Why Are There No Country Songs About Tinder?
Must you be a farmer to sing a country song? Is The Office a country song? And other interesting questions....
"To sing like a hillbilly, you had to have lived like a hillbilly. You had to have smelt a lot of mule manure."
- Hank Williams
Using this well known aphorism from Hank as a gatekeeping mechanism for who is allowed to sing hillbilly/country music is obviously ridiculous. Per that definition, nearly none of today’s teenagers are capable of qualifying. Back when Williams Jennings Bryan was the most important man in America, (one hundred and fifty years ago give or take), just about 50% of Americans were farmers and presumably smelled mule manure on a regular basis.That number has dropped precipitously throughout the years. What percentage of twenty first century Americans are working in farming and other mule manure related agricultural fields? I’ll spare you the guesswork. It’s only 2%.
Furthermore, in case a cultural argument defending a rural background as an authenticity prerequisite is put forward, the shifts of the last century have not been simply about changing professions, but rather a strong tendency towards urbanization. The share of the population living in large cities, and the surrounding suburban areas have increased significantly, often at the expense of farms and small towns.
To be strictly accurate, small towns have not necessarily shrunken, but they have at best treaded water. In his 2002 book American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century: How It Flourished and What It Cost, Bruce L. Gardner of the University of Maryland gets into the weeds about the shifting demographics. A great, if a bit dry of a read. From 1940 to 1960 was the biggest decline in farming. However, small towns did not experience as much of a drop as the truly rural farmers. Odd, because many of these small towns were heavily reliant on the surrounding farms for economic sustenance. The book explains this surprising reality- only a small part of the large themes discussed therein- and shows that much of the farming population moved into the small towns. This migration away from farms towards the small towns was enough to maintain an equilibrium with the small town populaces that left towards the big cities. Notably, the raw numbers are equivalent to what they were seventy years ago in spite of the doubling of the American population in that span of time.
Folllowing along with these demographic trends, the roots of country singers have changed apace with what the US census would have you think. For the generations of Hank Williams, Little Jimmy Dickens, Ernest Tubb, and Buck Owens, living on a farm growing up was fairly normal. As stated above, the big changes occcured post World War II. Vast swaths of poor farmers, the base population where country and folk singers usually came from, moved towards big cities (really this started with the depression and can be seen reflected in the music then already, but it acccelerated massively after the war). The stories of country music shifted as the people shifted.
It is no surprise that the city-fied countrypolitan production and marketing choices of The Nashville Sound came to the forefront starting in the late fifties and onwards. It reflected a strategic endpoint of merging a rural tradition with the small town to now-suburban realities of the audiences. The audience was not living on farms anymore. They did not get nervous if it didn’t rain for a few weeks in a row. They were living the realities of factory jobs or middle class management positions. However, their pasts and maybe even their parents still lived on the farm. This connection was commercialized via nostalgia. Nostalgia has human appeal and is present in many forms of entertainment, but has been capitalized by country music a degree stranger than most other forms of popular entertainment. Its cultural stance as a genre ostensibly bound to at least the trappings of tradition makes it a seamless and logical pairing. (Granted, nostalgia was present in country music well before this era. However, the divide between the nostalgia and present reality really widened during this period to a notable degree and that is my focus.)
In fact, taking some artistic interpretation to the words Hank Williams said, once you ignore the literal meaning of what he said, and chalk it up to his personal reflection of corresponding demographics of the country, we see a truth that cuts to the heart of country music’s appeal. If you want to be a successful country artist, you must conjure up the feelings and emotions that one would have developed had he/she worked on a farm. Or, if one was reflecting on the realities of 1980s America, 2000s America, or 2020s America, you would need a sincere relationship to whatever realities were being discussed.
The important thing that Hank was teaching us was that country music is an exercise in relatability, understanding, and empathy. The example was time bound, but the concept has proven to be the timeless key to successful country music expression. And yeah, quite often that is best done in a nostalgic and backwards looking direction.
The very format of what we think of as country music is heavily indebted to, and in a sense defined by these characteristics. The shifting in settings every twenty to thirty years gradually trails the ebbs and flows of the American populace, echoing with the lived experiences of the near past.
Up until now, the focus was on demographic and geographic change. Don’t blame me for bringing it up, I am pretty sure Hank done it this way. Those are an unsurprising area of conversation in country music. Background and identity is a common theme. However, by no stretch is it the main topic of choice for the genre. As is nearly always the case in music, country music is consumed with thoughts about love. This is fertile ground for exploring our thesis.
I would like to introduce the readers to a song.
