Why Country Music Loves Me
In a lace-curtained living room of a cabin by the Greenbrier River, four men I had just met picked up a banjo, a guitar, a mandolin, and an upright bass and cracked my world open.
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Posts Tagged: country music
Hootie Populism: Darius Rucker Is Country Music’s Newest Hit-Maker
Editor’s Note: We realize this breaks our “no pop” rule, but this essay was too good to pass up.
Darius Rucker is not Hootie. Instead, he’s Darius, the former lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish, a band that since 1994 has sold more than sixteen million records.
...moreCountry Music in Kenya & Mumbai
“Country music has fans wherever people are departing rural areas. In other words, worldwide. Turns out that the weeping tunes about better days can be understood even without understanding the lyrics.
That crying slide guitar is the perfect accompaniment for the universal nostalgia that millions of migrants experience in their new urban homes. They miss the countryside they recently left, and they can hear their own yearning for it in Kenny Rogers’s deep longing.”
Kevin Kelly on the international appeal of country music, as part of an essay on the reasons more people than ever before in history are choosing to live in urban areas, even when that means living in a slum.
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