Going to the Country

"The Horses and the Hounds" (2021), by James McMurtry

As predictable as tides, someone on social media will ask: “What kinds of music do you love/hate most?”

Even more predictable: people will go out of their way to indicate hate and loathing for rap and country.

(“Jazz” often gets called out, too, but you might as well be saying “I hate music” if that’s your go-to. Don’t @ me, bro.)

And it’s not that I don’t get it - there is something about those two categories that seem to gather up the worst impulses of our culture and smear them with pop gloss in an attempt to create the next Big Thing. Auto-tune, commercialized sex and misogyny, and lyrics that amount to tweets of culture war meme fodder tend to swamp the charts in those two genres in a way that drowns out anything thoughtful or meaningful.

Because of that, I don’t tend to follow new releases or up-and-comers in either of those two worlds - and I know I am missing out on a lot. But now and again, something breaks through and makes me grateful for the great storytellers.

My wife spent seven years wasting away as she battled an unknown health issue. Her doctors couldn’t figure out what was causing her to become violently ill at random intervals. They ruled out most of the dangerous things and came down to “some kind of allergic reaction” causing the weight loss and chronic nausea. Eventually, we figured out that she was allergic to rapeseed - the third-largest source of vegetable oil in the world.

Rapeseed oil is sold under the name “canola” - probably because “rape oil” would be a hard sell for the marketing department.

So, at some point, a song called “Canola Fields” was bound to catch my attention. James McMurtry, son of the novelist Larry McMurtry, channels his family’s talent for telling a compelling story into songs like this one. I was instantly hooked by lines that tell a complete story with a breath-taking economy of words:

In a way back corner of a cross-town bus
We were hiding out under my hat
Cashing in on a thirty-year crush
You can't be young and do that
You can't be young and do that

The magic of a bard is to capture something universal within a very specific situation and to use that universal feeling to evoke some larger awareness in his audience. The lonely guy at the center of McMurtry’s narrative doesn’t have a lot in common with me, but I recognize the sweetness of a thirty-year crush. I’m still in mine. While I still feel like the dumb twenty-something that I was at the start of my marriage, I know there is no way that kid I was could understand what the choices he was making would feel like in three decades.

But in the space of a four-minute song, I experience an epic romantic adventure with a bittersweet alternate ending.

So, when people claim to hate “country music,” I think about songs like this one and pity them a little bit for walling themselves off from this feeling.

“Canola Fields” was my gateway to McMurtry’s music, but this album has a lot of great writing on it. There is a deeper, more urgent message in “Operation Never Mind” than a simple “war is bad” sentiment - and if you get it, you’ll understand why Dick Cheney is an evil person.

There’s a lot of tense humor tracing through “Ft. Walton Wake-Up Call” - a road trip with a grouchy middle-aged couple shouldn’t be this catchy. Several of these songs tell stories that would fit in the pages of a Lonesome Dove novel - desperate men committing crimes for reasons even they don’t fully understand.

If country music is supposed to be about people making the best of things in out-of-the-way corners of the landscape, these are their stories. No auto-tune; no sequins; nothing fancier than a dash of romance, miles of weary roadwork, and the unavoidable aftertaste of regret.

As for rap… To Be Continued