican Americans in the Southwest and diaspora and African Americans in the South, as well as the middle-class suburbanization of “new country” audiences in the 1980s and 1990s.¹⁵ The present argument locates the most obviously working-class element of latter-day country culture not in the producers or consumers, but in the music itself.

Country music traffics in thematic, linguistic, and musical conventions that connect to identities characteristically working class (although Americans rarely self-identify as such) as well as rural; southern, southwestern, and Midwestern; white; Christian; and heterosexual. Country trains an intent focus on these social identities and is arguably the most widely circulating discourse on white working-class—not to mention southern and provincial—life and identity in American culture. Also arguable is whether or not its representations are accurate or authentic. The answer surely varies according to the instance, but it is important to note that country, like other popular music, is both a commercial product and an artistic medium and, as such, directs its appeals to fantasy and imagination as well as selected perceptions of reality.¹⁶

Some scholars have argued that significant country artists have come mainly from the South, others have countered that California and the Southwest have been crucial, and one might note too that the Midwest has yielded many important artists, Wilson included. Reception research has shown that commercial country (established ca. 1923) was initially a music of rural more than southern audiences; that by the 1970s its audiences were not distinctly rural or regional but comprised preponderantly midlife, working- and lower-middle-class whites; and that in the 1980s–90s it made significant inroads into suburbia.¹⁷Other indicators suggest that in some regions of the United States country music is less a distinct cultural object and more woven throughout the social and cultural fabric. For example, in certain areas of the South and West, country records are integrated in pop Top 40 radio rotation, and country audiences include members of the middle and even the upper classes, like self-proclaimed fans George H. W. and George W. Bush.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to chart the precise demographics of country’s producers and audiences, but for present purposes this would miss the point anyway. For while current circumstances may map people more or less onto certain social identities, they can never fully reveal their identifications, which are shaped by unseen personal and family histories, fantasies and yearnings, denials and disaffiliations. Self-identifications are key in audiences’ receptions of styles of popular music, which serve to symbolize specific social styles, values, and personas and function as powerful signifiers of contemporary social identity. Whatever the demographics of its production or consumption, country music is focused on the distinct values, concerns, and perspectives of the white, and sometimes broader, working class.

Whether or not country audiences are predominantly working class, white, rural, or southern, they are distinguished by their receptivity to a music heard and frequently stigmatized in terms of twang and associated with explicitly working-class, rustic, and southern themes and, often, implicitly white identities. Country audiences’ receptivity is notable in light of the hostility and contempt that have been directed at the music as allegedly backward and, since about 1970, menacing—a turn crystallized in the reception of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” (#1 1970), which exposed ideological divisions in American society that would figure in the coming decades’ culture wars. While the present argument locates country’s working-classness primarily in the music, apart from its audiences and producers, the process is reversed in the dominant culture, where images of the music and its putative constituency are merged. That is, country audiences are widely associated with white working-class, provincial, and southern identities, and country music is perceived and excluded in the same terms by which these groups are perceived and excluded: as uneducated, racist, and homophobic.¹⁸

Crucial to the sustenance of such stereotypes are reigning social conditions in the United States under which the classes are separate from and mutually opaque to one another, a situation the political anthropologist James Scott has referred to as “class apartheid.” The narrator in “Redneck Woman” addresses this mutual opacity when she points out to the listener who “might think I’m trashy, a little too hardcore” the codes and values proper to her “neck of the woods,” where she’s “just the girl next door.” In the context of radically separate social and cultural spheres, country music’s working-class reputation and focus often inspire alienation and revulsion from middle-class subjects. Country music hating can even help to produce and define middle-class subjectivity.¹⁹

The working class, however, has its own views and values, separate from and unrecognized by the middle-class system of values and symbolic exchange and, as Bourdieu argues, dominated by it. Ethnographic research by Michèle Lamont shows that American working men place moral above economic value and so, in the terms of their own value system place themselves above the middle class. This can suggest a subculturally productive function of country’s “poverty pride” songs (We were poor, but we had love) having nothing to do with revolution—of affirming collective self-worth against the dominant culture’s devaluations of the working class. Ethnomusicologist Aaron Fox also posits a transformative process of affirmation whereby country’s abject status in the dominant culture allows it to be alchemized into sublime pleasure in shared social rituals of the honky-tonk. Fox suggests that for working-class devotees the inversion of hierarchies of musical value—of country from (dominant-cultural) bad to (subcultural) good—implies a similar reversal in the socially prescribed realm of human value.²⁰

These instances point to Bourdieu’s observation that in social space, where material and cultural capital is differentially distributed, neighbors “may be more remote than strangers.” Bourdieu stresses that the question of this differentiated social space “is raised within the space itself—that the agents have points of view on this objective space which depend on their position within it and in which their will to transform or conserve it is often expressed.” Indeed, he notes,

Several sonic signifiers further define the “Redneck Woman” and mobilize a kind of musical cross-dressing. Wilson leads into the “hell yeah” section of each chorus with bravura full-voice high notes evoking hard rock and heavy metal male vocality à la Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and AC /DC. These vocals are coupled at the octave below (e.g., 1:09–1:13), a muscular gesture that recalls Kid Rock’s 2003 hardcore anthem “Son of Detroit” and the 1973 hard rock classic “Radar Love.” The fiddle in “Redneck Woman” is also referential, its sound and style evoking Charlie Daniels (e.g., 0:54–1:09, 2:30–2:42). And there is an arresting moment when the instruments drop out to underscore Wilson’s kicking things up a notch (2:48–2:50), echoing uses of the same technique by Lynyrd Skynyrd in the legendary extended guitar solo of “Free Bird” and by Skynyrd’s own heroes the Allman Brothers in “Whipping Post.”²⁵

