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I'll stand right here where I'm at 'Cause I wear my own kind of hat.
Merle Haggard
ALTHOUGH IT HAS BEEN CELEBRATED IN ALL FORMS OF POPULAR MUSIC, counrry has always had a special place for the songs of social and cultural identity, many of which tie this identity to particular locales or regions. From the Carter Family's 1937 "In the Shadows of Clinch Mountain" to Loretta Lynn's memories of Butcher Holler in her classic 1969 "Coal Miner's Daughter," country music has connected people to places, social and personal identity to region, individuals to their own earth. As Cecila Tischi has observed, "It is Ralph Waldo Emerson's legacy. Country music defines itself as belonging to, and united with, the natural world of the earth and sky and seasons. Nature is its foundation and its source of sustenance and strength-its very inspiration in the linguistic sense of breathing in. Nature is the bedrock of its authenticity" (197).
Whether it is the summer glow of a youthful coming of age in rural Georgia, as evoked by Alan Jackson in "Chattahoochie," or the dark chill and danger of driving a big rig through Maine's Haynesville Woods in the dead of winter, as depicted by Dick Curless in "A Tombstone Every Mile," country music has allowed us to breathe in the vast regions of difference and pride that this nation affords, and reveals, in tales of joy, heartache, toil, and trouble, the common ties of humanity that connect us across these cultural and regional differences.
As regional differences in America have become increasingly less pronounced, and as Nashville has become more pop oriented and focused toward the production of grand-slam national radio hits, the evocation of region and place in country music has appeared to suffer. Images of identity and place appear less often on the country hit parade, and when they do, they seem increasingly homogenized and stereotyped, with all of the rough edges of local realism carefully smoothed off. Today, when regional identity is evoked in country music, it most likely takes the form of a generic, romanticized trope-an agreed-upon, media-constructed identity or sense of place that any listener, no matter where he or she is, can recognize and perhaps connect with. As Shania Twain sings on...