One of the most pathetic aspects of Rumsfeld's Potemkin pro-Iraq War march in Washington earlier this year was its attempt to cast country music as the elevator music for warmongers and advocates for the wealthy not having to pay taxes to support their country.
Well, out in the real world, that ain't what country music is about: The rise of the 'redneck' stirs up country music by Patrik Jonsson Christian Science Monitor 10/13/05. And country music sure ain't about the racist, jingo ranting of that fool Chuckie.
Now, Jonsson seems to think that songs about working-class people are somehow culturally reactionary. Lord only knows how Yankees get such strange ideas. (I'm guessing he's a Yankee.)
That reminds me. I need to get Gretchen Wilson's new CD. I heard her on TV singing a song that's essentially a tribute to workers and soldiers. I thought when I heard her sing it that it could be Jacksonian anthem to be used at Democratic Party events. And it could be. It's written by Merle Haggard, one of the great popular music writers.
Jonsson reports:
"It's partly the Southernization of America, in that the Southern working-class version of redneck is becoming the national version, and it's good-natured, it has humor and, in some ways, it's a performance," says Charles Wilson, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at University of Mississippi in Oxford. ...
But in this newest Nashville permutation, Southerners, as they often do, may have the last laugh.
"Dolly Parton may be the ultimate example of this," says Mr. Wilson at Ole Miss. "It's an aesthetic that's in your face: big hair, short dresses, an emphasis on her physique, and she's making lots of money in the process. Like her, [today's singers] take demeaning images in Southern culture, turn it all on its head, and say, 'I'm really outsmarting you.' "
And to my hardcore Yankee friends, no, "Southern Culture" is not an oxymoron. Yankees just can't stand it that William Faulkner and Eurdora Welty were from the Deep South. Mississippi, to be more precise.
Dolly Parton's music, I might add, is notable for including social themes. Like her "Coat of Many Colors", which was beutifully sung by Emmylou Harris on one of her early albums.
It wasn't that long ago that the Dixie Chicks were being gleefully trashed by our blowhard super-patriots for telling an audience in Britain just before the invasion of Iraq, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas".
I just read a review of a new book of interviews called REDNECKS & BLUENECKS: THE POLITICS OF COUNTRY MUSIC that sounds like one worth reading: When politics goes country, it ain't as simple as red or blue by Steve Heilig San Francisco Chronicle 12/04/05.
Helig's review says, among other things, that country music is the favorite form of popular music in the US:
East-West coastal dwellers might be surprised to learn that country music is far and away "America's most mainstream music," as Entertainment Weekly writer Chris Willman posits in his fascinating and funny new book, "Rednecks & Bluenecks." There are more than 2000 country radio stations, more than twice as many as for any other genre, and a star like Toby Keith sells double that of, say, Britney Spears. Garth Brooks is second only to the Beatles in album sales. So although country may be "where the elite don't meet," as Willman notes, it's where everyone else does, relatively speaking.
Of course, a definition of "country" that includes Garth Brooks might be contested. At least he didn't mention Shania Twain, who Steve Earle has appropriately described as "the highest-paid lap dancer in the business." (Quoting from memory; Sha-nay-nay doesn't appreciate that description.)
And why does everybody have to try to diss poor Little Boo in these things? Isn't it enough that her rotten husband is being a creep while she has a new baby to take care of? Besides, Boo is doing cutting-edge, push-the-envelope holistic performance art. Of course you can't expect her to sell as many CDsas lowest-common-denominator pop stars!
I'mnot so sure about a couple of the points in his review. He says that Johnny Cash was "nominally Republican". But I'm pretty sure he was a registered Democrat. I know he favored Al Gore in the 1992 presidential primaries. His daughter Rosanne also said that he was more opposed to the Iraq War than anyone else she knew.
According to a German biography of Cash by Franz Dobler that a friend gave me last year, Johnny was even critical of Old Man Bush's Gulf War at the time, a war which won far wider support than Shrub's Iraq War ever has. He also relates how, at the 2002 American Music Association awards, Emmylou Harris and Johnny were prominent among those honored.
He writes that Johnny read the text of his song "Ragged Old Flag" and "interpreted it in a way that conservative fans of the song don't interpret it". And he added some new lines, and made some critical commentary about the Gulf War of 1991 and the war in Afghanistan.
I also knew that Merle Haggard has been critical of the Iraq War and supported the Dixie Chicks when the blowhard white-guy jinjoes were manfully trashing them.
And I've also read that Toby Keith, who worked the macho-patriotic theme after 9/11, also expressed major doubts about the invasion of Iraq.
But this bit from the Chronicle review about Merle surprised me:
So, on the country airwaves and in saloons and concert halls, the polarized shouting goes on, with more than one patriotic singer "banging on the drum to put money in his own pockets"; even a living legend like Haggard provokes a backlash if he expresses pessimism about Iraq - and wait until folks read him comparing Bush to Hitler here ...
Say what? Merle compares George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler?!? I think I need to read this book.
(By the way, the Merle song mentioned in the heading to this post is from his excellent tribute album to Jimmie Rodgers, the Mississippian who is credited with being the "father of country music".)
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