What’s Behind Country Music’s Powerful Enduring Appeal
When you consider that country music is derived from a people who were fiercely independent, clan-like, and distrustful of authority, you begin to understand the genre at its core.
Country music has evolved in America over the decades since its commercial inception in the 1920s, and its modern forms are many and varied. However, certain consistent aspects remain that make country unique in popular music.
First, a clear message is paramount in country music, whether a song tells a story, makes a statement, or both. The instrumental arrangements are relatively uncomplicated, placing the vocals out front and on top of the recording. The lyrics take a back seat in rock and are often barely discernible. For example, despite its status as a classic rock staple, few have likely clearly heard or understood the lyrics to “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger’s vocal stylings ill-afford a ready appreciation for references to “Gold Coast slave ships” and “skydog slavers” that are lost in the mix.
Whereas every syllable of the lyrics is present and accounted for in a country song. The lyrics are meant to be heard and understood, while the music, no matter how good it is, remains a secondary feature and more often a mere platform for the singer’s message. It is usually delivered with an attitude to help bring that central message home.
Country music frequently features a voice that is assured and independent, if not boastful, bold, and cocky, depending on the theme or subject of the song. Even when softly sung, there’s an assertive and resilient air to the music, tempered with tones of fealty, sentimentality, and tender appreciation for matters of the heart and aesthetics. Whether celebratory or contemplative, the delivered message is forthright, with little doubt or hesitation.
Much of country music’s emotional undercurrents are best understood in the context of folk music. Folk music was brought to American shores by a particular group of immigrants who greatly influenced this genre from its earliest beginnings. Folk music was the bedrock of country music, dating back to colonial times, drawing its powerful authenticity from its plain-spoken nature.
Much of this early folk arrived with a wave of immigrants commonly referred to as Scots-Irish. They were a people who bore the scars of British oppression on two sequential fronts, the first in the Scottish Lowlands that border northern England, and later in Ulster, Northern Ireland. After being forced out of both locales, their bitter retreat continued across the Atlantic.
Once again ostracized upon their arrival, they initially populated Colonial America’s mountainous hinterlands of Appalachia beginning in the early 1700s. While occupying its lowest social order, with time, the Scots-Irish eventually spread through all the nation’s regions and demographic layers. They brought a cultural worldview that gave folk and later country music its rebel warrior, hell-raiser vibe, balanced with blind allegiance to family and faith, and a quick disdain for authority, especially that of the government.
This American underclass was a breed that, to this day, displays a ready willingness to fight to the death to protect a perceived way of life, no matter how nasty, brutish, and otherwise it may be. Consequently, they have been America’s staunchest patriots and have fought most of its wars since the American Revolution. Theirs is a human alchemy of rugged individualism, tribalism, and a rare mix of thoughtful sentimentality and cavalier gruffness in the Scots-Irish: thick and thin-skinned all at the same time.
The influence of the Scots-Irish is the main reason why country music remains relatively uncomplicated, message-driven, and attitudinal. That influence also helps to explain the most common themes behind the messages country music still delivers.
In Country Music, the Message Is the Medium
The most common message coursing through country music centers on the artist’s values and is delivered referentially: a sentiment built around repeating references to compelling cultural icons. Many country music artists seem to be uttering the same lyrical talking points, forever reminding the listener of their simple recipe for the “good life”. These ingredients invariably entail an earnest reverence for a way of life marked by hard work, hard play, family, faith, the great outdoors, and the like.
Country music is also marked by a consistent undercurrent of yearning, seemingly born from a fear of losing that which is venerated as grounding in the face of constant societal change. When you consider that this music’s cultural source is derived from a people who were fiercely independent, clan-like, and distrustful of authority, you start to understand the genre at its core.
Much of country music’s lyrics remind listeners what the singer not only enjoys most in life but also what they believe in and value. These comforting references to a perceived traditional life based in the American heartland are cultural allusions to the satisfaction that comes from old trucks, trusty guitars, smokey honky-tonks, and Sundays spent at church or the old fishing hole.
So why do these themes resonate with country music fans today, such that any song reflecting them is awarded a listener’s hearty amen and a spot on the charts? While there’s a definite formulaic quality apparent in much of this music, it’s clear that there is something more at play than just a winning approach to songcraft. Much is explained when one considers the advent of this musical genre and the moment in America when it first began to enjoy widespread appeal.
Country music was born out of a sense of longing and nostalgia. From its commercial infancy in the 1920s, it played on the emotions of those who longed for better, simpler times, the mythical agrarian past of pre-industrial America, whether it ever truly existed or not. (Stanley)
America had been transitioning from its beginnings as a nation of farmers ever since the Industrial Revolution gained speed in the late 1800s. The pace quickened after World War I, with the rise of modern consumerism and mass production. For an ever-growing number of citizens, their economic future was no longer to be found on the farm; instead, they lay in the retail and manufacturing jobs of the growing cities and towns. (“The Rub”) This abrupt shift left an entire generation keen to hear the soothing familiarity of traditional music from their rural childhood.
