Crossover Country - Majuscule

Urban Cowboys, Immigrant Dreams

When I was a kid in the early 1980s, our family car was a powder-blue Pontiac LeMans. My father was an immigrant laborer who spent most of his career at a General Motors locomotive plant, and employee discounts on GM cars were generous. The radio had five manual preset buttons, thick ka-chunk-y ones that were fun for a kid to fuss with. But I recall my mother using only one of them, the one set to 99.5 FM—US 99, Chicago’s country station. 

My mother and brother and I had a lot of US 99 favorites. Waylon Jennings’s “Dukes of Hazzard” theme. The Oak Ridge Boys’ “Elvira.” Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler.” Dolly Parton’s “Here You Come Again.” Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers’ “All the Gold in California.” Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” In 1982, a US 99 station manager told Billboard that what they played was “lively country…. If it’s on the charts, we’ll play it. We aren’t concerned with whether it sounds ‘too country’ or ‘too crossover.’”

But I wasn’t following the debates in the music trades at the time. All I knew was that I liked most of what US 99 played. I especially liked Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night”—number one country and number one pop in 1980, as crossover as it got. I remember mom driving through the suburbs after a shopping trip on one actual rainy night, and my noting how the lyrics mentioned the windshield wipers keeping time, because that’s what the LeMans’s wipers were doing too.

I love a rainy night

My mother, an immigrant and non-native speaker like my father, didn’t sing along. Never did. Not her thing. She just took in the words, simple as they were. Don’t make fun. We all learn the language somehow.

I have a closed-lipped family—we talk almost as little as we sing—but certain stories sneak through. Most of them, the ones I cling closest to, involve how my parents learned English and became Americans. My father, who arrived in Chicago in the early 60s after he hopped off a merchant marine ship in Stockton, California, and decided not to hop back on, learned largely through books. His Greek-English dictionary, which I now keep at my desk, is filled with English words he scribbled in, underlined, starred, or otherwise annotated. I’ve tried to assemble a narrative out of these words—some inspirational tale of the immigrant experience—but there’s no arc to be found:

result

aberrant

crap

apprentice

pigmentation

work 

move

Some of these words may relate to jobs my father found in Chicago when he’d first arrived and was learning English. Pigmentation could’ve had something to do with a stint in a paint factory he once mentioned. Or he could have just been working through the English translations of Nikos Kazantzakis books he bought, the ones with stamps inside from Greektown bookstores. There’s no telling. But I keep looking through the dictionary, even though the pages have grown brittle, especially on the English-Greek half, worn by all those years of study. His learner days are crumbling. I’ve kept trying to make the words speak to the person he was becoming, a working-class man who left the sticks and came to the city to make his way in life. That’s a good, American story. They make movies about that.

My mother, on the other hand, learned English through the radio, with its own set of stories.

I didn’t know it at the time, but we were tuning in to US 99 amid a country-music crossover phenomenon. Following a sleepy stretch in the early 70s, Nashville enjoyed a commercial renaissance as the 80s neared. Some of this is credited to Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville; some of it is attributed to the success of outlaw artists like Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Merle Haggard. But the genre largely boomed thanks to a host of slicker, glitzier, more shallow artists: Juice Newton, Johnny Lee, Barbara Mandrell, T.G. Sheppard, and on and on. Lots of sequins, electric piano, earnestly drawled tunes about love and simple pleasures. 

The music struck a middle ground between Yacht Rock and outlaw country, and it paid off big. But nobody, even in this retro-minded age, is eager to reoccupy it. Few who didn’t live through that era praise these songs; nobody particularly loves this stuff. But if you’re learning English, you benefit from three things this particular batch of songs provided: Slowness, repetition, and idiom. The early-80s country hit parade delivered truckloads of it:

Workin’ 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin’

You’re one in a million to me

Take this job and shove it

Could I have this dance for the rest of my life

I was country when country wasn’t cool

I wouldn’t have missed it for the world

I love a rainy night

In 1973, about a month before I was born, country fiddler Charlie Daniels released a single titled “Uneasy Rider,” a talking blues told from the perspective of a hippie whose car gets a flat outside a bar in Jackson, Mississippi. The narrator falls afoul of the bar’s patrons when they spot his long hair and the peace-sign sticker on the back of his car. Seeking to avoid a fight, he tries to redirect the mob toward another man, naming everything that might tick off a stereotypical redneck: This guy over there is an FBI agent! An enemy of the Klan! Voted for McGovern! Hates Wallace! “A friend of them long-haired hippie-type pinko fags!” It’s enough of a distraction for him to make his escape. 

