Is Country Music Dead? (Linkfest)

There were those for whom country music died, in 1979, with Sara and Maybelle Carter. Not that you don't still hear the music. Much of it's even been digitized for Youtube. Still, I laughed out loud, somewhat bitterly, when the young writer and singer of a recent #1 country song hit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6tOAafAJCA) lamented that "there's nobody like Waylon Jennings or Loretta Lynn any more." 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zqmQAjv0wM

Child. There's been nobody like the Carter Family, like Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves, Jim & Jesse McGlothlin, The Browns, Johnny Cash, Hank Snow, Doc Watson, Roy Drusky, Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, Marty Robbins, Jimmy Dean, Rufus Thibodeau, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Patsy Cline, Dwain Reed, Bill Monroe, or Ernest Tubb, for a long time. There will never be another Dolly Parton (whom my parents considered an early sellout) or John McCutcheon (who never sold out, but whose sound wasn't Southern country), either. 

When I was young there was a sharp dividing line between Real Country Music and "rockabilly." Not only Elvis Presley and Jackson Browne but Kenny Rogers, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and The Judds were rockabilly. Dolly Parton's first super-hits were country but, after that, she was considered to have sold out and gone to the rockabilly side. Loretta Lynn was country but her unconvincing claim to be unable to read, even if it was true when understood to mean "in this light," was tacky anyway. Crystal Gayle was rockabilly. 

Real Country Music was at least based on the music people learned in rural areas and small towns. Everybody in Panola County, Texas, didn't sing like Jim Reeves--no one did--but his elders sang his general kind of songs, even if he had gone to university and learned crisp clear enunciation. The Carters learned most of their songs from people in the point of Virginia. Bill Monroe learned from people in Kentucky. Their music was commercialized and copyrighted but it was basically folk music.

Rockabilly, some of which I liked, was not folk music. The Grand Ole Opry used drums as the dividing point, but there was more to it than that. Topics were one thing. Country music could be "topical" in the sense of being about news items, and songs could be snarky, like "Eleven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat" or "Elecatricity and All" or "Old Age Pension Checks," but some attitudes were understood to be too divisive to discuss down the old-time country store, and some just did not exist in the country, so if you heard some opinions you knew it was not a Real Country Song. "I'm proud to be an Okie, from Muscogee" was a country song. "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" was not because it was understood to be anti-war, and if a real country person did vent anti-war feelings in front of people who had sent their children to fight the said war, they would've been looking for trouble.

More often, songs that were Not Real Country were the ones that showed no understanding of real country people's attitudes toward things. There are parts of the South where nice people might drink wine with meals, as Europeans do, at least before Coca-Cola was invented. Mine is not one. There were people who drank alcohol and places where alcohol was drunk, in my part of the world, in my grandparents' time, but that was a social problem--it wasn't even funny. There are all kinds of country songs about people drinking alcohol when they're deeply depressed, but the understanding is that these people are committing suicide slowly. Jim Reeves could sing a grim, semi-funny little song about a barroom brawl, "Take your drink to the end of the bar, buddy...he's sure a quick-tempered jealous man. What's that you say? I guess you're right. It's nothing to me," and so on, up to "Here they come to take him off to jail, buddy, and tomorrow someone will bury you. Oh well, that's life, or it was. It's nothing to me." That was country; the people who sold alcohol were hard, mean people, friendless, with no compassion for the heavy drinkers in a place where most people are alcohol-intolerant. A country song could portray a boozy, woozy loser drooling over a bar girl, "I didn't know God made honky-tonk angels," or rebuke him, "It wasn't God who made honky-tonk angels!" There are lots of country songs about the death of people involved with alcohol in any business--running "moonshine, moonshine to quench the Devil's thirst. The law they swore they'd get him, but the Devil got him first" or "Pour the wine, dim the lights, and play the jukebox...what's the difference if you die in this or that place?"--and the sad plight of their orphans: "My father died a drunkard, Sir, I've heard my mother say. I am helping Mother as I journey on my way." There are a few songs about the manic phase of Taking to Drink, "We'll go honky-tonkin'" or "Fill up my jug with that good ol' mountain dew"; they're still sad, cautionary songs. 

