When You Realize that Your Re-Birth Centers Completely Around Country Music

When I was living with Betty, my Grandmother, every weekend and summer of my childhood, I would always read through a file folder of typed Country Music song lyrics. There were notes on them where she had corrected the typist's misheard lyrics and misspellings.

Betty should probably be around to correct this blog post. I am sure she is ready to correct me from her cloud.

When she died, I inherited her records. The cool thing is is that some of them are starred with the songs that she especially liked. They were rarely the singles. Betty was a hipster.

Mike said to me the other day that he felt like he came out of the closet as a Country-Music lover when he met me because I was a person that appreciated it, too, and would actively talk about it and go to shows in a totally non-hokey and non-ironic way. We talked about this a lot, because both of us felt that when we stood on the proverbial hilltop and said that we were into Country Music in a way that was more than liking that one Johnny Cash song that was played on Alternative radio, but not in that way that we would get loaded in a parking lot before a Florida-Georgia line show, that it immediately put us into a category that was ripe for ridicule and stereotyping by both people that liked and hated the genre.

I am not sure if it is because a lot of thought isn't put into it or if it is easier to avoid the deep sociological impact music and genre has on an initial ident about someone, but I am pretty serious about listening to people when they tell me what kind of music they enjoy. I also am pretty serious about listening to it if I've never heard of it. I want to get to know someone by thinking about the things that they like. This makes me a weirdo, if only because I am super-intentional and intense about getting to know people. This is probably why I don't get invited to many parties. But I am not sure that people are that serious about what they listen to and why. And that's a shame, but somewhere in there...you can usually find a song that moves someone in some way: it's a memory, or a song that their mom loved, or a song that was playing when they met their boyfriend or whatever. And these things last forever and knowing them makes me feel fuzzy.

When you say you like Country Music, people often will often speak about Johnny Cash. And then you'll tell them about Waylon Jennings and they might know "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys." Or they'll say they like Willie Nelson because he smokes weed (the man's written hundreds of songs for countless artists for fifty years, but you like his weed. Way to go, bro). Then, you'll tell them about Jim Reeves or Ernest Tubb and then they'll slowly back away and wonder where your cowboy hat is hiding. They'll question your intelligence because southern accents equal stupidity. They'll question your ethics and morality because people that like Country Music are racist. They'll question your cultural awareness because Country Music equals a siloed American worldview. They'll question your taste because all Country Music sounds the same. And y'all...that really sucks.

I think that Country Music became a way for me to understand two groups of people that fucking mystify me: men and Americans. Country Music waxes poetic often about family, the way that things used to be and being happy with having very little. And for Country Music artists, this is the key to allowing people to be feel good about the way that they lived and the way that they loved in a world where they are bombarded with the notion that being an American isn't enough. Instead of getting defensive, it opens the door to believing in the life that you had, but still understanding the wheel of progress. Johnny Cash's music says that he believes in your humanity even if you're in prison and a victim of America's really awful prison system.

I wear the 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.

Country music's pragmatism draws me to it time and time again. They're writing about farming, about raising kids, about being unloved and cheating, about being afraid, about having alcohol problems and dying in literal language.

You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille

With four hungry children and a crop in the field

I've had some bad times, lived through some sad times

But this time your hurting won't heal

You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille.

This language entices people that aren't good at poetry. It realizes that a lot of people can't read or can't read well. It gives them a place to emote that isn't necessarily a satirical song about an Oscar Wilde play (Sorry Morrissey, I still love you, too) that no one's ever read because they're working swing shifts at a sawmill and trying to repair their broken truck, their widowed mother's house and their sanity. Randy Travis writes in a way that sums up what a lot of American men feel about love, about being unable to express it and about knowing that what they feel is probably different than what they show.

Well I've heard those city singers singin' 'bout how they can love

Deeper than the oceans higher than the stars above

Well I come from the country and I know I ain't seen it all

But I heard that oceans salty and the stars they sometimes fall

But that would not do justice to the way I feel for you

So I have to sing this song about all the things I knew

My love is deeper than the holler, stronger than the rivers

Higher than the pine trees growin' tall upon the hill

My love is purer than the snowflakes that fall in late December

And honest as a robin on a springtime window sill

And longer than the song of the whippoorwill

It all seems so unglamorous in a world that is enchanted by what it doesn't have and what it doesn't see walking down the street and creating a nonexistent internet world where people continually compare their inside to everyone else's outsides. The balance of knowing that these people are real and writing songs, these situations are real and this language is important allows me to bring myself closer to sincere language about people that isn't a snarky meme that divides and stereotypes or a shitty buzzfeed article.

I think about all of these things and I think about how it seems that hour by hour our political system is becoming unrecognizable of something that is considered both the land of the free and the home of the brave. The day after the election, people were scratching their heads and trying to understand how it all got this way. How we had two terrible choices and we somehow picked the more dangerous than the other in many minds. We assumed that our neighbor felt like we did because we went to college, read books, went to the city, saw a brown person, ate different food, gave money to a homeless person or whatever and obviously that makes us right. The reality is is that many people know nothing of the world that doesn't relate to their exact existence at this moment in their immediate history. And even when it is terrible with little chance for growth and change, when it is threatened, mobs grow and dangerous sentiments get louder. 

People protest and the response from every opponent is, "Why aren't these people at work?" It is a sentiment echoed from the notion that we live in a society where people often can take paid time off to demonstrate or they don't have to work at night and can do what they choose with their time because they don't have a bevy of commitments like a farm, a broken-down vehicle or another job to make ends meet. There are the opponents that know this, but they whip the frenzy of the overworked and underpaid to capitalize on their misfortune and feed from their misappropriated anger. And for us to feed in by fighting without compassion and understanding really seems to do nothing but perpetuate the divisiveness and the misunderstanding that we all have a part in creating.

So Country Music became my savior in figuring out some people, because it allowed me to see that although there are plenty of American Men that really are grasping at straws to legitimize their only attribute of being a white, American man, there are plenty that are victimized by their own system and see nothing of what our country could be, but rather think of what it once was when it wasn't scary and it was okay to love your Grandpa, your little house, your shitty car and the little money your made to pay for it all in full.  People are wistful for this simpler life and spend their entire lives building the fortune that will allow them to get back to it. I can't suss it out when I really think about it. 

When we say that these sub-section of America isn't worth understanding and listening to because just their American culture isn't enough, we're saying that they don't matter. When I let myself believe that they don't matter, then I can no longer defend my ideas about saving Syrian children and opening the borders to those seeking asylum. Because y'all...we are all going to need that asylum within our own borders and in all of us is the fear. 

Country Music is an American invention that, much like any genre, continues to grow into things that can be marginalized, but it is also can evolve into things that bring us closer together and see the reality behind our off-hand remarks about people whose stories are completely unknown. 

I sat beside a middle-aged woman at a Dale Watson show this month and I thought that she seemed kind of dumpy and annoying. It turns out, she was super-fun, with it, silly, mourning the anniversary of her mom's death that night and told me some things that I needed to hear at that exact moment about love, life and getting older and being scared as fuck about it. Country Music can bring us to the place where we can reach across the aisle and get to know what is in front of our faces but not in our hearts. That compassion hasn't been on the top of my list. My loss.