The song hit 67 on the country charts, number 9 pop. That might’ve been “too crossover” for some listeners. But what does it mean to be “too crossover?” Which ideas stay in one place? What happens when some ideas don’t? Which ideas move around, so a kid in a suburb can absorb them?

The main instigator of country music’s early-80s boom is Urban Cowboy. Directed by James Bridges and released in 1980, it’s the middle film of a trilogy of man-child romances inspired by the New Journalism and starring John Travolta. The first, 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, was based on a 1976 New York magazine feature about bridge-and-tunnel disco habitues. The third, 1985’s Perfect, starred Travolta as a Rolling Stone reporter investigating the aerobic workout craze. Urban Cowboy was based on an Esquire feature by Aaron Latham about a young man who moved from rural Texas to Houston to make money, find love, and ride the mechanical bull at Gilley’s, a three-acre honky-tonk that opened in 1973. 

Overtly, the theme in all three movies is the same: How do we learn to navigate the world, become ourselves, become part of a relationship, join a social group, assimilate? Travolta’s characters are all misfits who blossom as soon as they put on the culture’s official uniform: the white suit in Fever, the spandex unitard in Perfect. In Urban Cowboy, Bridges lingers on Travolta’s change by panning slowly upward from his boots as he stands at the bar at Gilley’s, limning his tight-fitting jeans and faux-pearl-buttoned shirt. He casually holds a thick, blatantly phallic beer bottle at his hip. His face has that blank, childish, vaguely sullen look Travolta had back then. He’s new in town, but the message is clear—virility, and the right clothes, will let us fit in.

Latham’s Esquire article, “The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy,” makes a broad claim for what Travolta’s character is up to. Cowboy cosplay wasn’t just social capital—it was a tonic for America’s late-70s malaise. Latham writes:

When America is confused, it turns to its most durable myth: the cowboy. As the country grows more and more complex, it seems to need simpler and simpler values: something like the Cowboy Code. According to this code, a cowboy is independent, self-reliant, brave, strong, direct, and open…. In these anxious days, some Americans have turned for salvation to God, others have turned to fad prophets, but more and more people are turning to the cowboy hat.

It’s easy to see how this sentiment presaged Ronald Reagan’s rise to the presidency two years later. In her 1983 essay “The Rhetoric of the American Western Myth,” Janice Hocker Rushing suggests that this era—as seen through its hit TV shows and movies like Dallas and Urban Cowboy—signaled a moment of acute tension between America’s dueling ideals of community and rugged individualism, between Jimmy Carter’s “yeoman farmer” and Reagan’s “town marshal.” Carter’s clumsy presidency, Rushing writes, “piqued America’s appetite for a more appealing hero. This time the country reached as far West as possible, and found a ‘cowboy’ with a ranch near the metropolis of Los Angeles.” Dew, the inspiration for Travolta’s character, Bud, exemplifies the anxiety: He’s “sullen” when talking about his job at a refinery, Latham writes. “At work, the urban cowboy is a small, threatened creature.”

“To cope with the harshness and savagery of the frontier environment, he must above all be a rugged individualist,” Rushing writes. The line makes me think of my father, a quiet and hard man who never quite assimilated. His musical tastes rarely strayed far from the Cretan folk music he grew up with, and he tended to retreat from social interaction. His GM job was a union job, and in the early 80s he’d get laid off every so often, back when “layoff” wasn’t a euphemism for firing but a temporary stoppage. He would stay at home, fuss in his garage, and be a little sullen himself. Work itself didn’t cheer his spirits, but not working was worse. He craved quiet. Keeping the radio on in the background in the house was unthinkable for him, and threats to throw out the TV were common. He never followed through, though; the closest he ever got was one grumpy moment when he stormed into the TV room and snapped off the set, barking about how much he detested American culture. We were watching The Barbara Mandrell Show.

Urban Cowboy’s soundtrack became a crossover sensation. It sold three million copies, topping the country album charts and reaching number three on the Billboard Hot 100. It delivered five number-one country hits. During the soundtrack’s reign, country record sales tripled, and country radio boomed; between 1973 and 1983, the number of full-time country stations exploded, from 764 to 2,266. 

