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There is certainly country music and country music.
There is the ultra-commercialised pap and there is real country music,
which is often magnificent.
About ten years ago, the largest chunk of music I was buying was country
music. (These days I still buy a fair whack of country, but a lot of what
I buy is from north-west Africa, especially Tuareg rock (aka desert blues
aka desert rock) but also other stuff from Mali, Senegal and other places
in West Africa.
About 20 years ago a mate of mine gave me an album of country music from
the 1920s and 1930s and I was struck by how a bunch of the songs were as
much blues as country. And I don't mean they were country-blues, I mean
you literally couldn't tell whether the performer was black and performing
blues or white and performing country.
The Carters were excellent, especially the women. Bill Monroe is bloody
good and I found his biography fascinating. Devoutly religious but he
lived in a relationship without the 'benefit' of marriage. He also had a
black musician his band at the height of Jim Crow and when they were
touring they would drive around looking for a decent place for the guy to
stay.
There are so many really good country artists from "the old days", who
combined generally conservative (formal) social views with some sort of
rough class consciousness. And today there is a substantial alt-country
scene, with heaps of progressive country artists. Even devoutly religious
folk like Julie Miller and Buddy Miller tend to be socially progressive.
And then there are a host of alt.country people who aren't religious at
all, like Lucinda Williams.
I guess my favourite country music is bluegrass, the High Lonesome sound is
just beautiful.
And, of course, we have the likes of Emmylou, Steve Earle and a whole heap
of others.
Hell, although the TV music-drama 'Nashville' could be schmaltzy, it had
some great music in it. And the themes it deal with (like the
homosexuality of one of the main characters) showed just much has changed
in the country music mainstream even.
People who hate country music are really narrow-minded, and often very
ignorant about both the history of country music and where a lot of it is
at today.
True country music is like a poor white version of the blues, another form
of music I love very much.
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