During this tumultuous decade of the 1920s, that “ol’ time music” – the rural folk tunes handed down like a family Bible from generation to generation – was now being unearthed and recorded with new technology for the first time by the likes of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. The records of these early Country superstars found a ready audience in the rural parts and in the great numbers of disassociated souls who had migrated off the farm to more urban settings. (PBS Documentary “Country Music”; Episode One)
It wasn’t just nostalgia that drove the appeal of this traditional rural music. These early recordings of rural songs stood in sharp contrast with the jarring effects of a suddenly emerging world that was evolving with frightening speed that many in this diaspora could barely understand. These economic refugees needed an aural salve to offset the effects of the Jazz Age, which had served to destabilize and call into question nearly every aspect of rural American existence.
The aftermath of the horrors of World War I set the stage for doubting the very bedrock of the past. What followed was a host of cultural tectonics: rampant consumerism, easy credit, gambling on the stock exchange, the evolving role of women, labor unrest, inventions that defied belief, and the ascension of faith in science over religion. The grand experiment of Prohibition was also causing a surge in crime in cities, and Freud’s teachings revealed mysterious forces at play in our shared psyche. All of this vast social change, accompanied by the incessant blare and drive of a wildly popular new music called jazz, served to shake the very moorings that had once grounded much of society.
Early Country music fans in the 1920s led a cultural backlash of reminiscence and rebellion against all the perils of change. Since then, the genre has stood as a bulwark against the perceived ills of societal advancement and progress. The nascent American recording industry was initially surprised that there was any market at all for this “hillbilly” music outside the rural South as jazz had quickly become the most popular form of recorded music by the late 1920s. Jazz, however, would begin to reach its apex only a few years later, and while it stayed on top through the 1940s, country music was never far behind. Unlike jazz and rock, country music has never receded commercially; it is more prevalent than ever.
America’s Constant Revolutions
If the Industrial Revolution’s shift of Americans from farms to cities boosted country music’s initial popularity in the early part of the century, a more recent cultural-economic revolution sent it even higher up the charts for mainstream audiences.
Beginning in the 1980s and continuing for the next four decades, the US economic shift from manufacturing to service-based industries, especially the rise of the dot.com universe, struck another stinging blow to the many Americans who lacked the skills or inclination to make the transition. Good-paying blue-collar jobs were lost to technological advances, global outsourcing, industry consolidation, and mergers.
Once again, millions of middle Americans felt passed over, left behind, and their values ignored in the rush towards a global economy and the World Wide Web. Country music seems to have gained popularity in every media market, rural or not, over the last half-century because it’s always been the song for the displaced American. It’s no coincidence that with this latest economic upheaval, by 1990, country music was experiencing a commercial resurgence with super acts like Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, and Toby Keith filling sports arenas like never before. So too began in earnest the tendency for songs of this genre to make repeated references to a certain coveted way of life.
Such is the enduring popularity of country music. Country remains the choice for so many, despite the changing times, and because the times are constantly changing. It may have begun as a plaintive response to the shocking newness of all that had crept into American life after the searing events of a world war, but it never stopped being a cry over the din of progress: a clarion call for the world to slow down, straighten up and be comfortably familiar again.
Country music is still and probably always will be where one goes to find a message that resonates with those wishing to cast a spell that freezes the world in an amber of song. It’s the spot on the dial where the “God and guns” folks are doing much of their clinging. These anthems to the regular folks and their trappings will keep repeating, as if somehow to drive the pillars of the common life deep into the bedrock and keep intact the simple sacred things of the everyday that seem most at risk of slipping away. They serve as a musical mantra repeated like an incantation meant for some desired effect upon the listener, like the Ghost-Dance of the 19th-century Sioux and other tribes hoping to call forth a return to bygone times before their land and ways were taken from them. (Mooney)
Nothing lasts forever, and the only constant is change. Yet a whole swath of Americans continues to celebrate the familiar and comfortable through song in a quixotic effort to stem the tidal waves of cultural evolution. They may seem sad or misguided to some, but they’ve built a powerful musical tradition in the process of holding on for dear life to all they hold dear. Because change is inevitable and constant, country music’s call to slow its pace is never out of fashion and always welcomed by like-minded souls.
Works Cited
Baker, Dean, and Buffie Nicolas. “The Decline of Blue-Collar Jobs, In Graphs“. Center for Economic and Policy Research (cepr.net). February 2017.
Burns, Kevin. Country Music. PBS. September 2019
Country Music Association. “Country Music Continues to Grow“. 2018.
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford University Press. 1989
Harris, Katelynn. “Forty Years of Falling Manufacturing Employment“. US Bureau of Labor Statistics; Division of Information and Marketing Services. November 2020.
Jennings, Peter, and Brewster, Todd. The Century. Doubleday. November 1998.
Stanley, Bob. Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop Music: A History. Simon & Schuster. January 2022
Tabler, Dave. “Seven Generations of Stubbornness“. Appalachian History.net. 16 October 2007
Webb, James. Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. Broadway Books. October 2004.