In 2008 there were at least three country singles about teenage girls taking roles that were advanced of their years. All of them were domestic: about how keeping the baby, about not seeking an abortion, or an adoption. Two of them were written and performed by women, one of them were written and performed by a man. One of them, Carrie Underwood's, Just A Dream, elucidates a narrative about being a war widow at 18. One of them, Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, is a rockabilly track that rollicks towards a strange deus ex machina ending. One of them, Heidi Newfield’s Knocked Up, hides a conserative agenda in highly fashionable formalist dress, and all of them forget the 2002 Tim McGraw single, Red Rag Top, with it's scandalous mention of abortion as not only an option, but a done deed.

These songs intersect with the politically inconvenient pregnancy of Bristol Palin. functioning as a way of discussing questions about narrative, autonomy, poltical conciousness, gender, sexuality, the history of country music, and what it means to live in the flyover district.

Going through each of these performers, and the Palin’s methodically, leads to a seeking of consistent patterns. The youngest performer, and the one with arguably the least media attenion or studio help is Heidi Newfield. Both of her biggest singles are about traditional marriage. The first single, Johnny and June, a lachrymose ballad, continuing the sentimentalizing/canonizing of Cash. (Cannonzing in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierarchy and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behavior. The song is indictiative of Newfields performance style, in how it ignores a myriad of burrs under the saddle, including but not limited to Case h's first wife, his infidelity, his drug use, his affiliation to the outsider movement, and his contempt for Nashville. Weirdly, it also fails to discuss the biblically conservative desire for order and justice that saved his life as much as Carter-Cash's hard work and long suffering.

Newfield is 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, who refuse to particpate in the territorial disputes that have surrounded rock and roll vs country. This disupute is so persistent that it has lasted until Alan Jackson and George Strait's 2000 single Murder on Music Row—with it’s chorus: “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 traditionalists . What makes it country, is the lyrical content, from the vernacular use of language (“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.

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—dismissive of how much effort it will take to birth a child, and completely ignoring any 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. Southern critic and memorist Dorothy Allison, raised in this culture, talks about the difference between good poor, and bad poor—about maintaining a gentility and order about not having the resources necessary, taxonomizing 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 and being bad poor, she gets married.

This moral languge places the song in the nashivlle history of sentimental songs about young kids who get married, and survive. Tanya Tucker calls these young folks “two sparrows in a hurrican” , who have “a head full of dreams/and faith that can move anything”. A few years later, Trisha Yearwood's She's In Love with the Boy discusses how difficult and how close to literal starvation children who marry and have children can be.

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 Newfield 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 though Knocked Up is 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 do not understand what it means to parent with unruly children and an unwilling husband. 40 years later, there are no details in Knocked Up. Maybe she does not have them, or maybe she does not have Lynn’s narrative skills, or more likely, people are getting married and having childen later, and so in Nashville there is too much seriousness too quickly. T

The lack of seriousness and the formal masking that occur in Knocked Up are also seen in Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, though it's use of a more lyrically complex narrative mediates the humour. The song is sung in real time, with a teen-age couple in the back of a car, in the forecourt of a gas station, waiting to see if they are parents; “one means none and we're home free/two means three and a diamond ring”.

Though Newfield contains rock and roll influences, the Church track 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.

There is less shame in Church’s track. He will do what is required of him, and is glad that he does not need to. He also refuses to shame the woman, and even casually discusses how she leaves the car. Everything is okay, and there lives are not ruined. The difference then, is that Church refuses to judge pleasure, and Newfield refuses to acknowledge it’s existence. The politics of pleasure are encoded in discourses of rock and roll, and both Church and Newfield genetically splice that history into this new music

Country Music once feared the sexual power of rockabilly, so it becomes ironic that the push and pull of sexual shame and being with child can be placed now it’s cradle. David Shapiro talks about this history in his essay Blue Moon of Kentucky, Rising Over the Mystery Train, "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” (30)

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. This demographic 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 Church’s work.

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The initial 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) 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 lines like “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”, in Guys Like Me, 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 wes. This culutre 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.

The punctum that occurs in the Underwood track is one of youth, or self-awareness about youth. She 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 tragic tears and costumed procession of a funeral occur. There is a Sirkian concentration on the narrative and moral power of costume. The white wedding and the black funeral, mirror reversals of the narrative told in the video, surround gender, and the expectation of gender much more closely then other texts mentioned previously.

