Moments of Permanence - Conversations and music - country and otherwise...

From: naraht Date: June 9th, 2009 10:27 am (UTC) (Link)

Country music is rural, country music in a lot of cases is by and for the poor and the uneducated.

Sounds like folk music to me, but folk doesn't seem to come in for the same kind of mockery. I wonder why?

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From: sqbr Date: June 9th, 2009 10:32 am (UTC) (Link)

It's for mythical past poor/rural people rather than modern day real ones?

(sami: I've been watching the Country Music channel a bit recently and thinking similar thoughts)

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From: naraht Date: June 9th, 2009 11:32 am (UTC) (Link)

I don't know about mythical... most folk was written by real poor people, albeit past ones. Perhaps it's the past thing that is crucial. Blues is another genre that's in a similar position. Maybe enough time brings critical perspective, plus appropriation that makes the genre more palatable to the musical establishment.

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From: sqbr Date: June 12th, 2009 03:03 am (UTC) (Link)

Sorry, yes, mythical was the wrong word. Maybe "idealised and distant" is better, especially since it also includes poor folk singers from "exotic" countries.

That's a good point about the appropriation. Hmm.

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From: sami Date: June 9th, 2009 10:34 am (UTC) (Link)

What sqbr said, plus, folk music was played by Bob Dylan and other mainstream performers - folk music is for middle-class people who are just slumming, not real poor people.

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From: naraht Date: June 9th, 2009 11:34 am (UTC) (Link)

It *was* written by real poor people though.

I agree that folk, blues and such genres have been appropriated by the mainstream and that is likely to make them more acceptable and palatable to the middle-class people. But that then begs the question... why has country and western not been through a similar process?

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From: sami Date: June 9th, 2009 12:23 pm (UTC) (Link)

I think it's relevant that folk music hearkens to Simpler Times/Values etc, and therefore was ripe for appropriation by middle-class people (yes, SOME folk music was written by real poor people, but it was appropriated to hell and back, or why are the famous folk musicians people like Bob Dyland and Peter, Paul and Mary?), whereas country often embraces rural values that the middle class sneer at.

After all, songs about earth and farming and so on are Getting Real, but country songs about everyday contemporary life? That's so common. And it's written by people who are not just poor, but all Southern (in America) as well. (In Australia, country music is just rural, and that's enough. I mean, the Country Music Awards take place in TAMWORTH.)

And the country ideals aren't trendy. Even the ones which are in some ways modern, like the songs with a distinctly feminist bent, aren't the Right Kind of feminism. Take, say, Romeo, by Dolly Parton - that's the girl power ethos in action, but it's in action by older women with big hair making comments about a be-mulleted Billy Ray Cyrus.

What self-respecting urbanite would want to appropriate THAT?

I think I'm getting rather sarcastic, but I seriously think it's just that tendency to sneer at rural/country people. The assumption of inferiority and crudity, where at least folk music's roots can be idealised as Nature and Simplicity, and blues and jazz both came from *black* culture - which means they pick up a kind of Noble Savage motif, where it's clearly the Art of the Exotic Oppressed that white people can appropriate.

Whereas white people from Nashville or Tamworth aren't exotic, they're just uneducated, trashy, inferior. And therefore country music must be terrible. Dolly Parton is all big hair and overdone makeup and big tits - she couldn't possibly also be an amazing woman with serious talent, now could she?

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From: lady_ganesh Date: June 9th, 2009 12:46 pm (UTC) (Link)

Dolly Parton might not be the best example. ;-)

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From: sami Date: June 9th, 2009 12:55 pm (UTC) (Link)

For a horrifying moment I thought your point was that Dolly Parton is not actually awesome, and DUDE I CAN NOT LIVE IN THAT WORLD. (Given that I'm currently listening to songs off Backwoods Barbie on YouTube, and deciding I NEED to buy this album, if only so I can play Better Get To Living and Jesus and Gravity when I'm struggling with depression.)

I know that she's getting more recognition now, but on the other hand... she had to start her own record company to release Backwoods Barbie, because DOLLY FREAKING PARTON couldn't get a record contract any other way.

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From: lady_ganesh Date: June 9th, 2009 12:59 pm (UTC) (Link)

I COULDN'T LIVE IN THAT WORLD EITHER OMG.

That's in part because of mainstream country music, though! Don't start me on the modern record industry, heh. Johnny Cash only started selling again because Rick Rubin found a good way of marketing him-- and it wasn't as a country artist.

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From: sami Date: June 9th, 2009 01:57 pm (UTC) (Link)

Right, clearly I only listen to good country. ;)

Take the Dixie Chicks as an example, then. They're kind of sneered at too - even after the whole thing with the death threats for saying something mildly negative about Bush.

The thing I'm currently realising is how healing certain country songs are for me. At the moment Better Get To Living and Jesus and Gravity are kind of rocking my world, and the Dixie Chicks' Not Ready To Make Nice really helps me sometimes when dealing with my Bad History stuff.

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From: lady_ganesh Date: June 9th, 2009 03:19 pm (UTC) (Link)

Obviously! And honestly, some of the 'new' country is fine-- Carrie Underwood is as poppy as they get and I kind of love her.

