This is country music: How Brad Paisley and today's Nashville ain't as far from Hank Williams as you might think

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THIS IS COUNTRY MUSIC:

HOW BRAD PAISLEY AND TODAY’S NASHVILLE AIN’T AS FAR FROM HANK
WILLIAMS AS YOU MIGHT THINK

by

Alan Scherstuhl
________________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM: THE ARTS)

May 2011

Copyright 2011 Alan Scherstuhl

ii

Table of Contents

Abstract iii
Hank Williams’ Self-Rising Corn Meal 1
Brad Paisley is More Target Than Wal-Mart 7
Saying “I Hate Country, But I Love Johnny Cash” is Like Saying “I Hate
Dairy, But I Love Cream” 18
Bibiliography 23

iii

Abstract

Wildly popular yet too rarely investigated by critics, contemporary popular country
music is dedicated to the same primary commercial and artistic impulse that
distinguished the older country music often considered “purer” or “traditional.”
That impulse: crafting durable hits that address the real-life concerns of the music's
fans, often emphasizing truths that that audience might want to consider univerals
despite the relativisic bent of the rest of society. Today's Nashville hits looks back
not just to older country music but to all of the popular music that its audience grew
up listening to, from rock 'n roll to hip hop to pop ballads. Drawing upon recent
demographic studies, I examine the work of Brad Paisley and other current
hitmakers for evidence of how Nashville caters to the complex national audience.
Further, by exmaining the overtly commercial aspects of the career of Hank
Williams, I argue against the prevailing notion of a more pure country-music past
that today's pop-inflected Nashville hits betray.

1

I. Hank Williams’ Self-Rising Corn Meal

In 1951, Hank Williams, Sr., the haunted and hard-living father of country
music, earned himself $100 a week recording live radio shows for Nashville’s WSM
promoting Mother’s Best Flour. At 7:15 a.m. eachweekday, he would sing a snatch of
his “Lovesick Blues,” one of his hurtin’-est hit, a song about feeling heatbroken over
a gal who “will do me, she’ll do you” because “she’s got that kind of loving.” An
announcer called Cousin Louis Buck would interrupt him after two lines: “The
millers of Mother’s Best Flour, Mother’s Best Farm Feeds, and the new Mother’s Best
Self-Rising Corn Meal bring you that one and only ‘Lovesick Blues’ boy, Hank
Williams!”
Morning after morning, Williams made a jingle of “Lovesick Blues,” that
exemplar of urgent personal expression in popular music.
Just 27 years old, Williams was at the peak of his fame and just a year and a
half away from his death from a heart attack likely stirred by the morphine, chloral
hydrate, and alcohol found in his blood. Seventy-two of his fifteen-minute Mother’s
best shows have turned up on a 2010 box set. They reveal an upbeat professional,
alternately playful and reverent but always eager to give his audience and his
sponsor what they both want.

2
Each show follows a simple pattern. First comes that “Lovesick” intro,
followed by Williams’ banter about the qualities of Mother’s Best (“Hasta la biscuit!”
he sometimes chirped) and a hit song: often one of Williams’, a painful tune like
“Nobody’s Lonesome for Me” or “Wedding Bells” (they ring for his love but not for
him). Then, his band, the Lonesome Cowboys, would knock out either an
instrumental or a number with Williams’ wife, Audrey. The Cowboys’ take on the
“hot” turn-of-the-century jazz/vaudevillian ditty “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball”
reminds us that the distinctions between “race” and “hillbilly” music were often
more about marketing than music, and Williams hits like “Moaning the Blues”
further muddy easy notions of genre.
A more serious pitch for Mother’s Best invariably followed, and then a
religious song, and Williams’ farewell admonition to “Be good to yourself” over a
lively instrumental treatment of “Lovesick Blues,” and just before Cousin Louis
Buck’s final pitch for flour, Williams would instruct some off-air woman, “Put your
biscuits in the oven, I’m on my way.”
This is country music. The man venerated as its original outlaw, its hard-
time poet, was never ashamed about combining personal expression with formula.
Williams and his music were playful yet pious, truthful yet cornpone, deeply felt yet
unabashedly commercial. The broadcasts make clear that his art was steeped not
just in the ballad, folk, and blues traditions but also in Tin Pan Alley’s crowd-
pleasing pop. For all his dark songs of cold hearts, his was also a chummy, utilitarian