That she compares the death of her husband to a bullet of the heart suggest she is a romantic martyr, in the same way that he becomes martyrdom for freedom. 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 solider, 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 permanence and permanence dashed for no particular purpose.

Laura Mulvey’s essay on Douglas Sirk, elcuidates how female sexuality, costume, décor, and rituals can slyly hide narratives of political catastrophe. Mulvey writes, “The melodrama, the genre of mise en scene, site of emotions that cannot be expressed in so many words, concentrated critical approaches to Hollywood that had tried to find a deciphering mode of reading the image on screen... “( Fetishism and Curiousity, 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 representation, 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 possibilities of an 18 year old with child. Melodrama is a form that it expects certain things from its participants, 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 solider 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 intensified by history, by genre expectation, and by the political implications of both new Nashville, and the pyscho-geographical implications of a working class life. Considering that two of the most complicated narratives of the most recent war both came from the place where country comes from. Both Lyddie England and Jessica Lynch. Those two, who were supposed to be the villain and the hero of this recent conflict, are much less stable, and much able to be melodramatized, or even written about in an easily accessiable way. Even the Pentagon’s attempts to make a new kind of feminized, attractive, and yet strong/resilient hero out of failed.
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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.

This seemingly obvious statement is problematized in the Tim McGraw’s Red Rag Top, recorded in 2002, and included in his greatest hits. It is the only song that talks about terminating the pregnancy. This termination is encased in a narrative of nostalgia and completion. In this way, it becomes a normalized text of regret and personal history, a discussion of youthful indiscretion. This discussion has become a standard genre, and a highly popular one.

The industry can be divided into those who listen to music, and those who create it. Using two metrics, the billboard Hot Country 100 chart of singles, and the best single/song awards from the Billboard Music Charts suggest how popular this cult of nostalgia can be. Starting from when Red Rag Top was released (note, this single stalled at no. 5) in 2002: Three songs were explicitly about nostalgia, taking up 14 weeks of that year, with the longest run being Kenny Chesney’s Good Stuff for 7 weeks. In 2003 four songs followed the same kind of flash back narrative, or took the place in the past, and suggested a similar aesthetic to the ones in 2002, taking up 20 weeks of the chart. The longest was There Goes My Life for 7 weeks. This year included the previously discussed Travelin' Solider, and Beer for my Horses, by Willie Nelson and Toby Keith that became so popular that there was a movie made for CMT last year starring both Nelson and Keith. In 2004, three songs following the same pattern, took up 7 weeks of the chart, with the longest being Days Go By, by Keith Urban, for a month. In 2005, 7 weeks, 3 songs, Fast Cars and Freedom by Rascall Flatts, for 3 weeks. In 2006, 3 songs for 9 weeks, two months of those being Kenny Chesney tracks, in 2008 an uptick, with five songs and 12 weeks, Kenny Chesney and Rascall Flatts tying for a month a piece, 2008 3 songs, 7 weeks, the longest being Brad Paisley’s ode to high school and making the same mistakes earlier, Letter to Me, and so far in 2009, two songs for three weeks.

As for the CMA awards, four songs in 7 years have won either single or song of the year with themes or music that was explicitly nostalgic. Though Kenny Chesney seems to make the most money from this particular meme, Tim McGraw is not immune to it (his hits that talk about the past, that frame moral narratives into flashback parables of suburban disenchantment include Grown Men Don’t Cry, Memory Lane, Telluride, 17, and Please Remember Me and Please Don’t Take The Girl.

Chesney and McGraw both have a taste for the iconic, and a lack of details or the use of specific geographic places as larger symbolic utopias. They have complicated relationships to their own bodies, and to the bodies of adolescents that manifest as a bittersweet desire to abandon fame for the simpler pleasures of youth. Though this narrative sells very well, and on a surface level Tim McGraw provides these bass pleasures to his audience, he appears much more aware of the natural consequences of the actions and restrictions of the life he lauds.

