Musings on My Kind of Music...

In his 1998 autobiography simply titled Cash, The Man in Black makes a keen observation about the history of country music that is as true now as it was then. Unfortuanately, it will likely be true from here on out. He noted that there was a certain way of life that produced Country Music. Now, it is Country Music that produces a certain way of life.

The southern farmer, after hot days of back breaking work, would craft songs describing and lamenting experiences in the fields. The melodies, instrumentation, and tone were initially inherited from their Scotch-Irish forbears, but later mingled with the mournful sounds from black slaves (and later on urban blacks), and occasionally the dusty desperado music of the American west, to create a quintessential American art form.

Now there are hardly any southern famers, save those who work on large corporate farms. We listen to this music and try desperately to recreate the hardscrabble life from generations ago. When Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard sing the Townes Van Zandt classic Pancho and Lefty we no longer feel the immediacy and raw instinct that comes out of the line "He wore his gun outside his pants/ For all the honest world to feel." Instead we create a cult-like following around firearms and make up imaginary enemies out of people who supposedly want to take them away from us.

I think the reason many of us continue to listen to country music is because it provides us a window into when times were harder. It is escape music of a different kind. This says a lot about the value of all the things that make our lives easier, that we would want a form of music that harkens us back to a time when there would be much more dirt under our fingernails and a real reason to wear cowboy boots.