Me and Bobby McGee

I remembered when one of my aunts looked at me in surprise and said, “You like our music?”

Country music is looked down on. It originated at a time when enslaved blacks and indentured whites worked side by side and invented blue grass (blues plus ballads). It’s rural and not urban and not civilized. It’s the simple music of the poor. Even worse, it’s the music of unlettered white people. It’s very white, and I need say no more. It’s not elite or educated or diverse. It’s didactic, expressing in songs the social rules of the Scotch-Irish (as we called them until recently) or Scots-Irish or Orange Irish or Ulster Irish. It is, some say, Southern and quick to anger, the sounds of frontier folk, armed to the remaining teeth. At its best, I say, it is a direct and moving expression of things we experience.