Why Pop Country Doesn't Work
or, how Louis L'Amour explains the model for real, successful country music.
Louis L’Amour was low key basic
To understand Louis L’Amour is to understand country music. You may not know who Louis L’Amour is, but your Dad definitely does. For those uninitiated into the world of Dad fiction, L’amour wrote an incredible amount of Western novels. Most of them are relatively slim and feature an essentially anonymous cast of ruffians, cowboys, troublemakers, outlaws, and the like engaging in the classic Western tropes of shootin’, drinkin’, and rescuin’ (damsels in distress). For those father figures not fans of the Western genre, L’Amour wrote some other Dad-coded material, all strictly falling into the adventure genre. They’ve never been considered terribly serious literature. This is understandable; trade paperbacks have never been a medium for sophisticated literature, and the Westerns especially, with its root in populist dime store novels, has never been considered a setting for the highbrow literature folks. But this isn’t just the result of bias, there are many real limitations to these books. They tend to be relatively simple and straightforward and consistently rely on the tropes of the Western genre to move the plot forward.
For L’Amour’s fans, what makes his work so compelling is the vividness by which the slim plots are rendered. The hallmark of it is the attention and detail paid to landscapes and settings. This is an underrated hallmark of Western film and writing. L’Amour himself traipsed around much of that country, both as a young man and even in his later years, and the ease with which he paints pictures of vistas and canyons and deserts that his frequently urban audience had never been to is remarkable. It makes it feel very real. And more so, the land acts as a silent character. The desert imposes its will on the cowboy, who must bend to fit with its reality.
This is an apt metaphor for L’Amour’s work as a whole. The institution of the Western has templates and tropes galore. Of course, the main character is a strong silent type. Of course, he carries a six-shooter and can hit a bullseye from the hip after a few stiff drinks. It just wouldn’t be a proper Western if it were done any other way. L’Amour plays within the bounds of the trope, sketching out the traditional settings and storyboards with both new tweaks and comforting similarity. Much as L’Amour’s characters adapt to their unchanging natural landscapes and circumstances out of necessity, L’Amour does the same with the literary landscapes and boundaries he was bequeathed by choosing this genre as his canvas.
Free, but is that a good thing?
For those not predisposed to enjoy this sort of thing, a particular fascinating subgenre of the Louis L’Amour experience is when he attempts to break free and produce “real” literature. Welcome to 1987’s The Haunted Mesa. In The Haunted Mesa, L’Amour targets ancient civilizations as his central plot hub. Someone as infused and connected to the land as he was naturally wonders about the previous inhabitants of the land. In the American Southwest, that labour traipsed around so freely as a young man, that would be the Anasazi people, a tribe of prehistoric Americans that we only have archaeological evidence of. L’Amour is fascinated both by the people and the land, and therefore the people’s relationship with the land. Much of the book is predicated on the thesis of a supernatural explanation for their disappearance.
To explore these more sophisticated science fiction themes, a more robust protagonist is required. Mike Raglan does not entirely fit the standard L’Amour paradigm. The typical L’Amour paradigm is aloof and a loner. Mike does have that. However, there is no classical trope the character falls back on. He does exhibit certain L’Amour characteristics — the skilled background, the experience bouncing around, the comfort with land. He is a stint working for a professional circus, which L’Amour frequently used as a bit of a self-insert. But he is not this exceptionally talented lonesome cowboy. He is a modern-day man, an investigator of paranormal activity, a skeptic, but one who — in an attempt at a three-dimensional characterization — balances this general skepticism with an openness and acknowledgment that there must be something more to this world, something not explainable by the skeptics’ playbook. It’s one of L’Amour’s boldest attempts at a textured, nuanced character, not relying on mere trope to illustrate.
Herein begins the fatal flaw of this book. In the absence of trope and pre-established context for the readers, L’Amour must build that context for himself. Introducing us to both the scientific conception of the Anasazi tribe as well as his supernaturally inflected approach takes time and many pages. To this end, the book ends up in a slog of meandering, often directionless passages, unnecessary exposition, and unnatural characters that appear to be in certain places at certain times simply in order to present a sufficient amount of information for our protagonist to proceed to the next step of the journey. Unlike the quick beginning, middle, and end arcs of the Western novels L’Amour cut his teeth on, here — in order to justify the longer page count — one would expect much in the way of setbacks, red herrings, and a complex textual interplay. In the beginning of the book, it indeed appears that there is going to be a decent amount of conflict, but as the book proceeds, conflict fades, and instead Mike devolves into a video game character playing on easy, overcoming all obstacles, achieving success after success in an unnatural fashion.