Listeners use popular music for affective and identificatory purposes, to touch places inside and to project signals outside. Relatedly, we might expect the musical references in “Redneck Woman” to operate on a special level, more subliminal and embodied than that of the verbal shout-outs. They might also inspire particular admiration from fans by virtue of the skill and craft involved in creating them, especially in a working-class context where “walking the walk” commands more respect than “talking the talk”—where the worth of a job attaches to its usefulness, and there is contempt for those whose usefulness falls short of their prestige.²⁶

Wilson’s track expands an established genre of self-mythologizing hard country song comparable to the rap genre that musicologist Adam Krims designates “Mack” rap (both genres are rooted in the same centuries-old American braggadocio tradition, according to historian Adam Gussow). In Mack rap, an emcee, characteristically male, struts his sexual prowess and wealth.²⁷ In the hard country version a male singer boasts about his class-outlaw excesses, touting his toughness, fearlessness, or indifference; his bad habits of choice; and maybe a favorite car, truck, bike, or freight train. Examples include Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” (#1 1968), David Allan Coe’s “Son of the South” (1986), and Hank Williams Jr.’s “My Name Is Bocephus” (1987).

Another example is Kid Rock’s “Son of Detroit,” an adaptation of Coe’s “Son of the South” that compares with “Redneck Woman” on several counts. Rock claims both “redneck” and “pimp” identities and name-checks Hank Williams Jr., Run DMC, Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top (also invoked in the guitar riffs), himself, and “Willie, Waylon, George and Merle” to define a special Detroit hybrid persona rooted in both country and hip hop, white “hillbilly” and urban African American cultures.²⁸ The track also specifies the narrator’s preferences in booze: “I like my whiskey straight up daiquiris / make me ill.” And booze leads to ride. The line “I’m a drink a couple dozen beers, / go out and jam some gears” is followed by references to the narrator’s “west coast chopper,” “pickup truck,” “four wheelin’,” and street racing.

Wilson’s declarations are similarly macho. Her name-checks overlap Kid Rock’s and assert a similar hardcore patrilineage. She declares her own intolerance for prissy drinks with “I can’t swig that sweet champagne / I’d rather drink beer all night.” This leads her to specify her haunts and her ride: “In a tavern or in a honky tonk / Or on a 4 wheel drive tailgate.” 

This close examination of Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” and the cross-gender elements in her performance and image construction is not meant to suggest that the persona she conjures is new or unprecedented. On the contrary, Wilson breathes new life into an old gender-class identity with an established cultural presence. It was much the same identity that R. J. Reynolds market researchers defined in 1989 and dubbed the “Virile Female.” RJR had commissioned a study for a marketing strategy targeting young white working-class women, a highly profitable segment for rival Philip Morris’s Marlboro brand. Although its ads have featured rugged males exclusively since the birth of the Marlboro Man cowboy image in the 1950s, Marlboro was in 1989 the best-selling cigarette among young female smokers in America. It still is, likely helped by the fact that Reynolds’s planned “Dakota” cigarette never materialized. The company abandoned the campaign in early 1990, when a Washington Post reporter exposed “Project V.F.” just weeks after the tobacco giant touched off a furor with its launch of “Uptown,” a cigarette aimed at African Americans.

All this links to Wilson and “Redneck Woman.” The song is a gender-inclusive statement of redneck pride and a call to twenty-first-century working-class consciousness, fine-tuned to distinctions of consumption and self-construction and their social, economic, and affective reverberations. It exemplifies Bourdieu’s scenario whereby the “object” of sociology’s classifications produces her own “classifying operations” and articulates a polemical view of the other class. For example, the lyric in verse 2 classifies lingerie consumers in terms of Victoria’s Secret vs. Walmart types and scoffs at those who would pay twice as much at Victoria’s Secret for “the same damn thing” Walmart sells, just for the status marker of a “designer tag.” Such attention to details of clothing and style has long been feminized, trivialized, and readily condemned as a dissipation of revolutionary impulse. As Carolyn Kay Steedman points out, however, fashionable clothing is a necessity for women and girls’ entry into the social world and historically has been an object of working-class women’s desires and labors. She contends that the desire and envy of poor and working-class women for “decent clothes” is nothing less than political, a contention borne out by “Redneck Woman.”²¹ The narrator expresses her interest in attractive clothes in tandem with disdain for the social and cultural tyranny of designer labels, empty status markers of bourgeois individualism, premised on a distinction between the individual and the (here, Walmart-clad) masses.

The Multimedia Creation of Gretchen Wilson’s Public Gender and Class Persona

Historians and critics of country music have devoted considerable attention to the ways in which country artists convey sincerity and biographical authenticity, or “realness,” through their songs and public personas. Peterson has examined the creation of country music as a process of “fabricating authenticity,” and Jimmie N. Rogers has written of the “sincerity contract” in country as the expectation for rapport between a credible, straightforward artist and her or his audience. The latter ideal finds illustration in Wilson, who since 2004 has cultivated an image as a real “Redneck Woman” along the lines sketched in her song. We see her in the video muddin’ on a four-wheeler and elsewhere, in ads and media reports, modeling jeans and lingerie beside a shiny new Chevy pickup; hanging out with “ol’ Bocephus,” Hank Williams Jr.; and wielding her “REDNECK” signature guitar.

