Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Willie Nelson: What I Learned About Happiness From Country Music (Timothy O’Malley, July 26, 2024, Church Life Journal)

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.