Bourgeois in the U.S.A.

Country is America's music, they say, just like the Dallas Cowboys are America's team. ("They" really mean white America.) Country music has dented the cultural mainstream again recently: Country records top the overall pop music charts; country music TV specials draw big ratings; and national magazines proclaim a country renaissance, heralding a "new breed" of sophisticated country artists.

It is not all hype. Granted, a lot of mediocre Garth Brooks clones in cowboy hats are trying to substitute three names, a shag haircut, and good pectorals for paying dues. But a pretty amazing body of quality work is being offered in country music today, much of it firmly and ferociously rooted in country traditions--like Allan Jackson's honky-tonk wail and Marty Stuart's rockabilly kick.

Great country revivals seem to happen periodically. Country singers (Patsy Cline, Ray Price, and others), backed by lush orchestration, topped the pops in the 1950s with the "country-politan" fad. The great folk music boom of the 1960s, when a market opened briefly for all things authentic, brought in another period of country hype. Bill Monroe and his many bluegrass descendants especially profited from this career opportunity.

There was also the great urban cowboy scare of the late 1970s. Who can forget John Travolta doing the Cotton-Eyed Joe? As this pattern suggests, urban and coastal America is perpetually opening its door a crack for its cracker cousins, then getting bored or embarrassed and slamming it shut again.

As a son of the white Southern working class, I have always included country music in my cultural horizon. Even in my most rock-and-roll-crazed periods, I've been aware of the country music scene, for better or worse. My first great rock-and-roll period was from 1965 to 1970 (fifth to 10th grades), when the world was new and scary. I spent those years bashing out the guitar chords to "Gloria," "Wild Thing," and all those songs that sound like "Hang on Sloopy," and following with true devotion every word that fell from the lips of the Great Lennon.

But even then I was also sitting in front of the television every Saturday afternoon for back-to-back airings of Flatt and Scruggs, Porter Wagoner, The Osborne Brothers, and all the other low-budget country music stars. So when The Beatles recorded a Buck Owens song ("Act Naturally"), I already knew the words.

While growing up, there was no such thing as pop or Top 40 radio in my hometown. There was a "beautiful music" station for the upper crust; everything else was hillbilly, gospel, or rhythm and blues.

This world of my childhood was the cultural milieu from which rock and roll emerged (in the person of the Hillbilly Cat, Elvis Presley). As a cultural cousin to the King, I instinctively related to rock and roll as a sort of mutant extension of Southern traditions (black and white). And, of course, it is.

At any rate, Earl Scruggs' blinding banjo and Porter Wagoner's trash'n'flash persona seemed to my young eyes and ears to be of-a-kind with the volume, velocity, and bad attitude of rock and roll. And so did the Fender guitar twang that dominated every record by the aforementioned Mr. Owens and his ex-con protege, Merle Haggard.

My other intense rock-and-roll period spanned roughly from 1979 to 1984 (when I was old enough to know better). These were the years of the great punk explosion and its subsequent ripples throughout pop musical culture. One day I heard Elvis Costello's first album on the radio and the world began again. During this time I was in a band (which included two other members of this magazine's staff). During this period the Great Lennon fell.

My band mainly did original material, though we did play "Gloria" and "Wild Thing," a Mickey Gilley song, and a couple of country numbers from cousin Jerry Lee Lewis.

That said, however, I'm always suspicious when outsiders flock to the country tradition. I can't help suspecting that they're drawn to the music of my people for all the wrong reasons. Part of the country music boom simply comes from new generations of middle- to working-class people—predominantly Southern, Western, or rural—rediscovering a tradition that was theirs all along and now speaks again in their voice.

But I fear that, for a lot of the urban, Northern, and baby-boomish crowd, country music may be a suburbs of the soul...a safe, white, non-political haven from the disruptions and aggressions of contemporary urban culture. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as it is recognized for what it is. Too often pop pundits don't acknowledge the one obvious reason for the current country fad. Briefly put, country is so big on the charts right now because the current crop of African-American music stars (the rappers) are not as warm and cuddly and white-folks-friendly as Michael Jackson used to be.

Part of my reservations about the country fad arise from my own long experience of the music and its world. Country music represents a closed-circle cultural tradition with clear limits and clear definitions of the ins and outs. That can be comforting, especially for rootless postmoderns. But it can also be intensely claustrophobic, and hell on the misfits. The new generation in Nashville is bending the lines of country tradition, and all for the better. But those lines will not break. There was a reason why America needed Elvis to blow its white world apart, and a reason why the country milieu produced him.

We will need an Elvis again. And he will not be called Travis Tritt.

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.