Country Music

A couple of weeks ago Stanley Fish — I know I’m supposed to know who he is, but I don’t, and really, I’m fine with that — wrote about country music in his New York Times blog. Because he is who he is — I know from his blurbio that he’s a professor — he takes a little academic sidestep to muse on whether Petrarchanism informs country music, but he quickly comes back to what’s really appealing about country music.

Not quickly enough for some people, though. This commenter (in contradistinction to a commentator), who styles herself “Country Mouse” calls Fish “an old man,” and then chides him for being an Eastern Establishment White Male (NY Times? Hello?) “discovering” country when people like her had know about it all along.

In other words, [She] Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool.

Country Mouse’s bona fides are unquestionable, and I’m not going to quibble with her whether Mr Fish should have known about country music all along. What grabbed my attention about her comment was this:

This sudden late-coming interest in country music reminds me of the time npr did a report on the pop-country Gretchen Wilson phenomenon about two-years after her rise to fame, presenting it as a self-congratulatory imperialist ethnographic feat of cultural openness.

Can you guess what it was? If you guessed “self-congratulatory imperialist ethnograpy,” you’d be wrong.

It was Gretchen Wilson.

I couldn’t remember if I had ever heard of her. I had a feeling I had, but I couldn’t be sure. God I love the Internet. I had glimpsed her a couple of years ago, and then she slipped out of my cone of vision.

Miss Country Mouse, like Mr Fish I am an NPR-listening, left-leaning, paper-recycling, imperialistically-ethnographying member of the East Coast Elite (I read the NY Times, after all). And I am sorry that I didn’t know about Gretchen Wilson earlier.

Because clearly I should have. And now I’m three years late to the party.

I picked up her first album Here for the Party, and it is darn good.

The first two songs, Here For the Party and Redneck Woman, set the tone for the territory we’re going to cover in this album:

I keep my Christmas lights on my front porch all year long

As Mr Fish discovered, albeit way too late, the draw of country music isn’t the drawl, it’s the story. The 3-minute dramas. The small town anthems. Like my love of Leonard Cohen, my affection for country isn’t about the music, it’s about the lyrics. Yes, this is obvious to anyone who loves either LC or country music, but it’s surprising to me how many times I have to call attention to that point.

I think my favorite song on this album is Pocahontas Proud. It has all the things I like in country music: the story of her growing up in Pocachontas, IL, pride, bragging, and humility.

I’m the biggest thing that ever came from my hometown
I’ll be damned if I ever let them down

That doesn’t mean, my dear Bluffaloes, that I’m going to play country all the time. But in between Electrelane and Dubstar, don’t be surprised if I play The Bed.