Pardon me. Are you using this soapbox? Mind if I borrow it? Thanks.

All y’all may not know this, but I have a bit of a twang. It’s subtle most of the time, and it’s mixed with some weird bits of Pittsburg-ese and Irish and British slang, but I have lived in the Old Dominion for most of my life, and it’s clear as a bell if you listen. And yet, here I am with a bit of a twang; a mixolydeon fiddle tune stuck in my head; “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy” on the tip of my tongue, ready for singing; Appalachian Studies courses and syllabi all stuffed in my brain; years of flatfoot, square, and clogging teaching and performing under my belt; a banjo, a mandolin, a fiddle, and a guitar all within easy reach; hundreds and hundreds of CDs and pages of sheet music. And still, I often have to force myself to say “I like Country music” without adding some kind of qualifier. I don’t add a qualifier to “I like rock/Irish/Swing/Punk/Klezmer . . .” Just “Country” is hard to say.

You know why it’s hard to say? It’s not because I’m ashamed of my family or of Appalachia or of my love of what is truly an American art form. It’s because I’m ashamed of Nashville. I don’t mean the place—I mean the music machine.
And I’m ashamed of Nashville because Nashville apparently hasn’t realized it should be ashamed of itself for refusing to support musical geniuses like Gillian Welch and David Rawlings and Old Crow Medicine Show and Uncle Tupelo and the Be Good Tanyas until someone with enough buying power (i.e. we alt-country, old-time, and bluegrass fans) twists their arms into doing it.
For ignoring geniuses like Willie Nelson and Patsy Cline and Hank Williams and Johnny Cash until they’re in vogue again, and then trotting them or some facsimile of them out like performing monkeys and hoping we’ll forget when those geniuses were marginalized and maligned because they were doing something different.
Ashamed that looks rather than talent seem to be pre-requisites for music deals.
Ashamed that it took until 2005 to add Deford Bailey to the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Ashamed that Jerry Douglas is the only recipient of a CMA award this year with real roots chops.
Ashamed that the Nashville machine continues to bleach the history of Country so folks forget that this music developed from the music of Cherokees and Shawnees and Creeks and Choctaws and Africans and Melungeons and immigrants who had accents and were poor and who sometimes supported communism, not just Anglo-Saxon whites who were respectably right-of-center and pious and straight and sober.
Ashamed that Nashville is ashamed of where Country came from and what it really is to those of us who really know it. It’s folk music, not bubblegum pop. It’s about struggle and poverty and war and depression, even if they think those things won’t sell as many records as treacle. Harumph.

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