Country Canon

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The Bloomsbury 33⅓ series of album monographs encompasses both canonical rockism and canonical poptimism. Rockism: defined often in a backwards sense—the authenticity of music, and technical skill, over the artifice of pop. Poptimism: defined by Jody Rosen as setting “the old assumptions on their ear: Pop (and, especially, hip-hop) producers are as important as rock auteurs, Beyoncé is as worthy of serious consideration as Bruce Springsteen, and ascribing shame to pop pleasure is itself a shameful act.”1 Notably, the two books that early on sold best for 33⅓ were Carl Wilson’s polemic about populist taste via Celine Dion’s “Let’s Talk about Love”2 and Kim Cooper’s volume on indie rock heroes Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In an Aeroplane over the Sea.”3 The critical conversation in the 33⅓ books is not pop against rock, or commercial against indie, but commercial and indie working together to limn a post-rock crisis of taste.Surveying the series volumes, most of the albums are North American and follow either prescribed indie taste or an allowable poptimist one. What is not even considered pop, however, the but in the “everything but” (as Wilson noted in a taut discussion of the issue), is country. Excluding the Japanese and Brazilian series, there are 154 album monographs to date. Depending on how loosely one defines country, there are between three (Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee,” by Rachel Rubin; Bobbie Gentry’s “Ballad of Billie Joe”, by Tara Murtha; and Johnny Cash’s American Recordings, by Tony Tost4) and seven (if you consider Grateful Dead, Drive-By Truckers, The Byrds, or Nick Cave country or country-adjacent). What is missing? Only the most important artists in country music history: Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, George Jones, Freddy Fender, Shania Twain, Garth Brooks, Barbara Mandrell, Jimmie Rodgers, and Charley Pride, among dozens of others.Five main reasons explain this gap: even poptimist pop has its own shibboleths; country music operates under a different ecosystem; singles structure genres differently than albums do; efforts at diversity notwithstanding, music criticism is not a working-class playground; and canonizers guided by fashion retain a desire to be cool, or at least current. I’ll briefly examine each of these:There are many country artists, though, whose work is overdue for the 33⅓ treatment. The recent books and podcasts on Dolly Parton and her decades-long performance of Appalachian authenticity misreads her complex understandings of camp and of performative gender—but she is beloved by everyone, including indie critics.13 And the 1970s albums of Willie Nelson are as conceptually whole, as built around deeply personal views of personal and relational failings, as Shoot Out The Lights (which has a 33⅓ volume).There is a currently missed opportunity for conversations about country, its gnarled aesthetics and politics, to be part of the conversation about popular music in general. Poptimism, and the 33⅓ series, should recognize that though country music is said to rest on tradition, a swirling maelstrom of innovation exists within it.