Yet Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns’ companion book to the 2019 documentary series Country Music largely relegates the Urban Cowboy phase to a sidebar on similar movies, and quotes from a cantankerous jeremiad by Everett J. Corbin titled “Storm Over Nashville.” Urban Cowboy-era musicians, Corbin wrote, “have strayed from traditional country music. Can we, in all good conscience, support and extol those who have broke with the old traditions and allowed country music to slide into gradual oblivion?”

There’s a similar sentiment in Michael Streissguth’s 2023 book, Highways and Heartaches, a history of how new traditionalists like Ricky Scaggs and Marty Stuart yanked country out of the clutches of the Urban Cowboy aesthetic in the late 80s. Streissguth frames the Urban Cowboy moment as overtly craven, a sop to rising Reaganism. “With an ear to conservatism’s refrain, executives turned down the volume on Waylon and Willie’s outlaw movement as well as the Studio 54 vibrations in Tanya Tucker’s act,” he writes. “The iconoclastic Roseanne Cash, newly signed by CBS, was told by marketing executives she should always appear predominantly chaste in promotional material but with traces of ‘fuckability,’ a typical American duality.” 

American dualities were fuzzier then than they are now, though. The conservatism of the Urban Cowboy movement was complicated—the yeoman farmer vs. town marshal dynamic that Rushing discussed in her essay wasn’t a clean split. It was a spectrum; it had room for crossovers and “lively country.” Nelson and Haggard weren’t ostracized in the early 80s. Haggard had eight country number ones between 1980 and 1983 and Nelson had four; and they had one together, “Pancho and Lefty.” Dolly Parton scored a number one hit (both country and pop) with “9 to 5,” the theme song to a hit film that’s still fairly progressive in its portrayal of harassment and demands for gender equality and childcare in the workplace. (The film was Jane Fonda’s vehicle. In her 1994 autobiography, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, Parton explains that she was recruited by Fonda to help the film appeal to Southern moviegoers.) Those hits were entwined with songs boosting Reaganesque masculinity and bravado; Kenny Rogers specialized in story songs about the virtues of rugged manliness in tunes like “Coward of the County.” Christy Lane delivered churchy tunes like “One Day at a Time,” which cracked the Top 40; US 99 often played Edgel Groves’ adaptation of the “Footprints in the Sand” poem, the one about how when you only saw one set of footprints in times of trouble, that’s when Jesus was carrying you. 

Jesus provided a handy idiomatic touchstone for my religious mother. She had only been in the States for about a decade, and she arrived not knowing a word of English, and in a new country, you look for the things that feel a little less foreign. She had the Greek Orthodox church and family gatherings—the Chicago suburbs were a magnet for many of my relatives. But my mother was inclined to assimilate too, if only to get out of the house and away from the pressures of raising a family. This was the flip side of Rushing’s rugged individualist cowboy: “In order to settle and civilize the frontier, he must continually face the demands of the community for cooperation and conformity.”

So, mom worked. The block I grew up on was zoned residential, but just barely. Across the street from the row of prefab houses like the one I grew up in were a beer distributorship, a carpet salesroom, a truck dealership, and a tool and die shop. One day, my mother walked to that tool and die shop and used one of the few words in English that she knew: Job. Repeats it at the front desk: Job. Job. Job.

They put her to work. She was terrified, not yet a naturalized citizen. When a boss asked if she was Polish, she heard police.

But she picked up the language, on the job and watching television: Soap operas, children’s fare. Romper Room and The Young and the Restless. She picked up English as colloquial English, something sprightly and a tick ironic in it, with inflections and phrasings my dad’s Greek-English dictionary could never teach. She helped the family during the times when dad wasn’t working. He protested that, much like Travolta’s character does when his new wife, Sissy, played by Debra Winger, tries to ride Gilley’s mechanical bull herself. But during layoffs, we needed help. My mother picked up a second job at a Marshall’s store, and she was good at it; she got along well with coworkers, got the jokes my dad never would. 

We watched movies. There were so many of them about country singers at the time, or that had a kind of country vibe. The Electric Horseman. Coal Miner’s Daughter. Tender Mercies. Sweet Dreams. Honeysuckle Rose. Smokey and the Bandit. One of the cable channels seemed to constantly play Six Pack, a 1982 Kenny Rogers vehicle in which he played a down-on-his luck racecar driver who somehow came into possession of six orphans. 

