Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Willie Nelson: What I Learned About Happiness From Country Music
When I was nine years old, I moved from the swamps of southern Florida to East Tennessee. Even before our relocation, my initiation into the history of country music had been substantial. In 1989, I saw Tammy Wynette in a flea market in southern Florida, not quite aware of the tragedy I was beholding (Tammy Wynette, the queen of country music singing at the Swap Shop in Broward County). My mother regularly played the records of Willie Nelson, Charley Pride, George Jones, and Dolly Parton around the house. Before there were CDs, when cassettes were new-fangled media only for the fanciest of cars, the tone and timber of country music had been written upon my psyche.
In 1991, I moved to East Tennessee, a mere forty-five-minute drive from Sevierville, the birthplace of Dolly Parton. As an eleven-year-old, I remember seeing Dolly Parton ride a carousel with Burt Reynolds at Dollywood, where I had season tickets (in Maryville, we all had season tickets). At the time, the various shows of Dollywood were focused on telling the history of country music, taking the viewer from the early days of singing hymns in churches to the music of, well, Dolly Parton. The school buses of East Tennessee, which I rode every day to high school starting in 1996, played exclusively country music: Alan Jackson, Deana Carter, and Randy Travis.
Something about riding the bus each day to school made me hostile toward country music. Yes, I still listened to bluegrass. But it was the mid-nineties, and I wanted to be known as a connoisseur of alternative rock: Nirvana, Alanis Morissette, and Blink-182. Not someone who found his heart singing whenever the steel guitar played its opening notes. With the move to college up north, I doubled down. Along with my slight accent (marginal compared to my friends), I left behind the music of my childhood for Ani de Franco, the Indigo Girls, and Damien Rice.
The gift of growing up is that you get to admit that your youthful embarrassments are stupid. So, at the age of thirty-eight, I finally admitted to friends, my children, and my wife something that I had kept hidden in my heart: I love country music. Not just the Americana, roots music that sophisticated academics are supposed to like, but Lainey Wilson, and Miranda Lambert, certainly, Margo Price. Even at ninety-one years of age, Willie Nelson—I brought my children to see Willie this year, and now my daughter says her favorite singer is not Taylor Swift but Willie.
Now, there are lots of reasons for my love of this music. The fiddle, the steel guitar, and the banjo bring me back to humid summers in East Tennessee. Every time I hear a song about a southern summer, I find myself recalling the taste of honeysuckle and sweet tea, the smell of wildflowers, and the cold water of creek swimming. Part of me will always remain in Maryville, TN, where I grew up. A good portion of me swells with pride when I hear the opening notes of Rocky Top. I shed a nostalgic tear every time that Kenney Chesney and Kelsey Ballerini conclude “Half of My Hometown” with a harmonious exclamation of Knoxville, TN—the one city in the world where I feel entirely at home.
But since I admitted that I loved country music—I still regret the pandemic for its cancellation of the concert involving Brothers Osborne, Chris Stapleton, and George Strait that was supposed to take place at our beloved Notre Dame Stadium—I have made it my hobby, my obsessive hobby. Do you spend each day waiting to hear about a new episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones, a podcast dedicated to the history of country music in the twentieth century? I do. Do you go to the Country Music Hall of Fame, bending the knee before the guitar of Buck Owens, a score from Loretta Lynn, or the first record of Charley Pride? I do.
The hobby has made me recognize a couple of things about country music: it is the kind of music that proposes something about the human condition. It means something. It has revealed something, to me, about happiness (and how perilous that condition of contentment is).
The first thing such music has unfolded for me is, in fact, that something is wrong with me. Something is wrong with you. Something about this world is wrong. It is a bit of a cliché at this point: dogs die, trucks break down, and relationships end. But listen for a moment to Miranda Lambert’s “Tinman.” Or Carly Pierce’s recent “Fault Line.” Or Willy Nelson’s “Can I Sleep in Your Arms.” Broken hearts rip you apart, such that you would be willing to trade it all to be made of heartless tinman. Love leads to suffering, the kind where once solid relationships become sources of violence. A red-headed stranger may be able to kill you at a moment’s notice, but what he longs for most is to spend the night in the arms of a woman: “Don’t know why, but the one I love left me / Left me lonely and cold and so weak / And I need someone’s arms to hold me / ’Til I’m strong enough to get back on my feet.”
The wrongness of the world is often tinted with the kind of violence more appropriate to a Flannery O’Connor short story than popular music. The murder ballad, “Knoxville Girl,” sung in the haunting blood harmony of the Louvin Brothers, narrates the senseless murder of a young woman. The tale is recounted by the murderer himself, who confesses the deed. There is never a reason described for the murder. He kills, and he pays the price, spending the rest of his life in jail.
Such violence is also addressed by singers who have a definite reason to kill. The erstwhile Dixie Chicks gleefully tell us why Earl must die. More recently, Ashley McBryde speaks to Martha Divine, her father’s mistress: “Honor thy father. Honor thy mother. But the Bible doesn’t say a damn thing about your daddy’s lover.” So, the singer kills Martha Divine—if she is caught, she willl say the devil made her do it. In his “Wait in the Truck,” Hardy describes a murder of an abused woman’s partner. The singer faces the consequences of his murder, spending the rest of his life in jail.
There is something like a gothic sensibility to country music. Violence is lauded not because it is a good, but because the reality is that in this broken world where dogs indeed die, where love does not last forever, there is also the violence of the human heart. There is a genuine tragedy defining the human condition. The only thing to do is to sing about it.
