Yesterday Trance said she is anti-county music. I had another friend say the same thing recently. I feel like I have to defend country music.

I like country music. I like it because it’s American music. And I don’t mean that in a jingoistic, “Don’t You Remember”, “The Angry American”, my-country-love-it-or-leave-it way. I mean that it is the branch of music that sprang from folk music. Before radios and recordings, music was passed from person to person, generation to generation by live musicians. Songs became popular for more than the few weeks that they were on the charts, they were taught and remembered and tweaked over time. One branch of music traveled down to the Delta, picked up the Negro spirituals and the Blues and became Rock and Roll when Elvis introduced it back to white audiences. Another branch went out west, through the dust bowl, returned by railroad and became Country.

The tips of those branches we see today carry with them all of the traditions of their long histories (I lost my metaphor somewhere). When a Rock and Roll artist sings about their mojo, the crossroads, or banging your head, we know what they mean. Country has its own language and accepted metaphors also.

Love is a train. Anytime you hear someone singing about a train, they’re either singing about a lover or a love affair. Unless the train is long and black, in which case it is driven by the devil, so don’t you get on.

Flying is freedom. Saturday night is for partying. Drinkin’ is for forgettin’ your baby. Sunday morning is for repenting and drying out. The word “rodeo” is always preceded by the modifier “that damned old”.

Country music glorifies and reinforces the values of the people of America’s heartland. Justice is served. People stand up for what’s right. Women love their man. Men love their women (just not as much as they love that damned old rodeo).

Women should like County music if for only one reason: in Country, men dance.

I grew up in a household that watched Hee Haw. I learned to play the violin because I wanted play backup for Buck Owens. But that’s not what they teach to 12-year-old kids. They teach you orchestra. Bleh.

Buck Owens introduced the electric guitar to Country music. He may not have been the first, but he made it acceptable with his Telecaster. If I remember right, he was the first to play electric on the Grand Old Opry, shocking the old-timers. If that’s not Rock and Roll cool, what is? That sound (one of the “twangy” sounds that country-haters hate) became known as the Bakersfield sound for Bakersfield, California where Buck was from. Today it is carried on by one of my favorites, Dwight Yoakam.

Like most teenagers, I preferred Rock and Roll. I was reintroduced to Country after college, in 1989, when I heard a radio show about Rosanne Cash. This was at the same time as the rise of Melissa Etheridge, Sinead O’Connor and Natalie Merchant. Bonnie Raitt had just become big, and Shawn Colvin was about to hit. And here was Rosanne, daughter of the legend, and she was doing the same kind of stuff, but she had already been doing it for 10 years. Yes, she was Country, but she also covered Tom Petty and Steve Forbert. I loved her. I bought all her CD’s.

At the same time, my brother was a DJ at a Country radio station and was telling me about Restless Heart and Patty Loveless.

I was working at a chain record store back then, and I collected new albums that shared common musicians. Shawn Colvin, Rosanne Cash, and Mary Chapin-Carpenter shared a label, a bassist (Joni Mitchell’s husband, Larry Klein) and producer/writer John Leventhal. Chapin-Carpenter was a part of an alternative-Country movement that included Yoakum and Lyle Lovett. Rosanne was married to Rodney Crowell (who is responsible for writing more hits than you think). When they broke up, Rosanne went folky with Interiors, one of the great divorce-inspired albums. (I have another theory that some of the greatest albums have come right after an artist’s divorce: Face Value, Synchronicity, etc.)

Then the new Country hit. Garth Brooks, Clint Black and Randy Travis all came out at the same time. Country radio became about that type of Country and I’ve followed it, to one degree or another, ever since. As the pop chart has drifted toward rap, it strayed away from me, not the other way around.

Yes, when great things were happening in rock, I was there. For most of the 90’s, I was into the female singer/songwriter. There was a point where I had every Tori Amos recording you could buy. I went through the Fiona Apple/Ani DiFranco phase. Like a good depressive, I wore out some Sarah McLachlan. I still love Garbage and The Sundays.

But right now, forced to choose between Britney Spears, Jay-Z, or Toby Keith, I like what I hear and see on CMT the best. At least they still play videos.