Country Music in a Fractured Country

I am really trying, here, to remain true to my commitment not to antagonize individual people. It would surely help me to grow my readership if I were to initiate some beefs, but as a matter of principle I must resist. If I ever do have differences with anyone, this is only because of the ideas they express, not because of who they are, and so it seems to me right and decent to separate the ideas from the person, and to discuss only those. Lord, give me the strength to remain committed to this principle — for it would, I know, not only be savvy from a metrics point of view, but also just so delectable to beef!

Twice over the past months I have seen prominent academics in elite American universities, both of whom are broadly committed to progressive politics, proclaiming their distaste for country music. Allow me to anonymize my account of what they said, by consulting my thesaurus and offering near-synonymous adjectives to replace their own. One of them described country music as “ignorant”, the other as “simplistic and unduly plaintive”.

Are these characterizations fair? I think we can agree that these same people would never dream of characterizing blues music as “ignorant” or as “simplistic and unduly plaintive”. So in that light we can ask: is there a sufficient difference between blues and country, such that these terms may be applied to the one genre and not the other?

Not all country music is “country blues”, but much of it is. The country blues scale is typically just the major pentatonic plus a single chromatic note, the “blue” note. In the standard blues scale, we find the same hexatonic twist, except that it is most commonly added to a minor pentatonic rather than a major. That’s it — that’s the basis of the perceived difference between the genres. The country blues scale can move across country, blues, and rock-and-roll without much difficulty, and unsurprisingly we hear it with great regularity in canonical blues musicians themselves, notably Mississippi John Hurt, Sam Chatmon, and many others. Could our unnamed academics possibly come up with any coherent reason why the pentatonic minor plus the blue note is adequately “complex and duly plaintive”, while the major variant is simplistic and unduly so? Let us not hold our breaths.

A good number of the canonical standards in these traditional American musical forms are the same. A while ago I shared two lovely versions of the traditional hymn, “I Am a Pilgrim”, the one by Merle Travis, and the other by John Cephas. The lyrics are the same, while the interpretation is a bit different. Can our unnamed academic tell us why the one is simplistic and unduly plaintive, and the other not?

Or let us consider the great Mose Rager, who gave his name to the “Rager roll” (which I learned in a tutorial from Buster B. Jones). Here now is Mose, likewise performing “I Am a Pilgrim”, in his home in Kentucky. When asked how he learned the thumb-picking technique, Rager replies: “Colored fellers way back played thumb-pick just as far as I can remember.” Now, is Mose Rager’s thumb-picking simplistic and unduly plaintive, while the music of the Black Americans he learned it from is something else? Can we isolate and describe the key musical difference here?

Or let us consider the great, great, (great) Sam Chatmon. Here he is playing “Make Me Down a Pallet on Your Floor”, which still brings tears to my eyes every time I hear it: the simple, pure, Christian essence of American vernacular music, the perfect musical translation of Matthew 25:36, where we are reminded that whatever you have done for the least of your brothers and sisters, you have done for Christ. As for the music, Chatmon himself explains at the beginning that “it’s a blues type, but it ain’t a blues”. He says he learned it when he was only around four years old, before the blues properly speaking existed. What he is singing, plainly, is a country song. If you want some more straightforward blues from him, you can go for “That’s All Right,” but again I suspect you would be hard-pressed to provide a coherent account of how the one song is simplistic and unduly plaintive, while the other is not.

I could just go on and on with more examples, but you probably get the idea. Our academic colleagues were almost certainly not thinking of any strictly musical criteria for their overconfident determination. It’s safe to say they likely had some extramusical sociological considerations in mind, and indeed wrongly supposed that country music is, historically and by definition, a “white” American musical tradition.

We’ll get back to the matter of race in a moment, but first I wanted to share with you just one more “fave”, a recent discovery of mine that has me absolutely riveted. I have mentioned in the past that Merle Travis is my great Maestro, whose thumb-picking has been my primary model and inspiration ever since I started learning guitar during the pandemic.¹ But now I know I am going to be spending a good bit of time in the coming months, at least, with a man named Sam McGee. Here he is along with his brother Kirk playing “Railroad Blues” (the audio is not great, so turn up the volume):

There would be so much to say about this, not least to remark on the incredible musicianship, especially beginning with the imitation of a train in his solo around 1’30’’ (for another ingenious train imitation, as well as a machine gun and even the sound of time itself, see Roy Clark doing his own version of “Folsom Prison Blues”), as well as the whole performative shtick of it, the monkeys “making whoopee”, the fortune teller who “Read my mind / And then she slapped my face” — just such ebullient, delirious, pre-recording-era storytelling!

My first exposure to the McGee Brothers, however, was in the television reportage below, from 1975. Here we have a very different picture of their style and temperament, with none of the raunchy silliness on display in “Railroad Blues”. The first song they perform here tells a simple story of the hardships of the pioneer times, while the second is “Peace in the Valley”, a gospel-blues song originally written for Mahalia Jackson in 1939 (also sung by Elvis on How Great Thou Art, his superb 1967 gospel album).

In the interspersed interviews with the brothers, we discern a deeply traditionalist and conservative sensibility, fear of a changing world, of the sexuality on display on television, but also a general apathy and resignation at the dying of the world they had known. Some of what Kirk says especially, about all the people today who “look different and think different”, comes across as muted fear of immigrants, or perhaps of city-dwellers. I doubt it is an expression of fear of African Americans. If you are a Tennessee country-blues musician, who shares musical standards with Mahalia Jackson, you cannot but know deep in your heart that there’s nothing “new and different” about Black people. You and they have been simmering in the same dank stew of American history all along.

In brief anyone who thinks country music is racist —and clearly this is the thought our unnamed academic friends were hoping to euphemize with their clumsily chosen adjectives— is an ignorant classist. Correlatively, anyone who really knows and loves country music cannot be a racist.

Progressive politicians and their educated supporters used to know this, and consequently were somewhat better at not expressing open contempt for the great mass of Americans who live and breathe in vernacular forms. Even John F. Kennedy, not particularly progressive in my opinion,² understood this. Not unrelatedly, we are able to catch a brief glimpse of JFK himself in a framed photo on a shelf in the McGees’ Tennessee home, twelve years after the assassination in the middle of Gerald Ford’s presidency. We all know full well that in America today the temperamental descendants of the McGee brothers will likely have MAGA flags hanging in place of window curtains.

In other words, the Democrats have really fumbled a ball they once held firmly and confidently…