The book has, unsurprisingly, mixed reviews. It was released soon before his death, so charitably, one could wonder if the editing process was cut short because of ill health. Possibly. To my eyes, the fundamental takeaway is that L’Amour was operating on ground unfamiliar to him, in a world where the shortcuts and established background he had used to such great effect proved insufficient. In an attempt to be innovative, he undercut what had made him successful. There are many takeaways one can have from this, and for country music we must explore both the similarities and the differences of this thesis.
Country Music Ain’t Different
It is no surprise that L’Amour has been invoked in country music by acts as far afield as Corb Lund, with his track “Louis L’Amour” off of 2020’s underrated Agricultural Tragic, to the EP Fireside with Louis L’Amour by Texas country folk duo Jamestown Revival dedicated to the storytelling inspired by the L’Amour stories, themes, and characters. Colter Wall, our current most prominent cowboy singer, has also positively invoked L’Amour in his song Western Swing & Waltzes (“…and its horsehair floors and Louis L’Amour…”). These are artists deeply embedded in the Western side of country’s DNA. The reason for these ties, as we will see, runs deeper than shared taste.
Country music has a history. Western film, TV, and literature have a history as well. And the further removed we get from the actual frontier, the more merged together these two American art forms become. Anyone walking into either of these, except perhaps for the youngest of exposures, has preconceived notions. These are based on, at this point, nearly a hundred years’ worth of Western material. The modern Western, as we understand it, is rooted in an even older tradition of the tales penned by the likes of James Fenimore Cooper in the early 1800s of the woodsmen in New York State, essentially the frontier at the time. Extending through tales of Daniel Boone, the Kentucky trailblazers, the trappers slowly spreading across Appalachia, and from there to the Mississippi riverman across to the wide open West. These are all the precursors for the Western. And its final form became identified with the final avatar of the American frontier: the cowboy. The story, in a sense, ends there. Since then, we either spin in circles with the same cast of characters (just with higher-powered rifles and pickups trucks) or push well beyond boundaries into speculatively defined pseudo-Westerns — perhaps most famously Logan, where even a genre purist like me admits that Wolverine occupies a role very evocative of the Western, telegraphed explicitly through its connections to Shane, one of Western literature and filmography’s greatest achievements. Logan is not a Western. But it draws enormous emotional weight from the genre’s scaffolding — the aging gunfighter, the one last job, the innocent he must protect — and without that inherited context, the film’s lands as a fraction of what it is. The scaffolding built from Cooper through Sheridan is so durable it operates in works far beyond the genre’s explicit borders.
Country music is the same. It is technically a straightforward genre. Prog-rock lyricism, bordering on the bafflingly obscure or alternatively the deeply poetic, ain’t how the southern folks in country music tend to do it. If one is having a feeling that today their world has slipped away, then they will sing that “Today My World Slipped Away.” If someone is very much in love with a person, they might sing that they are “crazy for loving you”. It’s conversational, relatable, and yes, simple. Always has been.
And yet fans connect with great depth and will proclaim that country music, with its three chords and the truth, cuts deep to their soul. How? Sure, it aims directly for the heartstrings without remorse. But also, it does contain the depths of other genres, but accomplishes differently then them. Country does so in the comparable method to the Western. Consider what happens when a singer mentions crying into his beer at the honky-tonk. Immediately — before the next line has arrived — the listener’s mind floods with data. Hank Williams’ tear in his beer, Ernest Tubb despondent over a girl with a Honky Tonk Heart, and fifty years of barroom losers materialize. The dire to shrink into the neon and the sawdust hoping for an escapism that we all know will not come. All of that arrives instantly, delivered not by the songwriter but by the genre itself. The same mechanism fires with “dirt road.” With “front porch.” With “pickup truck.” With “Hank”. Each phrase unlocks a cascade of accumulated meaning that the artist never had to build because they inherited it. Country music speaks in compressed poetry not because its writers are lazy but because the genre has spent a century building the dictionary (and, it’s especially fluent in the whole cowboy stuff because it wholesaled lifted Western imagery when the & Western got added to the hillbilly music charts, thereby allowing for even more shorthand to be added. See “The Cowboy Rides Away” and basically any Western ever made).
As the strengths, so the weaknesses. When country music pushes beyond its tropes, pushes beyond its genre into a space that now requires world-building, establishment of lore, and context to be fleshed out by the artist — as genre no longer does the heavy lifting in establishing context — it puts a great burden of pressure on the artist.
The masters at work, and also those that tried
Alan Jackson’s blues record, Like Red on a Rose, is the exemplar of pivoting genres in a way that works. Jackson understands how country’s soft-spoken simplicity is the means by which emotion is most efficiently conveyed, and his take on the blues sticks directly to that lane. The tropes of country have a great deal of overlap with the tropes of the blues. This was an effort at sophistication, a slight pulling away from the country genre to add more blues into the mixture, but the central relationship stays. One glance at the album cover tells you all you need to know. Jackson is still wearing his trademark cowboy hat, but now it’s paired with a sophisticated-looking pinstripe suit and a crisp white shirt. The hat stayed country, the music leaned blues, and it worked because the distance between those two places was shorter than it looked.
