How Country Music Soured on the War

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HOW COUNTRY MUSIC SOURED ON THE WAR.
Changing Tunes
by Michelle Cottle

Country music prides itself on being the voice of red-state America. So it’s hardly surprising that, in the years immediately following September 11, country music artists came out loud and proud with a variety of fightin’-mad anthems. From Clint Black’s “Iraq and Roll” to Darryl Worley’s “Have You Forgotten?” to Toby Keith’s infamous “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” aggressive, defiant flag-waving made perfect cultural (not to mention economic) sense. It also jibed neatly with blue-staters’ sniffy view of country fans as blindly patriotic, ass-backward rednecks. (Indeed, Keith’s 2002 megahit, with shit-kicking lyrics like, “You’ll be sorry that you messed with the US of A / ‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass / It’s the American Way,” was so jingoistic it put off even some of his country compatriots.) By the time of the Dixie Chicks “incident,” in which an anti-Bush utterance by lead singer Natalie Maines while in England led to the group’s ex-communication from the country fold, there was little doubt that, when it came to Iraq, Nashville had the president’s back.

Photo illustration Anastasia Vasilakis; Photo courtesy from left to right: Jason Moore, Roger Wiliams, Dane Andrew/ZUMA PressThere were, of course, exceptions. On Christmas Day 2003, Willie Nelson penned an antiwar ditty called “What Ever Happened to Peace on Earth” that he performed nine days later at a campaign rally for Democratic presidential gadfly Dennis Kucinich. Fellow outlaw Merle Haggard has been making even bigger waves of late. Back in the 1970s, Haggard thrilled conservatives with anti-antiwar tunes like “The Fightin’ Side of Me” and “Okie From Muskogee.” Now, he’s tweaking those same folks with songs like “That’s The News” (less a protest song than a swipe at the media’s uneven war coverage), “Rebuild America First,” and, most provocatively, “Hillary.” (“This country needs to be honest / Changes need to be large / Something like a big switch of gender / Let’s put a woman in charge.”) Less famously, “alternative country” artists like Rodney Crowell, Allison Moorer, and Steve Earle have long been putting their liberal politics into their work. Still, while alt-country artists and cranky old bulls like Nelson and Haggard were expressing their fed-uppedness, the vast majority of big-money, big-audience country served as a cheering section for the administration’s foreign policy.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the surge. Sometime around 2004, the in-your-face calls to arms faded, and the war-themed offerings coming out of Nashville started taking on a more somber tone. In 2004, for instance, both girl-group SheDaisy and John Michael Montgomery produced hit singles focused on the pain of separation felt by soldiers and their loved ones. The former, “Come Home Soon,” climbed the country charts to number 14; the latter, “Letters from Home,” all the way to number two. As SheDaisy laments,

    And I sleep alone
    I cry alone
    And it’s so hard livin’ here on my own
    So please, come home soon
    Come home soon.

With his 2005 tearjerker, “If I Don’t Make It Back,” multi-platinum star Tracy Lawrence took the theme of loss still further. The song begins with a soon-to-ship-out soldier instructing his buddies what to do if he doesn’t return from battle:

    Have a beer for me
    Don’t waste no tears on me
    On Friday night sit on the visitors side
    And cheer for the home team …
    And find someone good enough for Amy
    Who will love her like I would have…

and ends, heartbreakingly, with the group trying to fulfill the final wish of its fallen friend:

    And I introduced Amy to a friend of mine from Monroe
    He’s a good ol’ boy
    But you know, she just ain’t ready.

Even Darryl Worley seems to be mellowing. Worley’s 2003 “Have You Forgotten?” is often held up alongside Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” as evidence of country’s deep-seated, reflexive patriotism. (“Some say this country’s just out looking for a fight / Well after 9/11 man I’d have to say that’s right.”) But his 2006 hit, “I Just Came Back from a War,” is more ambivalent. The story is told from the perspective of a recently returned vet sitting in a bar, trying to explain to his buddies why he seems different:

    I just came back from a place where they hated me and everything I stand for
    A land where our brothers are dying for others who don’t even care any more
    Chances are I never will be the same, I really don’t know any more
    I just came back from a war.

This progression from chest-thumping jingoism to mournful introspection is not new to the genre. In Country Music Goes to War, co-editor Charles K. Wolfe examines a similar evolution during World War II. “As Americans suffered defeat after defeat in the early days of 1942 and began to realize the war might be a long, costly affair,” Wolfe writes, “the smug self-confidence and simplistic optimism of the early songs gave way to more somber and self- reflective works.” Much as we’re seeing today, these second-generation songs–”Each Night at Nine,” “White Cross on Okinawa,” “Soldier’s Last Letter”–dealt with the war on a personal level by reflecting the anguish of families separating and suffering loss on a firsthand basis. Similarly wistful and conflicted offerings emerged from the Korean war as well. In “Fuzzy Wuzzy Teddy Bear,” for instance, a father mourns the loss of his son with the dead soldier’s favorite childhood toy: “Old fuzzy wuzzy teddy bear sits all alone … and seems to face the bitter truth so brave.”

Not that country music is about to go all Country Joe & the Fish on us. This is not “protest music” by any definition, and most mainstream country folks still wouldn’t dream of doing anything that could be construed as making common cause with the antiwar crowd. (It’s worth noting, though, that Toby Keith, of all people, never supported the Iraq war–”Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” was inspired by Afghanistan–and favors a timeline for troop withdrawal.) But, as Iraq drags on and the body count rises, the most flag-waving segments of the country are struggling to come to terms with the human cost. Even a stiff-upper-lip tribute like Trace Adkins’s 2005 “Arlington,” in which a soldier tells of his pride in making the ultimate sacrifice for his country and of his thankfulness to be among the “chosen ones” who “made it to Arlington,” is nonetheless a doleful ballad about a dead boy coming “home” to the country’s most famous cemetery.

There is a delicate balance at play in these songs, of pride and sorrow, perseverance and uncertainty. It is impossible to hear them without thinking about the tragedy of war–about all those lost loves and shattered futures shipped home from Iraq each week in flag-draped caskets. Country music may never turn its back on Bush’s disastrous Middle East adventure. But war weariness is quietly creeping into even the reddest of red-state culture.
Michelle Cottle is a senior editor at The New Republic.