Cheating on marriage, even to the extent of dancing with someone else's partner, was another thing rockabilly music got just exactly wrong. Country songs were full of broken hearts. Country people believed that "for every boy and girl there's just one love in this whole world." In Virginia they didn't actually say beshert, probably because using German words was considered a Pennsylvania thing, but they believed in that idea. In the old songs couples often ruined their lives by leaping to conclusions when they saw their One And Only laughing and talking with some long-lost relative. Real Country singers did, of course, divorce and remarry. but that was a source of shame. People would move to a different state or country after a divorce. "You can't love two and still be true." There are "blended families" in country music, but there aren't happy "blended families." 

Some early country songs actually preserved the perspective of people who didn't buy into the motorcar fad. "I've been wagoning for over twenty years...I'll be here when the trucks are gone." (Last song on the album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3uVfkCBv9g.) Before about 1945 the means of transportation most mentioned in country songs was trains, though there were also songs about wagons, horses, mules, and of course walking. Later country songs mentioned cars and buses because country people started riding those. "Leaving on a Jet Plane" was not a country song, and while a few older country songs mentioned ships and "sailing far over the sea," Real Country Songs were for and about landlocked people whose travels were usually day trips to a nearby town.

Country music was mostly about people who led wholesome Christian lives but it did include cautionary songs about bad decisions that put people in prison. Almost as bad were decisions that left people in cities. There are pre-country songs of love and pride in American cities, but country songs were about people for whom cities were places to visit, not places to live. "Memphis" was where the speaker wanted to call somebody. "Jackson" was where foolish people wanted to "go and make a big fool of yourself." "It's a Long Road Up to Atlanta" because the speaker was going there to serve time in prison. Even tiny little settlements were mentioned as places people might have visited: "I left someone there that I might lose...the one I left back in Maces Springs." Country music had a sort of default assumption that people lived on farms, unless they were renting places in cities and singing about "oh, how I want to go home." 

Some other things that, if mentioned in a song, generally indicate that no matter who is singing it, or in what style, it's not a Real Country song:

* Religious differences (we may talk about them, but we don't sing about them)

* Any other country, except Mexico

* Any technology "higher" than tractors

* Department stores

* Any kind or expression of "sexuality" other than monogamous, heterosexual "falling in love" and marriage

* Welfare (if everybody lives on a farm, everybody has food)

* Drugs or medications

* Credit card debt ("In God we trust, all others pay cash")

* Selling land, viewed as anything but a tragedy (if you wanted to move into town, you're not country)

* Television (country people got their news from the radio)

* Abortion (if a country woman couldn't keep a baby, she knew which friend or relative adopted it)

* Big businesses, including professional sports 

* Real mental illness 

On the other hand, country songs could be pretty frank about:

* Snobs, and contempt for them

* Money, from any point of view, including that of someone who has just recently acquired a lot of it

* Any legitimate job, and some questionable ones like moonshining, that farmers did for extra money

* Travel, originally train trips, later road trips in cars

* Advice and philosophical reflections, especially as attributed to old people

* Stupidity--the choice

* Symptoms/effects of alcohol intolerance

* Man's inhumanity to man

* Love, and despite the 1950s' obsession with romance, country music was more likely to focus on sex-free kinds of love

* Pollution and desecration of land

* Being "crazy" in the sense of "lovesick"

* Any form of homesickness, nostalgia, the rather pleasant sadness people feel when remembering good things in the past

* Above all, contempt for the idea that "Progress" was pushing people to move into cities

And they could draw very sharp distinctions between silly fantasies about everyone being "equal" and real abuses of the poor, too. Country music was the music of people who had little use for Communism because they had a better ideal, of Christian charity.

Also, country music is accompanied by stringed instruments only, no drums and no winds. The Grand Ole Opry did allow a piano, and harmonicas have occasionally been sneaked into country music performances, but basically country music is accompanied by guitars. Fiddles, banjos, mandolins, Maybelle Carter's autoharps, and Alisa Jones' dulcimers, were country music before Nashville became the home of the industry built on exploiting it, but even those instruments never became part of That Nashville Sound. Other instruments are not country.

