Strong Medicine: A Selection of the Radical Roots of Country Music
On August 13, 2013, two days after I began the tenth grade, Luke Bryan released his second album Crash My Party. Teenage girls from all corners of Haralson County fell in love with the country superstar and his unmistakable twang. From the high school roof to the Wal-Mart parking lot—every hang-out spot in town—Luke Bryan could be heard singing about girls and tailgates and bottles of beer on the pier.
I had just turned 15, and I hated everything about country music. Although I’d grown up singing the lyrics to Reba’s “Fancy” from my booster seat, something had shifted as I grew older. Country music had stopped being about carseat karaoke with my mom and started to take the shape of mean girls in cowboy boots and scary boys wearing camo. Throughout my school days, I associated country music with my classmates who made racist jokes in social studies classes and yelled homophobic slurs from the windows of their big trucks.
Everything that made me feel unwelcome in school was set to a country music soundtrack, and so I took refuge in my own obnoxious teenage love of bands like Arctic Monkeys and the Strokes. But everything changed with the release of Ken Burn’s Country Music docuseries in September of 2019. Episode after episode, I learned more about the radically progressive roots of country music. The more I watched and researched, the more my years-long distaste of the genre began to melt away.
Here, a mini-selection of three moments in country music history that shook my view of the culture. The stereotype I grew up with of mega-church crooners and MAGA millionaires stands small in the shadow of the spirit of midcentury country music, from Johnny Cash to Ray Charles.
Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian by Johnny Cash (1964)
In 1964, country juggernaut Johnny Cash released the album Bitter Tears, a collection of songs chronicling the hardships of the Native American community. With songs like “Apache Tears” and “The Vanishing Race,” Cash sings mournfully about “dead grass,” dry roots,” and “hunger crying in the night.” In “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” perhaps the most well-known song from the album, Cash tells the story of a decorated war hero who comes back from the battlefields of World War II only to be thrust back into a life of poverty. Cash sings:
he was wined and speeched and honored
everybody shook his hand
but he was just a Pima Indian
no water, no home, no chance
After its release, radio stations refused to play the album, a decision that infuriated Cash. He made it his mission to combat the embargo, even going so far as to write an open letter to Billboard Magazine. In his protest letter Cash boldly challenges the status quo, writing: “DJs, station managers, owners, etc., where are your guts?”
Modern Sounds in Country And Western Music (Volumes 1 and 2) by Ray Charles (1962)
Legendary blues singer Ray Charles brought country music to Black audiences in 1962 with the release of the album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music Vol. 1. Growing up in Florida, Charles was a huge fan of country music, spending much of his childhood listening to stars like Hank Williams on The Grand Ole Opry radio show. After making it big in the music industry, Charles translated that childhood passion into a collection of covers of some of the biggest country hits of the day. Released the same month that white students rioted against the integration of the University of Mississippi, Modern Sounds went beyond the world of country and spoke to the larger American struggle of cultural integration. As a Black man singing the stories of poor whites, Charles emphasized the universality of art and used music to break racial barriers.
“The Pill” by Loretta Lynn (1975)
In 1975, country music star Loretta Lynn brought feminism to the airwaves with her explosive song “The Pill”. A bitter national debate had erupted in 1960 following the invention of the very first oral contraceptive, and even 15 years later the majority of Americans were opposed to the idea of birth control. A mother of six herself, Lynn captured the anger and newfound freedom felt by many American women caught in the cultural crossfire. In “The Pill,” she sings:
all these years I've stayed at home
while you had all your fun
and every year that's gone by
another baby’s come …
yeah, I'm
makin' up for all those years
since I've got the pill
In response to Lynn’s bold lyrics—and particularly her triumphant chorus—over 60 radio stations across the nation banned “The Pill” and a prominent Kentucky pastor encouraged his followers to boycott Lynn’s work entirely. The bad press only served to spike the song to success, though: it sold 15,000 copies a week in spite of the radio silence.
These were the stories that rewrote my relationship with country music. Before, I always looked on those booster seat years I spent singing “Fancy” with a twinge of shame. I may come from country people, but I’m not country, I used to tell myself. I didn’t want the hollow party tunes of artists like Luke Bryan or the cruel kids in their cowboy boots and camo to represent me. It was only after hearing the stories of country artists like Cash, Charles, and Lynn that I began to see the genre as a vast and nuanced thing. Although country music has been used as a battering ram for conservative Christians in the past, it’s above all a genre that tells stories. And whether it’s the tale of a young black boy from Florida finding himself in the music of the Hillbilly Shakespeare or a young mother from Kentucky reclaiming her life and her body, every day I find strength in this untold music of marginalization and political resistance.