I can’t really believe that I’m the first person to come up with the idea for this song.  You’d think that , with over sixty years of recorded barroom country and honky tonk music under our belts, every extendable metaphor would have been extended to its metaphysical breaking point by now.  I was afraid to check until just now, but an internet search of related terms turns up only (i) an Elvis Costello song I’d never heard called “Town Crier,” also covered by Toad the Wet Sprocket, which song has nothing to do with Merry Olde England, and (ii) this youtube video I can’t listen to because Janet apparently still doesn’t believe me when I tell her that her iPhone screws up my internet connection when she puts it close to the modem/router thing.  Based on what I’ve heard in eleven-microsecond clips, Mr. Tochterman’s song is a fine one, but it ain’t old-timey.

But wait a minute:  Junior Brown hasn’t written a song about a town crier??  Really?  A town crier? 

That’s not possible.  I think he must have but it got mistakenly channeled through me.  Because this is Junior Brown’s song.  I’m giving it to him now.

Long Essay About Something I Didn’t Even Intend to Talk About Until 3:30 Monday Afternoon

I’ve been thinking about how we categorize music and the arguments that ensue over what belongs in those categories.  Actually, how this got started was that I wanted to make this statement:  “Country music is by nature a conservative form.”[1]  But that’s a conclusion without an argument (which is fine if you’re Bill O’Reilly but not if you adhere to the high standards of journalistic debate of this blog.)  So I started wondering what I meant by that.  And I think the conclusion I’m coming to is that the labels we give to music aren’t about the music but about the people who mostly listen to the music.

The history of rock and roll is well documented.  It was born of the blues, codified by Elvis and Chuck Berry, adopted/co-opted by rebellious white kids, and had all its rules thrown out the window by the Beatles.  Blah blah blah blah blah.  Viet Nam and LSD and MLK and more blah blah blah blah blah.  Today there are jillions of sub-categories of “rock,” and there is still a brand of pure “rock and roll,” I suppose—guitar-driven music with a backbeat that apparently can’t be misplaced—but nobody really argues about what can and cannot be included under the umbrella of “rock.”  The category is too big now.  There’s room for ZZ Top, Tom Petty, REM, Patty Smythe, Radiohead and thousands of current bands who are totally off my radar screen.  Limp Bizkit comes to mind.  So does Lemonhead.  I don’t know anything about those bands or what kind of music they play—they’re just names I remember hearing the kids say—but I bet you could get away with calling them rock.  The term “rock” as used by most people now is just a synonym for pop.  Nobody gets mad about who presumes to belong under that umbrella.

But “country music” as a category never acquired the expansiveness that rock did, although what got played on country music radio and got labeled country music changed over time just as “rock” changed over time.  I think there’s a sense that while the music going under the banner of “country” music changed, there was some ineffable core identity of country music that still made it country music, that makes country its own category and not a sub-category under the rock umbrella.  Put another way, while there have been sub-genres of country music—pop-country, honky-tonk, bluegrass[2], countrypolitan, outlaw country, Texas country—I think most people have assumed that the relationship among those sub-genres was still strongly rooted in the “country” part of the equation, that the fruit didn’t fall far from Jimmy Rogers’s tree.  Rock might sell out its patron saints—Elvis, Chuck Berry, Ike Turner, arguably others—but country never would.  Country music would always be identifiable, was the assumption; Ernest Tubb would always be able to hear himself in it.

Which, I suppose, is why a lot of people grouse about contemporary country music calling itself country music.  Show me the path from Hank Williams to Miley Cyrus, they say. [3]  Or at least in my hypothetical people say those things.  I have a whole attic full of straw men like that.[4] 

I don’t know whether that path exists.  It probably does, since all roads are connected one way or another, but if it exists it’s probably going to be the same path that leads from the weathered old Burma Shave sign on the side of the dirt road to the new Super Wal-Mart a half mile outside of town.  That is to say, the path is not going to show you how the steel guitar disappeared at this place and the nasal twang disappeared here and the airbrushed photo got added to the CD cover here.  It’s a journey based on the listeners’ demographics, the move from the country to the city to the suburbs, not on the music or even the people making the music. 

So why is it called country music?  For the same reason that Canada is called Canada:  that’s what the people who live there call it.  Maybe you’re getting it confused with Canadian, Texas.  It’s an honest mistake.  People get them confused all the time.