If one reads McGraw closely, he posits an ethical structure of choice. You can hear it in songs like Drugs or Jesus, where the narrator (and he frequently writes in the first person, so they become confessional), allows that “Everyone needs to get high” to escape from the dull routine of small town life. Though he makes a personal choice for Christ, and the song hints that this is the more positive choice, acknowledging both the isolation of rural/exurban/suburban existence, and that there perhaps can be redemption in getting high in less ecclesial ways.

Red Rag Top combines most of these themes, and the problems of iconic narratives as well. The first lines introduce a couple, one 18 and 20, both legal, so that the scandal of unmarried, teenage sex on top of the terminating of a pregnancy would be enough scandal to sink the narrative, at least on the charts. But if they are 18 and 20, and he is speaking of an adult with a wife and a child, what was the date where the abortion was acquired. If we assume that the abortion was acquired after 1973, when it was legalized in the United States, and that he managed with his girlfriend to pay for the termination of pregnancy. The narrator avoids parents and cops, to commit minor traffic violations. Could the transgressing of the ethics of a small town in matters of traffic be extrapolated into the more adult task of taking responsibility when the fun stops?

There are other questions. If they are working class, which seems to be a fairly safe bet, considering the demographic of country music right now, how would they pay for the termination, and though he alludes that they broke up a year after the procedure and never talked again, was it the abortion that resulted in the lack of communication and later relationship? If they had the child, would they be married like Newfield, or would he be willing to foot the bills like Church? In this way, the only thing that changes the Deus Ex Machina ending of Church, or the family obsessions of Newfield, or even the state sponsored widowhood of Underwood, is that McGraw was the only one who made a choice. The narator never uses the words abortion, or terminatiom or even baby, but says he “made a choice not to have a choice”, that line underlines the thesis of all of those songs about nostalgia and loss that centre American country music. Nostalgia becomes less of the action mourned, but about the possibilities that could occur if a choice never had to be made.

Reading the third verse, where he as an adult sees a girl who looks like the woman he knew at 16, he shuts off the passivity of what could have happened: t was all make believe in the end:

No I cant say where she is today,
I can’t remember who I was, back then
Well you do what you do and you pay for your sins,
And there's no such thing as what might’ve
Been, that’s a waste of time; drive you outta your mind

The lack of control in the Underwood, her melodramatic breaking apart, is the beginning of an internalization of that message. The choices you make cannot be unmade, and the choices that one makes in concert are de facto the choices of your own. The scabbing over of loss, never fully completes, and just as Underwood’s track, by using the first person, becomes simultaneously a monument to those who die on foreign shores, and a blistering indictment of war in general, and the war in Iraq by implication,

Red Rag Top becomes twofold, it is about the ability of two scared barley post adolescents who are allowed to access abortion, and choose to do so, but it is also about the mourning for the potential of a relationship, and perhaps even a life, that can occur post abortion. In this slippery move between the two rhetorical positions of the Right and Left, namely it is always a women’s choice, and abortion is murder, and never taking a side, he allows for the moral possibility of either or both or neither, or something else entirely. In this way, it becomes an interior criticism of popular country music. while still managing to chart as another popular song of nostaliga.

Nostalgia presupposes a perfect past and an imperfect future, it allows the creation of a narrative that is clean and precise, and the precision is achieved through excising the inconvenient. Basically, then what is real and what is not real can be determined by an ability to control the narrative that is being created. It is interesting that these songs about teenage pregnancy or widowhood were popularized in the election year when the vice presidential Republican candidate had a pregnant teenager of her own.

To put it In its most simplistic way, the goal of a presidential campaign, especially in the television era, post-Nixon is to collapse complicated and human lives into one seamless and simple story, via vetting and speechwriting, (talking about what went wrong with the campaign in the New York Times, republican operative Paul Costello makes this exact point “ “That’s the best you can do, turn it into a narrative that gives the American people a positive story”. Like editors on reality television shows, the stories should have one plot point, and simple moralism, ending in an uncomplicated moral. With the republicans these narratives are often about self-control, and bodily continence.

