Heidi Newfield has come to prominence quickly, and both of her biggest singles are about what it means to be married, in a fairly conservative and traditional way. Johnny and June is a lachrymose ballad, continuing the sentimentalizing/canonizing (both in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierarchy and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behavior) that has worked as a corrective to the establishment ignoring his presence for decades. The song is not very interesting, and it should only be noted because it makes the chaotic narrative of Cash's life clean, and pedantic. The song ignores a myriad of burrs under the saddle, including but not limited to Cash's first wife, his infidelity, his drug use, his affiliation to the outsider movement, and his contempt for Nashville politics, it even (weirdly) does not discuss the profound protestant biblically conservative desire for order and justice that saved his life as much as Carter-Cash's hard work and long suffering.

Newfield is a contradictory figure though—she is young, of a new wave of pop influenced, sexually sophisticated, and musically synthesizing female singer songwriters that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years, including Kellie Pickler, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Sunny Sweetam and half a dozen others. This is not a new thing, Country Music has a new wave every 5 or 10 years, from Patsy Cline in the 1950s, to Martina McBride in the 1990s, the only thing that might be new, is that the controversy about keeping country, or remaining a purity of voice, or avoiding the pernicious influence of Rock and Roll (a controversy that has been so persistent that it has lasted until Alan Jackson and George Strait's Murder on Music Row—which includes the lines: For the steel guitars no longer cry/And the fiddles barely play/But drums and rock 'n' roll guitars/Are mixed up in your face”

Newfield's track very explicitly contains drums and guitars in a mix that would horrify the traditionalists like Jackson and Strait, so what makes it country, is then the lyrical content, from the vernacular use of language (i.e. Here comes what Granny's been dreadin'/Belly full of baby in a shotgun weddin'), the signifiers of a rural working class poverty (Hand-me-down crib in a pick up truck), the use of moral language (Knocked up, shame shame/I'm gonna ruin my family name), the vague references to country music history, and how she is in the middle of a multi generational, matriarchal line.

Each of those can be critiqued widely, and delicately. The song is written by Angaleena Presley / Mark D. Sanders. Mark D Sanders wrote the Lee Ann Womack I Hope You Dance, a song of great manipulative power, filled with cliché and the kind of aphorisms that on the surface would appear to suggest taking great risks, but only those risks that will not result in seismic changes. Knocked Up is about radical changes to an adolescent's life, but written in a way that is light hearted and jokey—dismissive of how much effort it will take to birth a child, and completely ignoring the other options, to be an unplanned mother is a gift, that can not be given away or gotten rid of, regardless of how surprised or unprepared a teenager is to raise children.

That she depends on a hand me down crib suggests that she is part of a culture of child rising, and that others have done the preparation for her. In her collection of personal essays, Dorothy Allison talks about the difference between good poor, and bad poor—about maintaining a gentility and order about not having the resources necessary, and she succinctly talks about the moral language that is used to discuss the disordered: “I understand we were the bad poor: men who drank and couldn't keep a job, women invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours...” (Skin, 15) Just as the rock and roll guitars are considered criminal in traditional music, the idea of having babies before birth is considered systematically broken in the working class argot that Sanders employs. In order to prevent shame, in order to prevent being bad poor, she gets married.
This use of moral language puts it into stark relief to the country history the song embodies. There is a history of sentimental songs about young kids who get married, and survive. They get married against parental permission, and as Tanya Tucker writes “a head full of dreams/and faith that can move anything”. Unlike that song, or Trisha Yearwood's She's In Love with the Boy, both of which mention the dangers that these lovers go through, Sander's dismisses the dangers of desire in just two lines: “Daddy, he's a good lookin' guitar man/I was his from the very first kiss”. The line good lookin' guitar man is so general, and so historically minded that it can be expansively used to include basically anything. What means even less, is Newfield's explicit claiming of the work as a sequel to Loretta Lynn's The Pill—this is confusing, because she seems to be building up a brooder house, though thirty years ago Lynn was tearing it down.

Lynn wrote her work from a specific personal history, and so the song is a bit closer to One on the Way, but that song has explicit details of what it means to mother, and is actively contemptuous of those who are not mothers, or at least those who do not understand what it means to parent with unruly children and an unwilling husband. 40 years later, everyone mentioned in the song becomes a cipher; there is nothing explicit, no details in Knocked Up. There is a granny, a daddy, a teenage mother, and a guitar-picking boyfriend, but none of these characters have details needed, because the whole thing would become too dark, and too serious too quickly.

It is a problem that one also sees in Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, though it's use of a more lyrically complex narrative mediates humour. The text is sung in real time, with a teen-age couple in the back of a car, in the forecourt of a gas station, waiting for the results; “one means none and we're home free/two means three and a diamond ring”.

There are other similarities to the Newfield track. They are both rock and roll, though the Church track has a much more traditional, and much less studio based sound, and it is much less of a studio creation. The song rockets through the narrative, and the mix does not dip perceptibly in the middle, unlike Newfield. There are differences in the narrative as well. The narrator in the Newfield song is already pregnant, and is keeping the baby. Church has decided what he is going to do if his lover is with child; there is again no discussion of options, just a diamond ring and a life together. That they manage to avoid having a child, there is no discussion of the complexities of giving birth as a child.

