ON A recent night at the “Grand Ole Opry”, a live radio show that is a country-music institution, the songs’ themes were familiar and unabrasive: homesick wayfarers, smoochy asseverations of love and the virtues of the simple life, God and corn whiskey. Until the guitars began twanging for “Church Bells”, sung by Carrie Underwood (pictured), the genre’s reigning queen. The ballad tells of a backwoods beauty who marries up, but to a violent man. After a beating she finds herself “covered in make-up…sitting in the back pew /Praying with the baptist.”
As Robert Oermann, an expert on country music, says, unlike the sanitisations of pop, “country songs reflect the culture from which they spring.” Parts of the South, country’s heartland, suffer badly from domestic violence. For example, proportionally more women are killed by men in South Carolina than in any other state. That blight has always featured in country lyrics—but traditionally from the perspective of male perpetrators, who are only sometimes punished or even regretful. In the 1920s tune “T for Texas”, Jimmie Rodgers sang of shooting “poor Thelma/ Just to see her jump...Continue reading
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