Singing Australian – A History of Folk and Country Music

Answers to questions about national identity are notoriously elusive. This is especially true in a modern democratic nation like Australia that embraces multiculturalism in recognition of the common interests and competing claims of its various and numerous immigrant peoples. 
Who are we? Where do we come from? 
Where are we going? What are our values? What is an Australian? 

These are the questions in an agenda that occupies much of our national thinking. 
While we are unlikely to find definitive answers, the questions provoke discussion and debate critical to our social and cultural well-being at any time, and even more so in times like the present when identity is at the core of much social unrest. 

Graeme Smiths Singing Australran enriches this debate with its provocative exploration of folk and country musics and their role in Australian cultural identity formation Ironically, Smith's discussion is likely to attract less notice than it deserves, because its subject matter—especially country music—as Smith acknowledges, is awfully 'uncool'. Singing Australian is a major contribution to debates on Australian cultural identity, and on music and identity. 

The great strengths of Smith's book are its refined and clearly enunciated theoretical propositions, its incisive, cogent, and sustained argument, and its carefully balanced synthesis of data and theoretical development. His writing is always good and at times eloquent. He displays a 
comfortable familiarity with the language of cultural studies and his work will be of interest to those who pursue New Musicology ethnomusicology. 

Smiths work is grounded in critical historiography, music analysis and social and political analysis. Smith is himself a folk musician and has played in Britain and Australia for more that three decades, and he declares himself to be an admirer and an outside observer of country music. 

He is a member of the enthusiastic local branch if the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and makes a special point in acknowledging the support of his colleagues in the Association, a support remarkably similar in ethos to that of the community voluntarism which characterizes what he terms the folk and country 'scenes'. Smith's central argument is that folk and country musics better represent Australian identity than do any other musics The claims of folk and country forms to be distinctively Australian—and even the music' of the nation—are well founded, he writes. 

Musical, political and ideological processes guide Smith's thinking. He examines how people construct the sound and stories of folk and country musics to shape practice and articulate values. Meaning, Smith makes clear, is not embodied; it is accreted to music in an process of ever-evolving change wrought by their large communities of followers who form and manage clubs and associations, distribute advertising material, present radio broadcasts, and work at festivals for no payment.