When I was a kid I loved country music. Johnny Cash had his TV show, everybody watched it back in the day of 3 network channels plus the oddball local channel with the Star Trek reruns. Somehow country music and I drifted apart, but now thanks to Youtube you can find a whole lot of wonderful things. Here's a classic from the Carter Family, very simple production but still powerful.
But I find myself liking all kinds of country stuff ... more below the Squiggle of Doom.
I suppose it's horribly corny now, but I really like Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell. Switching back in time a bit, a rediscovered classic was My Baby's Gone by the Louvin Brothers, which was featured on the Crazy Heart soundtrack. These two were quite a pair, they were both devout Baptists who designed their own uniquely hellish cover for their album Satan is Real. Here's what the Wiki has to say about them.
Their songs were heavily influenced by their Baptist faith and warned against sin. Ira Louvin was notorious for his drinking, womanizing, and short temper. He was married four times; his third wife Faye shot him four times in the chest and twice in the hand after he allegedly beat her. Although seriously injured, he survived. When performing and drinking, Ira would sometimes become angry enough on stage to smash his mandolin; otherwise his style was heavily influenced by Bill Monroe.
As of 1963, Charlie was making enough money that he was able to start a solo career, and Ira also went on his own.
Ira died on June 20, 1965 at the age of 41. He and his fourth wife, Anne Young, were on the way home from a performance in Kansas City when they came to a section of construction on Highway 70 outside of Williamsburg, Missouri where traffic had been reduced down to one lane. A drunken driver struck their car head-on, and both Ira and Anne were killed instantly. At the time, a warrant for Ira's arrest had been issued on a DUI charge.
Another gospel-based group were the Statler brothers (only two brothers however, none of them named "Statler") whose classic "Flowers on the Wall" was revived somewhat by being featured in
Pulp Fiction. This song has a wonderful harmony part, including great bass vocals:
One song that was very popular when I was a kid was I'm Not Lisa, sung by Jessi Colter. I suppose it's impossibly sentimental today, but it still sounds good to me.
Another whole area of country music is the Bakersfield sound, which combined country with a lot of the elements of Mexican-American music, exemplied by this splendid piece sung in 1988 by Dwight Yoakum and the late great Buck Owens:
Of course these are just a few songs of a huge amount of music -- can't compress this huge topic into one or even a 1000 diaries. I don't have a big political point here to make. If there is one, it's that we progressives are just as much the heirs of the le patrimoine culturel, as the French would say, as are our opponents, and that includes country music.
But beyond that, I'd say just like the music you like, and dance whenever you can. Life's too short to do otherwise.
Pax.