Why I Love Country

I love country.

There, I’ve outed myself and revealed a secret guilty pleasure.  My country is not the achingly cool alt-country of Wilco but the Stetson and sequins world of Dolly, Johnny and Merle. I’ve always been partial to the camp and nothing matches country for homoerotic flamboyance, with the added bonus of an unbelievably wonderful canon of great songs. If morris men and folk records the British working class experience then that a bloke in a ten gallon hat with a 70s porn ‘tache singing about honky tonks represents the blue collar experience across the pond…. oh, and a woman in a floaty dress and huge beehive suggesting you ‘Stand By Your Man’, even if he is a cheating lowlife.

I’m a 70s child and on our three channels a series of exotic women wafted through those awful ‘Summertime Special’ type programmes singing of experiences and a world I had no clue about.  But something was sparked in me so when I started buying records, country was definitely in the mix.

Dolly Parton is always a great starting point because she is: a) as camp as tits, b) the product of grinding rural poverty she writes so beautifully about, c) one of the greatest songwriters ever. Like all the great country acts she is as her best as a storyteller; most of us have experienced the insecurity at the heart of ‘Jolene’, and many of us have known the poverty recalled in the kitsch ‘Coat of Many Colours’. She is also queen of that other country staple: the big ballad. I’d urge you to check out on YouTube her version of the almighty ‘I Will Always Love You’ that she sings to Porter Waggoner, who was the mentor she ditched when she hit the big time. It is a moment of sheer poetry as she sings to her first great love the song written as an apology because she knew she’d stiffed him and his career.  It is almost unbearably tender.

The undisputed king of country storytelling (and bad plastic surgery) is Kenny Rogers.  I must have heard ’Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town’ a thousand times, yet this simple tale of a slattern betraying a crippled Vietnam vet never fails to move me.  Sex, betrayal and bit of politics…bliss. ‘Coward of the County’ is equally good. And there is nothing to stir the blood like the opening bars of ‘Islands in The Stream’ as Kenny opens proceedings before Dolly joins in.  It is not a karaoke classic for no reason.

I bought a ‘Best of Country’ CD for the car to begin indoctrinating my seven year old and as we drove along ‘Witcha Lineman’ came on.  Another song I have heard countless times, but yet again I was mesmerised by Jimmy Webb’s perfect song writing and Glen Campbell’s equally sublime reading of the song.

Country is often seen as terribly right wing and there is Republican nonsense like Toby Keith’s ‘Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American)’. Then there are outlaws like Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, Willie Nelson at Farm Aid, Jeannie C. Riley’s ‘Harper Valley PTA’ , or pretty much anything Steve Earle has recorded. But for a northern working class lad it is the chronicling of blue collar life by the likes of Merle Haggard that resonate;  Dylan might be a poet but his middle class ramblings don’t speak of the real world.  Check out Merle’s ‘The Bottle Let Me Down’ for reality to the max seen through the bottom of a beer glass, or the quintessential ‘Working Man Blues’.

In the late 80s I worked in Record and Tape Exchange in London where the ‘too kool for skool staff’ made the crew in High Fidelity look like the smirking morons in the Disney Shop.  But every day without fail we’d shove on a country classic and usually it was Randy Travis’ ‘Storms of Life’. Maybe it was his rich baritone that could loosen your fillings, the superlative song writing or just the sheer honesty of the songs –  ‘On the Other Hand’ is told from the perspective of a man considering cheating to mask his pain, the flipside ‘Reason Why I Cheat’ is where he does – that speared through the fug of cynicism hanging over the counter.  If you want to start exploring county then ‘Storms of Life’ is as good a place to start as any.

Like all genres, country has the good, bad or indifferent, but at its best it is unbeatable because the classics are so familiar: a couple of notes in and you know it is ‘Ring of Fire’, and every day ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’ is being played on a radio station somewhere in the UK. Familiarity sometimes breeds contempt, but in the case of the country classics it is a living testament to the enduring magic of gifted songwriters, singers, Stetsons and sequins.

Paul Clarke, @PaulLeedsConf