I remember it like it was yesterday: I was seven years old, my dad and I driving to a County Board meeting, heading west on the Stevenson. We were listening to a variety of songs when suddenly I heard the strumming of an old six string and the words "Blame it all on my roots, I showed up in boots and ruined your black-tie affair,” and I jammed out. That’s right, Dan Bennington jammed out to Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places” at age seven. Now, you may say, “Dan, you’re a kid from the suburbs of Chicago, what on earth do you have in common with or like about country?” Well, there are a few things.
First of all, country music, while it does involve trucks, guns, tractors and quite a few exes, it does spread its wings further to deliver a deeper message. Listen to Brad Paisley’s ballad, “Whiskey Lullaby." A young man finds his partner in bed with another man, so he drowns his sorrows in a bottle, which leads to his eventual death by the bottle. Driven mad by the guilt of his death, his partner follows suit, also drinking herself to death. Usually, we think country glorifies drinking whiskey or moonshine, but “Whiskey Lullaby” shows the danger of using it as a crutch, while also looking for different methods of mending a broken heart.
A lot of imagery in today’s pop hits take place in the big city or in a club, and for some people that works, for others they want something different. Country’s titles sometimes include foreign terms to us city-folk such as “backroad," “small town,” or even the dreaded “tractor."
It feels good to get away from the normal or the clichéd and take an escape, not to a tropical island or “some beach” as the crooner Blake Shelton proclaims, but to a small town where people genuinely care about you and you can party with in a field or a barn.
Rodney Atkins’ hit “Take a Back Road” tells the story of a cliché day on the highway during rush hour; moving inches where you would normally be moving miles, listening to the same songs over and over and basically wanting to rest your head on the wheel and let the horn blare. Then, a magical song (George Strait, 1982, if you’re so curious) takes him back to his small town and, specifically, a backroad where he gets to just relax and be stress free.
Lastly, it’s not about where you’re from or what you wear to determine whether or not you are “country.” You do not have to wear all the plaid and own all the cowboy boots in the world to be country (at least in my experience). It’s about your beliefs and how you carry yourself.
I own one plaid shirt, one pair of boots that I used for my high schools production of “Oklahoma!” and zero (count it: zero) 10 gallon hats. Like I said, I was born and raised in the western suburbs of Chicago and am not embarrassed by it in any way. But for some reason (possibly the fact my dad took me and my brothers to his small town home town or that we were involved with scouting and went camping in spots that were usually small towns), the thoughts of waking up in a quiet area and driving down a backroad to the river always seemed perfect to me.
Am I a wannabe hick? Maybe. Am I a redneck? I have gotten sunburned so many times that I have a decent farmers tan, yes. Have I drank moonshine? No, but a buddy says they’ve got a mason jar of it waiting for my 21st birthday. Despite all this, I identify with the country culture, and I only got one thing to say: Yee-haw.
