PrintMany Columbia students’ exposure to country music begins and ends with Miley Cyrus, perhaps with a little Taylor Swift thrown in. In the immortal words of Miley, Columbia’s campus is “definitely not a Nashville party.” Still, a few maintain an allegiance to the traditions of country and roots music amid a campus of Passion Pit and Ratatat devotees.
But can a genre that derives much of its appeal from the way it evokes the feeling of being in a rural setting thrive in the lap of Alma Mater and the heart of Manhattan? When our idea of life on the farm comes from shopping at Whole Foods and our wide-open spaces are limited to Low Plaza, is a country music scene possible?
Many country fans arrived at the genre independently before they got to college. Singer-songwriter Yoav Guttman, GS/JTS ’10, is inspired by the roots music of his home state, North Carolina. “It’s not so much pop country, but sort of the old, folky country,” he says.
Logan Ledger, who chairs the American department at WKCR, plays in a band and hosts The Moonshine Show, a bluegrass show that runs Sundays from 10 am to 12 pm.
Malcolm Culleton, a sophomore in CC, first discovered blues by way of Led Zeppelin and bluegrass by an odder route—through websites devoted to jam bands such as Phish. Culleton hosts For Folk’s Sake on WBAR, a show that straddles genres, including blues, bluegrass, folk, old-time, and even some classic rock—“as long as it adheres to the spirit.”
What is this “spirit?” Culleton describes it as “music that is approached in a nonintellectual fashion. … It has some ground in just the pure momentary emotion.”
Yet for some, Columbia provides the first introduction to the country or bluegrass tradition. Many members of Lion in the Grass, a bluegrass ensemble sponsored by the Center for Ethnomusicology and the Music Performance Program, come from classical or jazz training.
Five years ago, the ensemble had seven members. “We have like 25 now,” Toby King, a Columbia Ph.D. student and the group’s leader, says. “It’s getting hard to manage. I’m like a bluegrass wrangler.”
Despite Lion in the Grass’s snowballing membership, many people feel that Columbia’s urban setting impedes the development of a down-to-earth country scene.
Guttman says that he doesn’t see much interest in acoustic music at Columbia. “We’re in the city and people want to go out to clubs. … Electronic music is very popular right now, and I like to listen to it, but I’m not making that kind of stuff.”
Still, Culleton remains optimistic. “I think there potentially could be [a stronger country scene],” he says. “I definitely don’t think it is inaccessible.”
But can this “mountain music” resound with the same poignancy when it echoes off the sides of skyscrapers and is mixed with the clamor of the subway? Or are country musicians, radio programmers, and country aficionados just incurably nostalgic?
“It is kind of funny when you look at the surroundings and the music being played is so anachronistic,” Ledger says. “Definitely, I do have some longing or nostalgia for being in the country. … It is a contradiction, and it makes me uncomfortable.”
“I have one song that talks about … look[ing] at the stars every night,” Guttman says. “You have to have stars to look at, you know what I mean?”
Still, Guttman’s other songs, such as one called “Manhattan Sunset,” show a willingness to combine styles and themes. “I have these roots of where I came from and I’m applying it to this urban atmosphere,” he explains.
According to some, country was itself born from nostalgia. “Country music was a phenomenon really of migration of people from the South migrating to northern cities, like Detroit,” Ledger says, adding that this migration was pivotal in creating country as a commercial genre. “Certainly one of the major themes of early country songs is a longing for home,” he says.
Ledger cited some of the biggest country radio stations, based in Chicago and Washington D.C., as proof of this phenomenon. “These are places that people moved to, and they were lonesome and they wanted to hear, like, the sounds of home—or this artificial reconstruction of what some idealistic notion of what home was.”
King also admitted that much of bluegrass’s lyrical themes and visceral power tie in with a longing for home. “The irony is that they’re creating a place for themselves as they do it,” King says. “Music is a tool for creating place, and it works very well. … New York is as much of a bluegrass town as anywhere else.”
Ryan Chaney teaches Contemporary Civilization at Columbia and wrote his 2008 Ph.D. dissertation about roots music culture in southwestern Virginia. “As much of the music’s evocative power is derived from where it’s played as where it’s from,” he says. “The way someone thinks about bluegrass or country music or old-time in, say, southwest Virginia or … different places in the South—it’s probably different than somebody who is from New York and of a certain socioeconomic status. Whatever it means, whatever connotations the music has, and whatever reasons it is that people are drawn to it, whatever it’s evoking is as dependent, I think, on the place that the people are in who are listening to it.”