One of the ways to show this bodily continence is of course, not having sex before marriage, and being fecund afterwards. There is some discussion about when John McCain knew about the pregnancy of Bristol, and some discussion about when Sarah knew as well. Though she mentions that she told her parents, and presents a domestic narrative that includes having Levi Johnson in the room, and sending her children away, Bristol does not tell exactly when she told
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The confusion about Shame what was told, and what was left out, and the timeline of what was said to whom and when, reminds us that a girl who is with child, is a state who is always under threatened, and who’s life cannot be easily plotted. The 16ht century text, The Instruction of a Christian Woman, tells us what happens when her virtue (and for virtue read hymen) has been comprises: “the threat of ostracism, which are shown here to run like contagion through the community in relentless, ever widening circles, are summoned to police the young women’s sexual behavior, her body and desire are not hers to do what she pleases, for her body posses a significant worth that goes beyond the merely personal.” (Quoted in Virginity, A Cultural History, Anker Berno, 139). That Bristol Palin even bothered to have sex, that she claimed the autonomy of her own body, is the beginning vector that begins the contagation.

Sarah Palin’s refusal to control Bristol Palin’s body, like the community expects her to is not the only failure that occurs. This was not the only thing that Palin failed to tell the MCCain camp though, she failed to tell him about her attempts to get her husband out of trouble, or her firing state troopers to protect her in-laws, among other domestic squabbles, in this way the failure of the Palin/McCain campaign is not only a failure of narrative control, but an example of how domestic melodrama can destabilize, or collapse exterior, traditionally masculine spheres when they interact with each other’s It becomes a mirror reversal of the Carrie Underwood song, which miniaturizes a large scale international conflict . making it intensely small and personal.

The unruliness of Bristol Palin’s body becomes the de facto permission for media representations of chaos and uncertainty. Bristol Palin becomes the blankness where people can write their own texts. One could note how Sarah Palin introduces a community of matriarchs taking care of the child in the interview with Greeta Van Sustreen for example, or be like Michelle Malkin, who wrote in a column on her blog: “the Palin family values the sanctity of life. Or “They talk the talk and walk the walk…all of those narratives are present,” There is also a narrative of class, from Levi Johnston referring to himself on his Myspace page fucking redneck, or if the Star tabloid is to be believed, Johnson’s sister calling the Palin’s white trash. There are some attempts to synthesize a variety of these narrative, a Fox News editorial before the election within the space of two paragraphs, notes “many obsessive’s noted the pregnancy served to humanize the Palin's and showcase the candidates rejection of abortion” and “Johnston, an avid hunter, hinted at the time that they were expecting a boy. He said he was already looking forward to taking the boy hunting and fishing”, just as his parents, and the grandparents of his child had done.

Country music often becomes an intensely synthesizing and personalizing medium; In many ways, what is assumed to be conservative is insular, and it has its own traditions, its own culture, and its own solutions. Looking at the Palin situation in that context, thinking about it as a country song, opens avenues of discourse traditionally closed. Thinking just in terms of class peels away layers of taboo anew expectation that have crusted around Palin and company.

What they all have in common, though, is recognition of the difficulty of choice. For all of the rhetoric of choice, each of the texts discussed up to this point, has been about the limiting of choices, about the options that exist or fail to exist, in a small town, or with family pressure, or with political desires pressing into you. In this way, it becomes the choices you are allowed to make, as opposed to the choices that you want to make. The negotiation of limited choice is not something that is often discussed because it is in direct opposition to the American mythos of manifest destiny, but it is very much within the pragmatic ethos that the US has placed as a corrective, as an alternate discourse around that myth. The cleverness of the writing, the allusion rich and narrative heavy desires of these texts have an enormous formal sophistication, but that sophistication has any number of seemingly contradictory polysemic functions.

That polysemic quality, combined with the plain speech, makes country unique in telling American stories that complicate the hope. There are few answers, because attempts to document quotidian lives, and the past. Its narratolgies are one not of seeking, or answering, but of sorting, about finding patterns in lives that seem to have meaning imposed from above. In this way, the singing and the writing becomes a searching for autonomy, to suggest a solid this is what x means, betrays the function of the text. I am too far away in age, in location, in sexuality, to truly understand what it means to be an 18-year-old war widow, or 16 and knocked up, or even whatever the heck Bristol Palin is feeling. I am reminded of Loretta Lynn in the mid 70s, who praised birth control, but decimated the women’s movement for not taking her life seriously, who loved her man and threatened to kick the shit out anyone who crossed him. Think of this then, as a way of bringing these narratives to others, with respect, and humility, fully recognizing they are not my stories.