“Country’s Cool Again”

A Southern Cultures Country Music Reader,
curated by Amanda Marie Martínez

Featuring twelve classic hits from the archive and three new essays, this collection brings country music’s past and present together to consider why country’s cool again (and again). Illustrations by Laura Baisden. Subscribe to Southern Cultures now and receive a free “Country’s Cool Again” sticker sheet.

“Pop Stars Don’t Die, They Move to Nashville to Record”

The Alliance Between Country and Pop

by Amanda Marie Martínez

In 1986, singer Dobie Gray released From Where I Stand, an album identified as “country soul.” Because Gray, a Black man, had principally been marketed in pop and R&B, reviewers felt the need to address skepticism he might face about an entry into country music. “When they transition with Gray’s grace, then such moves should be »

The “Good Old Rebel” at the Heart of the Radical Right

by Joseph M. Thompson

On July 4, 1867, Augusta, Georgia’s newspaper, the Daily Constitutionalist, published the words to a new song that seemed to reflect the bitterness felt by many white southerners following the Confederate defeat. The paper printed the song’s title as “O! I’m a Good Old Rebel” above a spiteful dedication to Thaddeus Stevens, the abolitionist congressman »

The Grand Ole Opry and Big Tobacco

The Grand Ole Opry and Big Tobacco: Radio Scripts from the Files of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, 1948 to 1959

by Louis M. Kyriakoudes

Historians rely on documents from the past that have been preserved in archives, museums, libraries, sometimes basements and attics. What gets saved and what gets tossed out is often a matter of luck or circumstance. One of the more interesting cases is the fate of the tobacco industry’s internal documents. Long considered the most secretive »

What’s Happening in Country Music

by Jocelyn R. Neal

Each fall, the Country Music Association presents an awards show that it pioneered in 1967, a once-a-year opportunity to celebrate musicians and industry personnel with titles such as Entertainer of the Year and Song of the Year. Celebrating one winner in each category, these awards suggest to audiences that they summarize the state of country »

“Country Music Is Wherever the Soul of a Country Music Fan Is”

Opryland U.S.A. and the Importance of Home in Country Music

by Jeremy Hill

“Nixon’s visit (only five months before his resignation) was seen by national journalists and politicos to be a trip to one of the few places where he would still receive a warm reception, and it was quite warm indeed. Nixon took the stage, played two songs on the piano, and bantered with Roy Acuff.” As »

Down in the Hole

Outlaw Country and Outlaw Culture

by Max Fraser

The earliest documented exploration of a deep cave in eastern North America occurred roughly five thousand years ago, in the limestone-rich hills of the Upper Cumberland Plateau along what is now the border between Kentucky and Tennessee. Carrying torches lit with charcoal made from river cane, one or two small groups of hunter-gatherers entered a »

Don’t Sneak

Lessons from Lavender Country

by Brendan Greaves

Almost exactly two years ago, on October 31, 2022, one month after suffering a stroke on a flight home from Oakland, where he had been performing, Patrick Ambrose Haggerty, the visionary seventy-eight-year-old songwriter, singer, and embodiment of the band Lavender Country, died at his home in Bremerton, Washington. Beside him on both passages was Julius »

A Short History of Redneck

A Short History of Redneck: The Fashioning of a Southern White Masculine Identity

by Patrick Huber

In the cotton counties along the river in Mississippi, where there are three black skins for every white one, the gentlemen are afraid. But not of the Negroes. Indeed, the gentlemen and the Negroes are afraid together. They are fearful of the rednecks . . .who in politics and in person are pressing down upon »

Icon and Identity

Dolly Parton's Hillbilly Appeal

by Graham Hoppe

“Dolly, where I come from would I have called you a hillbilly?” asked Barbara Walters in 1977. “If you had, it would have probably been very natural, but I’d have probably kicked your shins,” replied Dolly Parton, continuing, “We’re the ones you would consider the Li’l Abner people, Daisy Mae, and that sort of thing—they »

Playing Chicken With the Train

Cowboy Troy's Hick-Hop and the Transracial Country West

by Adam Gussow

“[S]uch fiddling and dancing nobody ever before saw in this world. I thought they were the true ‘heaven-borns.’ Black and white, white and Black, all hugemsnug together; happy as lords and ladies, sitting sometimes round in a ring, with a jug of liquor between them . . .” —Davy Crockett (1834) “There ain’t nothing like »

“Redneck Woman” and the Gendered Poetics of Class Rebellion

by Nadine Hubbs

In 2004 Gretchen Wilson exploded onto the country music scene with “Redneck Woman.” The blockbuster single led to the early release of her first CD, Here for the Party, and propelled it to triple platinum sales that year, the highest for a debut in any musical category. “Redneck Woman” shot to No. 1 faster than any »

Saturday Night in Country Music

Saturday Night in Country Music: The Gospel According to Juke

by Jimmie N. Rogers, Stephen A. Smith

The American South has always been a mythic land of contrast and juxtaposition—Black and white, rich and poor, mountaineer and planter, hospitality and violence, unregulated development and a sense of place, greed and grace, illiteracy and great writing—and it remains so today. One of the more intriguing paradoxes is the image of the South as »

Going Up and Coming Down

Kris Kristofferson, Authenticity, and Country Music's "New Breed"

by Alex Macaulay

Attendees at the 1970 Country Music Association awards were startled when Roy Clark announced that Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” beat out Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” for Song of the Year. Amid applause and some gasps, a dazed, disheveled, long-haired Kristofferson stumbled up the steps of the Ryman Auditorium, looking an awful lot »

Give Me That Old-Time Music . . . or Not

by Larry J. Griffin

Southerners have every right to be proud of the music we have produced and bequeathed to the entire globe. American popular culture would be unimaginable without the music—blues and rock ‘n’ roll, jazz and country, gospel and bluegrass, salsa and zydeco—created by the South’s disfranchised, impoverished, and forgotten peoples, Black, Brown, and white. Toe-tapping, feet-shuffling, »

Rednecks, White Socks, and Piña Coladas?

Country Music Ain’t What It Used to Be . . . And It Really Never Was

by James C. Cobb

Just the other day, I read a lengthy piece suggesting that the Grand Ole Opry is about to fade away. Fans of “contemporary” country apparently don’t find Little Jimmy Dickens or Porter Waggoner terribly relevant, and the current chartbusters among the younger generation of artists are loathe to forgo the big bucks from lucrative road gigs for the paltry $500 or so that the Opry pays. Such news is certain to set off a new season of wailing and hand-wringing from those who fear the imminent demise of so-called “traditional” country music. »

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