Workin’ Man Blues

While musicians such as Creedence Clearwater Revival, Grand Funk Railroad, Aerosmith, and Ted Nugent took rock ‘n’ roll back to the masses, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Merle Haggard, were transforming the genre of country music, making the medium more original and more relevant as America’s cultural center of gravity was shifting south and west. Country now expressed its own forms of rebellion, against both the strictures of its industry and the condescension of outsiders. As country became a little bit cooler, it was inevitable that cool rock ‘n’ roll in turn would become a little bit country.

6. “Mama tried”

While the Nashville sound dominated much of country radio in the 1960s and countrypolitan turbocharged its pop leanings in the 1970s, other styles of country music were still being played that would ultimately help bring a revival of “traditional” country sounds back to the charts. “Mama tried” describes the new amalgam of rockabilly, honky-tonk, and Western swing that was developed by artists like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens in the mid-1960s, along with the outlaw movement in Nashville, the members of which rebelled against the major labels’ limitations and returned to country’s roots. Other artists who formed their own unique sounds included Johnny Cash.

“These Are My People”

This chapter covers the politics of country music through a variety of different angles. First, it explores country music’s intersections with electoral politics, as candidates have employed country songs or artists in support of their campaigns, or as country artists themselves have run for political office. Second, it looks to the history of political subjects appearing in country songs, from the beginning of hillbilly recording in the 1920s through the debates over the Iraq War in the 2000s. Finally, the article posits a shifting cultural politics of populism that surges through the history of the genre, a tendency of identifying the “nation” and the “people” with the audience for country music. Artists of note who appear in the analysis include Jimmie Davis, the Dixie Chicks, Steve Earle, Merle Haggard, Toby Keith, Willie Nelson, Eck Robertson, and Woody Guthrie.