Country music, where art thou?

My introduction to the working class world of country music came on a luckless cotton tenant farm in East Texas more than sixty years ago. One of the most cherished musical experiences of those years came when my mother sang the chilling words, "I am death, none can excel / I hold the keys to Heaven and Hell," from the doleful old ballad "Conversation with Death." We needed few reminders in those bleak Depression days that, as my mother phrased it, "life is uncertain and death is sure." It is surprising, and gratifying, to now discover that the song, performed by the great bluegrass singer Ralph Stanley, has been the recipient of a Grammy award, and is at the center of one of America's intermittent revivals of old time country music.

The current enthusiasm was fueled by the phenomenal success of the musical soundtrack from the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? At last count, the compact disc had sold more than three million copies, briefly enjoyed the number one position on the Billboard sales charts, and garnered five Grammy awards, as well as assorted prizes in the country music field. Pretty good for a collection made up exclusively of roots-oriented performances! The O Brother phenomenon has been touted as evidence of a widespread displeasure with the bland and homogenized sounds of Top 40 country radio (where the soundtrack has seldom been played) and of a hunger for authentic, down home rural styles. A few commentators, in fact, have spoken of Americans' renewed romance with the culture and music of Appalachia. And an expensive array of entertainers, composed principally of performers heard on the soundtrack, are now touring the country with a show called Down from the Mountain.

These public paeans to mountain culture obscure the fact that neither the movie nor the music has anything to do with Appalachian culture.

The movie is actually set in Depression-era Mississippi. Except for Stanley's haunting singing, which is clearly rooted in the hills of his native Virginia, the music is generically Southern rural and not explicitly linked to any specific geographical region. Most of O Brother's singers (along with the soundtrack's producer, T-Bone Burnett) come from places like New Jersey, Illinois, California, and Texas. Without discounting the genuine charm of the songs heard on the movie's soundtrack, or of the expertise with which they were selected and performed, the conclusion seems inescapable that the soundtrack owes much of its popularity to deeply held fantasies about the music and culture of the American South and their alleged peculiarities.

Like television's The Beverly Hill-billies, or such movies as Deliverance and Urban Cowboy, which also generated interest in country music, O Brother reinforces the venerable idea that poor white Southerners may be bizarre, and even a bit degenerate, but they sure can make good music!

From the day it began its commercial history in the 1920s, country music has profited from the apparently enduring need among dislocated and urbanizing Americans to connect with an abandoned but still-romanticized rural past, or to experience the vicarious thrill of identifying with exotic characters and themes. Thus, we find a recurring public fascination with mountaineers, cowboys, hoboes, outlaws, ramblers, and other divergent personalities. And country musicians from Jimmie Rodgers to Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Stanley, and Dolly Parton have been more than ready to exploit these romantic flights of escapism.

As an ardent, lifetime fan of country music, I am delighted with the current revival of old time styles. But as a careful scholar of the genre, and of the Southern working class culture that originally nourished it, my response is also tinged with a strong note of wariness. It is good to know that music does not have to be overproduced to be good, and that acoustic-based sounds and down-to-earth sentiments and themes can find receptive audiences. I hope that the O Brother soundtrack and the Down from the Mountain tour will inspire a broad interest in traditional sounds similar to the vogues inspired by Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952 and by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's recording in 1972 of the landmark album Will the Circle Be Unbroken, where they were joined by such veteran country performers as Mother Maybelle Carter, Roy Acuff, and Doc Watson.

On the other hand, it is not simply my academic training that encourages me to insist that the old time revival should be properly understood, and that we should resist the efforts, whether made by Hollywood, the recording industry, or music critics, to present a simplistic or distorted view of Southern folk culture. As a child of the Southern working class, I can't help but be troubled by the enduring stereotypes perpetuated by the movie (even if I laughed at them), and I remain intrigued by the readiness of Southerners to embrace the cliches of ignorance and depravity if money can be made from them.