Welcome to New Country: Music for Today's America

Welcome to New Country shows (as opposed to argues) how and why commercial new country music is a major collective achievement, on par with jazz and the Broadway musical. A traditionally Southern and working class idiom has been transformed into a national and middle class mode of expression that articulates many of the hopes and concerns of life in America today. At its most interesting, new country music is music for the middle: middle class, middle aged, and often in the middle of the country. Welcome to New Country is written for anybody who can follow a serious country song -- which is a lot of people. It is also written sympathetically, as a small contribution to ameliorating some of the divides that run through this nation. Using copious quotation from hits, straightforward explication, and a bit of memoir, the book shows how new country music articulates an American mythos. Country music not only expresses an imaginary (small towns, cars, fields, etc.), but also meditates on life, from birth to death, home to politics to being out on the lake to God. Politically, country music reflects changing ideas of America itself, which may be caricatured as a shift from experiment in self governance to appreciation of American experiences. America is reinventing herself, and this music is a way to start talking, in very plain language, about how. Psychologically, new country music is on occasion what in another context was called existential: it queries, sometimes rather desperately, the significance of often ordinary lives. Indeed, there are a number of country music songs (and a chapter of the book) about "life" itself, and how we stand vis-a-vis our days. Middle aged concerns. So country music is popular and commercial and so forth, but that is not to be confused with unserious. I hope you enjoy the book; it has been a good long journey.