This is in the journals section, but nobody seems to have been interested, so I thought maybe it might do better here, where it might be more appreciated.
It's that old joke, isn't it? You know the one, from the movie The Blues Brothers? Jake (or is it Elwood, I never remember) asks the waitress what kind of music they play in the bar, and she, with a winning smile, assures him "Oh we got BOTH types here, hon! Country AND Western!"
Yeah, Country gets a bad rap; it certainly did from me, for a long time. Look, I'm not particularly proud of it but I won't try to deny I was in my youth something of a music snob. I liked what I liked, and the hell with everything else. Pop music was out. Reggae was out. Punk was out. And so on. And Country was definitely out.
See, I had some very bad preconceived notions of this type of music. Firstly, that it all basically sounded the same, which it probably does to someone who doesn't invest the time to look into it properly, as I never had any intention of doing when I was a young rocker. Secondly, that it was "old people's music". Well, to an extent I couldn't be blamed for that. Country is a very old genre, one of the oldest in fact, dating back to the 1920s, and with the exception of classical is probably one of the few other than folk and traditional (often lumped in together, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) that is still both relevant and popular today. It's the music our parents and possibly grandparents may have listened to, but with its broadening appeal as it stretches over into the realms of both rock and pop (and, in some isolated instances, even hip-hop!) the younger folks are getting into it too.
So country music still has its place, and with artists like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain flying the flag, it doesn't look like it's going away any time soon. In this journal I intend to explore this much-maligned and oft-ridiculed genre, find out more about it and dispel some of the myths and prejudices regarding this most American of music styles. I'm quite aware that there are people here far more versed in country than I am, and to that end I'm always ready to learn, so dispense your wisdom here.
Like my history of progressive rock, this will follow a timeline, probably quite rigidly, and I’ll be listening to - but almost certainly not reviewing - important albums along the way. I don’t have in any way the same knowledge of country that I do of prog rock, so I will be guided by my usual research tools, and anyone who wants to cowboy up and lend a rube from out of town a helpin’ hand, why that’d be right welcome of you, sir. Or ma’am. I hope nobody thinks I’m taking liberties with their favourite music genre here; I really do want to understand and get to know it better, and my explorations thus far have led forward rather than back. I don’t like all of the current country music, though I will say there is some that is, if you’ll pardon the expression, mighty fine. So feel free to join in, add your expertise, or just follow me in your pickup as we rattle on down the dusty highway, to paraphrase Waits, lookin' for the heart of country music.