This is the thread where you can namecheck left-wing country acts

Stop it.

WILLIE NELSON FTW

Steve Earle
I

this is the thread where i give a shit.

oh wait, nope, it isn't. get fucked.

This is the thread where you name slaphead Norwegians who make a positive contribution to ILX.

I don't see why this thread is any more useless than "Songs About Class/Class Consciousness" or any other similarly inconsequential list-thread only tangentially related to music. Aside from the fact that it's Geir's thread, and some people object to Geir on general principles, rather than his, uh, unique musical theories.

If you think Geir is a government agent compiling data on subversive musicians, better you should alert us than simply making with the nasty remarks.

Anyways, I was gonna say Willie. Other than that I really have no idea (and little interest).

Nice Umlaut!

I read an interview with Toby Keith where he said he is pissed he is associated with the right wing-he says he is a life long democrat.

Faith Hill and Tim McGraw. Tim McGraw has discussed running for congress as a Democrat. Nobody's going to mistake him for a lefty, but in the country music world he's pretty rare.

Merle Haggard has had some recent songs pretty critical of the Bush administration.

Rosanne Cash is a flat-out lefty, and she said her father hated Bush and the Iraq war.

yeah, i don't know if i can ever completely forgive merle for "okie from muskogee" though.

He wrote that song from the point of view of his dad. Think of it as a Randy Newman style character sketch.

Nice Umlaut!

I've always enjoyed your posts Mark, so I'll just assume (and hope) that remark is meant as a (fairly funny) good-natured dig, and not an attempt to bait me!

The umlaut is meaningless and not a reflection of my (AngloScotsGermanJewish) background. I added it out of necessity, because I fucked up my original attempt at nu-ILM registry back in January. Plus it looks cool.

Exactly. I hadn't noticed it before.

Merle on "Okie" (from the Onion AV Club):

O: How do you feel about being closely identified with the politics of "Okie From Muskogee" and "The Fightin' Side Of Me" now?

MH: Oh, I must have been an idiot. It's documentation of the uneducated that lived in America at the time, and I mirror that. I always have. Staying in touch with the working class... but it's pretty easy to lie to me. You could lie to me. They had me in a film called Wag The Dog because of "Okie From Muskogee" and my close scrutiny of the people that are being shitted. I've become self-educated since I wrote that song. But it still has a very timely description.

O: You were expressing how a lot of people felt.

MH: That's what I'm saying. That's the collective demeanor of America at the time.

O: Do you feel that those songs and the controversy over them limited your audience?

MH: I'm sure it did. And there, again, I made mistakes, because I didn't have anybody saying, "Well, you shouldn't do this. You shouldn't do that. You know, you might not should do that, because you've got this good career going, and you've got this flow. Step out here and make a political opinion, and you're gonna be classified an idiot." I probably could have avoided a lot of this, had I had someone managing me that... I had a manager, but he didn't really try to get involved in my feelings on things. He always let me go.

O: Did you vote in the last election?

MH: Yeah, yeah, I did. And I don't know, I wasn't happy with the count myself. I thought it was pretty damn obvious that we had a situation there where it made no difference what the American public thought. They intended to be in office, and they are in office. That's the bottom line, and we've been manipulated. I feel really violated as a citizen.

BTW, the interview was published on March 14th, 2001.

Man, I love Hag. Anybody ever hear his song "Wishing All These Old Things Were New" from a few years back? So classic.

was it my imagination, or was the first line of that song something about watching his friends do coke? either way, jeez, hag's a towering motherfucking talent. yeah, ok, i'll go as far as to put his ass up there with miles davis.

http://m1.freeshare.us/159fs887923.gif

"watching some old friends do a line
holding back the want-to in my own addicted mind"

is the Haggard line that leads off "wishing all these old things were new" - it's a gem for sure

i wrote a long article about this for red st ate review, but i dont thnik it ever got posted

He also has an Iraq song, it came out right around the time of Mission Accomplished. It's called That's The News, making fun of the right wing spin machine and how the press ate all the propaganda up. Four years later, Hag's looking pretty prescient.

i think/assume/hope people are pissed off at the question because the basic assumption/stereotype behind it is hopelessly wrong. country music is loaded with democrats/leftwingers. rock music is loaded with republicans/rightwingers. some of them express their views plainly and transparently in their songs. some of them don't. some of them, toby keith say, may want to beat the crap out of you not because of his political views but because he doesn't like the question.

There's a PAC called Music Row Democrats that sprang up recently in part to counter the idea that country = Republican. Some of the Music Row Democrats:
Hal Ketchum
Nanci Griffith
Rodney Crowell
Emmylou Harris
Mary-Chapin Carpenter

Nobody's saying that country music has no left wingers. But the majority of country music fans are right wing, and Nashville on the whole is notoriously right wing/GOP.

To suggest that it's "hopelessly wrong" to imply that there's a strong conservative bent to Nashville and country music is somewhat disengenuous.

kr6969, the only thing questionable and/or dicey about your statement is this part: "the majority of country music fans are right wing"; fans != "nashville", and a lot of country music gets sold in purple states. otherwise, you're right.