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*Winner of The Peter Loewenberg Essay Prize in Psychoanalysis and Culture from the American Psychoanalytic Association
The pursuit of happiness is an unalienable right promised in the Declaration of Independence. Driving one of America's primary musical traditions, however, is the pursuit of sadness. A country music anthem by Joe Nixon celebrates this pursuit: “Mother country music let your sad songs roll” (see the 1977 recording by Vern Gosdin). Those sad songs have been rolling out of recording studios, radios and dive bars, roadhouses and dance halls, honkytonks and front porches, and concert halls and stadiums, for as long as what is known as hillbilly music has been around.
Sad songs, certainly, are not the whole story of country music, which embraces a range of emotions, attitudes, and moods as broad and deep as that of its performers and listeners. Many of these songs, however, are focused on experiences of loss and isolation. This can include easy sentimentality, indulgent nostalgia, self-righteous clichés, or in-your-face defensive contempt for city ways that threaten a rural ideal with little or no relationship to lived experience. More deeply, this music reflects the hardship, poverty, and disruptive social and economic changes that shaped the culture of the rural America in which it is rooted.
The world of rural life and values from which this music emerged started disappearing before Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family made their separate ways to Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927, to make their first recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company. Rural life as the American way of living and knowing; the old country church as the center of social and spiritual life and truth; the unchallenged supremacy of whiteness as a racial norm, or of maleness as a gender norm;