Sweet Dreams: The World of Patsy Cline.

Mather, Olivia Carter

Sweet Dreams: The World of Patsy Cline. Edited by Warren R. Hofstra. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. [xiii, 198 p. ISBN 9780252037719 (hardcover), $85; ISBN 9780252079306 (paperback), $25; ISBN 9780252094989 (e-book), $22.50.]. Illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Few country singers are as well-known outside country music fan circles as Patsy Cline. Her crossover hits, tragic death in a plane crash, and revival through a biopic and a postage stamp have made her an iconic figure in American popular culture. Cline's hit recordings (especially "Crazy" and "I Fall to Pieces") are prime examples of the "Nashville Sound," a production aesthetic that eschewed fiddles and nasal vocals for a sophisticated soundscape of soft backing vocals and piano. It was this pop-oriented sound, often augmented by string arrangements, that opened the doors for Cline and others to cross over onto the pop charts during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Since a revival of her music beginning in the late 1970s, Cline has held an unshakable position in the pantheon of "classic" country stars while her songs stand as an antithesis to the music of newer "inauthentic" artists. Cline was also arguably the first female country star who launched her career without being a sidekick to a male star, being a member of a professional musical family, or singing an "answer song."

In the history of country music scholarship, histories and topical studies dominate over close readings of single artists or the songs they produce. Projects that remedy the imbalance include work by Jocelyn R. Neal (The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Legacy in Country Music [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009]), Jonathan Silverman (Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010]), and Marcus Eli Desmond Harmon ("Harris/Cash: Identity, Loss, and Mourning at the Borders of Country Music" [Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011]). In this new volume on Cline, a focused analysis of one artist's career again reaps rewards. Warren Hofstra's edited collection Sweet Dreams: The- World of Patsy Cline lifts the veil of stardom to reveal the social forces that made Cline a success. The topic of the book is not so much Cline's music as the transformation of working-class Southerners into middle-class American consumers. This transformation changed how country musicians became stars and the way that country audiences interacted with their music. Cline took advantage of growing television ownership and the nationalization of popular culture to stake her claim on a middleclass lifestyle. Unlike collections whose contributions gather loosely around a common theme, Sweet Dreams advances a unified argument throughout, that "Cline's own dreams for success and material comfort evolved side by side with the emergent American dream of middle-class society" (p. 3).

The authors of Sweet Dreams hail from a variety of disciplines, but what they have produced is an accessible work of social and cultural history, albeit lacking in critical theory. The book presents 1940s and 1950s America through detailed analyses of several spheres of society that tracked with Cline's own experiences. After an editor's introduction, the book opens with a short statement by Bill C. Malone that lays out one of the main presumptions of the rest of the book, that commercial country music depended upon modernization, especially in the South. With chapters on the geography of class in Cline's hometown of Winchester, Virginia, the importance of "respectability" to one's acceptance by middle-class America, and television's popularity in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, the book outlines the terms on which Cline could begin her music career. The authors do not take the position that class and gender lines are rigid, however, but that the postwar economy provided a great opportunity for fluctuation that could complicate an identity like Cline's at every turn. Kristine M. McCusker's chapter on "Cultural Scripts and Patsy Cline's Career in the 1950s" disputes the notion that Cline was a proto-feminist, a narrative advanced by stories of Cline's appropriation of masculine speech (e.g., frequent swearing and calling male friends "hoss") and disagreements with her producer Owen Bradley. By reviewing the representation of women in country music fan magazines and the contributions of women to the production of these magazines, she shows that roles for women in the country music industry ranged far and wide, while still limiting their access to stardom.

The attention to social and cultural history serves to "recontextualize" Cline. Instead of recycling the caricature of a tough-talking and talented Southern woman with sex appeal (as she is often portrayed in biographies), the book introduces a musician who had to compromise due to forces beyond her control. Two essays in particular make this recontextualization explicit. Jocelyn Neal's "'Nothing But a Little Ole Pop Song': Patsy Cline's Music Style and the Evolution of Genre in the 1950s" shows how the current acceptance of Cline as an "authentic" country musician clashes with the sounds on her hit songs, recordings that fans of "traditional" honky-tonk initially rejected. Joli Jensen's chapter "'Becoming a Postage Stamp': Patsy Cline, Visual Image, and the Celebrity Process" traces the process of Cline's posthumous iconization, thus uncovering how culture makers controlled Cline's image for the purposes of creating a mythology. Jensen's critique of Cline's postage stamp applies to most representations of her:

   It does not give us the tensions between
   the rural and urban down-home and uptown
   that so deeply shaped her career. It
   also does not reveal the ambivalence
   about her social class ... Why should it?
   It gives us a Patsy that can tell us the story
   we want to be told about a strong, caring
   woman whose talent and temperament
   were ahead of her time and made her a
   star. (p. 165)

The achievement of Sweet Dreams is that it explores the tensions and ambivalences in Cline's career and does so in a way that instructs scholarship on other country stars. Its authors tell a story that some may not want to hear: that Cline was not a feminist, that her hits did not initially inspire her, and that she was not afforded the agency we have imagined her having.

For at least a decade country scholarship has confronted the Nashville-centric narrative of the music's economic and cultural rise with projects on regional styles, non-Opry barn dances, and alternative recording centers like Los Angeles. Sweet Dreams argues implicitly for the importance of the heretofore overlooked Washington, D.C. in the mid-century structural changes to the business of country music. As George Hamilton IV's "Interlude" piece and Douglas Gomery's chapter ("Patsy Cline: A Television Star") discuss, large numbers of Southerners migrated to D.C. for work in the 1930s the way they did to Cincinnati, Detroit, and Southern California. They composed a ripe audience for a daily country music television show hosted by entrepreneur Connie B. Gay (mentioned in five of the book's articles) and became a solid fan base for Cline.

The only piece of music scholarship in Stceet Dreams is Neal's chapter. She challenges the late-twentieth-century assumptions about what makes a song stylistically pop or country by grounding her discussion in the structure of 1950s music industry charts. By "repositioning" Cline's music from its current designation as "traditional" to its original status as anti-honky-tonk, Neal complicates our conception of genre. She analyzes the form of "A Poor Man's Roses (Or a Rich Man's Gold)," a song that Cline insisted on recording after recording "Walkin' After Midnight" against her wishes. Her analysis as well as her description of instrumental and vocal style discloses the subtle stylistic markers that argue against clear categorization.

Neal's essay is the point from which further scholarship on Cline and other mid-century country singers could launch. With the backdrop of postwar social changes established, scholars can look for manifestations of these changes in the sounds of music. How might her singing embody the tensions and ambivalences of her time? Is her voice itself a site of struggle? With the groundwork laid by Sweet Dreams and the skills of music analysis, musicologists can follow these lines of inquiry toward a deeper understanding of how country music works and why it is meaningful to so many working- and middle-class Americans.

OLIVIA CARTER MATHER

Long Beach, CA