Though there is a noticeable relief to the Church track, there is much less shame, though in Knocked Up, Sanders has made the prescriptive depiction of love, and Church has only included details of anxiety and the natural consequences of the wildfire sexuality of adolescence. The narrator claims to be willing to marry the woman, but makes no real discussion of love, even in the most conventional, heterocentric, and obligatory usages of those terms. The ironic use of the conventional expectations of the desire—is that the music has a raw edge, it would not be outside what would be called Rockabilly, 40 years ago. Bill Malone wrote about Rockabilly, "It may well be that the struggle to suppress country music, 'this deep sense of fear and resignation' by which it was constrained, provoked the eruption of country's deviant offspring rockabilly, and caused so many to rail against it as a threat to their livelihoods, if not their souls. Rockabilly, in the words of Malone' gave vent to impulses that had long been impeded, if often dormant, in southern culture, a hell-for-leather hedonism, a swaggering masculinity, or in the case of the women, an uncharacteristic aggressiveness and strangely a visceral emotionalism among both men and women that seemed as reflective of the church as the beer joints”
Quoted by David Shapiro, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Rising Over the Mystery Train, 30)

Eric Church has managed the emotionalism of Rockabilly, the roaring of sex, and the destabilizing pleasure of raw fucking, but he manages to contain it in a terror of the body, of the consequences of sex. So instead of maintaining the hegemonic requirements of musical purity, as was previously required by the Opry establishment, he decides his priorities, he is capable of discussions of class, of gender, of sexuality, and of morality, but his songs are very much grounded in a southern rock tradition. Or to put it another way, he is someone who is recognizes that the working classes, especially in the south and the Midwest who sing along to his songs, were raised not only on country, but a history of rock and roll—and there is an attempt to synthesize both of those instincts. (Eric Church sings about this instinct in the double entdre song, She Won't Leave My Willie Alone—where he talks about his love of Lynrd Skynard, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, the Beatles, and of course Johnny Cash, but “she keeps coming back, for the only thing that turns her on/she won't leave my Willie alone”--where a desire for musical purity is negatively contrasted with a musical profligacy)

To put it another way, Rockabilly is no longer threatening to Country Radio and country promoters, because the men who listened to it, and its antecedents in the last few decades, are the same demographic, one that is delineated in a brilliant essay by Adam Watts, collected in White Masculinity in the Recent South. A Real Place, Attitudes and Environment in a Southern Deer Camp uses the heavily localized space of shooting deer, to make two cognizant points about this new masculinity, both of which are talked about in both Two Pink Lines, and in other Church songs, including Guys Like Me, and These Boots. Both are ballads, and both are less guitar driven, less formally clever then the real time structure of Two Pink Lines, but all of them are excellent examples of Watt's thesis.

His first observation, (and it helps to think of the Deer Camp as a metonymy of places where working class men gather recreationally, away from the influences of women). The first is “"Few would claim to be working class, although all would claim to be working men...", the desire then, is to make a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is. Class becomes a series of cultural signifiers that are outside the Marxist language, of class identification. When Church sings “I spend Saturdays working on my truck/I don't like to fight/But I ain't scared to bleed/Most don't mess with a guy like me/Guys like me drink to many beers on Friday after work/Our best blue jeans have skoal rings
We wear our boots to church/So rough around the edges”, he outlines a set of specific cultural significations, related to how he interacts with his environment, that are outside of one immutable class.

The mutability of class is the other point that Watts makes. He talks about his membership in the Deer Run that he visits, that he uses to shoot... “Members of Clear Run, like those of other white Southern men, view the pursuit of white tail deer as a natural, even necessary reason for white Southern men and boys, increasingly suburban, or urban with predominately indoor lifestyles and careers, to enjoy the outdoors...” Though country is usually ex/suburban, and though increasingly those who are part of the working class function as service workers as opposed to manufacturing, there are a variety of self-identifying moral signifiers. The ability to take responsibility for unforeseen actions, to provide for women and children, and in the words of Two Pink Lines: “yeah her Daddy's gonna kill me and that’s a fact/maybe we'll just leave town and never come back/or I could stand there and tell him/face him like a man” or “not being scared to bleed” or the ability to kill deer to feed family for a living, are all things that are not only about working for a living, but an ethical desire to serve.

