What's Behind Our Return To Country Music?

In Western North Carolina in the late 90s, you were just as likely to hear Tim McGraw’s anti-cancer ballad “Don’t Take the Girl” as you were Martina McBride’s fiery “Independence Day,” a narrative ode to burning down an abuser’s house. Let me state the obvious: times were different. The political climate was probably less fraught, but then again, I was seven years old, riding either in an angle-less sedan straight out of the X-Files or a bouncy white Ford Ranger. What mattered was not moral righteousness or political correctness but extracting maximum pathos from any given piece of art — turn the vibes up to eleven and swoon.

If my taste in art has changed dramatically, the embarrassing truth is that my litmus test really hasn’t. I want to be swept off my feet, momentarily humbled and unable to intellectualize. At 12, “Red Rag Top” revealed the saddest epiphanies life had to offer; at 34, I am more apt to cry to Gillian Welch’s “Revelator” or, on an especially sentimental day, The Louvin Brothers’ “What is Home Without Love.” This is to say: trends change, and so do we. Life shapes us like a river carves up a canyon.