All these images encourage us, particularly through gender and class signifiers, to understand Wilson as one and the same with the “Redneck Woman” of her song.²³ So does the biographical information that circulated in the press and media and in the lyrics of the track “Pocahontas Proud” upon the release of her debut album. It emphasized the singer’s background as the child of a teenage mother; a resident of trailer parks in rural Pocahontas, Illinois; an eighth-grade dropout who went to work tending bar in a rough country dive. “At fifteen I was tending Big O’s Bar / I’d sing till two a.m. for a half full tip jar . . . / And I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let ’em down,” she sang in “Pocahontas Proud.” The elaboration of Wilson as Redneck Woman continued with the 2007 release of an autobiographical book (with co-author Allen Rucker) titled Redneck Woman: Stories from My Life. In early 2010 Columbia Nashville issued Gretchen Wilson: Greatest Hits with a rusting, battered mobile home pictured on the cover. And two months later Wilson announced her fourth studio album, I Got Your Country Right Here, as the first release on her own label, Redneck Records.

The track “Redneck Woman” asserts multiple affiliations of gender and class, as well as race and taste, through its many shout-outs. These include name-checks and musical references to a pantheon of male hard country and rock gods, along with a few marketplace endorsements (beer, Walmart) and dis-endorsements (Barbie, champagne, Victoria’s Secret), all defining a distinct “Redneck Woman” identity profile. Wilson invokes the southern-rock legends Lynyrd Skynyrd, self-proclaimed “American Bad Ass” Kid Rock, “King of Country” George Strait, “Redneck Fiddlin’ Man” Charlie Daniels, hard country icon Hank Williams Jr., and one woman: Tanya Tucker, the so-called “bad girl of country” and the only iconic female star associated with the 1970s Outlaw Country movement.²⁴ Each chorus ends with a “Hell yeah” performed in slightly ragged unison by what we might call the “regular folk’s chorus” (here, sounding young and female), a feature of various country songs of the past decade including Martina McBride, “This One’s for the Girls” (#3 2003); Brad Paisley, “Alcohol” (#4 2005) and “Welcome to the Future” (#2 2009); and Toby Keith, “I Love This Bar” (#1 2003) and “Get Drunk and Be Somebody” (#3 2006). The chorus represents collective buy-in around the song’s message and promises to enfold the listener in the warmth and vitality of communal embrace—or from another listener perspective, threatens to obliterate the individual distinction that underwrites middle-class subjectivity.

Project V.F.: 1989 R. J. Reynolds market research defines the “Virile Female”

•. Young white female with high school education at most

•. Service or factory worker

•. Likes “partying” and “cruising”

•. Significantly male identified: into boyfriend and whatever he is doing, including:

Hot rod shows

Tractor pulls

Concerts, especially by all-male groups

•. Smokes Marlboros²⁹

Following its fatal disclosure, details of Reynolds’s “Virile Female” report were disseminated, now with a novelty-infotainment slant, to Harper’s Magazine and National Public Radio audiences. In these audiences the mere phrase tractor pull can elicit a chuckle, serving to distance one from the class and taste community evoked thereby. But the central exhibit offered for armchair anthropologists was more fascinating still, a familiar species of gender-crossed working-class female newly named and classified.³⁰

“Redneck Woman” both conforms and talks back to long-standing perceptions of working-class women as excessively or inappropriately gendered. Historical and pop-culture examples of “hard” women among provincial poor and working-class whites include Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley, Li’l Abner ’s Mammy Yokum, Loretta Lynn’s persona in “You Ain’t Woman Enough” (#2 1966) and “Fist City” (#1 1968), and Tanya Tucker’s Outlaw Country persona in the 1970s–80s. Masculine or butch personas among queer women bear long associations too with working-class identity. Real-life and fictional examples include the female invert as viewed by nineteenth-century sexologists; 1950s lesbian bar culture as chronicled by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis; butch lesbians and transmen as represented in Joan Nestle’s and Leslie Feinberg’s writings; the late Brandon Teena, fictionalized in Boys Don’t Cry (1999); and sociologist Sara Crawley’s study confirming the prevalence of working-class identity among late-twentieth-century American butch lesbians. As these examples might suggest, gender is contingent on class. Working-class women “have always been positioned at a distance” from femininity, a historically specific construction that was indicatively bourgeois from its eighteenth-century beginnings.³¹

The Working-Class Female Predicament

The persona under discussion appears so gender-crossed and extraordinary from a dominant-culture perspective that it has been dubbed the “Virile Female.” But this identity seems more normative among young female country artists. In 2005 Jo Dee Messina scored a No. 1 hit by striking a flinty pose toward an ex in “My Give a Damn’s Busted.” Her cocky, taunting persona in the track and video suggests an aspect of the Virile Female unnoted in Reynolds’s marketing report but foregrounded a few days after its exposure, in a Washington Post column titled “Cigarettes and Virile Chicks.” “I went to high school with girls like this,” recalls the author, a self-described “Chaucer major.” “We called them ‘hitter chicks,’ because they liked to hit people, and I adored them for their wild ways.” He describes the Virile Females of his 1960s adolescence as Marlboro smokers who were savage in fistfights.³² The tough persona portrayed and exoticized here resonates with “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” “Fist City,” and other examples previously cited.

