Country Music Still Sings About Work, Faith and Flag, and It Is No Accident

Here is an experiment you can run in a pickup truck, a kitchen or a dentist's waiting room. Turn on a country station and start a stopwatch. Count the minutes before somebody sings about a paycheck, a church parking lot, a grandfather's hands, a flag on a porch or a dog that deserved better. You will not need a long stopwatch.

Now run the same experiment on the other formats, and notice that the songs there are about other things. Nothing wrong with that. Pop music has its subjects, and so does rap and rock. But here is a fact that fascinates me: in a business that spends billions of dollars trying to find out what people want to hear, one genre keeps coming back, year after year, to the same four ideas. Work. Faith. Family. Country. It is not an accident, and the reason says something about the audience, about the industry and about the country.

Where it comes from

Country music grew from the working people of the American South and Appalachia, and from the Scots-Irish ballad tradition, the church hymns of rural congregations, the blues of Black and white musicians who worked side by side, and the songs sung in fields, mills and mining camps. It began to reach a national audience through radio and recordings in the 1920s. The Grand Ole Opry, the Nashville radio show, started on WSM in 1925 as the WSM Barn Dance, and it became the great institution of the genre.

The early songs set the template. The Carter Family, who recorded in the late 1920s, sang about home, loss and the hereafter. Hank Williams, who died in 1953 at the age of twenty-nine, wrote songs of heartbreak and sin that were also deeply shaped by gospel music, and he is remembered as much for the hymn-like ones as for the barroom ones. The sinner and the church were not enemies in a country song. They were two ends of the same long conversation.

And work was always there. A coal miner, a cotton picker, a truck driver, a farmer behind on his note: these were the characters. "Sixteen Tons," written by Merle Travis in 1946 and turned into a huge hit by Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1955, is a song about a miner who owes his soul to the company store. Loretta Lynn's "Coal Miner's Daughter," released in 1970, turned a childhood in Kentucky into a national anthem of dignity in poverty. I will not quote lyrics, but you can look them up, and I recommend it.

The argument

Let me state the thesis plainly, and number it.

1. Genres reflect their audiences. A music business is a market, and a market that survives for a century is one that serves its customers. Country has survived because it sings about what its listeners live.
2. The audience lives work, faith, family and country. A very large share of country listeners live in places where the economy is built on physical work and the community is organised around church, school and family. A song about a Friday-night paycheck is not an abstraction there. It is a Thursday.
3. So the songs celebrate those things, sincerely. Not ironically, not at arm's length. The genre's pride is that it does not condescend to its audience.
4. That sincerity is rare, and the market rewards it. Many entertainment forms are shy of earnest feeling. Country is not. When a performer in another genre sings about flag and family, the audience may wonder if he means it. In country, they assume he does.
5. And the sincerity can survive disagreement. Plenty of country songs complain, grumble and criticise. The genre is no choir. But it grumbles from inside the family.

That is why I say it is no accident. A genre that goes on selling the same values for a hundred years is not a coincidence. It is a conversation between a people and the people who sing for them.

Three songs, three eras

I want to mention three songs, and I promise not to quote a word.

"Okie from Muskogee," 1969. Merle Haggard released this song in 1969, in the middle of the Vietnam War and the campus protests, and it became a number one country hit and one of his signature records. It portrayed a small town that held on to old-fashioned values while the culture around it was in an uproar. Haggard's own life was no postcard. He had been in prison, at San Quentin, in the late 1950s, and the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, pardoned him in 1972. That is a story with a moral of its own. The man who sang about a small town's values had been through the worst of the system and come out on the other side, and an audience that knew his history trusted him for it. Haggard himself gave different accounts over the years about how serious the song was meant to be, and I leave that debate to the scholars. What is not in dispute is that audiences took it as a statement, and that the song made its mark.

"God Bless the USA," 1984. Lee Greenwood's song came out in 1984 and has remained one of the best-known patriotic songs in American popular music. It returned to the charts during the Gulf War in 1991 and again after the attacks of September 11, 2001. It is a simple song of gratitude, written in plain words and sung with conviction, and its success is proof that sincerity sells.

The post-September 11 songs. After the attacks of 2001, country artists produced a wave of music responding to the moment. Alan Jackson's song about where people were when the world stopped turning was performed on the Country Music Association awards in November 2001 and was widely heard as a national hymn of grief. Charlie Daniels released a song asserting that a flag was no mere rag. Toby Keith's angry response came out in 2002, and Darryl Worley's song asking whether Americans had forgotten came out in 2003. They differed in tone and in how well they have aged, and not everyone liked them. But they were the genre doing what it always did: answering a national event in the language of ordinary people.

The 2003 case, discussed honestly

Now comes the part where I have to be careful, because there is a free-speech lesson here that cuts both ways, and I want to treat it fairly.

On March 10, 2003, at a concert in London, days before the invasion of Iraq, Natalie Maines, the lead singer of the group then called the Dixie Chicks, told the audience that the band was ashamed that the President of the United States was from Texas, their home state. The remark was reported in the United States and set off a furious reaction. Many country radio stations stopped playing the group's records. Listeners organised boycotts and destroyed CDs in public. Sponsors and promoters were pressured. Some of the response involved threats against the band, which were reported at the time, and which nobody should defend. The band, which had been among the best-selling acts in country music, saw its radio presence collapse. It apologised in part, then stood by its right to say what it had said, and in time returned with an acclaimed album that won major awards.

