Country Music and Nostalgia

Photo by Ryan Crits

Traced back to its origins, nostalgia means the pain of homecoming. No one does that pain better, in its endless variations, than country music. Part of country music DNA is that the idea of home, and the idea of pain, is always present. Home looms heavily as an idea, as a concept, moving back and forth, time expanding and contracting. The pain comes through stories--the elegance of a well-hewn tale over time, means that the desire to return is both painful, but sweet. A commitment to nostalgia is a commitment to both the pain of memory, and the pleasure revelling in that pain, a land where one never quite forgets. Listening to historically minded country music is not always melancholy though, sometimes the story can be a joke, or a reverie, or something more comfortable.

When I write about country music and nostalgia, I keep thinking about that ambivalent southern master, William Faulkner, when he said, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” That is especially true for this gnarly genre whose earliest hits were about a pain and desire for returning to a mythical Arcadia. Country music started by looking back, and every few years it has a significant existential crisis--this idea that in the before times, while never quite defining what the before times were. There has to be ways to still think seriously about country music, to respect its heritage, and to not be so anxious about the crisis of the past. 

Spending the last few months with Alan Jackson’s last album Where Have You Gone, and the new albums by Bobby Dove, and Scott MacKay, have made me consider nostalgia again. Jackson’s melancholic mourning for the perfection of a genre, that was always a little fucked up, provides one understanding of Faulkner’s past without a past; MacKay’s bucking pastiche of honky tonk allows for pleasure to seep in; and Dove’s gender queer heartbreaking tenderness pushes another way forward. 

MacKay and Dove cannot be understood as country music outsiders, unless they are put in relationship with a consummate Nashville insider like Jackson. There’s a joke that every decade or so Jackson provides a way to mourn the death of traditional country music, and then it stumbles on without him. When Jackson sings about a lover leaving him, or a genre leaving him, they don’t seem that far away. This was a man whose songs about the death of the genre include: “Murder on Music Row,” from 2003, with nostalgia as a noir-ish tinged murder ballad; or “Small Town Southern Man” from 2008, who seeks a kind of gentility that never really existed; or the collections of 19th century protestant hymns and bluegrass anthems that marked the last decade. There was a shimmer of pleasure in Jackson, even in the hymn albums such as Precious Memories, suggesting that he took joy in his performances. The new album Where Have You Gone is often deeply moving, in the most traditional ways--there are two songs that he wrote as songs for his daughter’s weddings, courtly arguments about monogamy---between husband and wife, between performer and genre. 

The music sounds as old fashioned as the messaging of the lyrics--this isn’t strictly a turn for Jackson, with very few exceptions he has always glowed amber. Listening to the new record, he makes such tender and moving arguments that you almost believe a love in historically informed country music must believe in “traditional” lifestyles. But listening to Jackson, and then putting on Scott MacKay’s Stupid Cupid, well, MacKay trashes that argument. Reminding us that, like rock and roll, honky tonky was as much about the grinding of the hips as anything else---the rhythm section of this album has a historical memory. But, the memory is one closer to Wanda Jackson’s “Fujiyama Mama” or The Dominoes “Sixty Second Man”. Honky Tonk as a hybrid genre, as a feeling more than any other category. 

MacKay drawls all over a rollicking pedal steel. It’s a party record, one that could be in the bottom shelf of a parent’s hifi. It’s also profoundly current. is song “Romance Novel”, about a dissatisfied housewife, is a funny and clever song full of yearning, of sexual history, and of adult desires – adult in the sense of sex, but adult in the sense of morally complex. In press for the record, MacKay talks about Shel SIlverstein and Bobby Bare--the story songs, which shuffle jokes, stories, heartbreak, sex and failure---are adult like that too. 

“Romance Novel’ mentions listening, and the next song, “They’re Makin’ Love Below Us,” pushes the melancholy of a heart break – a ballad about not having sex, and wanting sex--the dissolution of a marriage, blunt aboout the failures. There is a small coda of harmonica, and listening to that, knowing the history of a relationship, and the history of music, the nostalgia for a failed relationship is made even more poignant by an old fashioned sound. 

Country music is earnest about its irony, and ironic about its earnestness. This kind of country, and how it plays with old forms, becomes both a distanced discussion of the intricacies of history and genre, and a collection of genuine songs about heartbreak. Bobby Dove, a non binary singer songwriter, is a middle ground between Jackson’s almost censorious moralism, and the rollicking pleasure of someone like MacKay. Dove’s Hopeless Romantic is both a simulacra of 70s heartbreak records, and a record of true heartbreak; it is an ironic discussion of the pain, and a collection of some of the best recent songs about heartbreak. The CCNY-esque guitar breakdowns in their “Gas Station Blues” have a freedom and liberation--for a song about being left at the gas station, it is a rollicking good time. In their song “Early Morning Funeral'' a pretty good rhythm section punctuates a tale of loss  about growing old and failures to perform n a church or a bar. For a song that praises the protagonist for having an “economy of words,” “Early Morning Funeral'' offers both delicately hewn details, and some excellent instrumental sections. One can see the future nostalgia, in their song, “Golden Years”--a very funny, very sad, song about wanting freedom when one’s circle is getting married and having babies, the mirror of a kind of prescient nostalgia, a song about “swimming through the tidal wave of tears,” of the pain, in order to receive a homecoming--not a leaving and then returning, but a seeking of a home that may never come. 

To be nostalgic is to note how the country genre works. Nostalgia works then, as a methodology or a set of tools. Listening to these three artists, the argument is about how we use nostalgia, how we construct meaning from narratives of the past, and how to play at being sad or in pain, and to use those skills in order to return home--but a home which constantly changes places, a home that is never really absent, and never really past.