How country music became embroiled in the US culture wars
Country music is having one of its moments of political introspection. On the Right, you’ve got Jason Aldean’s song Try That in a Small Town, fast emerging as the Okie from Muskogee of its day. Riffing off the crime and protests blighting American cities, Aldean warns the miscreants not to “try that” in his neighbourhood, populated as it is by “good old boys” with guns their granddaddies left them. Critics noted that the music video featured a courthouse from which a black man was hanged by a mob in 1927.
Aldean, who denies being pro-lynching, has received support from Travis Tritt, John Rich and Lee Greenwood – yet the powerful Country Music Television dropped his song, while progressive artists, including Sheryl Crow, voiced their disgust.
“I’m from a small town,” said Crow. “There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence.”
Country might still permeate Republican rallies, but some singers, including the red-haired chanteuse Reba, have come out against anti-trans laws passed in southern states, and conservative artists worry their industry is going woke. A surprise sensation in the crossover of country and hip-hop is Lil Nas X, a black, gay rapper who, in the video for Montero, performs a lapdance for the devil.
What would country pioneer Merle Haggard make of it all? Well, if we’re going to judge the state of country, we’d better begin by defining it.
Country is a folk tradition, so it is loyal to the values and style of the place and the people that created it – the South, an agricultural, deeply religious community blighted by civil war and the poverty that followed. Southerners recall their history with sadness and nostalgia – “in the good old days, when times were bad”, to quote Dolly Parton. When their music burst into national consciousness in the 1920s, it offered Americans overwhelmed by modernity a link to the past. Conservatives saw potential. Henry Ford, the anti-Semitic car maker, promoted what was then called “hillbilly music” as an alternative to jazz, which was perceived to be less moral, less white.
But if early impresarios imagined they were curating a pure “Anglo-Saxon” culture, they were quite wrong. Hillbilly was a marriage between the British fiddle and the African banjo, and the first great country star, Jimmie Rodgers, picked up his sound working on the railroad with black workers singing the blues. Rodgers sang about dying of TB; others immortalised train crashes and floods, drink and drugs (Take a Whiff on Me), and, of course, sex. The country star Jimmie Davis was elected governor of Louisiana in 1944 off the back of a catchy campaign song called You Are My Sunshine – but his output also included innuendo-laden ditties such as Tom Cat and Pussy Blues.
Country sought to articulate the “lived experience” of its audience, hence it could be wholesome and naughty, conservative and liberal. In the 1940s, Woody Guthrie, a son of Oklahoma, took his protest songs to New York City and helped lay the foundations of the urban folk revival. Folk is widely considered antithetical to country, being liberal, yet its sound is close to hillbilly: fiddle, guitar and banjo, a high male voice, simple melodies and a repetitive chorus.
Where the two genres parted company is that folk obsessed about its purity while country proved to be commercially savvy and upwardly mobile. It shed its agricultural image by embracing, first, the Western; later, the glamour of Hollywood (the ritzy costumes, with their tassels and faux-diamonds, were an invention of a Jewish tailor called Nudie Cohn in California). Then came rock, a crossover between black and white music that set country on the road to its modern sound, making everything from Billy Ray Cyrus’s Achy Breaky Heart to Taylor Swift possible. Country is, and always has been, innovative and multicultural.
When Jimmie Davis won re-election in Louisiana in 1960, however, he did his best to stop the state’s desegregation – and a number of country stars, including Hank Snow, campaigned for George C Wallace, the racist presidential candidate in 1968. At the height of Watergate, Richard Nixon received a warm welcome at the Grand Ole Opry, the home of country music. He led them in a chorus of God Bless America on the piano.
Merle Haggard captured this new, reactionary spirit of country by writing, “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee … ’Cause we like livin’ right, and bein’ free.” In private, of course, Haggard smoked a ton of weed, and had done time in San Quentin. No wonder he became a good Republican: it was Ronald Reagan who pardoned him as governor of California. But when Haggard wrote Big City during Reagan’s White House years, he lamented dirty streets, miserable work and mean welfare, for it is simply impossible for the effective country singer to take the side of the rich against the poor.
Johnny Cash spoke out against Vietnam. Charley Pride broke racial barriers as the first African-American country star. Jeannie C Riley poked fun at middle-class morals in Harper Valley PTA (“if you smell Shirley Thompson’s breath/ You’ll find she’s had a little nip of gin”).
Loretta Lynn campaigned for the Bush family, but also sang in praise of birth control. Feminists might hate Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man, but gay men love it. On her televangelist show, Tammy Faye Bakker told men with HIV that Jesus’s grace was sufficient for them too.
You cannot nail country’s politics down. During the Iraq War, Toby Keith warned terrorists, “We’ll put a boot in your ass/ It’s the American way” – practically at the same time as the Dixie Chicks (today, just the Chicks) told an English audience, “We’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war!”
Left and Right complain of censorship. Progressives say the backlash against the Chicks forced others to shut up or move into mainstream pop – while John Rich recently claimed that Nashville, the Mecca of country, is now so liberal that uttering a Right-wing opinion can ruin your career.
That’s hard to swallow given the popularity of “bro country”, a style that is Haggard revamped, celebrating traditional family values mixed with the joys of booze and girls. In one song, Rich famously advised women to “save a horse” and “ride a cowboy”.
If it seems theatrically male and southern, perhaps that’s an unconscious concession that Dixie isn’t what it used to be. Nashville is ground zero in the new South. Washed out by a flood, flattened by a tornado, it has been rebuilt with luxury hotels and expensive night clubs. Even the poorest southern states are now reckoned to be richer than Britain, and although Donald Trump is the political equivalent of Elvis, Civil War memorials have been taken down.
The South is now suburban. Country is the mood music for a bourgeoisie playing at cowboys. Which is why Lil Nas X is the natural next stage in its evolution. He was 20 when he wrote Old Town Road, in 2019, and it cost him just $30 (£23) to produce. As it climbed the charts, there was an effort to cancel it; traditionalists called it amateur hip-hop, piggy-backing off the genre, and Billboard removed it from its Hot Country chart. Cyrus stepped in to help Lil Nas X do a remix; Old Town Road returned in triumph to become the longest-running number one in US chart history.
The tune is camp, silly and urban, but it’s also the eternal story of a man who stubbornly chooses to ride a horse over a Porsche and its chorus is as catchy as Sweet Home Alabama or Ring of Fire. Country continues to move forwards while looking backwards.