A few months after “My Give a Damn’s Busted” broke the charts even Carrie Underwood, an icon of wholesome and glamorous femininity, joined the V.F. club. Following her American Idol victory and conquest of country and Christian radio with the inspirational megahit “Jesus, Take the Wheel” (#1 2005), Underwood’s next No. 1 single was “Before He Cheats” (2006), a revenge song that has the narrator keying her unfaithful man’s “four-wheel drive” pickup and whacking it with a “Louisville Slugger.” This latter sends glass shards flying in the video, which cuts between the cheater’s seduction scene with the other woman and the singer’s cool, unflinching delivery of a verbal and vehicular thrashing.

Underwood’s persona here is downscale and belligerent. She appears throughout much of the video in heavy blue eye shadow and a faded black slit-neck tee, shoves strangers in the alleyway without a glance, and imagines her romantic rival performing “white trash . . . karaoke.” Her choreography includes menacing looks, sneers, and a “chicken head” gesture by now associated with Jerry Springer Show contestants, and glass shatters spontaneously wherever she walks. Underwood’s publicity has never cast her in the Virile Female mold, and her fashion-model looks and frequent magazine cover appearances have helped prevent anything too hardcore or “real” from sticking to her celebrity image. But her foray into Virile Female territory in “Before He Cheats” was well received by country fans and seemed only to bolster her credibility as a country artist amid her stylish image as a TV, newsstand, and musical crossover star.

Reaching back over a half-century, we might draw a further comparison with “Redneck Woman”—though not on Virile Female grounds. Kitty Wells was censored by country radio and by NBC and its Grand Ole Opry broadcast because of the perceived radicalism of the message in her own career-making megahit “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” (#1 1952). A riposte to Hank Thompson’s plaint against a good-timin’ woman who left him to return to “The Wild Side of Life” (#1 1952), the song became country’s first No. 1 single, and first million-selling record, by a female solo artist.³³ In fact, the lyrics of “Honky-Tonk Angels” presume conjugal heterosexuality and a traditional wifely role for women, while the tune reprises Thompson’s (itself a familiar recycling). But the song’s implication of male social-sexual irresponsibility and privilege in defense of “us women” was heard as threatening in 1952 (“Too many times married men think they’re still single / That has caused many a good girl to go wrong”). However demure, Wells’s track seems no less feminist than Wilson’s boisterous 2004 celebration of “redneck girls like me.”

Both artists were popular icons for female audiences in their respective moments. Both of their records were apologias for the same figure of sexually imperiled subjectivity, the white working-class woman. But the songs deploy different tactics. “Honky-Tonk Angels” makes a gender-separative appeal, blaming men for some women’s loss of middle-class respectability and thus ultimately affirming bourgeois values. By contrast, “Redneck Woman” makes common cause with redneck men and draws on cherished symbols of good ol’ boy ideals and prerogatives to articulate its manifesto, a cross-gender, macho-affirmative rejection of the very standards of hegemonic middle-class femininity.

Notably, the emphasis on class defiance in Wilson’s song does not undermine its feminist thrust. Indeed, this set-up jibes with contemporary intersectional feminism—the Redneck Woman insists that we apprehend her situation as concurrently working class and female. Wilson asserts the superior sexiness and late-capitalist savvy of the “Redneck Woman,” a monogamous object of heterosexual allure in impostor lingerie from Walmart. Directing its most explicit critique at middle-class cultural style and social supremacy, the song makes its feminist case—verbally, visually, and musically—through masculinity rather than against it and so, links with a central theme in postwar country music, insofar as it rehearses and props up the terms of white working-class manhood.

That manhood will be revisited in the conclusion. But first we will take another look at white working-class womanhood vis-à-vis “Redneck Woman”—in the song, the artist-image, and the audience, and in the interpretive light of social theory. Ortner observes “a general tendency for working- . . . class culture to embody within itself the split . . . between the working and the middle class.” This split is reproduced in working-class contexts as “a typology of ‘styles’ . . . the action seekers versus the routine seekers, . . . the respectables versus the undesirables, . . . [and] overwhelmingly . . . women are symbolically aligned . . . with the ‘respectable,’ ‘middle-class’ side of these oppositions and choices.”³⁴

In other words, women in working-class culture are assigned the role of middle-class moral conservator/killjoy.³⁵ This is illustrated in countless country songs (as Ching suggests in relation to male hard country) and parodied in the “Redneck Woman” video when Wilson wades into the cluttered living room of a house trailer, dominated by a flat-screen television and two inert men. As she gathers up empty longnecks, casts a disapproving glance, and snatches away one fellow’s fat cigar, we see that the good ol’ boys are Kid Rock and Hank Williams Jr. in cameo appearances. Of course, these are the heroes in Wilson’s song, the guys she stands with, not against. The gender conflict is thus revealed as a send-up, and class solidarity is reinforced anew.

Now, we might see working-class womanhood, as described by Ortner, in terms of a potentially even exchange: on good days you are the very emblem of respectability; on bad days, by the same token, you are a killjoy drag. But that schema operates only within working-class culture. In the dominant middle-class frame, working-class women signify disrespectability, with real-world consequences. Recent empirical research shows that both women and men, liberal and conservative, are more likely to assume it was “her fault” when they are given evidence indicating that a rape victim was working class than when the evidence points to a middle-class woman (here, too, clothing signifies and is political). In our culture’s symbolic economy the working-class woman personifies the “slut” and so, functions as ground to the middle-class figure of respectability. In fact, respectability exists only as a function of class distinction. It emerged historically as “a property of middle-class individuals defined against the masses.”³⁶ This class-gender backdrop is precisely what “Redneck Woman” plays out against.