It’s not a memorable movie, but the website savingcountrymusic.com suggests it had outsize influence on a generation: “For thousands, maybe millions of Americans who grew up in the 80’s, Six Pack looms quite large in their little cultural ethos. It’s where they learned to cuss. It’s where they learned about love. And for many, it’s where they were introduced to the coolness of Kenny Rogers, and country music.”

Is that overstatement, or a story my generation doesn’t want to confess to? I’ve never talked to any of my generational peers about watching Six Pack, but maybe we’ve all memory-holed the experience. Calling up Kenny Rogers’ music now, for this essay, I don’t particularly like “Islands in the Stream” or “Coward of the County,” but you can see why millions did—the shine and sparkle of the music, the storytelling, the easy, loping delivery, the restful counterweight for anybody set put off by the era’s synths, funk, punk, and rock. Rogers is at once familiar and embarrassing, something Justin E.H. Smith suggested in a recent Harper’s essay, discussing his passion for Rogers as a very young Gen Xer:

For my tenth birthday I got to see him live—my first real concert. I was disappointed when Dolly Parton was brought out for a surprise appearance in a green sequined evening gown with extreme decollete, and the crowd whooped and hollered and muttered, as one did back then, about the size of her breasts. I just wanted more Kenny.

This affection for Rogers, Smith concludes, represented “childish tastes.” But childish how? Unquestionably, Rogers was among the most cloying of the Urban Cowboy-era country superstars, trading in simple love songs and morality plays. (The “coward of the county” gets a backbone once he witnesses his lady getting assaulted. The community confronts the rugged individualist! The town marshal arrives!) It’s what distinguished the Urban Cowboy aesthetic from the rock, R&B, and pop songs of the era, even if “Call Me,” “Magic,” and “The Pina Colada Song” weren’t much more sophisticated about love and morals. Christopher Cross and Steely Dan had a light and easy groove, too, sure, but they didn’t have heroes and stories in the same way. 

If you were an immigrant, or the son of immigrants, people learning English as a second language, you could sense the distinction that country music represented, hear the message. The country singers were who you gravitated to because they sang slow and told a story. My mother didn’t sing along with the music, but she got the cues and idioms the songs were communicating. Alabama’s songs alone were full of lessons. You might relate to “Mountain Music” if you came from a mountainous Greek island yourself. “Love in the First Degree” taught you a whole bunch of idioms: “footloose and fancy-free,” “a perfect crime,” “begging for mercy,” “lock me away and throw away the key,” “guilty of love in the first degree.”

So this wasn’t entirely about love of country music. Some of it was just a matter of efficiency. Alabama took two minutes to explain what a police procedural would need an hour to do, what you’d need months or years to pick up at a job. It’s the immigrant’s way. You’ll use whatever odd, jury-rigged means to get the understanding you require. You’re never going to understand it whole, so you have to build it out of parts.

I can read my father’s story as a familiar tale of rugged individualism—escaping rural life, jumping ship, learning English in his clunky way, soberly claiming his roles as the man of the house in the big city, getting frustrated at his wife’s gestures toward independence. Urban Cowboy polished that conceit to a high sheen, to the point of unintentional hilarity. It made mechanical bulls, of all things, into a national phenomenon. (Rushing’s essay mentions the emergence of “Urban Cowboy syndrome”—pelvic injuries from bull-riding, basically.) All attempts in the movie to make the bull at Gilley’s seem fearsome are unconvincing. Bud’s uncle Bob (Barry Corbin) insists that the mechanical bull is harder to ride than the real thing—it lacks a head you can follow. This is supposed to make the mechanical bull more intriguing, I suppose, but it mainly just highlights its mechanical-ness, HAL without even a pretend brain. The movie is a man-versus-machine story that can’t make the machine interesting.

