Country Music and North Georgia

I am in northern Georgia doing some consulting work at Piedmont College in the little town of Demorest. They are a great bunch of people and I am having a very productive set of sessions. As always, I come here to help them but end up finding that they benefit me. More on that in a different forum.

I did not bring any CDs to play in my rental car, so I am listening to the radio. There isn't a station in my style on the dial so I am just listening to the local country music station that is aimed at this region. My mother used to play a lot of classic country when I was a child, but I became disenchanted with country later in my life when I found it to be formulaic and boring. I remember the joke, "My dog died the day I got out of prison, and my pick-up truck broke down on the way to the honkey-tonk."

It seems to be a bit different now. Maybe it is the rural nature of this area and the way the music is programmed, but I have found it interesting to listen to. I am not sure I will become a fan but I have been taken by the way many of the songs seem directly relevant to the lives of people. Songs have been about:

• Devotion to a woman after a long and successful marriage;
• The kinds of choices that women have to make at various stages in their lives;
• The burdens that dads face in trying to model good behaviors for their children;
• The pain that one experiences after a long marriage has failed;
• The ways in which small town life is good because people really make contacts with each other;
• That young women can party and have a good time without being sexually available.

It is interesting. The singing and the instrumentation still seems a bit formulaic, but listening to the words has made me think twice about modern country music. I am not sure that I will become a fan, but I have become a bit more respectful.