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Conclusion

Just as old “riverside sweetheart murder ballads” emerged from the courtship practices of their day, these contemporary country “cuckolded killer” songs emerge within contemporary sets of values about relationship fidelity. They do so in a time of changing gender roles and growing women’s empowerment. The old ballads dramatized the moral or practical error of making a secluded rendezvous outside the boundaries of courtship practices. They helped people voice anxieties in the change from “calling culture” to “dating culture.” The newer songs in this post dramatize the anxieties of infidelity in times of changing physical, economic, and social mobility, especially for women. In the aggregate, their implicit moral is difficult to deny. They dramatize a particularly heavy price women might pay for infidelity or abandoning their husbands.

Our selection of country murder ballads serves as one way to qualify the allegation that country music stayed away from “the Gothic.” It also shows that tropes of male control in the 60s have opened to incorporate violent female protagonists in the last 15 years or so. While they may not go so far as songs like Norah Jones’s “Miriam,” or other contemporary songs with murderous women, they have started balancing the scales. This is progress, of a kind–peculiar progress, but progress nonetheless.

When I was preparing this post, Cindy sent me a recent article in The Economist, “Something in His Whiskey.” The article discusses recent country songs involving domestic violence. It asserts that these songs respond to the prevalence of domestic violence in the South. Perhaps because of its brevity, the article tends to conflate “Southern” and “country.” This is intuitive, but also misleading. It is also tends to conflate “Southern” with “white.” Furthermore, the article cherry-picks data about domestic violence, distorting its regional prevalence (see here and here). The premise that country artists are addressing a particularly Southern problem weakens in light of demographics and data.

Goddu’s essay is more nuanced, but also promotes some of these conflations. The extent to which others cite her article, and the continuing tendency of others to lump these musical, regional, and cultural categories together makes the work of unpacking her analysis still pertinent.  While the South as country’s spiritual home has an intuitive ring to it, this intuition frequently relies on associations of the South with rurality, low socio-economic status, and whiteness. It diminishes the diversity of the South, and it ignores the immense, nation-wide, even international popularity of country music.

The associations with rurality and low socio-economic status are not accurate. The most prominent correlation with country fandom is a high value placed on family.  Country music fans have dinner with their families each night at a rate nearly twice the national average. This may be one reason why these “cheatin'” murder ballads prove a prominent exception to Goddu’s rule. As songs about disrupting the family, they override the distaste for “the Gothic” to explore this emotional territory and implicitly affirm the value of family.

Maps of music popularity show a strong pocket of country music fandom around Nashville. Other than that, country is now more popular in much of the American West than it is in much of the South. It is the favorite genre in Wisconsin and New Hampshire, but not in South Carolina or Georgia. Nova Scotia and the Canadian Maritimes have strong country traditions, as does Bakersfield, California. Maybe this has changed since Goddu’s essay appeared, but “Morenci, Arizona” in “Open Pit Mine” makes me think otherwise. “The South” is now more an idea than a region, especially after the migrations and mobility of the last century.

The various dynamics of these categories take us beyond our scope pretty quickly. I mention them, though, because stereotypes create social distance. These songs and the themes they explore are not the particular province of one region or sub-culture. One may not like or listen to country music, but it is still pertinently music about “us” and not “them.”