All of this seems to go against any sense of what constitutes naïve happiness (more appropriate to the bubble gum pop of the late nineties). That naïve sense is dreadful: the beginning of happiness is recognizing that you are broken. That you long for something more. Dolly Parton’s “The Grass Is Blue” reveals to anyone who listens to it the terrible irony of heartache. The world is so beautiful, so wonderful. But guess what, you are still going to cry. “The Tennessee Waltz” is beautiful and haunting at once: your sweetheart can be taken from you in a moment’s notice.
How can something so terrifying be sung in such a beautiful way? Rainbows and bunnies are not how country music thinks about reality. Even if the genre employs a stock series of archetypes (the adulterous spouse, the violent lover, the fragility of all relationships), it forces the listener to reckon with the truth that we all eventually figure out: something is wrong. And coming to terms with that wrongness is part of the beauty of human life.
Despite the tragedy of life, country music still possesses an awareness of the gift of existence. It is generally more comic than tragic. Alan Jackson’s “Chattahoochee” is not what we would normally think about as a lofty series of lyrics. He is remembering spending youthful days on a river between the Alabama and Georgia borders. There was beer. There was the hope of love. There was the future. In the video, he waterskies in jeans.
I suppose that you could think about such acts of remembering as nothing more than nostalgia, a kind of remembering what once was but has long passed away. But the world is full of so many glories if only the person has the eye to see it. Jordan Davis’ “Buy Dirt” will not go down as a classic in country music. But it possesses a hope that you could be happy if you have a spouse, a bit of land, and some kids to raise. It focuses your attention on the things in front of you, the deep-down things (once named by the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins) that help you see everything as a gift. Watermelon Wine. Moonshine. A Tennessee Mountain Home. Friends who will be with you, even in low places.
The comic nature of reality is evident in the puns and subtle irony ubiquitous in the lyrics of country music. George Jone’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today” is not the song of heartbreak that it is often treated as. It is a joke, albeit a mildly sadistic one. The only reason that this man’s broken heart is healed is because he is dead. He stopped loving her today because he died. On her recent record “Hummingbird,” Carly Pearce traffics almost entirely in the language of puns and the reversal of expectations. Her jeans may be blue, the sky may be blue, but despite her lover leaving, she is not blue.
There is a whole genre of country music dedicated to treating Tequila not merely as a drink but as a person. Miranda Lambert’s “Tequila Does” addresses the way that Tequila offers her a love that no cowboy can. Brothers Osborne sings their own love song to Tequila. You think you’re hearing about the time that the singer shared his first kiss with a lover. But nope: the lover is Tequila. Ingrid Andress describes her breakup as a waste of lime, possessing no Patron Silver lining. It is nothing but an empty margarita. All of this expresses the great comedy of existence, a sense that despite all the misery of the world (and the headaches that come from drinking too much Tequila), there is something to laugh about. When facing death, Willie Nelson tells us to roll him up and smoke him when he dies.
This comic perspective is inseparable from the roots of country music in Gospel. The line between the two genres has always been a thin one. In my East Tennessee, the small country churches of Cades Cove in the early twentieth century rung out with the harmonies of hymnody with a twang. One of the earliest “country” songs is the Carter Family’s “Can the circle be unbroken,” a hymn expressing the hope that in heaven families will be united. Every country singer of note has had to record at least one Gospel album: Johnny Cash, Alan Jackson, Carrie Underwood. Willie Nelson has a haunting version of “How Great Thou Art,” a song my grandfather regularly played as I was growing up. Crooked Still recorded a version of a traditional folk song, “Calvary,” describing the death of Christ on the cross. The banjos and the harmonies all come together as Aoife O’Donovan sings, “Let the sun hide its face/Let the earth reel in space/Over man who their Savior have slain; / But, behold, from the sod/Comes the blessed Lamb of God/Who has died, but is risen again.”
Whether the singers are aware of it or not (and especially in contemporary country, where most of the musicians are brands manufactured by labels, I suspect they are not), it is this fundamental religious conviction that serves as the grounding of the genre. It unites the tragic and comic together, a sense that the real meaning of happiness is coming to recognize the beautiful fragility of this world of ours.
As a native son of East Tennessee, I see this especially in the music of Dolly Parton. She is the singer of “Jolene,” a pleading song where the singer asks the beautiful Jolene to stay away from her man. The tragedy of forlorn love is all over her lyrics, “Little Sparrow” a warning that love can crush you. Yet, there is also hope. She (along with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris) sing “Wildflowers,” as Dolly describes her desire for that something more: “Just a wild rambling rose seeking mysteries untold / No regret for the path that I chose / When a flower grows wild / It can always survive / Wildflowers don’t care where they grow.” That same desire for the more, for a union that can never be broken, is captured in her recording of the traditional hymn in the “Sweet By and By.” If you are from the South, it is the sort of hymn that you know just as well as “Rocky Top” or the “Tennessee Waltz.” It is a hymn that my grandmother wanted to have sung at her own funeral.
It is a hymn fundamentally about a reunion in heaven, a sense that for all the glories and tragedies of the present there is a “sweet by and by.” In that land, “We shall sing on that beautiful shore / The melodious songs of the blessed / And our spirit shall sorrow no more / Not a sigh for the blessing of rest.” That is the hope of the Christian, the hope of a happiness that knows no rest.
Until then, there are plenty of other songs to sing. Some cry out with lament that love does not last, some make you realize how beautiful this world is, some are haunted with a world that has passed away, some sing out about a world that is still coming into existence.
And the way to happiness is to keep singing these songs. And now and again, as we are singing, we may even come to see a bit of that beauty, of that sweet by and by in a three-minute tune on the radio. That is what country music taught me about happiness. If you want to be happy, sing about the bad. Sing about the good. And have hope that when it is all over, you will join in a hymn that never ends.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay was originally delivered as a Fireside Chat at the University of Notre Dame, July 24, 2024.