Tampa Calling

When I give an interview, 9 times out of 10 I am asked the same litany of inane questions. The one I dread the most (even more than the completely irrelevant “How old are you?”) is this one: “Who are your biggest influences?” There are a lot of reasons I don’t like this question: It’s overly broad, it takes for granted that my “biggest influences” are “whos” rather than whats or whens and it assumes, quite dubiously, that whatever my influences are, I am consciously aware of them. These are all perfectly legitimate reasons for loathing this question, but they don’t tell the whole story.

The truth is I can’t stand being asked about my influences because, by general critical consensus, my influences are pretty lame. Take, for instance, my biggest influence, country music. I love it. And I’m not talking about the country that even hipsters like you CL readers can stomach. I’m talking about the uber twangy stuff that most people in my socio-cultural demographic dismiss as maudlin, cliché, trite and unforgivably corny; the songs about how the corn fed boys from my map dot can out work, out fight and out drink the soft handed sissies from your urban center; the songs with titles like “Where I Come From” and “Where the Green Grass Grows.”

Don’t get me wrong. Some of this music is hopelessly bad, but some of it kicks and spits on the door of greatness. I’m devoting this blog to separating the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats and any other biblically tinged agricultural metaphor for good from any other biblically tinged agricultural metaphor for bad that you can think of. Here it is: The good, the bad and the country according to me.

We’ll start with what I consider to be one of the genre’s worst songs, Chicken Fried by the Zac Brown Band. It’s the kind of song that gives country music a bad name. If it were up to me, I’d add it to the Kyoto Treaty’s list of banned air pollutants. (It is currently #22 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Goes to show you how much I know.) For those of you who haven’t had the misfortune of hearing it, it’s a musical knock off of Black Water (the Doobie Brother’s classic, not the private security firm). Lyrically, it is little more than a series of down home-esque clichés whose only apparent organizational scheme is rhyme. Here’s an example from the last verse:

“Thank God for my life / And for the stars and stripes / May freedom forever fly / Let it ring / Salute the ones who died / The ones that give their lives / So we don’t have to sacrifice / The things we love / Like our chicken fried…”

Now, I’m as big a patriot as the next gal and that is exactly why I demand that the heroism of our men and women in uniform be extolled with craft and eloquence. Is fried chicken really the most suitable metaphor for all that is America that Zac Brown and his band can muster? Please.

Jason Michael Carroll’s latest single Where I’m From is guilty of similar lyrical sins. It’s as cliché as a $0.99 greeting card. Here’s Carroll’s description of his titular hometown:

“Where the quarterback dates the homecoming queen / The trucks a Ford and the tractor’s green / And Amazing Grace is what we sing / Where moms and dads were high school flames / who gave their kids grandmother’s maiden name…”

These well worn metaphors are truly abysmal, but they’re not the ultimate reason for the song’s failure. Where I’m From (and countless other songs just like it) fizzles because it obscures the very America it purports to describe. It may not go as far as collapsing the whole thing into fried chicken, but it does reduce the greatness and grittiness of small town American life to a truck and tractor brand and visions of sexuality and the family sanitized to the point of fairytale. Some of us may wish we were, but no one is actually from the place Carroll is singing about.

I could sit here and rattle off examples of really bad country songs until boots go out of style, but there’s no need for that. I’m sure you already have a list all your own and I’m here to vindicate the genre, right? Let’s move on to the good stuff.

The best country songs don’t romanticize or simplify life in America’s hinterland. They paint the whole picture in all its tragic, beautiful glory. My Town by Montgomery Gentry is ostensibly the same kind of song as Chicken Fried and Where I’m from – it is about the same sorts of places and engages the same familiar themes – but it has much more in common with a song like Springsteen’s The River. The verses flesh out the sad history shared by countless small farming communities across America and warrant a thorough listen, but the chorus is enough to make my point:

“Where I was born, where I was raised / Where I keep all my yesterdays / Where I ran off cause I got mad / And it came to blows with my old man / Where I came back to settle down / Where they’ll put me in the ground / This is my town”

There is no comparison between the town of My Town and the town of Where I’m from. In My Town innocence gets irretrievably lost, families fight and forgive, people die and time marches on. This is country songwriting at its best.

Brooks and Dunn’s Red Dirt Road and Kenny Chesney’s Back Where I Come from are two more shining examples of all that country music can and should be. These songs sport some of the best couplets to ever come out of the song mills of Nashville. First, Brooks and Dunn, then Mr. Chesney:

“It’s where I drank my first beer, where I found Jesus / Where I wrecked my first car. I tore it all to pieces…”

“We learned in Sunday school who made the sun shine through / I know who made the moonshine too / back where I come from…”

These lines don’t peddle some cheap conservative fantasy of a picture perfect and monolithic America. They remind us that this country, from the shot gun shacks of Appalachia to the high rises of Manhattan to the suburban sprawl of everywhere in between, is full of hypocrites and heroes, fuck ups and fortunates, hard times and happy endings. “There’s life at both ends of that red dirt road” is more than just an awesome hook. It’s the God’s honest truth and that’s what great country music is all about.

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