Here is how I read it. There are two principles in conflict, and you have to hold both.

First, the government did nothing, and that matters. No law was passed. No agency fined anyone. The Dixie Chicks were free to say what they said, and they said it. The First Amendment constrains Congress and the government, and in this case it was not engaged. What happened was a reaction by private citizens, radio programmers and sponsors. A private radio station has the right to decide what to play, and a listener has the right to switch the dial. Free speech includes the freedom to criticise a speaker, and to stop buying his product.

Second, the intensity was a problem. Threats are not speech worth defending, and the idea that a person should lose a livelihood for a political remark made at a concert abroad does not sit well with a country that prizes the right to dissent. It also bore out a point I have made about conservatives and the cancel culture: if we think it is wrong when the other side does it to us, we cannot excuse it when our own side does it to them. I wrote about that in Cancel Culture Has No Judge, No Jury and No Statute of Limitations, and the principle is the same whichever way the pressure runs. A boycott is a legitimate tool. A threat is not. A campaign to ruin a person over one sentence, rather than to answer it, is the thing to avoid.

There is a third angle. The reaction also showed how consolidated the radio business had become, since a few large owners could shape what millions heard. That is a market structure issue, not a government one, and I think it is a fair point for anyone concerned about concentrated power in media. But the lesson for free-speech purists is that the remedy for a speaker you dislike is more speech, and a vote with your wallet, and not a wish that the speaker be ruined.

The Founders' text applies in a particular way here. "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." The clause forbids the government from punishing the singer. It says nothing about whether the audience should be gracious. That is a question of culture, of manners and of the kind of country we want to be, and the answer is not found in the Constitution but in our own habits.

What the staying power says

Why does the genre still sing about these things? I think the answer has four parts.

• Authenticity. The audience can tell a song written by a person who has lived it from a song written by a committee. Country has maintained a strong tradition of songwriters who write from experience.
• Community. Country fans belong to something. The songs are meant to be sung along with, at a bar, in a truck, at a stadium. A shared song builds a shared feeling.
• Continuity. Each generation of country artists borrows from the one before. That is the opposite of the pop world's constant demand for the new, and it gives the music a depth of tradition.
• Respect. The genre treats work as honourable. I wrote about how rarely the rest of popular culture does that in Dirty Jobs and Honest Work, Why Pop Culture Rarely Celebrates the Trades, and country is the exception that proves the rule.

None of this means every country song is pious or patriotic. The genre has more than its share of songs about drinking, cheating, regret and failure. It has artists of every temperament and politics, and it has been changing for a century. But the mainstream, the stuff that most listeners hear most often, goes on celebrating work, faith, family and country, and it does so without embarrassment.

A genre that kept the old furniture

Compare that with what happened elsewhere in popular culture. In From Father Knows Best to the Bumbling Sitcom Dad, What TV Taught About Fathers I traced how television slowly turned the head of the household into a punch line. Country music never made that trade. Its fathers are still the men who work too hard, love too much and say too little, and its mothers are still the people who keep the family upright. It is hard to imagine a country hit built on the idea that dad is an idiot, and the market would punish the attempt.

The same goes for the flag. I told the long story of the Pledge and the arguments around it in The Pledge of Allegiance From 1892 to Under God, and the Fights Along the Way, and the thing I notice is that the fights are mostly in courtrooms and on campuses. In a honky-tonk, nobody is arguing about whether to stand. They are standing, with a drink in the other hand, and singing along. That is a kind of civic education that no curriculum can match, and it is delivered for the price of a ticket.

The steelman, and the answer

The best objection is that I am romanticising. Country music is a commercial product, made in Nashville by professionals, and the heartland imagery may be a marketing strategy as much as a conviction. Many country artists are suburban or wealthy, and the audience is more varied than the stereotype suggests. And the genre's patriotism has sometimes been a way of selling records, as in the wave of songs after 2001, which some found opportunistic.

That is fair, as far as it goes. Any popular art is partly commerce. But the commerce proves the point. A market that rewards a theme for a hundred years is a market that has a real customer. If the sentiments were a marketing trick, the audience would have found it out long ago, because audiences are rarely fooled for a century. The sincerity may be shaped by the market, but the market was shaped by the sincerity first.

For the same reason, the same genre can be a bridge. I mentioned Okie from Muskogee, but I could have mentioned the many country songs of the last decades that sing about neighbours of every kind helping each other after a flood or a storm. The pattern is not partisan, and it is not anti-anybody. It is the music of a people who like where they live.

The case in brief

1. Country music grew from working people's songs, church hymns and ballads, and reached a national audience through radio beginning in the 1920s.
2. The mainstream of the genre still celebrates work, faith, family and country because its audience lives those things, and sincerity is its product.
3. Songs like "Okie from Muskogee" (1969), "God Bless the USA" (1984) and the post-September 11 patriotic songs show the pattern across decades.
4. The 2003 backlash against the Dixie Chicks was a market reaction, not a government one, and a fair reading condemns the threats while defending the right to boycott.
5. The genre's staying power comes from authenticity, community, continuity and respect for honest work.

What you can do: the next time you hear a patriotic song on the radio, look up who wrote it and when, and share what you learn with your family at dinner.