Country road, take me home

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 27, 1996 | by Woody West

If during the post-World War II and Korean War years you lived in a two-bit town or rural area -- almost anywhere outside a city -- you probably had a distinct opinion of what constituted music. And that would mostly mean country and western.

That would mean, too, that Hank Williams was your Mozart, with Tex Ritter, Roy Acuff, Lefty Frizzell and Hank Snow and his Rainbow Ranch Boys among those in the pantheon. The Grand Ol' Opry was a weekly highlight, piped from Nashville to the radio stations that stitched the cultural patches of America.

There was an asterisk recently in the newspapers for that generation. J.D. Miller, 73, died in Lafayette, La. His name notably connects to a song he wrote in 1952 -- "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-tbnk Angels" -- and its singer, Kitty Wells, born Muriel Deason in 1919.

"Honky-Tonk Angels" was on every jukebox in the land in those years. It was the first No. 1 song and million-seller by a female country vocalist (properly referred to, then and now, by admirers as "Miss Kitty Wells, the Queen of Country Music"). The song was written as a response to another by Hank Thompson, "The Wild Side of Life," and in the retort Kitty Wells remonstrated in her parlor-pure sweet voice:

It wasn't God who made honkytonk angels,

As you said in the words of your song.

Too many times married men think they're still single,

That has caused many a good girl to go wrong.

From across nearly half a century that sentiment sounds as dated as 25 cents-a-gallon gasoline. If it doesn't evoke the flavor and mood of the early fifties, well, you weren't there. Country music never went away, certainly. But it did fade as rock 'n' roll established dominance in the sixties and seventies.

So here we are in the shank of the 20th century and look what's pounding down the pike -- country and western as a prevalent sound once more in American music. In the past months, there've been a freshet of articles about this resurgence -- in a nation which is less countrified by the day and is eons removed from the roots of this music.

"Just as rock-and-roll foreshadowed many of the changes in gender and race relations that followed in the 1960s, country music today -- with its suburban, middle-aged themes of family and renewal -- may be the clearest reflection of many of the anxieties and aspirations that have just begun to bubble to the surface in American political life." Thus writes Bruce Feiler in a recent issue of the New Republic.

Those "anxieties and aspirations," however, haven't simply begun to bubble. They've been coming to a boil in the political pot for the past decade, though the big-league media are only recognizing this of late.

There are 2,642 radio stations programming country music, reaching 20 million more listeners a week than the closest competitor. Country radio, Feiler notes, is the top-rated format in 55 of the nation's top 100 cities. And get this: The $2 billion a year from sales of country records is 20 times what it was in 1970.

Most astounding -- at least to one who has not been paying close attention to trends -- is that late last year country headliner Garth Brooks became the third highest-selling artist of all time, behind only the Beatles and Billy Joel and ahead of Michael Jackson and Elvis.

There are, of course, differences between traditional country and western and the new. Feiler asserts that the old-made-new music is about the "new American frontier," suburbia and baby boomers into bumpy middle age. Certainly many of those singing the songs didn't come out of the hardscrabble, pre-entitlement culture before World War II, and contemporary themes are often softer-edged. (That women, after Wells, became prominent in country music surely has something to do with this.) For a couple of instances: Brooks has a college degree in advertising; Vince Gill's father was a lawyer; and Trish Yearwood's was a bank vice president. Button-down country.

The singers and their music, "crisper, cleaner and much more clearly about core American values than anything coming out of Seattle or New York in the last ten years, combine to create one of the most vivid examples of America's reigning backlash against its own cultural liberal past," Feiler writes, "a longing for raw emotion instead of ironic detachment." Not a bad analysis.

However, from the number of radio programs playing the "old" stuff, there's something more here, perhaps: Could it be a sense that the decades in which country music reflected a coherent if sometimes raggedy and raucous sense of virtue and a tenacious code of right and wrong have something to tell us today, that a time past when necessities heavily outweighed choice deserves reflection?

One more time, Miss Kitty Wells, Queen of Country Music: "It wasn't God who made honky-tonk angels." And rest in peace, Minnie Pearl, the belle of Grinder's Switch, dead this year.