3
music, urging listeners up and out of bed, commiserating over heartaches and
offering a chance to renew a connection to providence as far as the broadcast signals
could manage. Each morning Hank was there to say life is hard, God is great, and
biscuits are good, so why not cook some up?
Since his death, Williams has often been held up as the founding father of all
that is great in Nashville as well as the man spinning in his grave at all the ways that
greatness is betrayed. In a 1975 #1, Waylon Jennings hollered: “Rhinestone suits
and new shiny cars -- are you sure Hank done it this way?” In 2000, George Strait
and Alan Jackson sang:
Ol' Hank wouldn't have a chance
On today's radio
Since they committed murder
Down on music row.
The murderer: music-industry executives. The victim: country music itself.
The weapon: “drums and rock and roll guitars . . . mixed up in your face.” Strait and
Jackson's “Murder on Music Row” hit #38 on airplay alone, a feat that’s relatively
unimpressive except for the fact that the song (written by Larry Shell and Larry
Cordle) was an album track never even released as a single. Recent hits seem less
anxious about Williams’ influence. Last year Gretchen Wilson’s pugnacious single “I
Got Your Country Right Here” asked “Can I get a hand for ol’ Hank?” between shout-
outs to ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd. (Wilson also suggests you “Get off your asses
and raise your glasses,” and she sang the national anthem at the ’08 Republican

4
National Convention, actions more pointed than biscuit-making but both audience-
unifying nonetheless.) Jason Aldean’s 2010 crunch-rock #2“My Kinda Party”
celebrates “chillin’ to some Skynyrd and some old Hank” just before offering advice
Williams himself might have been able to use:
If you want to drink
Go on, baby, do your thing
But give up your keys.

Long gone are the high-lonesome sound and clear-eyed misery of “The
Lovesick Blues.” But the music reaching the listeners of today’s country music radio
stations shares numerous qualities with Williams’: it’s utilitarian, contradictory,
reverent, playful, informed by all the popular American sounds that preceded it, and
localized to express the truths its audience might right now consider universals: in
this case, if you’re going to drink away your troubles, designate a driver.
In the pages that follow, I will argue that there has been no murder. Instead, I
propose that today’s suburban country listeners relate to the pop-slick Nashville
hits of Rascal Flatts or Lady Antebellum much the same way that Williams’ fans did
to those ’51 Mother’s Best broadcasts. Whether fueled by the traditional pedal steel
favored by George Strait, the punk-pop riffs of Taylor Swift, or the hip hop beats of
Big & Rich, the songs suggest an audience at home with a wide range of popular
sounds of the last decades – sounds country music has annexed. This is not
dissimilar from the way Williams’ listeners could tap along to “The Darktown
Strutters’ Ball” or “On Top of Old Smokey,” a million-selling hit for Greenwich Village

5
folkies the Weavers the same year Williams recorded it for Mother’s Best Flour.
Likewise, that down-and-out ache of Williams’ great lost-love songs is mostly
absent from contemporary country radio, but current lost-love hits like Joe Nichols’
“The Shape I’m In” or Darius Rucker’s “Come Back Song” still make a go at
usefulness. They tend toward the optimistic rather than the miserable, the process
of healing rather than the process of suffering. Instead of commiserating, these
songs reassure.
Such audience reassurance is the hallmark of today’s country-music lyrics.
Country listeners live in a highly mediated, often suburban present fundamentally
disconnected from the American past. Songs about trucks, farmers, and
hardworking grandparents – all still staples of country radio – offer more than mere
nostalgia. They posit a direct link between the minivans and big-box retailers of
today – also staples of country lyrics – and the agrarian and small-town tradition of
that time “back when the country was strong,” as Merle Haggard put it on his ’81 hit
“Are the Good Times Really Over.” Hag specifies: “Back when a Ford and a Chevy/
Would still last ten years like they should.” His complaint about post-Vietnam
America echoes that of detractors of contemporary Nashville music: a concern that
today’s pop-oriented country is somehow less pure than it was in some nobler past.
The country audience is more wide ranging than many Americans realize. It
is not easily delineated by region or age group and, and it lives not just in rural
areas, or in what have reductively been identified as “red states,” but in the suburbs

