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September 6, 2005
The detractors of country music often claim that it is "primitive" and "mindless." It is the music of ignorance and racial bigotry of the poor working-class whites isn't it? Has not Nashville fostered a conveyer-belt production method that keeps the music sanitized, the artists generically processed, and the prospects of diversity, innovation, and creativity slim-to-none?
Is not corporate country a lost highway?
This highly popular form of musical expression has a tradition which extends from Appalachian balladeers, to Black and white railroad workers, to choirs of country churches, to the Carter Family, Gene Autry, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and Randy Travis.
When I watched the Lost Highway documentary on Saturday night, I could not help but think of music, working class, community and the 1930s Depression:
Margaret Bourke-White
Merle Haggard's music recalled the great rural migration from the Midwest dustbowl to California in the 1930s:
Arthur Rothstein"Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm. Cimarron County, Oklahoma." April 1936
The migrants arrived in in resettlement camps in California from the Midwest every month, driven by unemployment, drought, and the loss of farm tenancy.They settled mainly in the agricultural valleys of California, and during the Second World War many moved nearer the defense plants, particularly around Los Angeles, to work. During the 1950s and 1960s they became populist Reaganite conservatives--rednecks.
Randy Travis' music made reference to an autonomous, authentic working-class culture of the forties and fifties coal miners of Kentucky. The experiences of this culture is the wellspring of musical and cultural meaning of country music. Country music then helps form and express the experiences of poverty, loneliness, and hard times of a particular working-class form of life marked by limited mobility within the economic and social prison of American society.
Update: 7 September
I see that Tim Dunlop of Road to Surfdom, who is now in his home town of Adelaide after spending time in Washington, watched the first episode of Endless Highway.
He does not appear to have watched any of the latter epsisodes. Few in the Oz blogosphere have by the looks of it. Not even FXH over at From a LAN Downunder or Amanda at Flop Eared Mule.
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plagiarist. stealing other's work is wrong.