"What united the music was a catholicity of origin and an unerring obsession with life inside the home. Not a protest song but the reality of that vacant chair."

Another Country

The unpredictable politics of an American genre

JESSE BARRON

Before radio stations started calling it “country” after World War II, a man at an Ozark fiddle contest or a church gathering was listening to “hillbilly” or “old familiar.” His music spoke to a life lived not in opposition to the city but on its own plain terms. In the late 1800s, folk songs lamented the “vacant chair” at the supper table left by the Civil War. In the 1930s, the proto-country of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys dunked the Victorian music-hall love song into the swing-time sweat of the Friday evening barnhouse stomp—the soundtrack to unwinding after work. Hank Williams—the genre’s great, self-immolating hero, a star at twenty-three, dead in a Cadillac at twenty-nine—articulated the pain of failed love in a yodel influenced by blackface singers. What united the music was a catholicity of origin and an unerring obsession with life inside the home. Not a protest song but the reality of that vacant chair. Not social commentary but the brutality of love, the rhythm of work and leisure, the steady roll of the seasons, the passage from birth to marriage to death.