This ethical desire to serve is also found in how more working class people serve in the military, and the general military culture of the south and west, and is well documented in the widows/orphan military melodrama of Carrie Underwood's Just A Dream. The work begins with the first two lines of Eddy Arnold’s Make the World Go Away, and in the video, these lines play on the radio of a red convertible, where a blonde and handsome man sits next to her. He promises that they will be married, that there life will be eternal. He is a solider though, and he has died, and when he comes home, it will occur in a box. Since the war in Iraq has actually killed a large number of people, and since the war has killed more people from the south, then it has from any other region of the united states, this is one more track, like Travelin’ Solider by the Dixie Chicks, or Whiskey Lullaby by Brad Paisley and Alison Kraus or Arlington, by Trace Adkins.
Each of these songs is a ballad. They are all in minor keys, with glistening strings, a tremulous voice that is at the risk of breaking down as a literalazation of emotional break down of the characters. Each of them is about war either in general (Just a Dream, Arlington) or historical wars (Travellin’ Soilder about Vietnam; Whiskey Lullaby about the Second World War). Each of them are melodramas, often about sexuality and desire in the context of going off to war, or returning broken. The songs about the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan written within the boundries of music row are required to triumphant. (Because the audience of so called alt country is so politcally different, the expectations are radically shifted, which explains that they are capable of an explicitness that has to be spoken of in code for Nashville—the most obvious examples being Dress Blues by Jason Isosbell, and Steve Earle’s song about John Walker Lindh.)

The punctum that occurs in the Underwood track is one of youth, or a self awareness about youth. Though Natahlie Maines, Trace Adkins, or Brad Paisley write about being 18, they are two or three decades older then that. That Carrie Underwood sings at 18 about being a war widow, and both she herself and her audience is around that age, there is a clear transference in the autobiographical details. The song and especially the video then, become a hyper concentrated narrative about thantos and eros.

Within three minutes, and two verses, the happy tears and costumed procession of a wedding, and the the tragic tears and constumed procession of a funeral occur. There is also a Sirkian concentration on the narrative and moral power of costume. The white wedding and the black funeral, mirror reversals of narrative, told in the video, surround gender, and the expectation of gender much more closely then other texts metioned previously.

That she compares the death of her husband to a bullet of the heart, and that she refuses to acknowledge the event as really, provide two ways of working through the text. She becomes a martyrdom for love, in the same way that he becomes a martyrdom for freedom or patrotisim. Every detail, the shoebox of his materials that she carries to remind him before the wedding, the veil of the wedding dress, the trumpets of the military band that occur “two weeks before the wedding”, even the preacher man who prays over the future, and then the soul of the dead soilder, and the hymns of praise, and then the choir “singing the saddest song she ever heard”, the song is an incredibly sophisticated ode to the melodrama of permance and permanance dashed for no paticular purpose.

Reading Laura Mulvey’s essay on Douglas Sirk, the parrells between how he used a female sexuality, costume, décor, and rituals slyly hide narratives of polticial catasophre. The emotional rawness of personal tragedy become larger, they are used to document world scale events. She writes “The melodrama, the genre of mise en scene, site of smoitions that cannot be expressed in so many words, concentrated critical approaches to Holylwood that had tried to find a deceiphering mdode of reading the image on screen... “(29)
The images on screen, of a widow, and of a widow as the only acceptable female position in war, hide the difficulty of female reprsentation, just as the musical forms in Eric Church’s track refuse to discuss all of the options on hand, or how Heidi Newfield’s track heavily genderizes and dismisses the cataclysmic possibilties of an 18 year old with child. Melodrama can be an incredibly conserative form, in that it expects certain things from its particiapnts, and the rules of it’s creation become highly solidified.

An 18 year old, who has the desire to marry, to pine and to wait for her soilder lover to return from away, is so ancient and so expected, that it can only be discussed in a way that is heavily codified, that is intesified by history, by genre expecation, and by the poltiical implications of both new nashville, and the pyscho-geographical implicaitons of a working class life. But there are things that are left unsaid, even left unsaid (ironically) with in the separate traditions of alt or outlaw country, and that is it is not only fathers and husbands and sons that are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, for the first time in American militiary history, is that mothers and daughters and wives are dying on the battlefield, they have become the same kind of soilder.

Considering that two of the most complicated narratives of the most recent war came from the most recent war, both from the place where country comes from. Both Lyddie England and Jessica . Those two, who were supposed to be the villian and the hero of this recent conflict, are much less stable, and much able to be melodramatized, or even written about in an easy or ready way. Even the pentagon’s attempts to make a new kind of femminzed, attractive, and yet strong/resilient hero out of failed.

There is a great amount of complexity that can occur in a three minute pop song, moral relevenace, and pyschosexual desire abutting personal history and social implications, and in this capacity what is left unsaid, or what is glossed over, or who is speaking, or how they are speaking, become an intergral part of the expereince.

The two songs that I have talked previously, are about women, but do not talk about the details of lives lead when one is 18 and scared, the choices about keeping the baby or not keeping the baby, about aborting it or adopting it, or even a song that mentions high school or morning sickness or what it means to piss on a stick in a filthy bathroom in a gas station or even discussions of what it means to have sex at 18, so the listener is forced to complete the narratives on hand, and these narratives change if the listener is a teenager, or an adult, or as children. This seemingly obvious statement is problematized in the Tim McGraw’s Red Rag Top, recorded in 1997, and included in his greatest hits, it is an ur text for the songs discussed previously, though it destablises them, because it is the only song that mentions abortion, and a song that talks about the teenage pregrancy, and its termination in a narrative of nostaliga and completion. In this way, it becomes a standardized or at least normalised text of regret and personal history, a discussion of youthful indscretion, and nostalgia and part of the history of that subgenre within the larger patterns of the industry.