I don’t like country music. The yodeling vocals, the whining guitars, the relentlessly predictable lyrics about faithless babes, abusive bubbas, pickup trucks, disreputable nightspots in the middle of nowhere … An hour of this, and a visitor from another planet would marvel that everything south of the Mason-Dixon line had not long since slid off into the Gulf of Mexico, crushed into slurry under the weight of all that drama and all those tears.
“Wait just a gosh-darned minute!” I hear someone shouting from the back row. “Yes, a lot of country music is like that, but it’s not all the same. You’re being unfair.”
As a matter of fact, you are absolutely correct, ma’am. I am being grossly unfair. Although the tropes that I’ve mentioned are common enough to have birthed the stereotype of the cowboy-hatted men and big-haired women that make up such a large part of the country music image, they are by no means the whole story. Isn’t it possible to loathe Porter Wagoner but love Willie Nelson? What do Jerry Jeff Walker and the Dixie Chicks really have in common except their Texas origins? Is Patsy Cline “country”? Is Kenny Rogers? Celine Dion has that breast-beating, sobbing delivery down to a science, but would anybody really put her on the same shelf as Tammy Wynette? Why is “Blue Bayou” a rock-n-roll ballad for Roy Orbison, a pop song when Linda Ronstadt sings it, but country when Martina McBride takes it on?
Elaine de Kooning once recalled a party where she and another painter, Joan Mitchell, were asked, “What do you WOMEN artists think … ?” Mitchell interrupted, “Elaine, let’s get the hell out of here.” Mitchell, de Kooning, and other female artists of their generation suffered mightily under that characterization by gender, which made it so easy for the male-dominated world of critics and collectors to dismiss them en masse, classifying them as nothing but muses or bedmates of the “real” artists, which is to say, of course, the men. Labels. Categories. Fences made of words.
In a previous life I lived in Dallas, Texas, where there was for some years a Tower Records, where I could drop in and pick up a handful of CDs a couple of times a month. The store was carefully organized by genre: Country, World Music, Jazz, Pop/Rock, Classical (in the basement), Soundtracks, Children’s Music, and so on.
Even a casual perusal of the arrangement, however, betrayed serious shortcomings.
Take, for instance, the classic 1964 album Getz/Gilberto, with Philly native Stan Getz, Brazilian bossanova greats Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim, and vocals in both Portuguese and English by Gilberto’s German/Brazilian wife Astrud. Where did this music belong? Was this “Jazz”? Getz was, after all, a well-known tenor sax player in the New York jazz scene, and the album was recorded on Verve, a jazz-oriented label, in that city. Or was it “World Music”, as Gilberto and Jobim were already becoming legends in Brazil? Or maybe it was “Latin”, a category that embraced everything from mariachi to Andean flutes to Italian pop songs recorded in Madrid? All of the above? None?
According to music licensing service ASCAP, the most-recorded song in the history of copyrighted music is the aria “Summertime”, which appears a couple of times in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. ASCAP lists more than 25,000 different recordings of “Summertime”, by artists ranging from Billie Holiday and Sam Cooke to Janis Joplin and The Fun Boy Three. Operatic aria? Jazz standard? Pop classic? What difference, really, does it make?
Here’s another one for you: The first opera ever written by and about Americans was Porgy and Bess, with music by Jewish New Yorker George Gershwin and text by his brother Ira and poet DuBose Heyward. The work deals with love and death in Catfish Row, a dockside tenement in South Carolina; the characters are the children and grandchildren of slaves, and the style of the music is drawn from black worksongs, gospel, and other mostly African-American music forms. Critics for decades have wrestled with finding a convenient niche for this work: do we lump it in with The Barber of Seville and Wagner’s Ring Cycle, or do we call it jazz and stick it on the shelf between Ella Fitzgerald and Herbie Hancock? Is the music black, white, New York, South Carolina, jazz, pop, classical, lowbrow, highbrow … where the hell does it go?
Categories are the darlings of marketers, but the bane of creators. Nobel laureate Doris Lessing‘s five-volume Canopus in Argos: Archives is a vast and detailed analysis of a series of different social structures on several different planets, viewed over a span of millennia – nothing at all like her intimate, semi-autobiographical novels about life in mid-twentieth-century South Africa. Neither fish nor fowl, Lessing is impossible to place in any one category, but equally impossible to ignore. Charles Dodgson, better known to us as Lewis Carroll, the author of the immortal Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, was also the author of an comic poetry epic, a textbook on an abstruse branch of mathematical logic, and of a satire of Victorian English society disguised as a story about fairies. Is he a children’s book author, a poet, a mathematician, or a social commentator? Where do we put him, for crying out loud?
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Let’s go back to the statement I began this essay with: “I don’t like country music.”
What I’m really saying is that because I don’t like certain music or musicians that happen to be classified within a certain (completely arbitrary) category, I can justify throwing out everybody else who might happen to end up in that same category without bothering to listen to them first. Since I don’t care for Travis Tritt, I can walk past that entire section of the record store without so much as glancing at what else is being offered. It’s like staying away from New York City because you once had a bad meal at a Greek restaurant in the East Village.
We like organizing things, sorting everything – and everybody – into structures that allow us to rely on generalizations to determine our attitudes and our behavior, without requiring us to examine the component parts on their own individual merits. “Country”, “Jazz”, “Classical”, “Grunge”, “Rap” … With a single word we can accept or dismiss vast swathes of creative effort. No muss, no fuss, no need to invest a lot of time listening to anything unfamiliar.
Why not take this a step further, and add a few more labels to our shelves: “Abstract”, “Impressionist”, “Minimalist”, “Pop”? Or how about “Mystery”, “Poetry”, “Sci-fi”, “Thriller”? Or maybe still a few more: “Liberal”, “Trumpster”, “Intellectual”, “Evangelical”? Neat little drawers, each with its own label. So convenient.
The attractions of this approach are undeniable. Everything is so simple when you can reduce the entire messy, random circus of human existence to just a few convenient tags, and walk right by the awkward bits without even turning your head.
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