Country music has a history that is deeply rooted in traditional white Southern working-class values, patriotism, conservative politics, and lyrics that tell the unblinking truth about life. An old joke asks, "What do you get when you play a country record backwards?" The answer: "You get your wife back, your truck back, and your dog back." However, country music is much more than songs of hard luck in love and life. Those lyrics that face "the cold hard facts of life," in the words of a Porter Wagoner song of the 1970s, are more than a series of laments. They look at both success and failure, joy and despair with sentiment and realism. And though most country music and country music fans might advocate a straight and narrow conservative path, the lyrics of country songs deal with the dilemmas of life with a complexity not found in any other popular music.

Country music's earliest roots are found in the ballads of the Appalachian Mountains, songs that stemmed from a tradition brought to America by the English, Scots, and Irish who settled that territory. Their religion was a strict Calvinism, and many of their songs were dark cautionary tales of sexuality and retribution. Playwright Tennessee Williams, who came from that Southern Gothic tradition, put these words in the mouth of Blanche Dubois, his most famous heroine: "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, then transfer to one called Cemeteries." Williams had learned the message of those old songs: "A false-hearted lover will lead you to your grave" ("On Top of Old Smoky"). One song after another told the story of seduction followed by murder. Pretty Polly's false lover tells her, "I dug on your grave the best part of last night." The false lover on the banks of the Ohio admits that "I held my knife against her breast/As into my arms she pressed." In perhaps the most famous of these songs, Tom Dooley meets his lover on the mountain and stabs her with his knife. These dark songs were not the only part of the Southern mountain tradition, however. There were children's play-party songs, danceable tunes, and upbeat, optimistic songs. But the murder songs were so striking, coming as they did out of a tradition of sexual repression combined with stark realism, that they are the most memorable.

The music of the Southern mountains became something more in 1927, when Ralph Peer, a recording engineer for the Victor Talking Machine Co. (later RCA Victor), went to Bristol, Tennessee, to make some regional recordings of what was then called "hillbilly music." He sent out word that he would pay $50 for every song he recorded, and came away with the first recorded country music.

Peer recorded two memorable acts. The first was the Carter Family (A. P., Sara, and Maybelle Carter), whose songs included both the anthems of optimism ("Keep on the Sunny Side") and the ballads of sex and death ("Bury Me beneath the Willow"). In those recordings, still in print and still considered classics of American music, the Carter Family created an archetype of country music. From their harmonies to their guitar styles to their plain-spoken emotional directness, they created a template for the music that followed them.

Second, and even more important, was Jimmie Rodgers, a one-time railroad man (on his records he was known as "the Singing Brakeman") who had taken to playing music after ill health had forced him off the railroad. When Rodgers showed up for his first session with Peer, he sang popular songs of the day, which earned him no more than a rebuke. Peer was interested in recording folk singers, singing their indigenous music, and he told Rodgers to come back with some traditional folk songs. Rodgers did not know any traditional music, but he needed the few dollars that Peer was offering for the session. With the help of his sister, Elsie McWilliams, Rogers wrote his own "traditional" tunes, hoping that Peer wouldn't notice the difference. The songs they created made music history.

Rodgers' songs struck a chord with rural America. He glorified and romanticized the day-to-day issues of small-town working people--family, sweetheart, the struggles of the hoboes and the working class--and he placed these issues forever in the lexicon of country music. More importantly, Rodgers introduced the blues to country music. His first big hit, "T For Texas (The Blue Yodel)," created the Jimmie Rodgers sound--a traditional twelve bar blues, ending in a yodel. Rodgers was so steeped in the blues that Louis Armstrong played on one of his blue yodels, and his blues-based style was one of the first important melds of black and white styles in American popular music.

The blues had taken the country by storm in the 1920s, first in the urban, jazz-inflected recordings of artists like Bessie Smith, and then in the rural, country blues recordings of Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and others. The surprise commercial success of phonograph records aimed at a rural black audience encouraged companies like Victor to make a similar pitch to rural whites. The same success followed. Jimmie Rodgers sold between 6 and 20 million records (by various estimates) before his death in 1933. The blues were hit hard as a commercial medium by the depression, but country music did well in the 1930s. Radio, a more viable medium for white music, kept country music in the public ear with various local "barn dance" programs, including the phenomenally successful Grand Ole Opry, which started in 1925.