The record’s lyrics and video images show keen awareness of the pathologizing and abjection of working-class women and men and insist on a kind of reverse valuation. “Redneck Woman” attests for its audience, as Bourdieu’s writings attest elsewhere, that “the privilege of the dominant classes is that they possess social legitimation which is based on the power of the dominant to impose, by their very existence, a definition of what is valued and authorized which is nothing other than their own way of existing—they are at ease in the social world because they determine the legitimated way of existing in it—it is a self-affirming power.”³⁷

You can find working-class social and cultural affirmation in many country songs, including (to name a few) Lefty Frizzell, “Saginaw, Michigan” (#1 1964); Johnny Cash, “Oney” (#2 1972); George Jones and Tammy Wynette, “(We’re Not) the Jet Set” (#15 1974); Dolly Parton, “9 to 5” (#1 1981); Reba McEntire, “Fancy” (#8 1991); Aaron Tippin, “Working Man’s Ph.D.” (#7 1993); Montgomery Gentry, “Something to Be Proud Of” (#1 2005); Eric Church, “How ’Bout You” (#14 2006); and Jason Aldean, “Amarillo Sky” (#4 2007). But fans’ record-breaking response to “Redneck Woman” evinces the musical and stylistic appeal with which its message and rhetoric projected a young white working-class female persona that country audiences circa 2004 could embrace, and that sounded the right note for their catharsis and identification. “Redneck Woman” offers catharsis to working-class listeners through acknowledgment of and ammunition against the “rejection of self” that arises from everyday encounters with the dominant culture, a “grasping at a conscious level what has always been known at an unconscious level—that to be what you are is ‘not good enough.’”³⁸

Knowing that you are deemed wrong or inadequate by others’ standards does not necessarily make you want to be like those others. The working-class women in Skeggs’s ethnography were ambivalent toward the prospect of attaining the definitively middle-class attribute of respectability.³⁹ More pointedly, “Redneck Woman” rebukes a downward gaze, challenging “you” who “might think I’m trashy.” But ultimately the song too seems ambivalent, more intent on trashing the dominant culture’s ideal of respectability than extending such respectability to its cast-off “trash.” This is not to suggest that “Redneck Woman” lacks cultural ambition or productivity. In its celebration of the Virile Female the song produces a persona resistant to the twofold trap in which working-class women (a) symbolize a revered-and-resented middle-class respectability within their own class, even as they (b) embody disrespectability for the middle class. “Redneck Woman”’s rebellion against both straitjacketing options is flagged (a) in the video, by Wilson’s parody of the aspirational house-proud scold and affirmation of her one-of-the-boys affinity with Kid Rock and Bocephus, and (b) in the lyrics, when the narrator champions her sub-bourgeois wardrobe choices and refutes the charge that she’s “trashy” or “too hardcore” by invoking her own community standards, by which she’s “just the girl next door.”

The features of female working-class subjectivity discussed above illustrate Ortner’s observation that class conflicts in America are largely denied and often displaced to gender and sexuality.⁴⁰ Labeling a woman as “slut” is a quintessential instance. It is a class insult misleadingly delivered into the realm of sexuality and gender. In alleging impropriety on the part of an individual woman it denies the structural, classed basis of the judgment. We have learned much in recent years about how gender intersects with race and must be understood differently across different racial and ethnic locations. But we still have much to learn about the effects of class in relation to gender. These too are interwoven with race, ethnicity, geography, and other factors, as we can see in the case of Elvis Presley.

In the Marketplace of Subjectivities (Conclusion)

In a 1992 essay, literary and cultural critic Marjorie Garber placed Elvis Presley alongside Valentino and Liberace as a matinée idol who appropriated feminine dress and self-presentation to enhance, paradoxically, his heterosexual appeal. On the analysis of historian Michael Bertrand, however, Presley’s persona traversed, not any gender boundary, but class-specific racial boundaries. In his flashy suits and jewelry, pompadour and aura of cool, the white working-class Memphian drew on midcentury southern black working-class style, in which impeccable suits, coiffed hair, and manicures heightened heterosexual masculinity and asserted individuality without threatening a segregated social order. Noting that poor whites and African Americans constituted “two underclass groups the southern elite lumped together as lazy, dependent, and biologically inferior,” Bertrand posits that Elvis “appropriat[ed] this form of machismo for the same reason that black men utilized it, . . . to demonstrate his manhood within a society in which his dignity and self-respect . . . [had] been under constant assault.”⁴¹ This suggests the importance of class perspective in conjunction with racial and regional perspectives for understanding the workings of gender and sexuality around Presley’s celebrity persona.

Like Presley, Wilson and her Redneck Woman persona are unreadable beneath a bourgeois gender lens. Multiple factors—including Wilson’s iconic status among country fans, the broader history of the Virile Female, and “Redneck Woman”’s defiantly anti-bourgeois message—point to the need for another analytics, one that would acknowledge and investigate the class complaint at the center of the song. It would reckon with Wilson’s various male identifications as well as her claim, “In my neck of the woods I’m just the girl next door.” Examining “Redneck Woman” in relation to the provincial white working-class world mapped by the music and lyrics yields perspective on the track’s message and its eager embrace among fans.

