Your favorite country music

My grandparents were born in Bristol, Tennessee, and Bristol, Virginia. The town straddles the border between the two states, such that along a portion of Main Street, the state border also serves as the dividing line between the eastbound and westbound lanes of traffic. My grandpa always used to tell me how you could drive across both lanes so that the driver would be in one state and the passenger would be in a different state. The town and its border-straddling were featured in a Geico commercial a few years ago, and my grandpa was just tickled to see his hometown represented.

The Air Force brought my grandparents to Idaho in the late 50’s. Fast forward to the 90’s, when my parents, not quite brave enough to make my sister and I latchkey kids, asked my grandparents to watch us before and after school and during summers. We spent a lot of time with them at their house. There was always country music playing from a stereo in their bedroom. It was one of those six-CD things that would just loop endlessly through whatever albums they were listening to at the time.

My parents were young, and they listened mostly to the music of their time. No one else I knew listened to country. The genre is inextricably linked in my mind to my grandparents.

When I was five or six, my grandpa gave me a cassette of Johnny Horton’s The Battle of New Orleans:

This song is… maybe not that great. As an adult, I find it to be a bleakly jingoistic piece of music that overlooks any kind of nuanced treatment of war in favor of PG-rated American rah-rah heroism. But five-year-old-me thought this song was a banger.

My grandparents always shared with me their country music - Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash. For them, country music stopped being made sometime in the 90’s. Regardless of your opinion of country music in the last twenty-odd years, I don’t think you can argue that it’s sidled up a lot closer to Top 40 pop than it used to.

So as I got older, I kind of ignored country music. People would ask, “What kind of music do you like?”

“A little bit of everything, really. Metal, rap, indie stuff, country…”

“Oh, you like country music?”

“Yeah, but older stuff, like Loretta Lynn and Waylon Jennings.”

I had that conversation often. I had assumed that the style of country music my grandparents had enjoyed was just something that no one really made any more.

Then in 2016, in a Reddit thread titled “What’s one album that came out this year that you really liked?”, some poster mentioned an album called A Sailor’s Guide to Earth by someone named Sturgill Simpson. They didn’t say anything else. Along with many other albums from that thread, I fired it up on Spotify and listened to the first track:

A couple minutes in, and it occurs to me that this might be a country album. But I don’t know what to make of it. It gets pretty heavy. There’s a horn section? I’m intrigued. I devour the rest of the album. It’s definitely country music, but it’s so far removed from what I had thought country music had become. It’s openly anti-military. He has the Dap Kings doing the horns. There’s a Nirvana cover.

That took me down a rabbit hole that made me realize that “old” country - sometimes thrown into the Americana or Folk bins to differentiate it from the radio-friendly hits on CMT - was alive and well. Since then, I’ve been bringing my grandparents physical albums every time I find one I think they’ll like, and they’ve loved them all.

My grandpa has only been gone for a couple of years. I keep his memory alive through McDonald’s coffee, regular Budweiser, and country music. Even though I think it’s a bad song, I still listen to The Battle of New Orleans often.

Anyway, I’m gonna dump a bunch of awesome country music in this thread. Thank you for creating it!

Dang, I have that Johnny Horton Album in my collection. Been a long time since I’ve listened to it.

Ok this is more like bluegrass by way of folksy campaign music (recorded twenty years later), so I don’t know whether it’s according-to-Hoyle country, but I love listening to it anyway:

This thread reminds me of seeing Willie Nelson in concert. “Here’s one for Waylon!”

I guess if we’re including Uncle Tupelo then at least early Wilco should qualify as well:

Good heavens what a failure. To mention that you’re from Bristol in a country music thread without a reference to the Carter family or the Bristol Sessions!! Boo! Boo!

Country music is such a big genre that can be so diverse with folks featuring Americana artists/alt country.
Americana/Alt Country
Gram Parsons The Father
Emmy Lou Harris (the Protege)
Lucinda Williams
Steve Earle (Cross over from Outlaw Country/Americana/Country Rock)
Whiskey Town (Ryan Adams group)
Jason Isbell The current Champion
James McMurtry (Larry’s son and leads more to the Americana end)
BloodShot record label

My favorite blend of traditional/rock/alt country is Turnpike Troubadors. Wonderful lyrics in a short story format. Currently defunct but unbelievable poignant especially if you’re from a small town.

The Bird Hunters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2ZW0pA5COc

the housefire turnpike troubadours https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHvbfD6_O08

If you like Merle Haggard, you should check out Buck Owens.

Ha! I’ll mention it to my grandpa the next time I visit him. I did get to visit Bristol once with him and my grandma, about fifteen years ago, but it was a much shorter visit than it should have been!

If you go back, I think there’s a museum dedicated to the Bristol Sessions. The Bristol sessions are what started country music as we now know it. Fascinating history.

The only other American equivalent is the Lomax field recordings which catapulted blues into history and that was years not weeks.

The back of my head is somewhere in this shot, up close by the stage. The most sober I ever was at an Uncle Tupelo show, because there was no way I was leaving the stage front to refill our beer pitchers.

While thinking about what constituted “country” I ran across this article and found it interesting:
(edit - never mind, link is wonky. If you are bored google “how to tell if music is country” and click on the first link to dictionary.com)

Also, I like this a lot (pretty sure its county):

Country and folk music were the compromise choices for road trips when I was a kid, as both my parents liked them, unlike the classic rock and classical and new age stuff they tended to listen to on their own.

I never dug all that much further into it on my own (it didn’t help that when I checked out the popular stuff on the radio it didn’t seem all that close to what I had enjoyed), but I still have a soft spot for some of those, especially Dan Seals.

I can’t stand these male models singing about their trucks. But I do tend to go old school. REALLY old school.

You have good taste!

The Dead South play Bluegrass which is an American distillation of Celtic (Scottish/Irish) music. The most popularized Bluegrass is of course the Beverly Hillbilly theme or maybe some of the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack.

I do not really consider Bluegrass to be country because Bluegrass have a very distinct musical signature and actually shares improvisation with jazz (in bluegrass its called a breakdown)

Back on thread, I am also a fan of old time country, but I cannot stand the current pop country. Being a Texan I am gravitate to Willie and the Texas roadhouse sound.

How about some Iris DeMent?

There was a time–when country music really was still country music–that a lot was listenable. It was never my favorite stuff, but I wouldn’t turn it off if it came on the radio. That was before country became pop + steel guitar, or hiphop + steel guitar (I’m looking at you, Old Town Road).

Back when Glen Campbell wasn’t yet wearing rhinestones, and Marty Robbins was around, and John Denver was singing country/folk crossovers, and Patsy Cline was at her peak, etc. etc. Since then, mostly dreck. But that is true of almost all popular music anyway.

I will say this, though. If The Civil Wars qualifies as country, they are certainly worth listening to.

Aw man, Rhinestone Cowboy was my favorite song when I was a little boy.

Have you listened to his last song, “I’m Not Gonna Miss You”? It’ll make you cry. Especially if you have lost somebody to Alzheimers. My mother died of that.

I don’t believe I’ve heard that one, but I do recall reading an article about his plans to go out on one last farewell tour after he got the diagnosis. That in itself struck me as tragic, and yet at least he did get the chance to say his goodbyes.