Abstract
One of the principal tools for acquiring and maintaining cachet in the so-cial commonwealth of the barroom or roadhouse springs from a person's capacity to tell a story, and the more humorous or idiosyncratic the better. Ethnographic efforts to convey the ethos of just such an environment and means of communication often, sadly, sap the life out of this kind of infor-mal discourse and render routine what would otherwise be irregular and idiosyncratic. Aaron Fox's Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture constitutes one of those rare occasions when conjuring up a world most readers, certainly those from the academic domain, rarely en-counter does not compromise either its citizens or their self-determined means of communication.