Early in Cool Town, Grace Elizabeth Hale’s intimately detailed book about the Athens, Georgia, music scene, the author describes growing up in 1970s suburban America. In those days, she says, America was a place wherein parents who’d been rewarded by the spoils of the post-war prosperity brought up their children in “a new version of the South created by desegregation, interstates, air conditioning, and airports” (2). Yet it was also a place that clung to old ideas about life and work and community, a place that was oblivious to nuances of race, gender and class, and the children of those people, knowingly or not, felt unconstrained by previous era’s values and beliefs. “We did not want to be rednecks or racists or conservative Christians or live in subdivisions or work as middle managers,” Hale writes. “We dreamed not of the Reagan-era Sunbelt but of a different world, a new,...

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