Country Music 'N Me

Sermon

The funny thing about country music is: it came to me. There's a section of the Pennsylvania Turnpike where there's only country music on the radio. (In fact, the way this sermon goes, it’ll probably give you a feeling for bouncing around those stations.) On the turnpike I tuned around in vain and finally settled in to make do, when to my surprise I heard a clever song about being in church. Who sings about being in church? I guess that's a silly question, but I didn't know it. Where I grew up, there was no country music or Christian radio. There was a lot of rock, and alternative and three stations devoted to classical. Turns out, country music sings about going to church – a whole bunch of songs are about being in church, and more than one of them is funny and all of them are interesting.
No doubt there’s some rock or pop music out there that treats the same theme but not enough so's you'd notice. With country music, you couldn't miss it. And once I started noticing, there was a lot I liked. Absolutely wicked licks of guitar and banjo, the way country musicians slice into the violin. [First verse and chorus of "Two Feet of Topsoil"]

The corny and sentimental side of me that is so often starved by pop culture is nourished and held by country music. I like love. I like family. I like the idea of living in a town where people know you, and staying close with family and friends and living therefore with an identity that’s clear and strong, even if somewhat constraining at times. Country music paints a lot of pictures of loving homes and generational interdependence and life far from the pace and anonymity of cities. I wanna live where the green grass grows. Watch my corn pop up in rows. Every night be tucked in close to you. Raise our kids where the good Lord's blessed. Point our rockin' chairs towards the west … oops. That's going too far – I know nothing about raising corn. You thought I meant maybe the point about the good Lord. Well I'll get to that.

But in the meantime, I'll stay a little more superficial and speaking as a straight woman, mention that in the world of country music men never seem afraid of commitment. More songs than I can count tell of men just eager as they can be to pop the question and just as worried as they can be that she'll say no. Country music doesn't just value love and family, with all the quirks and stresses they bring, it counts them as blessings, and since I do too, I appreciate it. [First verse and chorus of "Just Another Day in Paradise"]

We heard a song earlier in the service, "You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive," about one couple's attempt, both successful and futile, to break out of the grinding poverty and bleakness of eastern Kentucky coal mining. It is an understated psalm of life's cruelty and the slow crushing of hope and the plain valor of living on such terms. Too, the song reminds us that there are longstanding ties between country songs and folk songs and labor songs, between all people who know what it is to risk and lose.

In this era when everything happens at so many bytes per second and everyone knows that more or less a year is acceptable as a period to pull yourself together after heartbreak, I appreciate that the poets of country music honor the untimely truths of the heart and the soul and even the tragic truths that there are some things we just don't get over and some lives that are unfair and unredeemed… but not unsung. [First verse and chorus of "Whiskey Lullaby"]
Country music is clever the way Broadway music is clever – not all the time, but then neither is Broadway. A common contrivance is to take a line of verse and repeat it throughout a song, but develop the story between times in the verses so that the exact same line means something very different as the song evolves.

And country music is courageous the way protest songs are courageous. Loretta Lynn's The Pill, about the advent of the birth control pill and what it changed for women, got her banned from country radio for a while, though she was at that time one of its reigning queens. They weren't ready to laud anything that freed women sexually and suggested that motherhood wasn't the sole desirable summit of feminine experience. [First two verses of "The Pill,"]

The story behind "The Pill" recalls the recent Dixie Chicks controversy when their lead singer criticized President Bush during a performance in London, England. The backlash and the band’s unregenerate stance, led to their own shunning by many country stations across the USA and now that their new album is out, with its pointed song, "Not Ready to Make Nice," the conflict continues – the new album isn't getting any airtime either, though their old songs are back on the playlists. Country radio is conservative and reactionary – as a part-Jewish, New England-raised liberal, committed to civil rights and gay rights, I can't help but notice there's not a lot of any of that on my country station or my country cd's. Family, love, identity and all that good stuff we already mentioned have a lot of definitions in the country world, and the definitions aren't mine.

And this brings me to what I think I have found most engaging, and important, about country music – what has made it not just entertainment but sermon material. I spend a lot of my time with all of you. I get my news from NPR. I spend my free time with friends, who are, of course, like-minded. I don't actually have much to do with folks who believe and think differently from me. And that's not helpful, because part of the message and hope of our faith is that we respect differences, think we have something to learn from differences, and something to teach in the form of our respect for those differences. If our respect is only hypothetical, without actual application, then our faith has no practical form, no basis for our adherence to it as a principle and is not a source of hope for the larger community which must find a way to coexist and learn and share with itself.

