New York City Gets a Country Radio Station!

Taylor Swift
in concert

According to this story in The New York Times, New York City is getting a country radio station! It will be the first country station to broadcast in New York since 1996, when WYNY, the only country station in the metropolis at the time, changed to a pop format.

Now New Yorkers will be able to tune in to the chart-topping songs of hot country artists like Taylor Swift (above left).

I love country music. I have been working on a website that I call "Twang!" that presents various songs and artists from the long history of the genre, courtesy of YouTube. It's a slow process, I admit, but eventually it will document a lot of country music history. Or so I hope.

Lady Antebellum performs

I also am given to pondering what it means that country music is so hot today. I'm not young enough to be in close touch with a lot of the teens and young adults of the day, but I am told that a great many of them consider themselves fans of country artists and groups like Ms. Swift and Lady Antebellum (right).

My how things have changed!

Time was when country music was apt to be about "barrooms and bedrooms," so it is said. The bedrooms were often illicit ones ... and then the singer, as the victim of marital betrayal, might seek to drown his sorrows with tears that he sheds in his beer.

These were themes appropriate to America's Southern working class during much of the last century. Other themes included how hard folks had to work; how little money they earned to raise their family on; how devoted they were to their Mama and/or their Daddy — and let's not forget their God; paradoxically, some say, how much they liked to drink and cavort, even when it wasn't being done to allay sorrow; and how they longed to get on an outbound train and just ride the rails to a different destiny.

I wonder how the young folks today react to Loretta Lynn's signature song, "Coal Miner's Daughter," shown above.

And I wonder whether such "hard country" sounds of yesteryear might not best be perceived by today's middle-class youngsters as a kind of folk music ... which, in fact, it always was.