I still keep meaning to watch Shut up and Sing. And oh, I love Not Ready to Make Nice.

IIRC, there are black roots in country music too. And of course, there are black country singers though they're hard to find.

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From: naraht Date: June 9th, 2009 04:14 pm (UTC) (Link)

I think it's relevant that folk music hearkens to Simpler Times/Values etc, and therefore was ripe for appropriation by middle-class people (yes, SOME folk music was written by real poor people, but it was appropriated to hell and back, or why are the famous folk musicians people like Bob Dyland and Peter, Paul and Mary?), whereas country often embraces rural values that the middle class sneer at.

I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at here. When I think of folk I either think of old songs like Matty Groves or new stuff like the music of Phil Ochs. Neither of them really falls under the category of Simpler Values.

If by "rural values" you mean conservative values, then I suppose I will confess to disliking that aspect of country.

Whereas white people from Nashville or Tamworth aren't exotic, they're just uneducated, trashy, inferior.

I do take your point about the non-exotic aspect of things but... if you're talking about country music being rural, then talking about Nashville is hardly helping your argument. It's a big city... about as big as Boston and far larger than any other city in New England. So I might argue that country music is now southern far more than it is rural.

I mean, I come from a city of 17,000 or so that is the largest and only city in the county. But country music doesn't reflect my small-town experience at all.

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From: sami Date: June 9th, 2009 05:03 pm (UTC) (Link)

Okay, time for clarification of terms: when I say "rural", I mean Australian country folk. Rural means people from what we call "regional areas" - the areas outside the major coastal cities where over 90% of the Australian population lives. Tamworth is rural. (It's a large town, but it's still a country town.)

(Also, 17,000 people isn't a small town by Australian standards.)

In America, being Southern is enough.

But no, rural and conservative aren't the same thing. Dolly Parton is one of the greatest country singers and songwriters who ever lived; she writes songs about God and Jesus, she write songs about heartache that don't pretend to be artistic or clever about it, they're just songs about how it hurts. Songs about being poor but happy, songs about being good and virtuous, in the positive sense of that word. She writes songs that mention cowboys and home and loving Tennessee. She dresses and looks like, well, Dolly Parton.

She is also on record speaking supportively of a transgender man who works for her, and devotes a lot of time and energy to philanthropy. She's spoken openly about sex, and written songs that embrace female sexuality as natural. She's been successful and made a lot of money, but she remembers what it's like to be poor, and she talks about it - talks about the tragedy of seeing and knowing people, family members, her parents, who never had a chance at a better life.

Not who wasted their lives - in country music, there are people who go nowhere, who stay poor, and it's not that they didn't try - it's that they tried as hard as they could, but they never had a chance to succeed. But they still live, and love, and experience joy and heartbreak, because they're people.

And there are people who do waste their lives, who could have done better and didn't. And that's just the way it is. There's no grand moral lesson in it. That's just how things are, and country music holds that too.

A lot of this stuff is uncomfortable to middle-class urbanites. No-one wants to acknowledge that out in the country, there are people who are doing it tough, struggling to get by in ways that they shouldn't have to, and yet also experiencing joy in ways that the city can't match. That there are experiences that are real and valid that don't apply to the cities.

Somewhere in there is also the discomfort with the idea that religion and faith can be a part of life, easy and natural as breathing. I sometimes think that God is easier to reach surrounded by nature and open skies, because country folk and farmers seem to find faith more easy and natural than people I meet in the cities, even in church.

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From: lady_ganesh Date: June 9th, 2009 12:43 pm (UTC) (Link)

I think some of it is the increased pop-i-fication and commercialization of country music-- my husband hardly listens to any contemporary country music because it's so processed and 'pop.'

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From: rainbow Date: June 10th, 2009 05:43 am (UTC) (Link)

This makes me thinky. I'm not much for country, but I think it's because when I was growing up (the 60s) most of it *that I heard* was "He was her man and he done her wrong" sort of stuff.

But I liked folk a lot, the stuff I think of as folk -- to me folk music is traditional music. I think of the music of Bob Dylan and most modern (60s to now) folk singers as pop folk or protest music, not folk songs (except when they do sing folk songs...). (I also think of modern C&W as pop country.)

Songs that are what I think of as folk songs are Barbara Allen, Auld Lang Syne, the Ashgrove, Greensleeves, Scarborough Fair, Sur le pont d'Avignon, Die Gedanken Sind Frei, Cotton-Eyed Joe, Lord of the Dance (granted the one I know is the pagan version), Tom Dooley, Cherry Ripe, Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye, Old Grey Mare, Clementine, Au Clair de la Lune, Hoist up the John B, Polly Wolly Doodle, Early One Morning, Ida Red, Volga Boatmen, Streets of Laredo, the Titanic, etc. (And traditional songs from other cultures, too, of course, but these are ones that I *know*. I'm a little ::cough:: fond of folk music, but it's mstly stuff I grew up with since I don't process heard stuff well any more so learning new songs is difficult.)

I do like some of the pop folk and protest music *too*, but I think of it as a very different genre than traditional folk music.

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