And it was thar, within the elevator of steel and barndoor, that Ray Price did extract the teeth of all the Injuns Andrew Jackson couldn’t bag and built around him the Country Music Hall of Fame. Ensconce yourself in miniature silos and hear Jimmie Rodgers sing the “Blue Yodel.” Read the Thousand Apologies of Ray Charles for allegedly pandering to the palefaces in 1962. See his copies of Playboy in Braille. Imagine him reading his Braille copies of Playboy and chuckle. Enjoy yourself immensely.
My relationship with country music is less strained than it used to be. The first song I fell in love with was “Shock the Monkey” by Peter Gabriel—I was about two—so Harlan Howard’s characterization of country as “three chords and the truth” was like what to me. I didn’t even start to see any use in narrative or punch lines until I was around 17. That idea of “truth”—a quality that permeates the rhetoric around country and soul—always seemed dumb and dangerous. Not dangerous because of my deconstructionist spirit (don’t have one), but because it ran counter to the poetic, imaginative escapes of the music I loved most when I was 15—Pavement and Brian Eno. When I listen to country now, I feel like I’m looking at color swatches trying to figure out what my weeping room will look like after renovations.
So it was comforting to be reminded that country is as big of a farce as anything; that the Hall of Fame should be overflowing with Nudie Cohn costumes (and that Nudie Cohn was a crazy Russian Jew from Hollywood); that they’d see fit to dress a wall with the corn patch from Hee Haw; that Minnie Pearl was lampooning the style as soon as it had shed its placenta in the popular mind. And 35 years before Pimp My Ride, Elvis got a teevee in the back of his Cadillac. (He harrumphs when RFK goes down and marches straight towards his Comeback Special.)
So, I guess: shut up, someone has written a country song about you and it went to a modest #55 two decades before you were born.
Also: I am officially a resident of Little Rock, Arkansas.