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I loved you 'till I killed you

Yee Haw. Line-dancing. Absurdly big hats. Songs about dead dogs. Shania Twain. Self-pity. Songs about horses. Garth Brooks. Songs about cattle. All these things quite rightly revolt us. Why? Because Country music is crap. In the fairly subjective world of musical tastes, it's about as close as you can get to an established fact that the naffest, cheesiest music in the world is Country. White-bread, red-neck, good-ole-boy music. Reactionary, racist, and counter-revolutionary, it's the music of truckers, inbred idiots and rural county councilors. (Actually, I apologise to the inbred idiots and truckers for lumping them into the same category as our servants in local government, who favour the even more putrid sub-genre, Country'n'Irish). Country lacks any musical sophistication, lyrical complexity or emotional depth. It is, in a nutshell, and to reiterate, crap.

And yet, I rather like it. In fact, cards on table and truth to tell, I love it. When I think of country I think not of Garth Brooks, Shania Twain or Leanne Rimes but of Johnny Cash, Gram Parsons, Willie Nelson. I think not of sequined stetsons and songs called 'How could you kiss the milkman Mama, when we owe the baker so much?' but of songs of honesty, integrity and bravery, sung by men and women, the best of whom, through their work and their lives, have done just what all great artists do; overcome all the suffering the world could throw at them, surviving to produce a sound that is affecting, heartfelt and profound.

'Country music ain't about love. It's about taking all your inner pain an' misery, and turnin' it into some fast cash' ­ Otis Lee Crenshaw

Otis is a fictional character, the creation of American comic Rich Hall, and though the above quotation is pastiche, it comes close to explaining what makes country music what it is. Yep, it's that old chestnut, transcendence through art. Take a look at the life of any great country singer, there's more to be transcended in one night down at the Honky-tonk than in the combined formative years of a half-dozen Gangsta-rappers;

Johnny Cash: Drug addiction, alcoholism, heartbreak, attempted murder, prison

Merle Haggard: Drug addiction, alcoholism, heartbreak, attempted murder, prison

George Jones: Drug addiction, alcoholism, heartbreak, attempted murder, prison

Well okay, presumably you're beginning to pick up on the pattern by now. The notion of the tortured artist is a clich¸d and often silly one, but Country may well be one of the few genres where you simply must walk the walk if you're to talk the talk. All the best country music was made by people who knew exactly what they were on about when they sang of lonesomeness (oddly, while everyone else gets lonely, only country singers get lonesome. This is another of the eccentricities of the genre which many consider proof of it's naffness, but which serve to endear it further to me). Johnny Cash can sing about prison, be it San Quentin, Folsom, or the unnamed death row in his terrifying version of the Nick Cave's 'The Mercy Seat', because he was in and out of the places all through the sixties. Not the kind of pampered, rehab-and-therapy laden establishments where Robert Downey Jnr. likes to hang out either. As a result, we get great music, authentic and genuine in the same way that Sinatra's post-Ava Gardner heartbreakers were.

Now consider the converse. Leann Rimes recently recorded an album of Country standards. Now Leanne, despite her name, her big hair, and her twangy voice, is not Country. Leanne is Britney with a southern accent, and her decision to record songs like 'Crazy' 'Your cheatin' heart' and 'The Crying Game' must surely be enough to send anyone with a respect for great songs into paroxysms of laughter or fury, depending on just how seriously they take these things. As it happens, her versions of these songs are all technically competent, and the arrangement and accompaniment are far more old-style, and less offensively glitzy than on her more overtly commercial work. What cannot be ignored is that 'Crazy' was the signature tune of Patsy Cline, who, by the time she had come to record it, had been married three times, twice to wife-beaters, and had that tussle with the bourbon bottle that seems to be obligatory down Nashville way. Leanne Rimes, on the other hand, is 4 years old, and the closest to the blues she's been is most likely the time she left her favourite My Little Pony behind her in the McDonalds' at DisneyWorld. (Incidentally, while flicking through Miss Rimes' CDs in a Dublin record shop recently ­ research, you understand ­ I came upon an a collection entitled 'The Early Years'. Was it recorded by ultrasound?)

Staying on the topic of women in Country for just a little longer, let's look at the queen of Crap Country, Shania Twain. In one song she says 'OK, so you're a rocket scientist. That don't impress me much'. Now if someone chatting me up turned out be a rocket scientist, I'd be impressed. Dead impressed actually. But Shania appears to see herself as a cut above the rest, a bit of a princess. This runs counter to the tradition that all the great female country singers were tough, gutsy women, with no illusions about themselves, and usually a nice line in earthy humour (Loretta Lynn once called herself 'The woman who put the cunt in Country').

So what would impress Shania then? 'Don't get me wrong, well I think you're alright/But that won't keep me warm in the middle of the night'. She doesn't need a man, she needs an electric blanket. A lyric closer to the spirit of Loretta Lynn would have said 'Don't get me wrong, well I think you're alright/But I'd prefer if you had loads of cash and a bigger cock'. Mind you, Loretta would probably have had a better rhyming scheme.

So where now for Country music? Is there anything that can show the sceptical masses that there's more to Country than the aforementioned cheesemongers who give the whole genre a bad name? Thankfully, there is. In recent years, a slew of bands, presumably bored with the same-old-same-ole dross that has emerged from what we still, absurdly, call the 'Alternative' scene have, like Dylan, the Band and the Byrds did in the late 60's, gone back to the source, and thus we have Alternative Country. Lambchop, aware that along with Soul music, Country is one of the wellsprings of what became Rock & Roll, have married the two styles, most effectively on their last album, the acclaimed 'Nixon' (since you ask, it sounds like Curtis Mayfield recording in Nashville, assisted by Prince). Wilco, in collaboration with Billy Bragg, have brought the songs of Woody Guthrie, a seminal figure in the history of American music, out of the dustbowl and into the present day, with the two wonderful 'Mermaid Avenue' albums. Calexico give things a latin twist. The Handsome Family go Gothic. Grandaddy are even on MTV.

And, proof that this article is more than just a lone voice in the wilderness, guess what was the most requested album on Today FM's 'Pet Sounds' last year?

Solitary Man. By Johnny Cash.

Fergal Crehan

20.2.01

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