6
ringing most major American cities. Even in the northeast: in January 2011, Country
Radio 102.5 in Waltham, Massachusetts, was the third most-listened station in a
market that includes Boston.
1
It can’t be easy to craft these localized-yet-universal
hits that satisfy the Ozarks and Red Sox Nation, the Wal-Mart and the Target, the
karaoke bar and the ride home from church. The tensions between these audiences
notably show up in the career of Brad Paisley, whose music offers an entry point
toward considering just how far the genre can be pushed lyrically.
In today’s country hits, Hank Williams is more a signifier -- even a brand
identity -- than a source of musical inspiration. He’s a touchstone rather than a
millstone, a model of how to connect to the listeners rather than some impossible
ideal hitmakers couldn’t possibly live up to. Any close listening to the radio shows
Williams’ churned out in ’51 reveals that Williams is in actuality still the model for
Nasvhille today: sing about people’s lives, remind them of God’s grace, and maybe
sell ‘em some flour.

1
“Boston, MA,” StationRatings.com, last modified March 2011,
http://www.stationratings.com/ratings.asp?market=13

7

II. Brad Paisley is More Target Than Wal-Mart

The rare contemporary country star who gets featured on NPR and in The New
Yorker, Brad Paisley distinguished himself from Nashville’s hatted horde with a
string of witty, sentimental hits on the subject of the gloriousness of marital love.
This is hardly new ground for country hits, but Paisley and his cowriters specialize
in richer narrative detail than most, and their bouyant, un-fussy melodies wear well
over repeat listens, a key consideration in a radio format where hits can knock
about the playlist for years. In “Waiting on a Woman,” he charts a love from first
date to honeymoon to one spouse’s death many decades later – but somehow still
manages a happy ending.
That trick is at the heart of many of today’s biggest country hits: acknowledging
the real-life hurts that have been one of the music’s traditional subjects but still
crafting around those hurts – or doubts, or resentments – a narrative of triumph.
Over a three verse arc, Paisley works the title phrase for every possible meaning.
First, it’s a gently retrograde joke, the rueful not-quite-a-complaint of husbands
parked on a bench while their wives shop at “the West Town Mall.” (Proper nouns
ground the story.) Then, tenderly, the older of the men recounts a lifetime’s worth of
waiting on his woman: for her to doll herself up for their first date. For her to walk

8
the aisle on their wedding day. For the honeymoon, of which he observes, “It was
worth it, waiting on a woman.” Then, over the course of their years together, for her
to get ready on any given day as she makes them late again and again, sometimes
intentionally.
Depending upon your own cultural prejudices, all this is either funny and sweet
or hopelessly condescending. For the millions of listeners, CD buyers, and ITunes
downloaders who made “Waiting on a Woman” one of the biggest hits of 2008, it
must be something more: a gentle reassurance that some truths about men and
women linger from generation to generation, no matter how much the rules of
romance change. It’s tempting to load that last sentence with qualifiers: to add “or
stereotypes” after “some truths,” to sprinkle the adjectives “straight,” “white” and
“American” before “men and women.” But that’s contrary to the spirit and perhaps
the point of big country hits. Much of their power comes from the idea that the
universals they depict need no qualifiers: time-honored truths are time-honored
truths whether there are newfangled exceptions or not.
This doesn’t mean the truths laid out in “Waiting on a Woman” are meant to
reflect the relationships between all men and women, or that the experiences of
those the lyric does not describe are somehow lesser than those it does. Instead, the
song simply illustrates one very specific generality, what we might call a localized
universal: that men waiting for women to finish their shopping is a hallmark of life
among country music fans who go to places like the West Town Mall.

9
For Paisley and songwriters Dann Simpson and Wynn Varble these localized
universals are a set up. Like good jokes and well-crafted parables, narrative country
hits build to punchlines or lessons. In this case it’s both. After a rousing chorus and
guitar-solo, Paisley, still singing from the perspective of the older man with wisdom
to share, makes a warm joke of mortality:
I read somewhere statistics show
The man’s always the first to go.
That makes sense.
I know she won’t be ready.