A Doug Stone classic. Classic late 80’s production with its slightly airy pop sheen adding just a touch of the ethereal to an otherwise grounded arrangement. Perfectly befitting the grounded and realistic love story delicately described therein about a workplace romance. I dearly love this song because of its sincere country straightforwardness paired with a wistful but clear eyed realism. No fantastical and angelic pedestal raising. No leery objectification. Just the real world.
What is very interesting to note about this song is that despite the ubiquity of workplace romances in TV and popular media, I can only think of a handful of country songs devoted to this topic. It felt unique. The typical love story in country tends towards a hometown honey or a high school sweetheart. This feels out of wack with how things actually work.
I had two theories to explain this reality. Firstly, just wishcasting. The storybook ending is always more appealing and these archetypes work so they get put into song. That is true, but doesn't feel entirely satisfying. Yes, country can be just as performative as any other genre, but overall, it tends towards the realized over the fantastical. I would want an answer that works with that reality better. I decided to pursue an alternate approach based on the above written understanding of country musics themes to answer this conundrum.
I surmised that if one looked objectively at data showing where Americans met spouses and then tried to focus on some of those periods of time, one could track trends and relate them to country songs in periods later in time.
I wish I could say that I have a spreadsheet with detailed cross references between clusters of marriage data and song trends. I don’t. However, I do have a lovely graph1 to detail how unlike the slower moving shifts of where Americans choose to live their lives, love changes much more rapidly.
What do we see? The first thing that jumps off the page to me is the steep decline for the “traditional” ways of meeting. Online dating has cannibalized the dating market. Not all of these declines are attributable to the Tinder-ification of modern dating. Plenty were in steep decline beforehand. Interesting.
That brings to mind a song like George Strait's Check Yes Or No- where a primary school crush turns into everlasting love. By the year of the songs release- 1995- only 10% of people met in a comparable fashion. Contrast that to what the data says about twenty or thirty years prior and that number more than doubles. With Strait's veteran and traditionalist artistic persona, leaning into the nostalgia for the "simpler times past" presents a story that, although perhaps not relevant to people in that exact moment and place in time, is highly relatable to listeners. It was only one generation before that this story was commonplace. Perhaps the listeners parents or grandparents met in a similar fashion, even if they themselves did not.
Seemingly, this would be the case with many country artists aiming for that reflective, nostalgic, and comfortable storytelling setting anchored solidly in the near past for best results. It fits with the broad strokes thesis of the genre as shown by the demographic analysis above, and anecdotally explains wonderfully why there are barely any internet dating songs even though we are many years into that revolution.
Interestingly enough, the Doug Stone record is a bit of an outlier per my theory. Coworkers meeting each other plateaued starting in 1980 and continued at the same rate for about ten to fifteen years. According to my theory, we shouldn’t really see this kind of song until 2005 or so. And yet Doug Stone was doing this thing back in 1990! Well I guess that blows things all up.
Or maybe not. It bears emphasis that this song was an outlier on radio. Stone intentionally chose to update the standard tropes and formula and pivoted to tell a story based on the more recent past. He was almost progressive in this way. Similar to how George Strait intentionally looked backwards to fit with his persona, Stone looked to the current age trying to appear more up-to-date by telling present day stories. The story that was happening in In A Different Light stood in contrast with the backwards looking stories being told all throughout the genre. I don’t feel entirely comfortable saying this is the exception that proves the point, but it does fit quite nicely. The very uniqueness of this song is because it subverted standard tropes.
Although it is not a perfect explanation (for one, it begs the question why in 2005-2010 we didn't get a rash of workplace romance songs- I'd blame country pivoting to the youth movement at that time with more "timely" patriotic and bro country material), it is one that explains why this song feels so grounded and indicative of the time.
The reason why In A Different Light stuck out to me personally when I first heard it a couple years back was for a very different reason.
In 2005, the American version of The Office launched. It still has a special place in the culture. Interestingly enough, its appeal was a little bit anachronistic. When the show hit its stride in the late 00s and 10s, the version of corporate office life being shown was already somewhat out of date. Office Space in 1999 nailed the zeitgeist much more firmly than The Office. The romantic leads of the show were John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer playing Jim and Pam in a quintessential workplace romance. I find it interesting to note that this resonated heavily with then-modern audiences. This was a show that was slightly backwards looking, overly sincere, and specifically featured a romantic plot that fit far more with eighties dating culture than it did the aughts. Sure seems like The Office is kind of like a country song! I'd nominate In A Different Light as essentially being built for Jim and Pam. It nails the vibes exquisitely. That was my first thought when I heard it for the first time. Inspired this whole article really.
Thanks for reading,
Joe
All credit to the fantastic work done and published here. https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.1908630116