”There once was a puddle of American folk music. Music poured into this puddle from the poor rural workers across the young nation. From this puddle flowed several genres that today are recast under the moniker “Country” for the sake of your Spotify algorithm. How and why this happened are both fantastic questions, neither of which will be answered here. Somewhere out in the ether is a Ken Burns documentary that can satisfy your thirst for this knowledge.
So let’s get exceptionally reductive for the sake of simplicity, and talk about just one song. “Coal Miner’s Daughter” was released by Loretta Lynn in 1970. The coal miner, like the rancher, cowboy and farmer, was a genuine source and caricatured subject of music one might call country. Even after a few decades of decline, coal mining was still a major job industry in Appalachia at this time, though the largest was manufacturing. Loretta Lynn — who really was a coal miner’s daughter — did not describe her album as Appalachian Folk Roots Americana. Simply, country.
Loretta remembers her “daddy worked all night in the Van Lear coal mines, all day long in the field a hoin’ corn.” But there weren’t enough coal miners or their reminiscent daughters around to justify Decca Records releasing this as the album’s single, were there? Of course, a ridiculous question! Country musicians like Lynn could describe what is a regional experience and connect (or sell records) to those across the country. Workers in cities across America could listen to songs like “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and be connected to the story by their own work, their own families, their own lives. In factories rather than coal mines, fathers in cities still performed physical and dangerous labor all day. Though in the suburbs or an apartment rather than “in Butcher Holler,” mothers still “rocked the babies all night,” to quote Lynn’s lyrics again.
Country music has never focused on the urban or suburban experience. It is rural, it is from “the country.” But, in its roots, it is also of the workers of America, who share experience across this spectrum of urbanity. And, since Lynn’s time, workers both urban and rural have seen the nature of their work change drastically.
When Loretta Lynn was eight years old in 1940, coal mining dominated West Virginia’s economy, employing about 130,457 workers, or roughly 19 percent of the state’s civilian labor force. By 2023, only 14,014 people were employed in coal mining, representing just 1.8 percent of the state’s labor force.
The biggest employment markets in Appalachia now are healthcare, retail and hospitality. The manufacturing jobs in urban centers suffered a similar fate — just look around South Bend.
Country music got lost somewhere in the transition from a labor-based economy to a service and technology-based economy. Cut from its roots, country music now ends up sounding like a parody of itself: a faint heart kept pumping by a pacemaker of auto-tuned drawls and plastic Southern accents, all neatly packaged under shiny, store-bought cowboy hats. A cynical fan might say this vein of country music — itself a historical product of honky tonks, Dick Cheney, and sweet, sweet, delicious profit — feels like an inauthentic product from an inauthentic culture. A more generous perspective may say this music tries to be nostalgic for a life its listeners could never consider living.
But there is still a desire for some genuine voice in the genre. There are artists singing country songs about the old workers and the modern remnants of their crafts, the cowboys and the miners of rural America. But who sings for the new workers of these places? When “daddy works all night” as a hospice nurse, will we sing of his exhaustion? When we wither alone behind screens in the hills and the ‘burbs, will we sing of teenage freedom? When we swipe through a thousand choices, will we sing of stumbling into that one true love?
The work is noble. The lives are ours. I hope we can sing them.