Nostalgia and the 2015 Academy of Country Music Awards

The country music tradition in the United States might be characterized as a nostalgic one. To varying degrees since the emergence of recorded country music in the early 1920s, country songs and songwriters have expressed longing for the seemingly simpler times of their childhoods—or even their parents’ and grandparents’ childhoods.

In many ways, one might read country music’s occasional obsession with all things past and gone as an extension of the nineteenth-century plantation song, popularized by Pittsburgh native Stephen Collins Foster, whose “Old Folks at Home” (1851) and “My Old Kentucky Home” (1853) depicted freed slaves longing for the simpler times of their plantation youths. Many early country recording artists tapped into the nostalgia of the nineteenth-century song repertory in their recordings from the 1920s, while still others composed original works that explored similar themes, as in Atlanta recording artist Fiddlin’ John Carson’s 1927 recording of “Old Folks at Home,” titled here “Swanee River.”

Similarly, the bluegrass tradition—which emerged as a subgenre of country music in the mid-1940s—openly embraced nostalgia in a rich repertoire of home songs that are intimately connected with the mass migrations of residents of Appalachia and the US South to northern and midwestern cities during the middle of the twentieth century. In songs such as “The Old Home Place” (written by Missouri transplant Mitch Jayne and popularized by J.D. Crowe and the New South), we hear a musicalized version of author Thomas Wolfe’s reminder that “you can’t go home again.”

Listening to this year’s nominees for the Academy of Country Music’s “Single Record of the Year,” we can hear another resurgence of nostalgia in contemporary country music. Following the brief rise and near demise of “bro country,” which celebrated generic rural spaces filled with trucks, beer, and beautiful “girls” (represented in this year’s nominees by Dierks Bentley’s “Drunk on a Plane,” which depicts a broken-hearted “bro” who buys drinks for everyone aboard a flight to a honeymoon for one in Cancun), the majority of this year’s “Single Record of the Year Nominees” train their eyes on nostalgia for both the distant past of the 1960s and the more recent past of the 1980s and 1990s.

Miranda Lambert—whose award-winning 2010 recording of Tom Douglas and Allen Shamblin’s “The House That Built Me” explores nostalgia for her childhood—meditates on the apparent simplicity of a world in which people used public telephones and couldn’t download the latest hits from the internet in “Automatic.”

Whereas Lambert’s “Automatic” might be heard as a call for a return to a simpler way of living, Kenny Chesney’s “American Kids” seems to be an exercise in Time-Life nostalgia for the mediated version of youth culture that has dominated much of the public discourse around the era since the 1970 release of the documentary film Woodstock. Celebrating casual consumption of alcohol and “smoke” and championing a sort of sanitized youth rebellion, “American Kids” also draws upon two iconic 1980s popular songs that engaged in a more nuanced critique of the 1960s and the broken promises of the American Dream: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” (1984) and John Mellancamp’s “Pink Houses” (1983). As the accompanying music video—which features a group of conventionally attractive, white twentysomethings riding around in a psychedelic school bus—indicates, perhaps Chesney and his collaborators did not listen carefully to the songs they drew upon.

“Bro country” pioneers Florida Georgia Line also contribute to the nostalgic tendencies of this year’s Academy of Country Music “Single Record of the Year” nominees” with “Dirt,” a celebration of the soul upon which rural people build their lives. Although the song’s lyrics embrace the conventional “bro country” imagery of rural spaces filled with beautiful women, the video superimposes a narrative of love, loss, and a simple life well-lived as we learn of a romance between “Rosie” (played by Lindsay Heyser) and a man played by songwriter and Nashville actor J.D. Souther that began in 1968 and that concluded with her passing and burial in the same dirt that they farmed, built a house, and raised a family.

Although nostalgia is certainly not a new addition to the country music tradition, the prevalence of such themes in the upcoming Academy of Country Music Awards’ “Single Record of the Year” category does raise some interesting questions about why nostalgia—particularly nostalgia for the late 1960s and 1980s—seems to pervade contemporary country music. In a 2013 essay titled “Melancholic Subjectivity” and published in Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century: Psychological, Sociological, and Political Perspectives, psychologist Stephen Frosh has suggested that nostalgia “for more certain times, in which… ‘identity’ was stable and one’s social role [was] clear and secure” may be connected to the rapid pace of life in the early twenty-first century (87-88). Is this response, then, a response to the uneven economic recovery from the 2008 recession? Or perhaps these songwriters, artists, and audiences are reacting to constant headlines of government gridlock and partisan bickering? Or could this simply be yet another example of country music’s persistent longing for simpler times?

Headline Image: Harmonica. CC0 via Pixabay.