"How I Fell in Love With Country Music" [UK Guardian]

How I fell in love with country music | Martin Farrer

My name is Martin and I love country music. There you go, I’ve said it. It’s not always an easy thing to do. When the subject comes up, I get a funny sort of look. Once you spring the c-word on people, you can see they’re thinking: “****, this bloke’s weird. Does he dress up like a cowboy at home and do those funny dances?”

Sometimes people like to crack a joke about country and I’ve heard most of them. There’s the one that goes: “Do you like country? Or just western?” And then there’s: “Yeeeeehaaaaa!” People think that one’s pretty hilarious.​

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a lot of what we call country music is irredeemably naff – chugging pop-rock with lyrics about beer and trucks sung by blokes with hats like Garth Brooks and Jason Aldean. But I also hate the joke because it obscures everything that I love about country. There’s no rollicking good-time tunes, no heartbreak, no great stories, no downhome charm and definitely no joyous fiddle or pedal steel to set your spirits free.

The country I love is what it was before it was even called country music. It was first known as hillbilly or mountain music, or just traditional music, born of its roots in Appalachia where families would sit around taking turns in ensemble singing and playing. I can’t say my life changed the first time I saw the Duelling Banjos scene in Deliverance, but it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and it occurred to me that there must be more to that sort of music than the Benny Hill theme tune.

At that point, growing up in Tyneside in the 1970s, I wasn’t exposed to any country music, let alone banjos. At school you were either a heavy metal fan or a punk or mod. I was a metallist and that meant AC/DC, Status Quo, Led Zep, Whitesnake. Highway to Hell is not an obvious road to Appalachia but once my rock tastes moved to Bob Dylan, The Band and early 70s Stones I’d found my gateway drug: country rock.

The moment of my full conversion came when the NME, at its indy and hip-hop loving height, released a country compilation called The Tape With No Name. It featured people I’d heard of like Johnny Cash, but the opening track, Guitar Town by Steve Earle, really was a life-changer. I loved the combination of its driving riff and country twang, and his outlaw drawl. Even just the way the lyrics ticked off the stops along the highway from Tennessee to San Antone was thrilling and it promised to deliver America’s limitless possibilities for excitement and renewal. It was rock’n’roll but not necessarily as I’d known it and seemed to distill everything I liked about music.

The rest of the cassette was superb too and introduced me to artists then known as new country such as Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, Highway 101 and Dwight Yoakam, the tape’s enigmatic cover star. I was captivated by it. They rocked but they also had swing, great melodies, harmonies and, yes, fiddles, pedal steel and banjos. It also had great story songs. Paradise by John Prine, for example, which charts the impact of strip mining in Kentucky, is the closing track and is still as powerful and resonant today as it was when he wrote it decades ago. No one could ever accuse country of being pretentious, a trait I find endearing.

The Tape With No Name spawned a deep dive into the back catalogue and turned up the joy of George Jones, Merle Haggard, Gram Parsons, Guy Clark, and many more, plus a flowering of new bands such as Uncle Tupelo, The Jayhawks and Whiskeytown that would be become known as Americana. Female artists really stood out though. To my ears there’s nothing more beautiful than Emmylou Harris’s voice but others such as Lucinda Williams – a sort of female Steve Earle – Iris DeMent and the peerless, contemporary champion of traditional music, Gillian Welch, all showcase vocals in a way rock simply can never do.

Over the years I’ve thought a lot about why I like country music so much. It occurred to me that plenty of people have seen Deliverance, but maybe never felt the same way as I did about that banjo sound. Why, I wondered? The answer, I think, is that country music is in my blood. The first settlers in Appalachia were from the Scottish lowlands and northern England’s rough hill country, which is more or less where my family is from too. Country music is their music and their stories about lost love, hard times and lighting up the town have remained eternal. Country has a great sense of history so it’s easy to feel this sense of affinity and belonging. I do actually like “all sorts” of music, but there’s only one type that I was really born to love. Yeeeeehaaaaa.​

 

In 2017, it seems odd that someone still has to defend their love of Country Music...
“real” Country Music, that is...

Interestingly, I wonder what the author, a “metalist” who enjoyed AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Status Quo, and Whitesnake, would have said in the mid Seventies if he was asked what HE thought of Country Music...
He probably would have laughed and sneered.

 

I think plenty of people have had the same kind of conversion to country, especially Brits like me who were not exposed to country in the 60s and 70s as a result of the preponderance of all the different waves of pop and rock from the 60s onwards. Even Johnny Cash was not really highly regarded by UK musos. Jim Reeves had some hits, but this was really music for sentimental oldies and the British version of it (e.g. Englebert Humperdink) was dire. Viewed from Britain, country had an old-fashioned image and connotations with reactionary politics which didn't sit well with "progressive" music.

This began to change for with the emergence of country rock, particularly represented by the Byrds - Sweetheart Of The Rodeo started to make country a bit hip. The Christian Life was quite surprising, but it sounded good! Then, coming out of that, Gram Parsons & Emmylou were interesting, but the real breakthrough for me was Elvis Costello's Almost Blue. That made me go and explore some of the sources - Gram, obviously, but also George Jones, Leon Payne, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Clyne etc. Some of the discoveries were slightly comic (the caricatured songs of misery, which are actually great fun), but there are such gems of musicianship and songwriting that it is a delight to get into the world of country without having to put on a cowboy hat and go to a country festival in a football stadium headed up by Kenny Rogers.

Since then I've been to Nashville and the Opry and almost convinced my wife that it's pretty good. A lot of the singers are just amazing, especially George Jones and Patsy Clyne, the musicianship fantastic (here I would cite Chet Atkins, but there are plenty of others) and there are lots of excellent songwriters. There's Hank Williams from the old days and let's not forget the Louvin Brothers, and there's Gillian Welch, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Steve Earle from modern times just to name a few.

I'm delighted to have been through that conversion process.

 

I've got that NME 'Tape With No Name'. I liked it then, and still like it now.
The series as a whole was excellent. But as much as I liked the country one, I vastly preferred the Northern Soul one, and most of all the Billie Holiday Verve compilation. Both of those led to much more listening.

As for listening to country in the UK in the 70s - it was everywhere. By which I mean Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, Jim Reeves, Kenny Rogers. Songs like DIVORCE and Coward of the County, they were loved by the British working class, in my experience.
They were about real life, and rang true to people.
It wasn't uncommon to find Jamaicans that loved that stuff either!

 

When someone says they love country music, I assume they are talking about the country music played on country radio or presented at big country music concerts. Most of the music described so far in this thread is either old time country music, Hank, George, Patsy, or "Americana" music.

Just the other day I watched the most recent Americana Music Festival show on TV and it was filled with many of my favorites like John Prine, Drive-By Truckers, Rhiannon Giddens, the Lumineers, Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires. I certainly consider Gillian, Towns, Steve Earle and other to be Americana and not country. As far as I'm concerned, one of the earliest Americana bands was "The Band".

For me, most of the best music being made now is from Nashville, but it's not the mainstream country variety.