Country music is of course part of the Anglo-American musical tradition, and when it started being performed by union members in Nashville it was largely restricted to the four chords all of those people could play, so it's a dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator form of Anglo-American music. That said, country music has never been exclusive. If you like it, well, it's easy to learn to perform. Some performers of Real Country Music were neither White nor American. Why Canadians or Black Americans or Icelanders wanted to perform country music, I don't know. Some of them did it well. 

And, speaking of the dumbed-down chord progressions, of course country music is known for memorably idiotic refrains. I think it has that feature in common with Bad Poetry. If you can write something great, that's good. If not, maybe you can write something funny, a self-parody of your own efforts and their shortcomings. 

Youtube pulled up a 1982 version of this early protest against so-called country music radio stations allowing rockabilly to displace the real thing. It was not a new song in 1982. I looked it up because I couldn't remember whether Justin Tubb started singing it in 1977, 1978, or 1979. I started singing it in 1979. It was like the national anthem of people who, when they chose to listen to country music, liked the real thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IR0OV4BG7i0

Considering how narrow the definition of Real Country Songs is, I think it's fair to mention that even country music stars have always listened to, and often performed, songs that don't quality. There's nothing wrong with that. The traditional LP format pushed studios to produce albums of ten to fifteen songs that all sounded pretty much alike. Now that Youtube allows people to mix their own playlists, does anyone you know have a playlist that always sticks to one genre? Knowing the difference between an apple and an orange does not mean loving apples and hating oranges.

But some local radio stations are losing audiences because first the Rabbit and then the Possum shows tried to "update" their content, and the local listeners just don't like the results. "But we can't play all oldies all the time. The old song hits may still be subject to copyright, and anyway it's discouraging to young people if radio stations only ever play songs by people who are retired or dead." They have a point there. Young people have talent and deserve to be heard. If they want to be heard by people who listen to country music on the radio, day after day, they need to stick to the rules of the country music genre. 

Including, but not limited to...

* Country music is deeply conservative in the sense of conserving and preserving traditions. If you want to sing about "social change," country music is not your genre. 

* It's possible that some country people are found in bars in towns, but since it means they're deeply, in most cases suicidally, depressed, this should not be the theme of the majority of songs broadcast in an hour. One song about that horrible situation is more than plenty.

* As with all other forms of entertainment and communication, the corporate sponsors don't have to like what the individual listeners are telling them--they have to "Just do it." 

* Country music is family-friendly. That means you don't say "sexuality"; you say "fell in love," "courted," or "married." If those aren't what you're talking about, country music is not your genre. 

* Country music is not sympathetic to hate. It is sympathetic to sarcastic expressions of disdain for the stupid things people do. It isn't even forgiving about expressions of contempt toward whole groups of people. The country music attitude toward people different from oneself is more of a good-natured "Whatever." A song, for example, about how evil same-sex marriage is would not be country. A song about the possible absurdities of a same-sex marriage, like the spoof of cross-generation marriage, "I'm My Own Grandpa," might be considered country if the words were family-friendly and the overall attitude was "What a mess these people did make for themselves."

* But country music is not p.c., either. I receive e-mail, regularly and by choice, from someone who'd like to change this...Country music is heterosexual. Homosexuality seems to be a biological reaction to crowded living conditions, partly because very little of it exists in rural areas. Even if Dolly Parton writes and sings a song in support of her "gay" men fans, it's nice that she appreciates her fans, but that is not a country song. And all country music has to say about "apartments" is how much some people regret having taken jobs that oblige them to live in such horrid places, and how much they want to go home. And if there are country songs about "climate change," they'd be silly ones about the poor fool still waiting to get the use of his beachfront property in Atlanta.

* In the country music worldview, if you want "social change" other than perhaps changing back to the way things were fifty years ago, you need to understand, you are the joke. 

That is something a lot of country music fans like about country music. It's not going to change because country music is and always was the music of people who resist being pushed into "social change."