Latham’s original story does a better job of making a metaphor out of the bull: “In his boots and jeans, the urban cowboy tries to get a grip on and ride an America that, like his bull, is mechanized. He can never tame it, but he has the illusion of doing so.” But the movie doesn’t try to extend the metaphor that far—Travolta is too baby-faced and sleepy-eyed and disinterested in larger themes, the dialogue too rooted in blood and sex. (Everybody complains about how the bull ravages your testicles. And Sissy’s rides aren’t presented as real competition, just displays of her sexuality.) The movie reduces the bull to a metaphor for relationships, uncertain and often rocky. Sissy wants to ride herself, but Bud won’t have it, stuck in old-fashioned ways as he is. Their marriage, barely started, begins to splinter. Bud abuses Sissy, who finds another lover—Wes (played by a brilliantly wolfish Scott Glenn), an ex-felon who becomes Bud’s chief competition for the mechanical-bull crown—who slaps her around some more. By the end of the movie Bud and Sissy are back together, but it feels like a loveless, pyrrhic victory. There’s little sign that Bud has reined in his anger and learned much of a lesson. He’s just proved himself slightly stronger than a felon and slightly smarter than a bull without a brain.

My parents’ marriage has never been so tumultuous, at least as far as I know. But it was built on the same old-fashioned gender roles that governed Bud and Sissy. Family lore: My mother was told, before she married, that her future husband lived handsomely in the city, in a big, beautiful house. In truth he was renting in a homely industrial suburb; it’d be a few years before he’d land a secure union job at General Motors and buy a modest house with a LeMans parked in front. It wasn’t exactly a trailer park, but it wasn’t living large. So, how were you going to get ahead in this strange country? What would you have to do to assimilate?

For a long time my mother wouldn’t go very far from home to work. There was the job at the tool and die shop down our street for a while, then a kitchen-utensil warehouse on the other side of our street. But, she assimilated. She rose up in the ranks, ramped up her English, became a warehouse manager, then jumped to a different kitchen-utensil firm, a bigger one in a bigger warehouse, and managed that one too. She was a model employee who even did some public speaking on the company’s behalf, less than two decades after arriving in the United States not knowing English.

I never once heard my father praise her for any of this. To be fair, I should add: Not in English. In the new world, I learned, you say less.

Urban Cowboy’s signature song is “Lookin’ for Love” by Johnny Lee. Lee had an undistinguished career in country music before then, toiling as the house act at Gilley’s before the film and the bull made it famous. It was a crossover hit, number one country and number five pop. It’s famous—in the movie, Bud says it’s his favorite song—but it’s aged poorly. Its biggest cultural legacy now may be Eddie Murphy’s rendition of it as the Little Rascals’ Buckwheat on Saturday Night Live. If you’re a certain age, it’s impossible to hear “Lookin’ for Love” without hearing “Wookin’ Pa Nub.”

But it was huge at the time, launching the soundtrack’s reign on the charts. Anne Murray’s cloying “Could I Have This Dance” (number one country, 33 pop) for one, a couple of yacht-rock-adjacent tunes by the Eagles and Boz Scaggs for others, a Bob Seger sop to rock for one more. (Urban Cowboy wasn’t stumbling into crossover country—it was actively chasing it.) A peculiar cover by Mickey Gilley of Ben E. King’s soul hit “Stand by Me,” soulless as Pat Boone’s “Tutti Frutti,” also charted, number one country, 22 pop.

But none of those tracks are anywhere near the most interesting or culturally influential song on the soundtrack, especially if you were the son of a pair of immigrant kids in a LeMans with the radio locked on US 99. That title belongs to Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” It’s the song played just before the climactic battle between Bud and Wes at the end of Urban Cowboy. It’s goofily fitting: Fiddle-offs and mechanical-bull competitions both are weird kinds of contests, so there’s something pleasantly disorienting and odd about the two of them combined in one scene. The long song is played almost in its entirely, a hefty Daniels gleaming impishly under the hot lights of Gilley’s. It’s childish in a Six Pack way, childish in a Rocky way, a story about a triumphant man-child. 

“Devil” is a story song, a little like “Uneasy Rider.” Its themes are simple—devil, temptation, reward, redemption, heroism. Though the song is lengthy, it’s not complicated. The devil thinks he’s the best fiddler around; someone proves him wrong, the end. There’s not even a verse where Johnny revels in his new gold fiddle. It was a crossover hit, topping the country chart in 1979 and hitting the top 10 on the pop charts. 

But it was more than just another crossover hit in a time full of them. It was a pivot point in Daniels’ own story, and a warning about the consequences of America’s desire for a town marshal.

