Memoir
“And some of us so country and so baaaad / like the daddy on Good Times when he gets up to / find a Western on TV and he pretends to be / John Wayne while he doing it” I saw Sissy in Urban CowboyA woman riding on a mechanical bullcould make men wake up »
Music
“Despite naming West Virginia,‘Country Roads’ is placeless in the way that it draws upon a sense of mythical, imagined place-belonging and community.” Sometimes, I like to sidle up to a jukebox in a dive bar and select the iconic “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” What happens next tells me a lot about the other people »
Music
In 1982, my cousin David “Hoss” Johnson was the last recruit Bear Bryant signed to the University of Alabama. He got his nickname at birth when he arrived on this earthly playing field at a whopping thirteen pounds, played in forty-eight games for Alabama, started in twenty-eight, and made the All-Decade ’80s Team.1 For five »
Interview
Reflecting on a century of country music, I could think of no one better to talk to than Frankie Staton, Rissi Palmer, and Holly G to get a finger on the pulse of the country music industry. Although the history of the country music business is a story of impressive commercial success, its growth has »
Music
“Riley’s continuous success in his lifetime . . . demonstrates that his musical talent and ambition transcended the marketing initiatives that ubiquitously upsold his disability.” A case study of Riley Puckett, a bestselling—yet largely forgotten—name in the fledgling country music industry of the early 1920s, starkly demonstrates how the genre’s century-long appeal to authenticity is »
Music
“Cowboy Carter has undeniably reignited mainstream conversations about Black contributions to country music and the banjo’s African diasporic origins.” In February 2024, during a Super Bowl 57 commercial, Beyoncé released a teaser hinting at what audiences speculated would be a country music album, released months later as Cowboy Carter. It featured Rhiannon Giddens performing a »
Music
I was nine years old when I heard country music for the first time. My favorite cousin, Ruthie, was watching my sister and me while my mom was away. I loved her because she never treated me like a kid. She had us learn the lyrics to some of her favorite CDs to keep us »
Music
“Country or hillbilly music and overalls are part of a modern vernacular; the music and garments evoke nostalgia for a ‘simpler’ past, while being the products of commercial enterprise and industrial modernity.” Westernwear is having a moment that’s bringing attention to the fashion of country artists past and present. It’s not the first time that »
Music
“By his own account, the model for the Grand Ole Opry radio show was a hoedown Hay attended ‘in a log cabin about a mile up a muddy road’ outside a little Arkansas burg called Mammoth Spring.” It’s a Monday in late August. I stand in the middle of a dirt road, flush on the »
Music
It’s a Tuesday afternoon at Southpoint Mall in Durham, North Carolina. As I window shop, I notice LeAnn Rimes’s “Nothin’ Better to Do” playing from the speakers. It’s followed by a pleasant but unassuming mix of songs from Kenny Chesney, Miranda Lambert, and Kacey Musgraves. This is a country music playlist. On my last two »
Poetry
A Day of It He’d put on a pot of beansand leave them to simmerthen rake a pile of leavesfrom her old flower bedsand get a smolder started.He’d cut a plug of Brown Muleand tuck it in his cheekthen lean on the rake,shifting the pile now and thento let air to the fire,arranging the sparksand »
Poetry
But I always had a bit of an authenticity complex,plus, D the waitress whispers, that’s not real Brown’s.and when my town has built an empiric tourism industryaround “authenticity”—something they stole to begin with—it’s hard to smell the stakes through mouthfuls of fake blood.Even Brown’s changed ownership recently and began renovation. I do wish to do »