Paisley’s old man – Andy Griffith, in the video! -- follows this up by imagining
himself waiting on a bench in heaven for his woman to join him. Retrograde or not,
the song is certainly effective, especially in the way Paisley and his writers build
from a small truth his audience recognizes to a grand, even cosmic reassurance that
a life of small things isn’t small at all. In “Waiting on a Woman,” a maddening quirk
his audience is willing to ascribe to women is recontextualized first as endearing,
then as self-defining, and at last as a human truth that can help listeners to cope
with death itself.
Three years after its release, the song still inspires comments on its official
YouTube video that demonstrate that Paisley has achieved an impressive emotional
engagement with his audience. Fans post that the song makes them cry. They pay
tribute to their own husbands and wives and or declare that this is why they love
country music. One man writes that his fiancée has developed a case of cold feet but

10
that he’s content waiting on her to come around. Commenter suzfitz66 dedicates the
song to Dorwan and Mavy Stoddard, explaining that Dorwan, age 78, died of gunshot
wounds after shielding Mary during the rampage of Tucson, Arizona, shooter Jared
Lee Loughner. suzfitz66 writes, ”Thank you Brad for this song that helps make sense
of his sacrifice for the woman he loved so much!”

Joke structure turns up in many of Paisley’s songs, most famously in a series of
playful hits that some critics dismiss as novelty numbers. The wry “Celebrity”
lances the easy target of reality TV, and “Online,” a rollicking rock-and-roll number
sends up a tubby guy pretending to be an alpha-male hunk on social media sites --
and even works into its mix the digital chord of a Mac powering up. On 2005’s
“Alcohol,” a first-rate sing-a-long from the first-person perspective of liquor itself,
Paisley praises Ernest Hemingway, toasts Bordeaux wine and builds a chorus
around the line, “College, now, that was a ball.”
All three songs hit Billboard’s top ten country singles chart. Since Paisley has
scored 26 top tens since 1999, this might not seem remarkable. But consider his
audience – or who people suspect his audience to be.
2

In June of 2009 the Country Music Association (CMA) released some startling

2
“Brad Paisley Chart History,” Billboard, accessed March 15, 2011,
http://www.billboard.com/artist/brad-paisley/339390#/artist/brad-
paisley/chart-history/339390

11
findings from its own demographic research: a full fifty percent of “core country
fans” do not have internet access in their homes, and 42 percent of those who don’t
have no desire to get it.
3
These numbers hit The Washington Post and soon sparked
much sneering online commentary. “Dial-up access on a party line would really
suck,” sniped some wit on the popular link-aggregation site Fark. Another added,
“On the plus side, 84% have rapid moonshine access, and a whopping 94.7% have
immediate access to corn pone.”
But as anyone who has listened to Paisley might suspect, the reality is more
complex. Less than a year later, the CMA revised its figures, pegging the number of
country fans with online access at home at 78 percent, twelve percent below the
national norm. Perhaps more revealing: a full 68 percent of country fans have some
of that college education that Paisley insists was a ball.
4

This news made neither Fark nor The Post.
The CMA’s poll results help explain many of the quirks of contemporary country
hits. The genre has always skewed older than most American pop music; currently,
the average age of a country radio listener is 39. This works out well for Nashville,

3
Melinda Newman, “A Challenge for Nashville: Survey Finds Country Fans
Lagging in Internet Use,” Washington Post, June 15, 2009, accessed March 5, 2011.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/06/14/AR2009061402241.html

4
“CMA Releases Critical Follow Up to Consumer Research Study.” Country
Music Association press release, February 25, 2010.

12
since it’s older listeners who still buy CDs. (Country album sales dropped five
percent in 2010, while rock dropped 16, R&B dropped 17, and only hip hop actually
gained.
5
) But complicating this is the fact that the best-selling artist of 2009 – and by
far the best-selling artist online in all of music – is Taylor Swift, country’s belter of
urgent, personal breakup songs that sound for all the world like the alternative rock
of the 1990s.
But the average age of the country music purchaser is 25.
6

That means Nashville’s hitmakers, like political candidates, must capture
multiple constituencies. They must win over Wal-Mart, where 48 percent of country
CDs are purchased, the more upscale Target, which accounts for 18 percent, and the
internet, where Taylor Swift, age 20, has moved 35 million mp3s through iTunes,
Amazon, and Walmart.com.
7
(In 2010 big box stores accounted for only 33 percent
of album sales in other genres.)
The CMA identified one unifying concern among its various audiences:
“Consumers' overall attraction to Country Music is due to the music's personal
relevance and uplifting nature in good times, and bad.” The challenge for Nashville

