Listed in Kansas City Star's 100 Noteworthy Books of 2007
Buy the book here from Powell’s
or here from Amazon
or click on the image above to buy directly from the University of California Press .
What the critics are saying:
"Proud to Be an Okie is the most important volume of country music history to emerge in years." --David Cantwell, No Depression magazine (senior editor of No Depression, author of Heartaches By Number)"Proud to Be an Okie is cultural history at its finest." -- Urban History Association award committee (in awarding an Honorable Mention for the Kenneth Jackson Prize for Best Book in Urban History)"La Chapelle uses a wealth of resource material to make the case that Southern California, in particular the Los Angeles area was a societal cauldron with unique Okie inspired musical, political, and cultural ramifications. La Chapelle’s many observations are convincing and thought provoking. . . It is satisfying to discover that a detailed, scholarly work about this comprehensive subject can be so readable, because here is a work worth reading. I have to hand it to La Chapelle. He is adept at making passages full of information scan with great ease, and his book is highly recommended." --Roger Deitz, Sing Out! magazine (click for full review ) "thoroughly researched, insightful. . . a lively and fascinating portrait of migrant culture and its assimilation into the mainstream, with country music as its soundtrack."--Jeff Tamarkin, HARP Magazine"thoughtful, carefully researched, and well written. . . a superb piece of scholarship"--Howard A. DeWitt, Journal of American History"an excellent historical account. It will alter the balance of attention that tilts country music history towards Nashville and place southern California more firmly on the map of the genre’s development... an important contribution to 20th-century musical history."-- European Journal of Communicaion"La Chapelle (history, Nevada State College) has crafted a unique study of the politics of country music in Southern California from the 1930s onward. . . Highly Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers."--Ronald D. Cohen, Choice (professor emeritus, Indiana University Northwest, author of Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society and Routledge's Folk Music: The Basics)"La Chapelle's book belongs on every music lover's bookshelf, alongside Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces and Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life." --Jarret Keene, Las Vegas CityLife (author of The Killers: Destiny is Calling Me and The Underground Guide to Las Vegas) "Proud to be an Okie is a fresh, well-researched, wonderfully insightful, and imaginative book. Throughout, La Chapelle's keen attention to shifting geographies and urban and suburban spaces is one of the work's real strengths. Another strength is the book's focus on dress, ethnicity, and the manufacturing of style. When all of these angles and insights are pulled together, La Chapelle delivers a fascinating rendering of Okie life and American culture." --Bryant Simon, author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America
"Proud to be an Okie is a fascinating book that details the history of Dust Bowl refugees migration to southern California. Unlike other books about this topic, this one intertwines history with the country music that the transplanted settlers brought to the region. La Chapelle does an excellent job of balancing both the migrants' history and that of the music history, giving a detailed description of both." --Michael Sudhalter, Country Standard Time
UC Press Blurb: Proud to Be an Okie brings to life the influential country music scene that flourished in and around Los Angeles from the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s to the early 1970s. The first work to fully illuminate the political and cultural aspects of this intriguing story, the book takes us from Woody Guthrie's radical hillbilly show on Depression-era radio to Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee" in the late 1960s. It explores how these migrant musicians and their audiences came to gain a sense of identity through music and mass media, to embrace the New Deal, and to celebrate African American and Mexican American musical influences before turning toward a more conservative outlook. What emerges is a clear picture of how important Southern California was to country music and how country music helped shape the politics and culture of Southern California and of the nation.
SaveDarfur.org has a post called " Generate Press Coverage " that's worth checking out...
Media coverage of the ongoing genocide in Darfur has been woefully inadequate. The Center for American Progress found that during June 2005, CNN, FOX News, NBC/MSNBC, ABC, and CBS ran 50 times as many stories about Michael Jackson and 12 times as many stories about Tom Cruise as they did about the…
Is Country Music Inherently Conservative?
http://hnn.us/articles/42602.html
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