Into the late 70s, country stars’ crossovers could be as political as they were musical. Parton-meets-Fonda was only one example. The outlaw personas of Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and Willie Nelson earned them fans among the counterculture; Nelson performed at the yeoman farmer’s inaugural ball. Daniels was a sideman on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album. (“I felt I had a lot in common with Charlie,” Dylan wrote in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Vol. 1.) In 1969 he performed at a Vietnam War protest on the National Mall along with Earl Scruggs. He too performed at Jimmy Carter’s inaugural ball in 1977. 

But in 1980, Daniels delivered “In America,” a bleat of xenophobia in response to the Iran hostage crisis:

We may have done a little bit 

Of fighting among ourselves

But you outside people best leave us alone

Cause we all stick together

And you can take that to the bank

That’s the cowboys and the hippies

And the rebels and the yanks

Daniels’ rainbow coalition of Americanness was just a pose. The point of “In America” was othering— “You outside people best leave us alone” sits a little different with an immigrant mom of two kids in the suburbs than it does with the typical Charlie Daniels fan. “In America” cracked the top 20 in both country and pop—crossover enough to encourage Daniels to keep going. The Reagan era would provide a bottomless well of inspiration for him in the years to come.

Reagan, the town marshal, promoted the lie that he’d rescued the Americans held hostage in Iran. He pushed union-busting at a time when the union helped keep my father at work. He pushed empty flag-waving patriotism in such an empty way that he wrongly assumed that Bruce Springsteen was trading in it. And, knowing where his appeal lay, he embraced anything to do with cowboy culture, including Urban Cowboy culture. In 1985 he invited Mickey Gilley to provide the entertainment at a bipartisan congressional barbecue at the White House. Comparing himself to Gilley as “a sometime cowboy to an urban cowboy,” he then proceeded to spin a modern-day cowboy yarn that was Reagan to the core, a cocktail of fearmongering, country-club humor, and easy pandering to old-fashioned American values:

[I want to] tell a little something that I saw in the Milwaukee Journal not too long ago that actually might—you could stretch it, and it might apply to the activities of all of us—our friends out here and myself and things we go through. This was a woman that’s been reading about all the crime and the violence and so forth and became frightened enough that she started studying judo. And she really did; she studied and she went through all the stages of that till she was a master of the art all the way to the very top. And then one night, the thing she dreaded happened. She was walking down the street—it was about 9:30—and a fellow stepped out of a doorway and grabbed her, this judo expert. She hit him over the head with her umbrella.

Americans are at their best when they don’t cultivate anything, Reagan was saying. Best if we just reduce ourselves to our basest selves, choose the simplest ways to prove our mettle. Ride a bull, throw a fist.

Daniels reduced himself to his basest self too. He put out Rambo-adjacent tunes like “Still in Saigon” and “M.I.A.” In 1988 he released a revised version of “Uneasy Rider,” and this time the hero is a good old boy who unknowingly enters a gay bar (in Houston, Urban Cowboy’s turf) and becomes violent when a man flirts with him. He followed that up with “Simple Man,” a single that, like “In America,” was a Southern-friend cri de coeur about crime and injustice. But Daniels wasn’t so big on the unification themes this time around. America needed Bibles, he insisted. It needed vigilante justice:

If I had my way with people sellin’ dope

Take a big tall tree and a short piece of rope

I’d hang ‘em up high and let ‘em swing ‘til the sun goes down

Daniels’ transformation was complete. The murderous hicks that the narrator of “Uneasy Rider” was desperate to escape were now the hero of the story. It hit 12 on the country charts but missed the pop charts; it was an idea that wasn’t ready to cross over. But that would change. After all, when America is confused, it turns to its most durable myth: the cowboy.

“The politicians, they always try to foolish the people,” my father is fond of saying. I used to mock him privately for lines like that—the clumsy syntax, the bad grammar. But I sympathize now. English is a tough language, and I can understand avoiding acculturation. He’d snap off The Barbara Mandrell Show if it got too loud, too overtly splashy in an American way. He didn’t bother with any of the ka-chunk presets, content to keep the radio off or tuned to a Bears game. The 1962 edition of Divry’s New English-Greek and Greek-English Handy Dictionary, Revised Edition, edited by G.C. Divry and C.G. Divry, has a lot of words in it, but it doesn’t have a grammar or usage tips. My father’s English is an English of printed words. He’s easy to shop for: History books always work. The last time he visited my home, he spent his spare time reading a dictionary-sized history of the world I’d long had sitting on my shelves. When I told him he could take it back home with him, he looked a bit surprised. How could I part with such a lovely thing, this brick-sized hunk of past?