5
Edward Morris, “Country Album Sales Drop 5 Percent in 2010,” County
Music Television News, January 6, 2011. Accessed February 10, 2011.
http://www.cmt.com/news/country-music/1655408/country-album-sales-drop-5-
percent-in-2010-rap-increases-3-percent.jhtml

6
“CMA Releases Critical Follow Up to Consumer Research Study”

7
Morris, “Country Album Sales Drop 5 Percent in 2010”

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producers, songwriters, and performers, then, is to concoct reassurances fresh
enough yet sufficiently steeped in tradition to connect to old and young, to the
suburbs and to the backhills, to YouTube and to AM radio, to Target and to Wal-
Mart, to the myth of ‘ol Hank and the guitars of ‘ol Skynyrd.
All this brings us back to Brad Paisley.
In the summer of 2009, Paisley released “Welcome to the Future,” a sun-
touched rock ‘n roll single boasting retro-futuristic synths, crisp pedal steel and the
ripshit commentary of Paisley’s own Telecaster, an instrument that seems to hail
from the vanishing point between guitar and gee-tar. Like “Waiting on a Woman,”
and many other contemporary Nashville hits, the song concerns the generation-to-
generation drift of American life, ultimately offering reassurance that the lives of its
listeners are filled with everyday triumph. But “Welcome to the Future,” which
Paisley wrote, looks ahead as much as it looks back, and the song builds to the last
thing those Fark commentators -- and many radio program directors -- would
expect: a red-state country star quite literally hollering “glory hallelujah” for
diversity.
In the nostalgic first verse, riding a four-on-the-floor rock beat, Paisley
marvels at how cool it is that the Pac-Man game he loved as a kid now fits on his
phone. In the patriotic second, he marvels at how cool it is that just two generations
after his grandfather sent hundreds of letters home from the Pacific during World
War II, Paisley routinely teleconferences with Tokyo. Then comes the gum-in-your-

14
hair chorus, twice, a sugary rush of guitar solos, and then suddenly it’s just Paisley,
strumming an acoustic and marveling at how cool it is to have a black president. Not
in those words, of course. Savvy about radio realities, he followed something like the
rules of The Price is Right: he comes as close to naming Obama as he can without
going over. He still had to call program directors across the country and assure them
that the references to cross burning, Rosa Parks and the suggestion that Martin
Luther King’s dream had been fulfilled didn’t make the song political – although he
admitted to writing the song after experiencing the thrill of Times Square on
election night 2008. He later blogged, “On November 4th, I felt an emotion like I
haven't felt in my entire life. I think whoever you voted for, you had to be moved.”
8

“Welcome to the Future” is the antithesis of Tea Party unease. It flips modern
country’s frequent nostalgia for some idealized American past into a passion for an
idealized American now. It also killed Paisley’s run of number-one singles, peaking
at number two -- no disaster, but in an industry culture where #1s can be a big star's
birthright, not insignificant.
Country's audience is by no means monolithic, and there is some truth to the
media cliche that this is music for the "red states," especially considering the fightin'
words nationalism of songs like Chely Wright's "Bumper of My SUV" or Toby Keith's

8
Brad Paisley, “Exclusive: Brad Paisley Shares His Night at the White House.”
CNN Entertainment, July 23, 2009. Accessed February 10, 2011.
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-07-
23/entertainment/brad.paisley.white.house_1_homecoming-queen-white-house-
difficult-time?_s=PM:SHOWBIZ