There’s a lot of arguments to be developed from those observations, not the least of which is that there’s much classism at bottom of much of the sneering at contemporary country music.  It could even be the case that some members of past generations who listened to “real” country music were listening to it for [gasp!] the wrong reasons.  They probably listened to it because it’s what their neighbors listened to, because it’s what they were used to listening to, because it’s what their radio would pick up clearly.  They probably never gave it a second thought-it was probably just part of their lives.  They probably never wondered whether it was sufficiently “authentic.”  It’s probably the same way for people who listen to Miley Cyrus or Billy Ray Cyrus or any of the other Cyra who get played on country radio these days.

That’s all a scattershot way of saying that when you’re talking about music, at least about folk music[5], you’re often talking about a lot more than music.  You’re talking about people and history.

Before I get accused of being all fair and even-handed, I should confess that much of that contemporary country stuff sounds vile to me.  It reeks of corporate cynicism (“Hey, I bet they’d buy this crap if we put a hat on the guy!  No, a bigger hat!  Bigger, dammit!“)  Also, it mostly sounds like a fun party I wasn’t invited to.  So I’m the pimply loser out in the parking lot letting air out of people’s tires.  Nothing new about that. 

But there’s no artistic or aesthetic basis for generally preferring the old stuff to the new stuff, which, let’s be honest, is better produced and better played by better looking people.  And the people who made and listened to the old stuff weren’t better human beings than today’s country music performers or audience.  True, the vision and individuality of the artist is largely missing from contemporary country, but I think it’s wrong to assume that yesterday’s performers were necessarily eaten up with vision and individuality.  Beyond Hank Williams and Merle Haggard, arguably Willie Nelson, there aren’t many country music performers who were true visionaries.  As for individuality, a little bit of that goes a long way with me these days.  (Really?  You have a tattoo?  On your ankle?)

If it sounds like I’m arguing with myself, you’re pretty astute.  I profess to love that old country stuff, a lot of it, anyway.  But, aside from the magnificent instrument that is George Jones’s voice, what is it about that music—the individual performers, I mean—that is arguably better than the very smooth stylings of contemporary country performers?  Why is Loretta Lynn “better” than her little sister, the much more vocally talented Crystal Gayle?  (I know, I know, Crystal Gayle isn’t contemporary any more.  But if she were, she would be, if you know what I mean.) 

Are we fooling ourselves, falling for the old nostalgia trick?  The old “it’s-better-because-it’s-old” trick?[6]

I’m not going to try to answer that now.  I do think there is a case to be made for the artistic worth of country music as a form, that there are particular aspects that make the form itself unique and interesting.  I’ve already broached one of those arguments, which is that country music is a branch of metaphysics.  If John Donne had been born in the American South in the early 20^th century instead of not on an island in the 16^th century, he’d have been Hank Williams (the guy wrote a poem comparing love to a compass.  It covered pretty much every way possible that love is like a compass.)  Also interesting is the role of the grotesque in country music.  Nobody is ever simply sad in a country song; he is always the saddest human being who ever lived at any time in the whole history of the universe.  His tears are so copious that he is literally drowning in them.  He is sadness personified. 

But those are intellectual musings.  I’m more interested in what’s moving about the music and why it’s moving when it’s so ridiculous.  That’s some trick, pulling your leg and your heartstrings simultaneously.  That’s just the lyrical side of the equation, of course, but the lyrics are more important in country music than they are in any other genre of music.  Ask REM.  You won’t be able to make out Michael Stipe’s answer.  So ask Bob Dylan.  Never mind.

None of that is even what I meant to talk about.  I was going to save my contemporary country music musings for an excuse to post a very bad, unintentionally funny song I have.  So I’ve lost that shield now.

I really meant to focus on a different aspect of the country music debate:  Why country music will not progress, will resist all efforts to be made new. 

Recall that my jumping-off point was that I wanted to state that country music is inherently conservative; ergo, there’s very little “new” you can do with it.  That’s an argument based on definition and therefore inherently circular, since all I have to do is say it’s not country music if it doesn’t sound like the old stuff. 

But it’s true, isn’t it? 

There are many musicians out there who are borrowing country idioms and making original music with those idioms.  They are not getting played on country music radio, and their music is not, for the most part, being referred to as country music but instead as “Americana.”[7]  Most of the current music I listen to these days falls under that category, at least according to Wikipedia.  But Americana as a label is essentially reactionary, a place for people who aren’t welcome anywhere else, a place for people with zithers.  The label is more helpful in determining what the musicians are not than in determining what they are.  In short, the label is an implicit declaration of shared rejection of modern music or the modern music business as opposed to an indication of shared musical heritage.  (What do Neil Young and Ricky Skaggs have in common?  They’re not Miley Cyrus—that’s what!  And both have had Emmylou Harris harmonize on their songs.  Not that that’s any more distinguishing than having sung a duet with Willie Nelson.)

