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When I was growing up in the mining country of Arizona, country music was like sunshine or air, taken to be almost part of the physical environment. It was what I remembered hearing over the AM radio as my father's dented late-1950s pickup dipped and bounced along the dusty road that led to our remote rural home. It was what preceded and followed the Apache medicine men who chanted Sunday afternoons on another local station. As a teenager in the 1980s, I discovered and became enamored of other genres: punk, New Wave, urban pop, thrash, reggae, heavy metal, and hip-hop.
Later, with some geographic and mental distance, I encountered country a second time. A recent college grad, I moved to Bakersfield, California, country music's self-proclaimed West Coast capital. There, as a young journalist, I met and interviewed a few of the people who figure prominently in this book. In reporting on the local country music culture and its Dust Bowl heritage for the arts section, and writing about real estate for the business page, I started to realize that country was about more than rural life. It was about overcoming obstacles and making transitions. It was about social class. And it was about race. The black and Latino residents of East Bakersfield and the blue-collar whites of nearby Oildale, home of Trout's, my favorite local country hangout, might have shared much in common economically, but they diverged in important ways. And country music was an important identity marker, a reminder of who was white.
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