15
"Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue." But Keith is a Democrat, and Wright outed
herself as a lesbian on Oprah, which reminds us that red states are not monolithic
either. Still, even before he gets to race, Paisley's "Welcome to the Future" expresses
sentiments more common to the Target than to the Wal-Mart: an excitement about
design and technology, a pride in global interconnectedness, and an emphasis on
stylish consumerism.
Then there's the politics. Paisley performed the song at the White House, got
teary-eyed at the climax, and reported that the president told him, “Wonderful,
wonderful words.” As Frank Sinatra could have attested in the '60s or the '80s, no
mass-audience entertainer can win a president's praise without also winning some
enmity. While Paisley has been careful never to express any political opinion, a
minority of country fans have expressed outrage, at times even comparing Paisley’s
suggestion of support for Obama to the Dixie Chicks’ direct expression of distaste for
George W. Bush. (A typical message board comment, on a Yahoo! Answers thread,
from a dude calling himself “btchplzzz”: “Beer, guns, God is good enough for a
country song. not all that other BS he sings about.”
9
)
Perhaps all this explains “This is Country Music,” Paisley’s first single of 2011
and his first entirely new song since “Welcome to the Future.” (In the interim, he
released a family-oriented single from the same album as “Welcome to Future,” as

9
“Brad Paisley's Song 'Welcome to the Future' Supports Barrack Obama and
Narrowly Avoids Controversy?” Yahoo Answers. Accessed February 11, 2011.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091102110906AAjkO43

16
well as a live-and-greatest-hits compilation.) The title track from his forthcoming
album, “This is Country Music” abandons the surprising first-person narratives of
“Waiting on a Woman” or “Welcome to the Future” in favor of the kind of collective
generalizations that those songs build upon. The lyric is a list of his country bona
fides, those things upon which we can all agree, many of which his recent hits have
neglected to honor: Jesus, tractors, mama, soldiers, flag. He doles out these signifiers
with an insistence that country music is the only place left where American culture
celebrates these virtues. “It ain’t hip to sing about” these things, he claims, building
to verse’s final line: “but this is country music, and we do.”
He does all this over a more-rustic-than-usual band performance of banjos,
fiddle, pedal-steel, and, as always, his own chunks of cheery guitar. For that live-on-
the-porch feel, he counts the song off at the start, and waits a verse before
introducing any electric instruments. On the chorus, he exhorts listeners to “turn it
on, turn it up and sing along” because “this is real” and “this is your life in a song.”
Brand positioning, sure. It’s also a thesis statement, a user’s guide and a
pledge of allegiance to the core virtues and signifiers country has long emphasized
as well as that uplifting personal connection highlighted in the CMA poll. It’s even a
playlist. Over a lengthy outro, Paisley sings the titles of songs that exemplify his idea
of country music: “I Walk the Line,” “Mama Tried” and “Stand By Your Man,” of
course, and George Strait’s peerless character study “Amarillo By Morning.” But he
also includes John Denver’s pop-folk “Country Roads,” Lee Greenwood’s jingoistic

17
anthem “God Bless the USA” and Hank Williams, Jr.,’s kick-drum stomper “A Country
Boy Can Survive,” a defiant ‘80s classic on which Bocephus shouts about life off the
grid – and taking his .45 to New York City to kill a mugger. Paisley croons this last
title in an Auto-tuned falsetto as sweet and airy as cotton candy melting in your
mouth.
This squares with Hank Williams singing “On Top of Old Smokey.” Paisley is
demonstrating pride that his genre and audience are broad enough to contain all
these disparate sounds, yet he’s also admitting that, however much he might stray,
he remains committed to those localized universals it prefers – those uplifting
thoughts that everyone listening can agree upon.

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III. Saying “I Hate Country, But I Love Johnny Cash” is Like Saying “I Hate Dairy,
But I Love Cream.”

The old joke goes that country today is just the rock ‘n roll of twenty years
back. Like any good joke (or country song) there’s some truth in it. Yes, many of the
Nashville hitmakers of 2011 sound like the gentlest hitmakers of the 1990s
"alternative" rock boom. Sometimes -- in the case of Jewel or Darius Rucker – they
are the gentlest hitmakers of the 1990s "alternative" rock boom.
Strip out the grace notes of fiddle and the twang, and Jason Wesley’s sour
“Real” could pass for the Gin Blossoms. The crabbed chords and layered guitars of
Jason Aldean’s “My Kinda Party” suggest the post-Nirvana arena-rock of Live. The
Band Perry’s lilting “If I Die Young” echoes Tori Amos, Sarah McLachlan, and – more
than anything else – the swooning, string-band moodiness of R.E.M.’s “Losing My
Religion.”
Even Sugarland’s skip-a-long power-pop smash “Stuck Like Glue” has an
alternative nation provenance: among its raft of cowriters are Kevin Griffen of
Better Than Ezra and Shy Carter, who also penned a hit for Matchbox Twenty’s Rob
Thomas and – complicating matters – co-produced Ashanti’s “Switch” with Nelly.
Yes, today’s country often sounds like yesterday’s rock. And its borrowings