Many of the Americana artists are making interesting and fine music, but no one, I think, can claim to have changed the dialect of the tribe the way Hank Williams or George Jones did.  No one has re-invented country music the way the Beatles re-invented rock or Miles Davis and John Coltrane re-invented jazz[8] or the way Dylan re-invented everything.  After those guys came along, you couldn’t do it the old way anymore.  They changed their fields from within those fields and stayed there and made everybody else follow.  That hasn’t happened in country.  Country is still Hank, Lefty and Merle, and if it’s not that, it’s not country.  (Merle and the still under-appreciated Buck Owens being the only ones to significantly expand the definition of country music and re-make it to some extent in their own images.) 

I’m still not sure what the conclusion is.  Probably that country music is simply a done deal.  There are “traditionalists” out there still playing in the old style, sometimes adding an ironic overcoat to it-the DeRailers, Wayne the Train Hancock, and Dwight Yoakum are a few.  Dwight Yoakum’s probably the one who has come closest to walking the fine line between respect for the tradition and modernizing the tradition, keeping the tradition somehow fresh and relevant without resorting to winking, but it’s well short of revolutionary.  Wayne the Train has a cool sound, but staying that close to the original results in mere novelty.  Same with the Derailers, the Old 97’s and the other throwback acts.  They need the wink for it to work.  It’s already been done; we don’t need it done again.  What else you got?

The problem is that the musical form was too simple to withstand revolutionizing and the lyrical confines too confining.  What do you get when you write a country song with non-country lyrics?  You get a parody, a joke song.  You get Nutcracker Buck.  What do you get when you add a minor seventh chord to a country song?  Well, it could be the Eagles or it could be Wilco or it could be Robert Cray, but it’s not country.  Hank never used a minor seventh chord.

So back to country music radio.  That’s what country music is now.  Just because you can’t hear Hank in the latest hit by Trevor Dylan Cody and the Well-Developed Biceps Boys Band doesn’t mean he’s not there.  Hank’s grandkids can hear him.[9]

You know who else used minor seventh chords?  Charlie Rich!  I love this song (but it’s not country):

Dedication.  “The Town Crier” is for Jenny Huth, the only Shakespearean honky tonk scholar I know.

[1] I don’t mean conservative in a political sense, Toby Keith and Dixie Chicks feud notwithstanding.  I mean in an aesthetic sense-i.e., the old-fashioned meaning of the word “conservative” as in “resistant to change.”  But I think that’s understood by the rest of what I say above.

[2] You’ll get plenty of argument about that.  Many would hold that bluegrass is sui generis, having sprung full-bodied from the mind of Bill Monroe, and that bluegrass has no special link to the broader category of country music.  Bluegrass is about as insular as a form can get.  That world still hasn’t resolved the rift from when Flatt & Scruggs added a banjo to the mix of guitar, fiddle and mandolin.  I will not be discussing bluegrass in this blog or elsewhere.  Those people are crazy.

[3] And I’m remembering now being seven years old and seeing a very drunk Charlie Rich take out his cigarette lighter and set fire to the envelope that revealed John Denver as the winner of the 1975 CMA Entertainer of the Year award.  Charlie Rich deemed John Denver not country enough.  Olivia Newton-John was a winner the year before.  Who’s more country, do you think:  John Denver or Miley Cyrus?  Or Olivia Newton-John?  Or Charlie Rich, whose biggest hits have more Ray Conniff than Hank or Ernest in them.

[4] Who are these “people” who are making these “assumptions” and thinking all these things I’m attributing to them?  Well, me, I guess.  And people on internet chatboards I sometimes read.

[5] Folk in the broad sense of “what folks listen to.”  As opposed to music that can be studied and appreciated on a theoretical or philosophical basis-art music and jazz, e.g..

[6] Not that there’s anything wrong with that either. But I can follow only so many digressions at a time.

[7] “Progressive country” and the godawful “No Depression” are other terms, but I’m not hearing them used much anymore.  “Alt-country” and “roots music” are still commonly used.

[8] How do I know so much about jazz?  I owned Kind of Blue when I was in grad school and would put it on at parties sometimes.  Aside from the authority that gives me, I’m relying on received wisdom in making the above pronouncement.

[9] Well, I think I handily won that debate with myself.  This is the longest thing I’ve written here yet.  This blog wasn’t even supposed to be a music blog.  It was supposed to be a blog about why a guy would spend three hours writing nearly 3,000 words into the vacuum of the internet.  Maybe we’ll get to that yet.