Image by Katherine Hanlon on Unsplash.
Is country music getting a new popularity? Are young people listening? According to this Reddit stream, even high school students are following Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter. A Newsweek article talks about the new Beyonce hit, Texas Hold Em.
I’ve been a country music fan all my adult life. I think it started when I was driving cross-country in the days before cars had sound systems. All you could get on the radio were country music stations. They were loud! And I never looked back. I’m in good company: there are videos of Bill and Hillary Clinton at the White House awards, singing along to whatever country performer was featured.
We don’t have to look to the news to learn about country music’s revival. A moving truck in my neighborhood had country music blaring one morning; the twenty-something crew said it was their choice. A coffee shop barista,also twenty-something, played classic country during his shift on Sunday mornings.
PBS had a series on the history of country music, just a few years ago. It’s still available in several places.
And just recently a WNBA player said she had country music on her playlist.
What does this show?
A person’s music is often considered a function of their age. When you ask people what music they like, you can usually guess their age pretty accurately.
People would roll their eyes when I would say I listen to country. It got a little better with Kacey Mugraves, who was a crossover I liked. But admitting I like Johnny Cash and George Jones was like musical suicide.
..I wrote an article for Medium about using country music as an inspiration for copywriting. Nobody cared.
Things come around. Yes, a lot of the new country sounds really different. But a lot of it doesn’t. It’s getting hard to place people by their musical preferences, and that’s a good thing.
Now there’s also taste in books and movies. My favorite genre of murder mysteries can be a little old-fashioned. The good ones are long gone. Not just Agatha Christie. We no longer have Robert B. Parker and Sue Grafton. We haven’t had Rex Stout for a long time. But we have my favorite series of the moment on PBS: Ice Cold Murders with Rocco Schiavone.
One trend in mysteries: we get to the dead body a lot faster. The old books seem a little slow now. But they kept me going for awhile.
And people are reading, too. A hot trend that was picked up by my youthful coworking space: coming together to read books. No, it’s not a book club. You bring your own book and…read. A real book. You interrupt to talk about what you’re reading. Then you go back to reading.
Some things are ageless. We just need a renaissance in classical music and the classics in reading. But it will come, one of these days. Life goes in cycles and so does culture. You just have to be true to what you like and wait for the world to catch up.