Presley’s sensational public persona appropriated cultural resources from his class, gender, and regional peers across society’s color line—from working-class southern black male counterparts. Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” persona appropriates cultural resources from her class, racial, geographic, and professional contemporaries across the gender line—from working-class–and rural-identified white male rock and country icons—while reaffirming her heteronormativity through stereotypically gendered images: lyrics on courting her man’s desire and propping a baby on her hip, video cuts to female cage dancers and trailer-park moms. “Redneck Woman” thereby puts a new spin on an old, tainted identity, the Virile Female, and most strikingly, manages to forge an appealing persona out of white working-class female subjectivity. Undoubtedly the persona thus created does not appeal to everyone, but any cultural instance that generates positive or even neutral interest in white working-class womanhood merits notice.

“Redneck Woman”’s appreciative reception surely reflects its deft rebranding of denigrated, essentialized white working-class female subjectivity. Operating on a cultural landscape where choice defines the empowered neoliberal subject, the narrator attests that she chooses her working-class, redneck affiliations with hard country and rock artists, beer over champagne, discount intimates, and déclassé front-yard spectacles. To this extent “Redneck Woman” might be heard as staking a claim for power and authority on the terms of the dominant culture. Of course, the song doesn’t take up the values of middle-class neoliberal self-exchange. It affirms working-class identification and ideals, giving voice to perceptions of the middle class as snobbish, elitist, competitive, pretentious, and morally lacking by comparison to working-class values of family attachment, loyalty, personal sincerity, and honor.⁴² “Redneck Woman” thus scores its symbolic victory over the class status quo, directing new-bourgeois self-resourcing techniques to anti-bourgeois ends in a gendered declaration of working-class consciousness lasting three and a half minutes, and perhaps beyond.

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Nadine Hubbs is a musicologist and cultural historian who teaches women’s studies and music at the University of Michigan and is author of The Queer Composition of America’s Sound and Rednecks, Queers and, Country Music. She is currently working on a book titled Country Mexicans.

Header image: Gretchen Wilson, July 20, 2004. AP Photo/Neil Brake.

NOTES

I am grateful for the input I received from audiences to earlier versions of this essay and to the sponsors and organizers of the relevant forums, especially Carol Boyd, Melissa de Graaf, Megan Jenkins, Jocelyn Neal, and Terri Torkko. For input, encouragement, and crucial dialogue I thank Michael Bertrand, Nancy Guy, Lydia Hamessley, Scott Herring, Jolene Hubbs, Kris McCusker, Sherry Ortner, Bev Skeggs, Jessi Streib, Valerie Traub, Aimee VonBokel, members of my 2009 and 2010 “Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music” seminars at the University of Michigan, and the Southern Cultures editors and anonymous reviewer.