Country music has challenged me to stay in dialogue with it when I have heard things that made me mad or even shocked me. I can't abide listening to some jingoistic post 9/11 songs; they make me almost ill and I have to switch away before steam actually starts to pour out my ears. Our national treasure, Willie Nelson, recently partnered with country star Toby Keith on a song, "Beer For My Horses," which at worst can be construed as a paean to vigilantism and lynching, and at best as a tribute to violent justice. [First two verses and chorus of "Beer For My Horses"]

The easy thing for me is to say that's a bad song, insensitive to all kinds of race and justice issues, and condemn it along with its singers. The much harder thing is to say a lot of people in this country love this song – it's a big hit song – and what does it say to them and what are they feeling and how can we share this country feeling as we do when our understandings are so disparate? It's hard… but it's not that hard. It's only as hard as tuning in our radio and listening; listening for the difference, listening for the sameness. We won't agree about what defines a family, but we certainly agree about what's precious in a family.

And music is a good medium for our practice because one meta-gift music affords us, beyond itself, is that music somehow gives us more expressive latitude. What I mean by that is that in worship, for example, we sing beloved music and in it we articulate ideas and beliefs as if they were certain, when they’re actually not certain, or not as certain as they used to be. We sing of what we wish were so, as if it actually is so – we sing what we cannot actually speak, or would not actually speak. For me, country music builds on that expressive latitude – I listen to ideas and beliefs sung that I would have no patience for spoken – and this keeps me listening and in a kind of dialogue with ways and people I don't usually encounter and can't generally debate. It also gives me a sense, perhaps still very flawed but still greater than what I had – of where they are coming from, and why, and how I and my kind look to them, and why.

And that's where the hope lies. Hope always lies in human interactions and perceptions because they so often generate connections, bits of sameness we can cling to in seas of difference. This is the way friendships form, it is the way love begins, it is the foundation of coalitions and of diplomatic agreements: the insight into mutuality, shared experience or understanding or concern, and I believe it exists more often than we know, if only we can stay in communication long enough to find it.

I don't mind talking about the good Lord if that is the term that works for someone else's definition of the most high, of divinity, of what is sacred, of God. Heck, we’ve got a lot of those dialogic challenges right here in our own congregation. Our faith proposes that we all gain more from striving to understand another than from merely restating our own established truths. Country music, its songs and its politics and its listeners who call in are not all one anything, and can't all be lumped together with any kind of accuracy, but there are certainly trends and the trends mostly aren't the same as in our faith community and that gives us a lot to understand, a lot to learn, a lot of room to search for the sameness we can cling to in a sea of difference.

The country music song of the year for 2001 was a 9/11 song called "Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning." The song does exactly what Unitarian Universalism strives to do: it asks questions throughout: where were you, what did you do? And though the many answers might generate implicit judgement – indeed it is almost impossible to hear it without thinking yes, no, yes, yes, no… the song never goes there. It continues with the litany – every possible answer is offered, acknowledged, along with the author's own humble admission that he doesn't really know a lot about some of the issues involved. And the chorus turns to faith and gently reminds that Jesus taught love.
I have always been proud of the value our faith attaches to difference and to welcoming difference. Increasingly I am tired of the lack of practice among us Unitarian Universalists, and in myself. I’m tired of the quick judgement expressed when someone steps on our toes because they don't know or agree with our principles or ideas or initiatives. I like being stretched by country music, and being forced to listen to something I sometimes disagee with. I like trying to keep liking one song by a singer after I have had a tough time with another of their songs. It's excellent practice for living in the here and now. I don't wish to live in a small utopia where everyone is just like me. I love America and I wish to live in America and I wish to understand my people and I wish to be a bridge builder among them and my faith supports me in that and so does country music.

If we do this, if we listen and if we hear and if we sing our selves and are listened to and heard, what will result, in the end is a new song such as to fulfill Psalm 96: a new song for all the earth, blessing, telling of salvation, declaring glory and marvelous works among all the peoples such as makes the heavens glad and the earth to rejoice, the sea to roar, the field to exult and everything in it. Then will the earth be charged everywhere with sacredness.

I can't imagine what that song will be – but I pray I will hear it or at least its precurser. Perhaps I have heard some of its ancestors already. Influenced not only by labor and folk and country music, but also by civil rights songs and gay and lesbian music and Jewish folk tunes and Arab ethnic tunes and on and on – many of these already sound the same and that’s no accident. We are all one, music knows that and one day, new songs will reflect that lesson and teach it to us anew. In the meantime, I am grateful for country music – for all that it sings that is precious also to me, and all that it sings that I must understand in order to live my faith.

Amen.