The inverse is equally instructive. Kacey Musgraves’ Star-Crossed is the moment that most comes to mind. Musgraves has always had a contentious relationship with country music because her early music was very much cutting against the cultural winds of the time. Texan, thoroughly country, chock full of attitude. It received praise not only for its willingness to cut against type, but also because she was possessed of a very distinctive artistic flavor. As her art developed, she expanded her palette, moving beyond the stricter neo-traditional definitions of her early records and embarking on what is perceived to be her magnum opus, Golden Hour.
Golden Hour incorporated a sophisticated pop palette, with subtle synths substituting for steel guitar, but crucially, the framework of country music was still there. The synthetic elements work either as substitutes for the textured flavor of the pedal steel or to push in other directions, borrowing from other genres. But the soul of the craft at the core, the imagery, the emotional directness, the songwriting economy, continues to rely on the country scaffolding and only gets enhanced by her creative additions. Not quite Logan territory, but a healthy push into uncharted terrain with just enough strings connecting to make the whole thing stay together.
Conversely, Star-Crossed was a full push into synth-pop territory. A fascinating concept album incorporating elements of classic tragedy as an interpretive structure for her relationships and it didn’t go anywhere. She had pushed too far. It was an aggressive pivot that abandoned much of the scaffolding that provided context. What was remarkable about Star-Crossed is that in spite of all the clear work put into the record, it felt empty, whereas on prior records depth abounded. The scaffolding was what was missing. Since then, she appears to have learned her lesson. After a half step back in Deeper Well, Middle of Nowhere brought back the latent country elements, that wild Texan at the core, reasserting what made her early records so special.
Point. Counterpoint.
Carrie Underwood is a counter-case, arriving in country music from the pop world of American Idol, and her initial singles charted mainly on pop radio. If any artist had the crossover infrastructure already in place, had the vocal instrument, the name recognition that transcended any single genre, it was her. And yet she never made the leap. She has remained emphatically, deliberately country. The reason becomes clear when you look at what her best material actually does.
“Two Black Cadillacs” is as good as commercial country gets in the twenty-first century. And it is good, in part, because country music has spent generations building the murder ballad tradition. The song inherits centuries of accumulated meaning before the first note plays. Remove that scaffolding by putting Underwood, with that voice and that song, in a pop context, and you have an interesting one-off novelty track. She never left, maybe due to label affiliations or the comfort of country radio, but also perhaps because she/her team understood that shifting away would remove something load-bearing from her artistry.
Perhaps she learned from those that came before her. LeAnn Rimes tried soon beforehand and learned the hard way. In 2002, after years of incremental drift from the country radio that had made her a star, Rimes released Twisted Angel, a full-throated pop album that shed nearly all of her country identity. It went gold, not platinum. Her country audience hadn’t followed her, and pop radio had no particular reason to adopt her when she was competing as a new entrant in a crowded field, stripped of the genre context that had made her exceptional. She returned to country with This Woman in 2005. Faith Hill had a very similar arc with This Kiss and Breathe, eventually followed by Mississippi Girl, also in ’05. The scaffolding that made you legible is not optional.
Garth Brooks understood this better than most. When he got bored and considered making a rock album, he created the Chris Gaines persona, providing an artificial context, backstory, and reference material to give that broader picture necessary for the album to actually work. He intuited, correctly, that you cannot walk into a different genre naked. The whole thing flopped, showing that artifice ultimately will crumble, and that you need a much more authentic relationship to culture and genre to build this. What is remarkable about the Chris Gaines moment is not the failure. Gambles are precarious by design. But consider who we are talking about. Garth Brooks has a legitimate claim to Beatles-level cultural saturation. If that man, with that level of fame and talent, understood that he still needed the scaffolding and tried to manufacture it from scratch, that tells you everything about how load-bearing the scaffolding actually is, and how difficult it is to create it by yourself. History is massive and no faux documentary can make up for it.
To understand Louis L’Amour is to understand country music. To understand the Western is to understand country music, because in so many ways they are one and the same. Respect history for it provides the concrete holding us up and meaning behind much of what we enjoy. Taylor Sheridan walks in trails that Daniel Boone cut and John Ford, Louis L’Amour et al immortalized. The unbroken circle of country music builds much the same.
Thank you for reading,
Joe
If you’ve enjoyed reading this and missed my last post, please consider taking a look at it here,
or here’s something about some pop country done right.
or, with the Red Clay Strays new record taking off, here’s a look at their previous record.
and lastly, some thoughts on production and trend chasing.