Stephanie Vander Wel's study of women's country music between 1930 and 1960 unpacks how female country performers negotiated the relationship between the politics of class, migration, and regionalism during the early twentieth century. Vander Wel's study connects “women's performances in a range of media (radio, film, television, and recordings) to [various] geographic locales” and “imagined places and spaces,” such as the “symbolic western frontier” and an idealized southern past (2). Vander Wel addresses how country music shaped these spaces through female musical expression, identifying the home, dance hall, and honky-tonk as part of the “real or imaged lives of women striving for upward mobility and/or resisting the rigidity of middle-class codes of behavior” (3). This study thus builds deep connections between class and gender norms, extending the work of prominent historians, feminist scholars, and music scholars on these topics, and offering new insights into the study of female performers in U.S. country music.Footnote 1 Although directed toward an academic audience, the book is accessible to general audiences with varying degrees of knowledge about country and U.S. popular music history. Vander Wel's use of interdisciplinary methods ensures the book will appeal to scholars in various fields, including academics in gender and American studies, as well as those interested in the intersections between vocality and demographic markers of race and class.
The book is divided into three sections that are organized chronologically and geographically. Each chapter offers a case study focusing on a single artist and relevant peripheral characters and contexts that attend to the roles of gender and class as expressed through female vocal production in country music, broadly defined. Indeed, a key component of Vander Wel's contributions to the study of women in country music is her attention to the female voice and vocality. She weaves deep analysis of female performing voices throughout the text, attending to the styles, techniques, and production qualities that have shaped their marketability and commercial appeal. This work is methodologically supported by the combination of archival materials, including radio program yearbooks and fan letters, and Vander Wel's informed analysis of key performers’ music and lives. Vander Wel's work is well-situated in studies of vocal timbre in country music—most notably Richard Leppert and George Lipsitz's study of Hank Williams's high range and nasal timbre, and Jocelyn Neal and Leppert's studies of Patsy Cline.Footnote 2 Beyond her aesthetic and culturally situated understanding of vocality, Vander Wel also attends to the physiological approach of women's vocal production in country music, arguing that the singing voice resonates beyond commercial marketing of country music (14).
Part 1 details the lives of performers on WLS (a Chicago radio station) and The National Barn Dance in the 1930s and 1940s, focusing on Lulu Belle and Patsy Montana. Chapter 1 looks at how radio programs like WLS's National Barn Dance placed old-time or hillbilly music onto regional and national stages, combining it with other forms of “high, middle, and low entertainment,” such as Tin Pan Alley tunes, vaudeville, and classical music (20). Vander Wel argues that the audiences for these radio programs were a heterogeneous group of listeners connected across class, gender, regional, and ethnic lines. This chapter further identifies how gendered performing personas like that of Linda Parker (Jean Muenich) were shaped by depression-era nostalgia for traditional familial and gender roles.
Chapter 2 continues to explore WLS and the National Barn Dance with a close look at Lulu Belle, one of radio's most successful women. Vander Wel explains the relationship between Lulu Belle's theatrical performances—which were informed by vaudeville and minstrelsy traditions—and her private roles of wife and mother. Here she argues that the star's vocal performance expresses the “responsibilities of domesticity” by exaggerating and parodying southern vocal conventions (68). Fan culture and reception prove important to this analysis because they directly impacted the acceptance of female performers on barn dance radio programs. Vander Wel therefore points out that Lulu Belle's comedic rube persona was developed through her onstage and later real-life relationship with Scotty Weisman, and that it was their marriage (which was well-publicized by WLS) that helped to frame “her slapstick humor and vocal parodies of highbrow and lowbrow music” against her private life (66). This juxtaposition allowed her to participate in middle-class propriety, even as her comedic performances did not.
