Our country, 'tis of thee

National Review, July 20, 1992 by John Podhoretz

SHE WAS in her mid twenties, small and pudgy, with a face that could have been pretty were it not for the incessant chewing motion she made with her jaw and wild eyes that could not stay still. Pinned above her heart in handwritten script was a large laminated button that read, "Garth Sucks!"

These were fighting words here in Nashville this sultry and damp June week, as she and I stood among 24,000 other wildly devoted country-music aficionados at an annual festival called Fan Fair. The Garth condemned by her button is Garth Brooks, who is not only country music's phenomenon of the moment but the biggest pop star in America too-the man whose vertiginous rise is the emblem of an explosion that has placed country at the forefront of American music.

Until very recently country music was considered merely the expression of an American subculture--interesting, perhaps, but a distinctly minority taste. Conservative both in its politics and in its sense of morality, it has been largely scorned, patronized, or exploited by the wider culture. That was the case until two years ago, when Billboard changed the way it tabulates record sales. This newly accurate accounting revealed that country wasn't the idiot Appalachian child of American pop. Actually it rivaled, even surpassed, rock music in the affections and spending habits of Americans.

"Did you make that yourself?" I asked the chewing woman, pointing to the button.

"Yes, sir, I did," she said in a Delta twang, brandishing it with pride before turning her attention back to the two long-haired young men who were standing on a table in front of us, swiveling their hips as they lipsynched. "That's Darrell and Don Ellis," she said to me. "They're great."

Her anti-Garthism was not the common sentiment at Fan Fair--a huge and sprawling event that took up the Tennessee State Fairgrounds--where thousands lined up for five hours just to get his autograph and have their picture taken

with him. (People stood on line for hours just to get a tour of the bus he rides on.) But my hostile friend may have been onto something. Country's current near-dominance of the pop-music charts could be a Pyrrhic victory. In gaining the world, country may lose its soul.

The soul of country has a lot to do with the intimate relations its performers maintain with their fans. Country-music singers are mostly from farms and small towns in the Deep South or the Texas panhandle. For the most part, they didn't go to college, but worked as truck drivers or waitresses before being scouted and discovered. When they stood on the huge stage and did a couple of numbers for the fans, everybody in the place knew: There, but for talent given them by God and some genuine drive and ambition, go I.

The performers know it too, and they are amazingly accessible. In these days when Hollywood stars travel with bodyguards and fear the threat of stalking maniacs, country star after country star stood in various booths while their fans waited their turn to talk to them for a minute, get a photograph and an autograph.

These fans, patient and well-mannered, were exclusively white, mostly over thirty. They were fat. They smoked. They wore cheap clothing whose clashing colors blinded the eye. They were, in other words, lower-middle-class and working-class Americans, the still-silent majority.

Country music is the music that speaks to them--its subject is not sex, as in most rock music, but the trials and triumphs of ordinary folk. Husbands cheat and beg their wives for forgiveness--or they are tempted by adultery but, as Randy Travis sings, "on the other hand, there's a golden band, to remind me of someone who would not understand."

Kids go bad but, as a band called Confederate Railroad sang from the stage on Thursday morning, "Jesus and Mama always loved me even when the devil took control." This song is directly in the tradition of the classic Merle Haggard number about personal responsibility, "Mama Tried," whose narrator "turned 21 in prison doin' life without parole. No one could steer me right but Mama tried. Mama tried to teach me better but her pleading I denied. That leaves only me to blame 'cause Mama tried."

My own obsession with country music began on a drive one Sunday in 1985. I was listening to a progressiverock station when out came this astonishing song, growled by the wonderful Hank Williams Jr., called "A Country Boy Can Survive." One night in New York City, the narrator's friend is stabbed to death by a switchbladewielding mugger. The mugger gets away with $43. And the narrator growls: "I'd like to spit some BeechNut in that dude's eye and shoot him with my ol' .45."

I nearly crashed my car in surprise and guilty delight. "A Country Boy Can Survive" wasn't just politically incorrect, it was pointedly so. There was wit to the song as well, and a facility with lyrics that one usually associates with Broadway show tunes: "We say grace, and we say ma'am, and if you ain't into that, we don't give a damn."