1. Chart figures refer to the U.S. Billboard Country Songs Chart: http://www.billboard.com.
2. Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (Sage, 1997); Class, Self, Culture (Routledge, 2004), 153; “Uneasy Alignments: Resourcing Respectable Subjectivity,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 2 (2004): 292–93; Class, Self, Culture, 55; “Uneasy Alignments,” 293.
3. Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture, 2.
4. Richard A. Peterson, “Soft Shell vs. Hard Core: The Vagabonds vs. Roy Acuff,” in Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 137–58. Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (Oxford University Press, 2003), 30, 4. Enlisting Peter Stearns’s “American Cool” concept, Ching argues that hard country deliberately produces an uncool—economically and emotionally uncontrolled—abject masculinity deploying an irony that’s widely unrecognized and misread.
5. Geoff Mann argues that popular music is no mere reflection but a powerful producer of society and subjectivity, and that country contributes to the U.S. production of particular kinds of subjectivity: “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 83–84.
6. See Patrick Huber, “A Short History of Redneck: The Fashioning of a Southern Masculine Identity,” in Southern Cultures: The Fifteenth Anniversary Reader, eds. Harry L. Watson and Larry J. Griffin, with Lisa Eveleigh, Dave Shaw, Ayse Erginer, and Paul Quigley (University of North Carolina Press, 2008): 303–27.
7. Richard A. Peterson, “Class Unconsciousness in Country Music,” in You Wrote My Life: Lyrical Themes in Country Music, ed. Melton A. McLaurin and Richard A. Peterson (Langhorne, Penn.: Gordon and Breach, 1992), 57–58. Bill C. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (University of Illinois Press, 2002), 46. On northern migration see James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and “Southernizing the American Working Class: Post-war Episodes of Regional and Class Transformation,” Labor History 39, no. 2 (1998): 135–54. John Hartigan Jr., Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (Duke University Press, 2005), 124. This was also the moment of Ernest Matthew Mickler’s bestseller White Trash Cooking (1986), but as Hartigan notes, “white trash” retains deep stigma and contempt and has not found redemption even in country music, “a domain of popular culture . . . where the badge of social scorn is often worn proudly” (124).
8. Thomas J. Gorman, “Cross-Class Perceptions of Social Class,” Sociological Spectrum 20, no. 1 (2000): 100; Sherry B. Ortner, New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58 (Duke University Press, 2003), 28.
9. Ortner, New Jersey Dreaming, 28. On this race-class conflation see Kirby Moss, The Color of Class: Poor Whites and the Paradox of Privilege (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
10. Peterson, “Class Unconsciousness in Country Music,” 60; 48; 50, 51, 55; 59; 36, 47.
11. Anthony Giddens, “The Class Structure of Advanced Societies,” in Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective (3^rd ed.), ed. David B. Grusky (Boulder: Westview, 2008), 133–34 (citing Max Weber, Economy and Society, vols. 1 and 2); Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Duke University Press, 2006), 23–24; Valerie Walkerdine and Helen Lucey, Democracy in the Kitchen? Regulating Mothers and Socialising Daughters (Virago, 1989), 13–14. See also George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s, rev. ed. (University of Illinois Press, [1981] 1994), 9 esp.
12. Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, 48.
13. Ortner, New Jersey Dreaming, 41; Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (Vintage Books, 1972); Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture, 5; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Harvard University Press, 1984), 372. 
14. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge University Press, 1977), 77 (italics in original); Distinction, 177.
15. On post-1980 U.S. and country-music suburbanization see Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, 168–69.
16. Katie Stewart refutes the distanced critique of country music as a massifying corruption of some earlier, more authentic folk form into the “naive schlock” of a failed realism and reads country as embodying the cultural poetics of romance (Northrup Frye’s “vision of . . . life as a quest”), its tear jerkers knowingly reproducing an old, stylized and conventionalized “poetics of intensification”: “Engendering Narratives of Lament in Country Music,” in All That Glitters: Country Music in America, ed. George H. Lewis (Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993), 221–25.
17. Richard A. Peterson and Russell Davis Jr., “The Fertile Crescent of Country Music,” The Journal of Country Music 6 (1975): 19–27; Gerald W. Haslam, Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California(University of California Press, 1999), 16–17. Northern migration figures in the biographies of several Midwestern country stars, a group that includes Bobby Bare, David Allan Coe, Jerry Douglas, Janie Fricke, Diamond Rio, Josh Gracin, Alison Krauss, Johnny Paycheck, Rascal Flatts, Roy Rogers, Connie Smith, Gretchen Wilson, and Chely Wright. On shifting country audience demographics see Richard A. Peterson and Paul DiMaggio, “From Region to Class, the Changing Locus of Country Music: A Test of the Massification Hypothesis,” Social Forces 53, no. 3 (1975): 500–503 esp.
18. On Haggard’s ultimately ambiguous “Okie” see especially Malone, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’, 210–52; and Peter La Chapelle, Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California (University of California Press, 2007). On universalization of middle-class norms see Mike Savage, “A New Class Paradigm?” British Journal of Sociology of Education 24, no. 4 (2003): 535–41; also Beverley Skeggs, Helen Wood, and Nancy Thumim, “‘Oh Goodness I Am Watching Reality TV’: How Methods Make Class in Audience Research,” European Journal of Cultural Studies11, no. 1 (2008): 5–24. Richard Goldstein, “My Country Music Problem—And Yours,” Mademoiselle, June 1973, 114–15, articulates post-“Okie” contempt toward country music as a bigoted, menacing cultural form; Maxine L. Grossman contends that country “erases” racial, ethnic, sexual, and interreligious difference, in “Jesus, Mama, and the Constraints of Salvific Love in Contemporary Country Music,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70, no. 1 (2002): 83–115; but country’s very abjectness fuels working-class audiences’ pleasure in Aaron A. Fox, “White Trash Alchemies of the Abject Sublime: Country as ‘Bad’ Music,” in Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, ed. Charles J. Washburne and Maiken Derno (Routledge, 2004), 29–46. On race and country see Jocelyn R. Neal, “Dancing around the Subject: Race in Country Fan Culture,” The Musical Quarterly 89, no. 4 (2006): 555–79, and Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White?” Country’s associations with the least-educated audiences exclude it from the tastes of entitled agents of “multicultural capital” in Bethany Bryson, “‘Anything but Heavy Metal’: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 884–99.
19. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale University Press, 1990), 133; Stephanie Lawler shows that disgust toward working-class existence is essential to and constitutive of middle-class subjectivity: “Disgusted Subjects: The Making of Middle-Class Identities,” The Sociological Review 53, no. 3 (2005): 429–46.
20. Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture, 153; Bourdieu, Distinction; Michèle Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Harvard University Press, 2000); see also David Fillingim, Redneck Liberation: Country Music as Theology (Mercer University Press, 2003). Fox, “White Trash Alchemies of the Abject Sublime.”
