Peterson — Creating Country Music

Author: Richard A. Peterson
Title: Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity
Year: 1997
Type: Academic book (University of Chicago Press)

The book’s whole argument is packed into its subtitle’s irony: “The ironic phrase ‘fabricating authenticity’ is used here to highlight the fact that authenticity is not inherent in the object or event that is designated authentic but is a socially agreed-upon construct in which the past is to a degree misremembered.”¹ Peterson, the Vanderbilt sociologist who built the production-of-culture school, runs that sentence through thirty years of country music: from Fiddlin’ John Carson’s June 1923 Atlanta session for Ralph Peer — the record that proved a market existed — to the death of Hank Williams on New Year’s Day 1953, by which point the machinery could manufacture “country” on demand and had finally settled on the name.² Nothing in the story requires the music to be fake. Peterson’s point is stranger: the genre’s realness is its most carefully produced feature, and the producing took entrepreneurs, costumers, radio sponsors, and publicists three decades of work.

The middle of the book watches the work being done. The genre tried on manufactured images in sequence — the old-timer, the hillbilly, the cowboy, each chapter a costume fitting, with Hollywood supplying the dress code that honky-tonk singers wore thereafter — while Henry Ford bankrolled fiddling contests against the decadence of jazz and radio scrubbed the music for family sponsorship.³ The pivotal chapter turns on a 1930s Opry rivalry: Roy Acuff, hard-edged and mountain-voiced, displacing the Vagabonds, a slick crooning harmony trio, Peterson’s specimen case for the two poles he names hard-core and soft-shell, the twang that performs sincerity and the polish that performs reach. “While hard core and soft shell are always present, one is usually predominant,” and the genre renews itself by swinging between them: each soft-shell drift toward the pop market provokes a hard-core revival sold as a return to the real thing, which is itself another fabrication.⁴ Authenticity, in the book’s best aphorism, is a renewable resource, and maintaining it, he writes, “takes work.”⁵ Hank Williams closes the argument as its personification: the womanizing alcoholic shielded by a clean-cut facade, credited with songs his publisher Fred Rose finished, canonized within months of dying — the genre’s realest figure, produced end to end.⁶

Run the model past its own endpoint and it keeps predicting. Elvis Presley’s arc — the Sun sides’ raw hybrid, the soft-shell Hollywood decade that followed, the leather-clad 1968 return staged as a recovery of the real Elvis — is Peterson’s cycle compressed into a single career, each authenticity a production. Where the book goes quiet is on who the fabrication was for. The “authentic” country image was built white: in the same years the Opry perfected its down-home family picture, it dropped DeFord Bailey, the Black harmonica star who had been the renamed show’s first performer, and its founder later explained the firing in a sentence of plain racial contempt: the misremembered past Peterson anatomizes had a color, and the book barely says so.⁷ His account of the genre’s naming has the industry fleeing the word “folk” in the McCarthy years and settling on “country and western”; the trade charts had in fact made that change in 1949, and his telling is best read as a story about when the label settled into speech rather than when it was coined.⁸ The book’s standing survived such quarrels: Billboard’s Timothy White called it “one of the most important books ever written about a popular music form,” it took a PROSE award honorable mention, and at Peterson’s death in 2010 the journal Poetics called it a seminal statement on authenticity, the touchstone for treating realness as something made.⁹

Key contributions

• Fabricating authenticity: realness as a socially agreed-upon construct that misremembers the past to order — the concept an entire scholarship of authenticity now leans on.
• The hard-core/soft-shell dialectic: country’s two permanent poles, with the genre renewed by the swing between them rather than by any drift from pure to diluted.
• Authenticity work: believability as ongoing labor by performers and institutions, with yesterday’s authentic regularly sloughed off as fake.
• The institutionalization arc: how scattered fiddlers, barn-dance radio, and record scouts hardened, between 1923 and 1953, into a self-conscious commercial field with Nashville at its center and a name of its own.
• The production-of-culture perspective at full length: the book is the school’s flagship case, reading a genre’s aesthetics off its industrial machinery.