19
go much wider still. That Sugarland single builds to a funky goof of a reggae
breakdown, a bouncing rhythm track over which Jennifer Nettles drops all pretense
of twang in favor of a Caribbean patois. The track sounds like its own mash up, as
does Montgomery Genrty’s 2009 hit “One in Every Crowd,” which whole-hog lifts
the riff from the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane,” the words from Billie Joe
Shaver’s “Honky Tonk Heroes,” and then, hilariously, at the minute-five mark,
Outkast’s exuberant “Hey, Ya!” shout, here transfigured as “Hey, y’all.”
George Strait’s “The Breath You Take” could be the big ballad in any number
of musical theater shows, as could Carrie Underwood’s “Mama’s Song,” which shares
melodic and lyrical DNA with Jason Robert Brown’s off Broadway hit “The Last Five
Years” and incidentally nicks the opening of the Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does
is Magic” and the ersatz African back-up singers from Elton John’s Lion King
showtunes.
The question is not whether Nashville mines the collective pop past. The
questions are why and how has country grown to include so much? And why must
the wide-ranging pop sounds of country radio wear the signifying fig leaf of fiddle or
pedal steel? And why do so many people who don’t listen to country —from rock
aesthetes to roots-music purists to the adherents of earlier eras of country hit
making – take umbrage at this?
First, the variety of rock styles on country radio range wider than in any
dedicated terrestrial rock radio format. This rock-based country fills a sizable

20
market niche: music for people who wish that rock radio still played new music
from artists in the “classic rock” vein – artists like John Mellencamp, Rick
Springfield, Hootie and the Blowfish, the Gin Blossoms or any of the others Nashville
echoes so unapologetically. In the ‘90s, so-called “alternative” rock wiped new rock
in the traditional styles off the airwaves, with the exception of oldies and “classic”
stations. Meanwhile, pop stations that previously had played rock songs listed
toward R&B and hip hop.
Remarkably, after the high-water days of the “alternative” format, rock radio
never settled back into playing pop-rock based on the pre-Pixies/Nirvana classic
chord changes. When Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty today release propulsive
new rock tracks, there’s no radio format that they would fit. It made good sense,
then, for Nashville to expand its sound to include those that rock radio had ceded.
The resulting music is a curious hybrid: upbeat, rock-ish songs played with
rock’s volume but not rock’s abandon and none of its sex and angst.
Country has for so long made a virtue of its dedication to a purer American
past that it’s all too easy to find fault with its lack of dedication to its own sonic past.
Of course, many rock aesthetes and roots-music purists don’t much believe in that
purer American past, but they do tend to harbor nostalgia for the sound of it. Jay
Farrar, of the bands Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt, exemplified this attitude when he
sang “Switching it over to AM, searching for a truer sound” on 1995’s “Windfall,”
now an alt-country warhorse.

21
In No Depression and Paste magazines (both now defunct), as well as many
college and public radio stations and other bastions of roots-rock purity, that “truer
sound” stands as an ideal much like George Strait’s idea of country music itself: one
murdered by Nashville’s pop-rock. Its paragons are tough-minded singer-
songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Steve Earle, unclassifiable iconoclasts like
Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams, and fellow-traveling Nashville greats like
Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Waylon
Jennings, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson.
These stars are considered the exceptions, the Nashville apostates who stood
up to the suits and recorded deeply personal songs at odds with Music Row
tradition. Many of them did this, just as Paisley, Miranda Lambert and Toby Keith on
occasion do today. But the apostates also all sang great piles of Nashville dross and
filler.
With most, this constitutes the bulk of the catalog. Merle Haggard released
his 30th album less than ten years after his first; Dolly went disco, slummed with
Kenny Rogers, and long before penning her classic leaving song “I Will Always Love
You,” polished off a tune called “I’ll Oil Wells Love You.” And what to make of Hank
himself trotting out “Lovesick Blues” for flour?
None of this is meant to suggest that these greats are undeserving of the
devotion they’re given. Damning today’s Nashville hitmakers for not sounding like
the legends of country music’s past ignores that the legends of country music’s past

