Where the buffalo roam (and the country radio blares): Rural America in urban culture
by Laurel Mathewson
The following are excerpts from a piece in Issue 8 of Geez Magazine.
When it comes to rural lands and people, American culture is rather bipolar. Two contradictory views co-exist. Old-fashioned, small-town wholesomeness is often portrayed as attractive – bucolic scenery, peace and quite, encounters with nature, Norman Rockwell. But rural people, the folk who actually live in the country, are often seen, more or less, as losers. This derision extends past the stereotypical shirtless, F150-drivin’, tobacco chewin’, mulleted male with a gun rack and a Garth Brooks CD to include the generic small-town people with their presumed small-town minds and ways. An exception is granted for “successful” people with country get-a-aways – Bruce Willis with his Idaho cowboy outpost, the suburban neighbor with a cabin at the lake or a president with a ranch – but as for those 17 percent of Americans who live day in and day out in non-metropolitan places, they’re generally dismissed or disregarded by the so-called culturally enlightened Americans.
Go for the money
You’ve probably heard the stats before. At our nation’s inception, 95 percent of the population was engaged in farming. Now, 17 percent live in non-metropolitan areas and less than one and a half percent are farmers. This trend has been described as an inevitability – sometimes glorious, other times tragic. Somewhere between Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of a nation of small independent farmers and proposals from Rutgers University professors who suggested we depopulate the Plains because it’s time to admit the settling of the plains was a failed experiment, we adopted the belief that the rural-urban population shift was not just a migration in quantity, but quality.
As evidenced by the people who suggest I should stay in a larger center of influence – and my own temptation to do so – we are attracted to the idea of fame, fortune, power and influence. These desirables usually come with the consolidation of capital, resources and culture, which tends, of course, to happen in the city. As Wendell Berry writes in The Unsettling of America:
“We attach much the same values to kinds of profession and levels of income that were once attached to hereditary classes. . . . Doctors are given higher status than farmers, not because they are more necessary, more useful, more able, more talented, or more virtuous, but because they are thought to be better. . . . The typical American “success story” moves from a modest rural beginning to urban affluence, from manual labor to office work.”
Country music
People who live in rural places know all this, and it shows in country music. Like many other genres, most country songs are about falling in love, breaking up, broken hearts and partying. But scattered consistently in country’s top 40 are songs that celebrate small-town, ordinary country lives, and overtly contrast that life with the bright-lights urban ideal. These “lifestyle” country songs, as I call them, bravely defend the character and ideals of rural people.
Bucking the typical American success story, these songs celebrate the value of family, hard work, faith and sometimes patriotism. They reflect and reinforce the idea that rural life is peaceful (or at least simple), close to nature and rooted in solid values. And they consistently contrast that with the shortcomings of urban life.
Take Kenny Chesney’s latest hit, “Never wanted nothin’ more,” which stood for weeks at number one last summer. In it, Chesney sings about his $500 rusted-out truck, his high school sweetheart wife (who he wooed with a “six-dollar bottle of wine” and a “little ring”), and finding the Lord at an altar call. Noting these things, he sings,
“Well, I’m what I am and I’m what I’m not
and I’m sure happy with what I’ve got
I live and love and laugh a lot
and that’s all I need.”
In America, you’d better believe this is counter-cultural: I’m happy with what I’ve got? I’m content with an old truck, my wife and my faith? That’s all I need? Not the message you get from MTV, NBC or any TV commercial.
During the first week of September this year, Chesney’s hit was just one of nine “lifestyle” songs I counted in the country top 40. Other examples are Rodney Atkin’s “These are my people,” or, from a few years ago, Tracy Byrd’s “We’re from the country (and we like it that way).”
While such songs are often clannish and may promote the insider-outsider mentality notorious in small towns, they’re also the one place in mainstream American culture where the worth and value of living in a rural place is consistently affirmed.
Urbanization of the spirit
There will always be people attracted to an urban life, and there are real benefits – spiritual and other – that come with living in the city. But there are also people attracted to a rural or small-town life, and it’s not just because they can’t “make it” in the city. For some, the attraction seems to root itself in a sense of what’s good for the soul. Norris writes:
“A person is forced inward by the spareness of what is outward and visible in all this land and sky. The beauty of the Plains is like that of an icon; it does not give an inch to sentiment or romance. The flow of the land, with its odd twists and buttes, is like the flow of Gregorian chant that rises and falls beyond melody, beyond reason or human expectation, but perfectly. Maybe seeing the Plains is like seeing an icon: what seems stern and almost empty is merely open, a door into some simple and holy state.”
What does it mean for us, spiritually, if the door to this life is shut down economically and culturally? What happens when our society doesn’t give people the choice, economically, to live in the kind of place where they most deeply encounter God? What happens to the greater spiritual commons when rural spirituality fades away?
Just as the unique spiritual insights of metropolitan life enrich our collective understanding of God and reality, so too do the insights formed by open spaces, encounters with non-man-made creation, and smaller communities. Taking rural people and places seriously is more than just a matter of fairness. With the loss of the rural perspective, the broader culture loses access to certain truths that balance the wisdom formed by the urban environment. In the midst of our urbanized culture, rural influences and ethos are needed to create a wider and deeper picture – one that more nearly approaches truth.
So if you aren’t already a fan, tune into country music radio every once in awhile. Tap your foot, cringe at the twang if need be, put aside the urban success narrative, listen for complicated political implications, and join in on the contagiously singable choruses. Phil Vassar’s hit “This is my life” would be a good start:
“Fat cat’s just getting fatter
Linin’ their pockets, what does is matter
All I want is an honest wage
A piece of ground where my kid’s are safe
. . . this is my life. . . And I want it back
Republican or democrat? Well…
I don’t give a damn about that
I want a chance to do my job
Pledge allegiance to my God”
Is this song a liberal, populist diatribe against “The Man,” or a conservative call for smaller government and more God in schools? The truth, as is so often the case, lies somewhere in between.
Laurel Mathewson lives in San Diego, California, which she hopes is a temporary stop on the way back to small town Oregon. She can be reached at laurelrs@gmail.com.
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