Columbia’s country aficionados are tied together loosely by their similar interests. “Just some scattered individuals. We’re all very lonely,” Ledger jokes.
On the other hand, a bona fide country scene flourishes both in Greenwich Village and across the river.
Ex-Texan JD Duarte is a central figure in the Brooklyn country scene. Duarte has been managing the website BrooklynCountry.com for two years. The site is a way for Brooklyn country, bluegrass, old-time, and folk bands to connect with one another and with their fan bases.
Duarte emphasizes that, despite Brooklyn’s post-everything reputation, the scene is largely un-ironic. “There are a few that are playing up the ‘Hey, I’m a cowboy in Brooklyn!’ kind of thing,” he says. “But if you look at a lot of the bands, they’re really taking the music they love in the tradition of country and blues, and offering it up where they live. … They’re dressing the part, they’re playing the part, they’re keeping the tradition alive—without becoming humorous about it.”
Nor are they trafficking in anachronistic subject matter, Duarte says. “Country and bluegrass tend to be songs about what is going on right then—they are songs about your society, your place. Just because it’s not now a mountain, or, you know, a small town. You’ll find some bands that are actually writing songs about New York, but still in the same style of music.”
Despite Brooklyn’s successes, Michele Lopez, president of the New York Metropolitan Country Music Association, claims that the lack of a country music radio station in the New York area is keeping the scene’s success in check.
“Country has a bad rap,” she says. “They [New York listeners] don’t really realize that a lot of stuff they’re listening to … like Garth Brooks is mostly country. Shania Twain is mostly country, but that also Kid Rock has some country stuff. … They assume that a country radio station would just have the twang.”
Though Kid Rock may not exactly have Columbians flocking to the genre, Lopez makes a valid point. The many sub-variations of country, and the historical events and movements that caused them, are lumped together by many listeners in the Northeast.
“Country” itself has several implications. To many people in our generation, especially those living in the Northeast, “country music” evokes images of cowboy hats, big trucks, and songs titled “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”—hence that ubiquitous “favorite music” description on Facebook, “anything but country.”
Within the umbrella term of “country,” however, there have been many movements and variations. Bluegrass and old-time are two divisions. “We can’t separate race from it all,” Ledger says. Country music and blues split up in the beginning of the century, largely for race reasons. “This sort of artificial separation took place where these black musicians become automatically blues,” he says. “That has a lot to do with record companies.”
He adds, “It sort of all runs together in the city.”
Chaney agrees. “From here [New York City], the distinction between old-time and bluegrass doesn’t make that much difference because, you know, it’s all ‘mountain music.’ When you’re in the mountains … it’s a big distinction.”
Many cite the immediacy of country and bluegrass music as a main draw. At a bluegrass concert, “You can’t blow anyone away with your electric guitar,” King jokes. The traditional bluegrass ensemble is made up of only string instruments: guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and dobro—which King refers to as “the bastard child” of the outfit.
Columbia, of course, is not known for its immediacy. There is some tension between an impulse to intellectualize the musical tradition and one’s role within or outside of it, and the desire to “just play the fuckin’ music,” as Chaney puts it.
In order to avoid a relationship with the music that is—in the fashion of our generation—a little too “meta” to be genuine, King tells his musicians to worry about how, not why or what, they play. “Bluegrass has this history that everyone is very cognizant of,” he explains. “At the same time, it’s a very active, performative thing. ... It’s very improvisatory. It’s jazz-like, in that way. ... I want students to come out of this group with enough history but enough creativity. … You have to leap into the fray.”
“I meet tons of people, a lot of whom are my friends, and they try to intellectualize country music,” Ledger says. “They talk about it as if it were like, a piece of modern art or something like that. … For me, it isn’t.” Still, it becomes clear from his near-encyclopedic knowledge of country and bluegrass history that the “why” is still extremely significant.
However, nearly everyone I spoke with agrees on one thing: What really defines country music is not the landscape it evokes, but the emotion it conveys. As Duarte puts it, country is “music about me” and “music about people.” Culleton cites the visceral and in-the-moment nature of country. “My approach to it is very instinctual,” he says.
“It’s just emotion for me,” Ledger says. “It’s what I like—it makes me feel. It’s what life is—if it didn’t exist, I don’t know what I would do. It’s like food or something … and I’m not trying to be poetic.” a