Murder On Music Row

Then the 1990s brought us Garth Brooks, more commonly known as just Garth, who I originally thought was all hat and no cattle, surely the final nail in the honky-tonk coffin. His pop-sounding megahits and his wacky flying over arena stages on a wire in his way-too-tight Wranglers made my skin crawl. Almost two decades later, and by today's Rascal Flatts-ian standards, I consider him almost a modern-day Hank Williams.

It hasn't been a straightforward march toward bubblegum pop, though. Over the years, the so-called neotraditionalists have had their moments: singers like John Anderson, bluegrass crossover Ricky Skaggs and the Honky-Tonk Man, Dwight Yoakam, managed to sell millions of records. [Editor's note: Records are big, flat, round things made out of vinyl that you used to put on something called a "record player," and music came out when you put a needle on it. Seriously, ask your dad.] In 2000, the soundtrack for the Coen Brothers movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" was a runaway hit, won a Grammy and went to No. 1. It's sold more than 7 million copies since, and has brought late-in-life fame to the most traditional of mountain-music artists, Virginia's Ralph Stanley.

As the years have passed, I've learned to relax about the changes in the music I love. I'm past the anger and denial, and fully in the acceptance stage. I could never in my lifetime listen to all the traditional country recordings that already exist, so who cares if only a handful of alt-country types are still at it? Besides, I knew my habit of mindlessly clinging to the past was finally licked last year when even Merle Haggard, he of the late-1960s anti-hippie anthem "Okie From Muskogee," wrote a campaign song for Hillary Clinton: "Let's Put a Woman in Charge." Uncle! Uncle!

In the old days, there were many, many songs like "Banks of the Ohio," in which a man stabs his girlfriend and heads down to the river, where he "threw her in to drown, and … watched her as she floated down." (Dirty secret: folksy, gosh-darny traditional country songs have violence that would make 50 Cent blush.) Today's producers are just giving people what they want, navigating the market as best they can. It's a business, after all. Today's suburban music buyers don't labor in coal mines or cheat on their wives. Well, they don't work in coal mines, anyway. Songwriters and hit makers write about what they know, just as their forefathers did, except now what they know is driving the kids to Target in the minivan, or staying at home because they're unemployed.

So maybe country sounds and lyrics veering a little toward spit-polished pop music aren't a sign of the end of the world, but something gritty and real has been lost. They borrow the vernacular of country music, the genuineness and masculinity of that hard-knock life, but they morph it into something that's barely recognizable. The rough edges and authenticity have been sanded off. As the great songwriter Larry Cordle wrote about this very subject in his hit "Murder on Music Row," "They said no one would buy them old drinkin' and cheatin' songs. Well, there ain't no justice in it, and the hard facts are cold."

I couldn't agree more. But to put it in terms Lonestar might understand, at some point, we all have to put on our big-boy pants and move on. The traditional stuff is still out there, if you take the time to look. How can you blame Nashville? Even a legend like George Jones, 77, the man Frank Sinatra allegedly called "the second-best singer in America," played to an arena that was three-quarters empty last week in the Virginia suburbs. The voice that gave us arguably the greatest country song of all time, "He Stopped Loving Her Today," went on gallantly with the show. In the so-called good old days, he might not have shown up at all.

© 2009