See also

• Segregating Sound — the racial floor under Peterson’s story: the repertoire the “authentic” white hillbilly image was fabricated from was a shared Southern commons, sorted by the same industry
• Romancing the Folk — the sibling fabrication: collectors building folk’s cult of authenticity while Peterson’s entrepreneurs built country’s, two systems misremembering the same South
• Reconsidering Rock — the third authenticity system: Peterson does for country’s realness what Keightley does for rock’s seriousness
• Country — the family the book anatomizes: its umbrella note runs Peterson’s fabrication thesis and hard-core/soft-shell cycle across the genre’s whole century
• Authenticity and its discontents — the IDEAS note this book underwrites; Peterson supplies its strongest version of the constructedness argument
• Cultural omnivorousness — Peterson’s other landmark thesis; the omnivore’s “country exception” is this book’s subject seen from the taste-survey side

Footnotes

1. Peterson, Creating Country Music, ch. 1, “Finding Country Authenticity”; wording verified against the Internet Archive scan (accessed July 4, 2026). The construct-and-misremembering formulation cites Maurice Halbwachs’s work on collective memory. ↩

2. Creating Country Music, University of Chicago Press (accessed July 4, 2026) — the publisher’s description frames the arc from Carson’s 1923 recordings to Williams’s posthumous success; full table of contents there. Carson’s session: June 1923, an empty building on Nassau Street, Atlanta, for Okeh, arranged by Polk Brockman and supervised by Peer. ↩

3. Richard A. Peterson, “Ten Things You Didn’t Know about the Origins of Country Music,” University of Chicago Press web essay, 1997 (accessed July 4, 2026). Ford’s fiddle-contest spending, the Crazy Water Crystals-era radio cleanup, and Hollywood setting the dress code (“emerging honky-tonk artists… donned cowboy-styled outfits to sing their hillbilly songs of life’s travails”) are Peterson’s own tellings there. ↩

4. Peterson’s “Ten Things” essay (above) for the Acuff/Vagabonds displacement; the “always present, one is usually predominant” sentence verified against the Internet Archive scan (accessed July 4, 2026), from the section “Why the Cycle of Hard Core and Soft Shell?” The free-standing version of the argument is Peterson’s “The Dialectic of Hard-Core and Soft-Shell Country Music,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 1 (1995). ↩

5. Chapter 13 is titled “Authenticity: A Renewable Resource”; “Authenticity is a renewable resource” is Peterson’s own summary in the “Ten Things” essay, and “Maintaining the sense of authenticity takes work” opens the book’s “Authenticity Work” section, verified against the Internet Archive scan (both accessed July 4, 2026). ↩

6. Peterson, “Ten Things” essay (accessed July 4, 2026): Williams was “dropped from the Grand Ole Opry cast for being too far gone to keep up the clean-cut facade,” and “almost all of the songs were finished by his brilliant song writing publisher, Fred Rose.” ↩

7. DeFord Bailey, Wikipedia (accessed July 4, 2026); DeFord Bailey — A True Star of Early Country with a Misunderstood History, Saving Country Music (accessed July 4, 2026). Bailey played “Pan American Blues” as the first performer on the newly renamed Grand Ole Opry in December 1927 and was dropped by WSM in 1941 amid the ASCAP-BMI licensing war; George D. Hay’s 1945 book explained it with the sentence calling Bailey, “like some members of his race,” lazy — as quoted in Kim Field’s account (accessed July 4, 2026). ↩

8. List of Billboard number-one country songs of 1949, Wikipedia (accessed July 4, 2026), citing Joel Whitburn: with the issue dated June 25, 1949, Billboard began using “country and western” in its chart titles. Peterson’s folk-flight telling (the Weavers, the McCarthy-era hearings) is in the “Ten Things” essay (accessed July 4, 2026); his dating compresses the record (Pete Seeger’s testimony came in 1955, before the House committee). ↩

9. Blurbs per the University of Chicago Press page (accessed July 4, 2026), which also lists the Association of American Publishers PROSE honorable mention; “Richard A. Peterson and the culture of consumption,” Poetics 38 (2010) (accessed July 4, 2026) — “a seminal statement on ‘authenticity’” that “served as a touchstone for other scholars.” Peterson’s biography per Wikipedia and the Vanderbilt obituary (both accessed July 4, 2026). ↩