In the last few years, country music has moved from its desire for formal sameness, and musical purity, to incorparting traditionally verboten rock and pop stylings. But in that loosening, there has been an increased, almost reactionary desire to mantain traditional lines of gender and sexuality. In 2008, these instincts of musical prolifagacy, and moral severity, combined in the figures of Eric Churc and Heidi Newfield. These two artists, and espeically their singles about teenage pregrancy Two Pink Lines and Knocked Up, worked in conjunction, and the lessons that they taught us about current day Nashville could be interlaced with the trouble that the Republicans had with Bristol Palin, or be placed against Tim McGraw hit Red Rag Top, with its nostaligic tale about abortion. Going through each of these performers, and the Palin’s methodically, leads to a seeking of consistent langauge that allows readers to understand discourses of class, gender, sexuality, and desire, that have traditionally been ignored by progressive academics, polticians, musicians, critics, and audiences.

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 is about Johnny and June Carter Cash, and although it mentions how Johnny kicked out the footlights, it is mostly a lachrymose ballad, contiuning the sentimentalizing/cannonizing of Cash (Cannonzing in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierach and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behaviour.)

The song is indictiative of Newfields performance style: the music contains rock and roll plus pop, so it is not musically country, but the lyrics ignore a myriad of burrs under the saddle, including Cash's first wife, his infidelity, his drug use, and his contempt for Nashville.

Newfield is of a new wave of sexually sophisticated, and musically synthesizing female artistss that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years. This group (Kellie Pickler, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lamert, Skye Sweetam, etc) . They refuse to particpate in territorial disputes around rock and roll vs country. These pererinal skirmishes are 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 music has a mix that heavily emphasizes what would traditionally be called Rock and Roll, the drums and guitars are so central, that if it were not qouting Johnny Cash, it would be difficult to taxonomize it as country. Her second single, Knocked Up cannot be claimed, formally as country. What makes it country, is then 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 Lee Ann Womack’s I Hope You Dance, a song of great manipulative power, filled with 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 is dismissive of the effort required to birth a child, and refusing any option but the keep it. 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 indicates 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, born poor provides the moral context that Newfield lacks: “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 hurricane” , 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 skims over these dangers 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 historically minded that it includes 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. This history mannifests itself in emotions like anger, or contempt or exhaustion, emotions that Newfield has not internalised. In fact she uses the rollicking fun of rock and roll as a way to formally mask the turmoil of young pregrancy.


The paucity of emotions 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 these difficulties. 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”.

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, but is glad that this is unnessecary. 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. This attitude towards pleasure, even the pleasure of the rock and roll, is heavily gendered. The woman is receptive and the male is active. That they are both basically rockabilly tracks, muddies the water though.

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 is now places on 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 (Bill) 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. (ie white, working class, young men, from the west and south) 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.

Watt’s 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...” making a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is, class becomes a series of cultural signifiers that are outside traditional Marxist language. Church has written extensively about this new mutability especially in the song, Guys Like Me with 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”, here he outlines a set of specific cultural significations.

The mutability of class another 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 increasingly 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. It is the same ethical desire that gives Newfield the new crib, or prevents her from aborting the fetus.

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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All of these narratives with their hygenic use of previously filthy genre music , bleach out 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.


This desire to keep things clean, leads to long gaps that hint and do not tell the whole story, in 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 have much in common, they speak moral lessons, talk of spefici cities in general stories, 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 base 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 that Newfield or Church lack. 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, it acknowledges both the isolation of rural/exurban/suburban existence, and the possiblity of less ecclestical form of redemption.

The first lines of Red Rag Top introduce a couple, one 18 and 20, both legal (Church also mentions tht he and his partner were legal, that Church and McGraw are older then Newfield, suggests an interest in legality allows for only one scandal, more then that might sink the song commerically)

The legality might be the center of this song, it mentions that they broke traffic and curfew laws, and also moral laws outside of the state. But if they are 18 and 20, and he is speaking of an adult with a wife and a child, can we assume that the abortion was acquired after 1973, when it was legalized in the United States? The narrator avoids parents and cops, to commit minor traffic violations. Could the transgressing of the ethics of a small town life be extrapolated into the more adult task of taking responsibility when the fun stops?

There are other questions about respobsibility. 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, 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:

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


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 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”.) With the Republicans these narratives are often about self-control, and bodily continence.

This bodily continence is about 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 Sarah.


The confusion about 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 16th 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.


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.

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.