Voices of the Country: Interviews with Classic Country Performers.(Book Review)

Voices of the Country: Interviews with Classic Country Performers. By Michael Streissguth. New York: Routledge, 2004. [x, 216 p. ISBN 0-415-90742-3. $19.95.] Illustrations, index, bibliography.

Interviews at their best can be a great primary source of information and give an entertaining sense of the interviewee's personality. At their worst, interviews can be misleading and lose the reader in a confusion of names or verbal meanderings. When interviews are published, the material surrounding the interview--the context, the clarifications and background--can be a key component in making sense of and appreciating the information presented. While a skilled interviewer and the interviewee already know the subject(s) well, the reader of an interview may not. Voices of the Country shows the difficulty of keeping the artist's voice on the one hand and making sense of the information on the other though oral narrative.

Michael Streissguth, who conducted and edited the interviews for Voices of the Country, is undoubtedly a skilled interviewer. Both the unusual assortment of performers represented and the questions asked show a keen appreciation and knowledge of country music. While the famous are represented (Loretta Lynn and Chet Atkins), others will likely be known only to fans of 1950s and 1960s country music; a few are downright obscure. The subject matter of the interviews varies equally, from career highlights, to reminiscences of other performers, to recollections of music business practices.

Five of the interviews, those of Hank Locklin, Sheb Wooley, Billy Walker, Charley Pride, and Loretta Lynn, have been published in part already in the journals Goldmine or Country Music. The interviews of Eddy Arnold and Chet Atkins were conducted as research for Streissguth's book Eddy Arnold: Pioneer of the Nashville Sound (New York: Schirmer, 1997). The remaining three interviews are with Anita Kerr, Ginny Wright and Red Kirk. The ten interviews are preceded by a two to three page introduction, with the interviews ranging in length from twelve to twenty-seven pages. A short bibliography and adequate index complete the volume.

While all the performers were active in country music in the 1950s and 1960s, the author does not claim any particular thematic cohesiveness among them. While he does mention the performers' shared rural culture, most of Streissguth's introduction focuses on the origins of his interest in country music and in the interview format. The short introductions to each interview do not relate one to another either; rather each stands alone. While there is certainly much of value in the individual interviews, readers looking for an overview of ...