As my parents get older, I’ve been thinking more and more about what I’ve inherited from them about story and language, and what my childhood interests taught me as well. I wouldn’t become much of a reader until my teens, so I picked up the narrative other ways, mostly through TV and music. But why have I blanked out so many of those Urban Cowboy songs, ones I knew by heart as a child? Maybe because I also associate that time so much with broken English, when my parents were still settling themselves. Being too much in love with “Smoky Mountain Rain” and “The Coward of the County” is a misstep, an error. Childish tastes. I loved the stuff—I remembered it—but my parents distrusted it. Maybe what I inherited was the distrust.

Through my mother, I learned some of story’s familiar arcs but carried them lightly, knowing they’d always be incomplete, unfinished, probably untrue; through my father, I learned language is prismatic, broken, not entirely up to the task, a list of words that you’re going to have to put together on your own. No happy endings, just some words you’ll need to define to make your way in the world. 

fuck

priority

apprentice

church

work

move

unable

unbound

unjust

unkind

Stories are things you can make a world around. But it’s wise not to put too much stock in them, especially when they come from movies, or politicians, or country songs.

But we keep telling stories, the same ones, over and over.

The spring and summer of 2023 were a rehash of 1980 on the country charts, just in more intense and divisive ways. Mickey Gilley’s cover of “Stand by Me” was supplanted by Luke Combs’ cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” (number one country, number two pop), setting off a debate about who gets to sing what by whom. Charlie Daniels’ hard-right turn in “Simple Man” was echoed in two hit songs, Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” (number one country, number one pop) a Daniels-esque fantasy of vigilante justice, and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” (number one country, number one pop), another town-marshal tale, an evocation of Ronald Reagan’s welfare-cheat bogeymen. Back then, the evildoers were alleged layabouts with multiple kids. This time the evil is perpetrated by…people snacking:

Lord, we go folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat

And the obese milkin’ welfare

Well, God, if you’re five-foot-three and you’re three-hundred pounds

Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds

Once again, the country song is in the business of othering; once again, the injustice is being done to the observer, not to those being observed. All three of those songs have been much-thinkpieced, but it’s not very complicated to me as the son of immigrants. It’s a story about drawing lines, saying who belongs and who doesn’t.

Charlie Daniels died in 2020. His son, Charlie Daniels Jr., keeps his legacy alive by posting on his website, writing missives that end with the hashtag #BenghaziAintGoingAway. In July he posted one piece under the headline “Try That With a Simple Man in a Small Town,” noting how much Aldean’s song owed to Daniels’ hit. Daniels fils mainly blithered about how neither song was racist, and that Black Lives Matter was “the militant wing of the leftists which began with radical groups like the Weather Underground from the 1960s.” The narrator of “Uneasy Rider” would’ve had some fun with that, but fun isn’t on the Daniels family agenda anymore.

Meanwhile, Urban Cowboy is getting a reboot. Last year, James Ponsoldt, director of The End of the Tour and The Circle, announced he’s producing the series along with thriller novelist Benjamin Percy. Maybe 80s nostalgia is driving the idea; a Flashdance reboot was announced the same day. But the story has changed. In 1980, “urban cowboy,” as a term, evoked a gentle irony, a chocolate-meets-the-peanut-butter combo, just a hint of the yeoman-farmer-versus-town-marshal battles to come. Now, though, there’s a red-and-blue-state divide to it. Urban. Cowboy. What kind of story do you make out of that? What things are crossing over?

Should you even make a story at all? A few years after those car trips, I started reading short stories and began trying to write a few of my own. My mother tried to stomp on that enthusiasm early. “It’s the worst way to make a living,” she’d say. If I was a little too much underfoot in the house, she said, dismissively, “Go write a story.”

I can’t begrudge an immigrant mother for trying to steer her teenage child toward more gainful employment. I certainly can’t begrudge her skepticism about storytelling. Story is the stuff of country songs, made-up things about home and God and love and all the rest. Potted, untrustworthy. Not bad for helping you learn the language. But once you have the words down, you’re going to have to find another way to speak, and be skeptical of where you learned the lesson.

Urban Cowboys, Immigrant Dreams

Mark Athitakis