In God's Country?

Country-rock. The Eagles, right? Poco. The New Riders Of The Purple Sage. Denim shirts, leather waistcoats, beards, beerguts and bad bar-bands mutilating Jambalaya .

Think again. Sure, the genre has been responsible for some of the corniest and most cliched music in history, but what emerges from Peter Doggett s book Are You Ready For The Country Elvis, Dylan, Parsons And The Roots Of Country Rock, is how frequently America s so-called alternative acts return to dip their toes in the moonshine streams of country music.
Bob Dylan s appearance on The Johnny Cash Show in Nashville in 1969 provides Doggett with his jumping off point. The amphetamine jokerman s conversion to a music that was considered reactionary, bigoted and downright racist by the counterculture set an unexpected precedent for the next 30 years: The Byrds, The Stones, Neil Young, Creedence, Elvis Costello, U2, The Grateful Dead, REM all of them at some stage have been seduced by the glitter of rhinestones or the mysterious nuances of mountain music.
So, Doggett traces a faultline that has run through pop music since Hank Williams: the rift between north and south, Yankee and Rebel, rural and urban, Republican and Democrat. And while this odyssey sometimes leads the author into areas that would make lesser men weep country-pop crossovers by Lionel Richie, Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers, or the post-Garth hat acts of the nineties he s sussed enough to reclaim names which have been written out of the plot, realising that the whole alt-country/No Depression phenomenon represented by the likes of Lambchop, The Jayhawks, Wilco, Beck, Son Volt et al, did not simply get passed down wholesale from Bob, Gram and Emmylou. So, this eighties roots-rock fan at least is heartened to see Joe Ely s affiliation with The Clash factored into the equation, not to mention cowpunkers and paisley undergrounders like Jason & The Scorchers, Rank & File, Green On Red, The Long Ryders, Lone Justice and Los Lobos.
In fact, in acknowledging that the New Country filled the hole left by grunge in terms of heartlands rock in the late nineties, Doggett raises the possibility of an entire book dedicated to what s going on right now in terms of millennial country-rock, 16 Horsepower, The Handsome Family, Will Oldham, Giant Sand etc. etc. And while he missed a couple of crucial developments how Kurt got Hank via The Meat Puppets on Unplugged In New York, or Mary Margaret O Hara s Patsy Cline-on-Mars moves, or The Waterboys radical conversion to cowboy chic in the mid-eighties Are You Ready is a comprehensive piece of work: crisply written, richly anecdotal, low on theory but high on fact and action. Recommended.

Are You Ready For The Country is published by Viking at #12.99 sterling.