graphic by brenda delgado
I didn’t grow up listening to country music. In fact, I was one of those people who used to say, “Yeah, I listen to everything BUT country.” I was never attracted to the Top 40 country hits or the nationalistic attitude often associated with those artists. As someone raised in the South, I got enough of country music at school dances or through the speakers of someone else’s car while sitting in traffic. I can’t mark when the change happened or why, but I know that all of a sudden, old bluegrass ballads snuck their way onto my monthly playlists. It wasn’t until I did a deep dive into one of my favorite songs, “Delta Dawn” by Tanya Tucker, that I began to realize how vast and important country music is.
“Delta Dawn” was written by Alex Harvey, a popular country singer-songwriter from Tennessee, about his mother, Emily Jeanette. She was a deeply complicated woman who grew up around the Mississippi Delta and “lived her life as if she had a suitcase in her hand but nowhere to put it down.” She settled down in Brownsville, Tennessee, had her son and became a hairdresser. By all accounts, Emily was a free spirit and did her best for her family. The mother-son pair got into an argument before Harvey was meant to perform on TV at the age of fifteen, and he told her not to come due to her substance abuse issues. She died in a car accident that night. After the initial recording was released in November 1971, Harvey said, “I always felt like that song was a gift to my mother and an apology to her.” For my first introduction to country music history, this was a big one. I had never expected a country song to be filled with such grandeur and strong storytelling. It earned a spot on my playlists, then found its way into daily conversation and even inspired a 98 page screenplay I wrote for a dramatic adaptation class during my junior year of college. That’s how much I loved this song.
Suddenly, country music wasn’t all about pick-up trucks, American flags, objectifying women and beer. It was about life and death, love, poverty, and — perhaps most essential to the South I know — politics. Old country artists like Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn were well-known and even praised for their political opinions. For example, Johnny Cash is best known as The Man in Black for almost exclusively wearing the color black. Cash explains this decision in his song aptly titled “Man in Black” by saying, “I wear black for the poor and the beaten down / Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town / I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime / But is there because he’s a victim of the times.” Loretta Lynn released her most controversial song “The Pill” in 1975 and is one of the first songs ever to not only reference birth control but paint it in a positive light. “All these years I’ve stayed at home / While you had all your fun / And every year that’s gone by / Another baby’s come / There’s a gonna be some changes made / Right here on nursery hill / You’ve set this chicken your last time / ‘Cause now I’ve got the pill.” In total, Lynn had six children and it was evident that she loved them all, but in a 2010 interview with NPR, she said, “It’s hard for a woman to have so many kids. And at the time, I guess I had four. And then I got pregnant and had the twins. But I was a little angry … If I’d had [the pill] I would have used it.” She later added in an interview with Time, “I had four kids before I was 18. If I had had the pill, I would’ve been popping it like popcorn.” Icon status.
To this day, country music stations refuse to play “The Pill” (I could go on a twenty-minute rant about the differences in how male country artists were revered while female country artists were blacklisted for doing the same things, but I digress). So much of country music and culture were living on the fringes, either literally in the form of rural towns or figuratively by existing on the fringes of society. Often, if you lived on the fringes, it’s probably because you didn’t fit in a societal expectation of white, cis heteropatriarchy. In other words, this music was for and about unions, voting, prison reform, war, queerness, religion and more.
But if country music was pioneered by and for the working class and marginalized people — what changed? Why am I forced to listen to Jason Aldean threaten me to “try that in a small town?” Where have the true roots of country gone? The truth is, they went underground. Following the September 11th terrorist attacks, music across all genres experienced a shift to pro-America and America-first rhetoric as a result of widespread fear and distrust of other nations — especially in country music. The old ways of writing and performing country music flew out the window, and if you didn’t conform to the new standards, you were subject to hate, shunning and even career takedowns. For example, after George Bush deployed US troops to Iraq in 2003, The Chicks, the best-selling female band of all time, publicly stated their opinion on the invasion: “We’re ashamed to be from the same state as him.” The end was imminent as the Chicks were banned from radio stations across the country and even prompted a response from the president himself: “They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out.” (Thankfully, as of 2020, The Chicks are back to making music and ruffling feathers.)
But around 2016, we began seeing a revival of country and bluegrass music. Nostalgic voices such as Sierra Ferrell, Colter Wall, and Tyler Childers invoke a vision of country music that reminds you of your grandma’s childhood home, but set in the fast-moving modern pace of the modern age. To have that one-of-a-kind talent and be able to hold attention when it’s so easy to scroll on is so indicative of the voices emerging in the country scene. For example, Tyler Childers performed at Healing Appalachia, a music festival dedicated to raising money to combat the opioid epidemic in the area, in 2019 with his song “Nose On The Grindstone.” In this performance, Childers addresses drug addiction to a crowd of about 7,000 people: “Daddy worked like a mule mining Pike Country coal / Til’ he fucked up his back and couldn’t work anymore / He said one of these days you’ll get out of these hills / Keep your nose on the grindstone and out of the pills.” Not only does the song talk about working-class families, but also how addiction can be a generational phenomenon. For people who may not have the education or the ability to leave their hometowns ravaged by the crisis, it can often feel like there’s no other choice. According to the Appalachian Regional Commission, in 2021, overdose-related mortality for people aged 25-54 was 72% higher in the region than in the rest of the country. In an interview with The Tennessean about addiction and drug use in his songs and community, Childers said, “That whole idea of drugs and what drugs are and what’s the good drugs and what’s the bad drugs … that’s kinda what’s got us in this mess. Just having an open and honest conversation about that will help change the landscape of how we are dealing with people going through addiction and how we help with that.” Stories and personalities such as Childers are the ones I want to follow.
Music not only tells people who you are or where you’re from, it also indicates our cultural and sociopolitical climate. This revival of country music is, in my opinion, the best indicator of that. It’s honoring the old sound and artistry of country while also acknowledging that people are sick of the conservative “Come and Take It” country music of the early 2000s (such as “Okie from Muskogee” by Merle Haggard). It’s getting into the roots of everything that made the music good and worthwhile, and it’s hard not to love it.
I think I love this version of country and bluegrass because I love the version of the South it presents me with. I love what the South could be, and the little bits of my childhood I find reflected in the lyrics. I love knowing that the music I love isn’t sung by people who would strip away my rights at the first opportunity and call the country better for it. Just like Emily Jeannette, just like the world, just like me, country is not perfect and it has a long way to go, but it’s doing its best to be damn good. That’s got to be worth something, right?