52 time August 26, 2019country is in the midst of a renewed debate over the
nature of its sound and the related question of who
counts as part of its club. Thanks to the success of
hip-hop-inflected hits from Blanco Brown and Lil
Nas X—whose “Old Town Road” has spent a record
19 weeks atop the Billboard charts—and the genre-
bending performers Miranda Lambert and Maren
Morris, the industry is undergoing a period of healthy
redefinition and soul searching. In some ways, these
questions are not so different from the ones the
broader nation is asking itself in the age of Trump.
So, what is country? Or to put it more plainly, can
a historically white ethos (in Burns’ film, Kris Kristof-
ferson calls country “probably the white man’s soul
music”) make room for the voices and visions of an
increasingly diverse America? The answer, much like
the music itself, is more complicated than even its
fans tend to realize.Debating What is country is a tradition nearly
as old as country itself. In 1975, Waylon Jennings
wrote “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way,”
which lamented the trend away from the kind of
music Hank Williams created and toward a more
polished, commercial sound. Charlie Rich would
be banned from the now prime-time telecast CMA
Awards for burning the envelope that declared pop
superstar John Denver country music’s entertainer
of the year, as he did in 1975. Whenever a genera-
tion puts less emphasis on the bedrock sounds of
fiddle, acoustic guitar and steel guitar, the argu-
ment begins anew.
Country came not from the affluent and the ac-
cepted, but from the fringes of America—from the
hills and hollows, from Sunday morning and Satur-
day night, from barrios and blues clubs. In Georgia
in the 1920s—the state where a new Ku Klux Klan
had been founded in 1915—“Fiddlin’ John” Carson
gained popularity, his music resonating in a coun-
try that was rapidly urbanizing. Even people who
had known only city life liked to indulge in reminis-
cence about simpler times.
“Country music is full of songs about little oldlog cabins that people have never lived in; the old
country church that people have never attended,”
the historian Bill C. Malone says in Country Music.
“But it spoke for a lot of people who were being for-
gotten, or felt they were being forgotten.”
One songwriter defined country music as
“three chords and the truth,” but the editor of Va -
riety in 1926 called country people “illiterate and
ignorant... poor white trash... with the intelli-
gence of morons.” Burns’ film, however, shows that
the music and its makers and promoters were any-
thing but ignorant or moronic—and they certainly
weren’t simple. Carson, for instance, benefited
from the rise of radio as a mass medium: WSB in
Atlanta (call letters that stood for Welcome South,
Brother) put him on the air, and together with a
growing market for phonographic records, the twin
technologies helped fuel the creation of what be-
came known as the music business.
There it all was, even in the beginning: nostal-
gia and newness, sentiment and sales. Ralph Peer
was a successful producer of what were called “race
records” when he noticed Carson’s appeal. Before
long, Peer had discovered both the Carter Family
singers and Jimmie Rodgers, whom he recorded in a
24-hour period in Bristol, Tenn. The Carters’ music
was rooted in gospel, the sounds of Sunday morn-
ing; Rodgers’ in the carousing world of Saturday
night—thus setting up ongoing themes in a genre
that touched on both redemption and sin.
Still, the ways country has been marketed from
the start have obscured its other faces. Long con-
sidered the soundtrack of conservatism, coun-
try is in fact more complicated and more inter-
esting than the prevailing caricature would have
it. There’s always been a strain of protest along-
side the sentimental patriotism. For all of the
beer- swilling “We’ll put a boot in your ass/ It’s the
American way” lyrics—see Toby Keith’s post-9/11
“Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry
American)”—there’s Cash defending prisoners or
Native Americans and Loretta Lynn warning her
man not to “come home a-drinkin’ with lovin’ onJOHNNY
CASH
The Man in
Black, seen
performing
at the White
House in 1970,
embodied
country’s
complexityLORETTA
LYNN
Lynn, who in
1970 became
the only woman
ever named
ACM Artist of
the Decade,
never shied from
controversial
material
DOLLY
PARTON
A nine-time
Grammy winner,
Parton is one
of only a few
women in country
to achieve
commercial
success on a
par with that of
male artists