I have been watching a multi-part PBS documentary on this history of country music. Its given me pause to reflect on my own relationship with it as a whole.
Country music and I are a complicated thing.
My parents only listed to very light and very “clean” or “clean-ish” country music when I was a child. Ronnie Milsap, The Statler Brothers, and the Oak Ridge Boys were the bulk of my parent’s albums. I knew other singers through the radio and from general admiration- Charley Pride and Barbara Mandrell were okay. Waylon Jennings was generally someone that got an eye roll. My father didn’t listen to Johnny Cash because his mother never liked Johnny Cash (keep in mind, my grandmother died in 1978). We always watched “Hee Haw” and the occasional holiday special from some artist or another… but my parents were never interested in the more artsy PBS show “Austin City Limits.” I have visited Dollywood several times, but my parents have never owned a Dolly Parton album.
My parents just don’t really get into music. For them it is optional background noise. Not something you invest your soul in. They don’t listen to music in the car at all. I’ve ridden to Washington, DC and Houston, TX with no radio. None.
But country music is in the air as much as anything else when you grow up in Georgia. You don’t know how you know the words to a Merle Haggard song your parents never played. You just simply do.
I can engage with country music, but I always feel inner conflict when i do. I never feel completely at ease. Completely honest. Even though I did grow up poor in the south and I have literally done all the things.
I’m a conflicted southerner in many things. This is just yet another.
Spiked Peaches- A tilted view from the South 