21. Pierre Bourdieu, “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,” in Grusky, Social Stratification, 871.
22. Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (Rutgers University Press, 1986), 121.
23. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity; Jimmie N. Rogers, The Country Music Message, Revisited (University of Arkansas Press, 1989), 17 and elsewhere; the current state of analysis of country authenticity is well represented in Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (University of Michigan Press, 2009). See Amy Green, “Even with Fame and Riches, Wilson Says She’s Still a ‘Redneck Woman,’” CMA Closeup News, February 15, 2005, accessed February 21, 2007, http://www.gactv.com/gac/nw_cma_close_up/article/0,,GAC_26068_4729456,00.html. Wilson has now recorded more titles and appeared with guitars other than her “REDNECK” acoustic but has not dropped the tag.
24. The “Barbie doll” allusion recalls working-class subjects who defined themselves by contrast to “unreal” middle-class others they referred to as “Barbie and Ken people” in Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men, 109, 148. With reference to Tucker, “bad girl” carries connotations of sexual disrepute that our culture ascribes exclusively to women and particularly those of the working class. The singer was notorious for having been censored by country radio stations in 1974, when she was fifteen, for her No. 1 hit “Would You Lay with Me (In a Field of Stone),” and for her intergenerational relationship in the early 1980s with the country star Glen Campbell.
25. Song timings sync with the video at CMT.com (URL given above).
26. Michèle Ollivier, “‘Too Much Money off Other People’s Backs’: Status in Late Modern Societies,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 25, no. 4 (2000): 441–70, found that electricians admired skilled trades and professions and deemed them useful by contrast to managerial/white collar occupations, which they acknowledged as prestigious but sometimes characterized as “overblown” or “overpaid.” Professors’ assessments of occupations, however, accorded with the status and pay they conventionally garner and typically invoked no usefulness standard. Karen Walker, “‘Always There for Me’: Friendship Patterns and Expectations among Middle- and Working-Class Men and Women,” Sociological Forum 10, no. 2 (1995): 273–96, found “walk the walk” values in working-class friendships, which tended to reciprocity and interdependence with regard to material goods and services (cf. Tracy Lawrence, “Find Out Who Your Friends Are” [#1 2007]). Middle-class friendships showed no such patterns of material exchange and reciprocity, were focused on shared interests and leisure, and served to enhance individuality.
27. Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Adam Gussow, “Playing Chicken With the Train: Cowboy Troy’s Hick-Hop and the Transracial Country West,” Southern Cultures 16, no. 4 (2010): 41–70, argues that such stylized braggadocio fused black and white cultural influences long before the country-rap hybridity of MuzikMafia’s Cowboy Troy.
28. Track 9 on the Kid Rock CD is “Hillbilly Stomp,” co-written by Rock. As Hartigan shows, “hillbilly” functions in Detroit as a rhetorical identity that distinguishes “between proper and improper behavior for whites” (34) when the latter threatens to blur the color line; still actively in play around Detroit, this hillbilly identity connects to a history of black and white southerners’ migration to the city dating to the 1920s: Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton University Press, 1999), 26–37. Rock’s cultivation of a public identity with linkages to hillbilly and white trash identities connects him to moral impropriety and racial ambiguity, both of which seem desirable for purposes of edgy-outlaw and hip-hop redneck image. Cultural significations here are complex, given that redneck, white trash, and hillbilly identities are popularly linked to both racial blurring (esp. white trash) and racial bigotry (esp. redneck). Rock himself (né Robert J. Ritchie, son of a prosperous auto dealer in Detroit’s northern exurbs) flaunts the Confederate battle (a.k.a. “Rebel”) flag even as he provides the face of what he calls “rap rock” and fronts his racially mixed Twisted Brown Trucker band.
29. Edith D. Balbach, Rebecca J. Gasior, and Elizabeth M. Barbeau, “R. J. Reynolds’ Targeting of African Americans: 1988–2000,” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 5 (2003): 824; Michael Specter, “Marketers Target ‘Virile Female’: R. J. Reynolds Plans to Introduce Cigarette,” Washington Post, February 17, 1990, A1.
30. “Stalking the Virile Female,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1990, 26–27. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (Routledge, 1992), 156–57, also refers to Reynolds’s Virile Female episode in a discussion of gendering and eroticism in past and present images of smoking, and flags its mention in a column (featuring self-distancing tractor-pull levity) by William Safire, “On Language; Virile Women Target Tobacco Men,” New York Times Magazine, March 11, 1990, 18.
31. For related discussion of Hollywood’s mannish portrayals of hillbilly women including Yokum and Calamity see J. W. Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), esp. “Mannish Misfits,” 242–47. On butch and gender-queer women see Lillian Faderman, “The Contributions of the Sexologists,” in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (William Morrow, 1981), 239–53; Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community(Routledge, 1993); Joan Nestle, A Restricted Country (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1987); Joan Nestle, ed., The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (Boston: Alyson, 1992); Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues: A Novel (Los Angeles: Alyson, 2003); and Sara L. Crawley, “Are Butch and Fem Working-Class and Antifeminist?” Gender and Society 15, no. 2 (2001): 175–96. Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender, 105, 98–117, recaps the classed history of femininity.
32. Tony Kornheiser, “Cigarettes and Virile Chicks,” Washington Post, February 23, 1990, B2.
33. Emily C. Neely, “Charline Arthur: The (Un)Making of a Honky-Tonk Star,” in A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music, ed. Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold (University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 48–49.
34. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory, 28.
35. Cf. Merle Haggard, “I Can’t Be Myself (When I’m with You)” (1991); and Montgomery Gentry, “She Don’t Tell Me To” (#5 2006).
36. Bias was greatest among male and conservative subjects in Bettina Spencer, “Classism in the Court System: Perceptions of Low-Income Rape Victims” (paper presented at the conference How Class Works, Stony Brook University, June 5–7, 2008). Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender, 3; see also Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory, 34.
37. Elizabeth McDermott, “Telling Lesbian Stories: Interviewing and the Class Dynamics of ‘Talk,’” Women’s Studies International Forum 27, no. 3 (2004): 184.
38. Diane Reay, “Dealing with Difficult Differences: Reflexivity and Social Class in Feminist Research,” Feminism & Psychology 6, no. 3 (1996): 452.
39. Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender, 3.
40. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory, 26.
41. Garber, “The Transvestite Continuum: Liberace-Valentino-Elvis,” in Vested Interests, 353–74. Michael T. Bertrand, “I Don’t Think Hank Done It That Way: Elvis, Country Music, and the Reconstruction of Southern Masculinity,” in A Boy Named Sue, ed. McCusker and Pecknold, 84, 76, and 75.
42. Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender, 56–57. Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men, 97–131, 146–48.