22
were themselves commercial artists bucking for hits. It’s pure nostalgia to believe
that the best of the past is the sum of the past. Such thinking is also deeply limiting,
something like insisting that the problem with today’s rock musicians is their failure
to sound like Buddy Holly. The argument against country sounding like yesterday’s
rock posits a hierarchy of what sounds are true enough for us to be nostalgic for:
Hank yes, Def Leppard no.
Today’s country music balls together all of past pop into hits for a wide-
ranging audience familiar with all of past pop. It is useful music, there to drink to, to
dance to, to rock to, to resist having sex to, to heal to, to reaffirm values to. It
endorses the church-approved ideals a listener might wish to hold to but also the
admission that those ideals are hard. It offers reassurance that there’s millions like
you, also listening, also feeling these things, also connected to the beliefs and voices
of previous generations no matter how much our lives might have changed in recent
decades. Above all it offers reassurance that what is true in your home and your
heart is true universally – even if your neighborhood and your president and most
of the signals on your TV and radio suggest otherwise. This is country music, selling
not just flour but the idea that you and everyone else who loves it are what’s best
about America itself.

23

Bibiliography

“Brad Paisley Chart History.” Billboard, accessed March 15, 2011.
http://www.billboard.com/artist/brad-paisley/339390#/artist/brad-
paisley/chart-history/339390

“Brad Paisley's Song 'Welcome to the Future' Supports Barrack Obama and
Narrowly Avoids Controversy?” Yahoo Answers. Accessed February 11, 2011.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091102110906AAjkO43

“CMA Releases Critical Follow Up to Consumer Research Study.” Country Music
Association press release, February 25, 2010. Accessed February 10, 2011.
http://www.pitchengine.com/countrymusicassociation/cma-releases-critical-
follow-up-to-consumer-research-study-during-country-radio-seminar/48929/

Morris, Edward. “Country Album Sales Drop 5 Percent in 2010.” County Music
Television News, January 6, 2011. Accessed February 10, 2011.
http://www.cmt.com/news/country-music/1655408/country-album-sales-drop-5-
percent-in-2010-rap-increases-3-percent.jhtml

24

Newman, Melinda. “A Challenge for Nashville: Survey Finds Country Fans Lagging in
Internet Use.” Washington Post, June 15, 2009. Accessed March 5, 2011.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/06/14/AR2009061402241.html

Paisley, Brad. “Exclusive: Brad Paisley Shares His Night at the White House.” CNN
Entertainment, July 23, 2009. Accessed February 10, 2011.
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-07-
23/entertainment/brad.paisley.white.house_1_homecoming-queen-white-house-
difficult-time?_s=PM:SHOWBIZ

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Wildly popular yet too rarely investigated by critics, contemporary popular country music is dedicated to the same primary commercial and artistic impulse that distinguished the older country music often considered "purer" or "traditional." That impulse: crafting durable hits that address the real-life concerns of the music's fans, often emphasizing truths that that audience might want to consider universals despite the relativistic bent of the rest of society. Today's Nashville hits looks back not just to older country music but to all of the popular music that its audience grew up listening to, from rock 'n roll to hip hop to pop ballads. Drawing upon recent demographic studies, I examine the work of Brad Paisley and other current hitmakers for evidence of how Nashville caters to the complex national audience. Further, by examining the overtly commercial aspects of the career of Hank Williams, I argue against the prevailing notion of a more pure country-music past that today's pop-inflected Nashville hits betray.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Asset Metadata

Creator Scherstuhl, Alan (author)

Core Title This is country music: How Brad Paisley and today's Nashville ain't as far from Hank Williams as you might think

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Degree Conferral Date 2011-05

Publication Date 05/09/2013

Defense Date 04/01/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag country music,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anawalt, Sasha (committee chair), Kun, Joshua (committee member), Page, Tim (committee member)

Creator Email alan.scherstuhl@sfweekly.com,scherstu@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3933

Unique identifier UC1503775

Identifier etd-Scherstuhl-4595 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-475502 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3933 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Scherstuhl-4595.pdf

Dmrecord 475502

Document Type Thesis

Rights Scherstuhl, Alan

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu