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!