Chapter 3 turns to Patsy Montana, who negotiated the stylistic fluidity between barn dance radio and early country music in the Western swing style. This chapter follows the rise of Montana's career, concentrating on how her vocal performances pushed conventional working-class gender norms beyond the “sentimental” or “intimate” personas other female western singers were known for at the time (74). Using key examples such as “I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart,” Vander Wel compellingly argues that Montana's vocal prowess brought together yodeling and conventional singing styles, emphasizing her autonomy as a female performer. Patsy Montana was thus able to claim the role of the singing cowgirl in the Wild West and contrasted it with her domestic roles as a mother, offering a solution to the “expanding gender norms in the mythological West” (91).
Part 2 moves to California-based country music performers. Chapter 4 focuses on Carolina Cotton, while Chapter 5 centers on Rose Maddox. Vander Wel offers a rich discussion of female yodeling practices here, contextualizing these two performers within white working-class migration from the south to the southwest. Chapter 4 contributes to important scholarship on the California country music scene, as it analyzes female performers in the dance-hall environment. Vander Wel details how Carolina Cotton became a popular female performer of the country-jazz style in the southwest during the 1940s with the support of fans, including Okies, and especially women, who had migrated there. Cotton therefore became a key figure in the western-swing era of dance halls and Vander Wel's detailed analysis of her yodeling and various film appearances demonstrates the agency that early female country performers had in cultivating their careers.
Chapter 5 connects societal shifts during and after World War II, including the renegotiation of gender roles among poor and middle-class white Americans, by aligning these societal negotiations with the rise of rockabilly. Vander Wel describes Rose Maddox's sound in detail, comparing her with Jean Shepard, Rose Lee Maphis, and the growing number of female rockabilly artists in California and Nashville, such as Laura Lee Perkins, Lorie Collins, Jackie DeShannon, and Wanda Jackson (145). Citing Maddox's chest-dominant belting technique and her more “rebellious hillbilly” performing style, Vander Wel positions Maddox as an innovator of the “southern rebel” type that male rockabilly stars like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis would later embody. Although the examples of rockabilly provided here are contextualized accurately through whiteness, there is a missed opportunity to extend this argument and attend to race more squarely—an issue I find common in country music scholarship, which tends to disassociate country music (and especially rockabilly) from its roots in the musical practices of Black Americans.
Part 3 turns to Nashville in the 1940s and 1950s, focusing on Kitty Wells and the rise of women's honky-tonk. Chapter 6 details how performers such as Wells, Goldie Hill, and Jean Shepard musically “destabilized the ideals of the private sphere” and voiced “the yearnings of working-class women,” thus contending with class prejudice against the dominant framework of domesticity (154). Vander Wel draws attention to ideological divisions between the masculine honky-tonk and feminine home, framing narratives about women in honky-tonk and emphasizing that Wells and her peers “complicated the constraints of working-class womanhood” by leveraging performances of feminine identity with agency (163–64).
Chapter 7 focuses on marketing in country music, fleshing out how the industry's ongoing “pursuit of respectability” was shaped by female musicians beginning in the 1950s (175). The country music industry has continually strived for commercial acceptance, and the women who participate have required what Vander Wel describes as a “model of propriety” to succeed (179). Kitty Wells's publicity materials serve as an example of this, portraying her both as a “good woman” and a good musician (180). Vander Wel chronicles how the industry began selling itself to a white middle-class audience through these marketing practices, shifting away from the poor, working-class, low-brow status it had gained from its days of barn dance radio programming and honky-tonk styles in the 1930s and 1940s.
The book concludes by outlining country music's attachment to female domesticity and propriety in the present day, describing how the vocal parodies of Lulu Belle, Maddox, and even Kitty Wells have continued with performers like Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, The Chicks, Miranda Lambert, and Gretchen Wilson. Vander Wel indicates that women in country music today use their voices to offer audiences insight into the contested spheres of class and gender that shape the “shifting demographics of the twentieth-first century” (197). Well written and deeply insightful, Vander Wel's study sheds light on how women in country music have used their voices to represent the intricate relationships between class, gender, and region in the United States.
