Country Music: The Image and the Reality

Sunday after church, on a quiet balmy summer day, dinner is fresh, hot, and ready for immaculate consumption. After clearing the table, the men adjourn to the front porch to talk politics, church, and relax after a long week of satisfying the burdensome requirements of familial responsibilities. After all, what man is there who would not rather be fishing? The women, on the other hand, scurry in the kitchen, do the dishes, clean up, and put things away; while repeating the local gossip about who is seeing who; who should and who should not be marrying who. These images may appear out of Norman Rockwell or Mayberry R.F.D. U.S.A., but they are the images the American country music industry and fans envision of themselves. These perceptions are extremely strong held views of a past that has come to exist more in recollection than reality. The country music industry, with its roots in deep southern religious traditions, is blinded by these and similar views, and unwilling to recognize its true state is far less appealing than the wholesome image it seeks to portend. Country music is a dichotic blend of the past and the present. It seeks to hold to religious traditions while oftentimes staggering in intoxication of those appurtenances contrary to its traditions; the clearest examples of this dichotomy are seen in the lyrics, dress, and dance found in modern country music.

To understand the present bifurcation of Country Music, a history of the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville is implicit. The Ryman auditorium began its existence as the result of a religious transformation by steamboat captain Thomas Ryman on May 10th, 1885. Ryman, while attending a preaching service held by the late nineteenth-century evangelist Samuel Porter Jones, ...

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