Country Roots

In high school in the late 1940s, Mom and her girlfriend nicknamed themselves Kittie and Dottie after country singers Kitty Wells and Dottie West. The names didn’t stick, but Mom’s love of C&W did.

I grew up on a farm where listening to country music blasting from Mom’s radio was a daily occurrence. She played the music while she washed dishes, folded laundry, scrubbed floors or did any of the endless of jobs that come with a household of five kids. Whether honkey-tonk style with fiddles and harmonicas, rockabilly, or the Nashville sound, she loved it all. She’d turn the volume extra loud while vacuuming so she wouldn’t miss a note of her favourite crooners like Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, and Charlie Pride. Or singers like Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Roger Miller, and George Jones

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When my older brother discovered rock music in high school, it meant I did too. Suddenly it was no longer cool to listen to C&W. (I still liked C&W, but I knew better than to admit it to my classmates or my brother.)

While my brother and his band Helix were playing in Kitchener-Waterloo in the music competition known as Battle of the Bands, I was battling my mother for control of the radio dial. She preferred CKNX in Wingham where country tunes followed the daily hog report, while I insisted on CHUM 1050-AM out of Toronto tracking the Top 30.

Then in the 70s, crossover artists appeared—John Denver, Glen Campbell, B.J. Thomas, Olivia Newton-John—many of whom were still classed as country, but just as likely to be heard on pop rock stations, sometimes called easy listening. Anne Murray, Bread, Bee Gees, Jim Croce, Eagles.

In the decades that followed, there was a blurring of the lines as country musicians broke the traditional boundaries to incorporate different sounds into their music. The genre names changed frequently—pop-country, country-rock, soft rock, stadium rock, neotraditionalist country, cowpunk, alternative country.

In those decades of relabelling, I lost track of music. Who had time to listen to the radio when working fulltime and raising a family? Yet here I am now with new country as the only pre-set on my car radio, watching country videos on TV’s Stingray channel, and line dancing at the community center.

I’m not exactly sure when music resurfaced in my life, but my best guess is that it happened during the early 2000s. At that time, I was studying at the Toronto School of Homeopathic Medicine in Toronto, driving back and forth from London on weekends (a minimum two-hour drive each way.)

There was a lot of time to listen to music. I often enjoyed jazz on those trips. Perhaps during one drive the jazz station wouldn’t come in, so I found an “easy listening” station and got hooked before realizing I was listening to country. (Or new country as it is often called today.)

As I make plans for an autumn trip to Nashville, I imagine I can hear my mother singing along as she and Dad twirl circles on the heavenly dance floor.

As the saying goes…you can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl.

Yee haw, y’all.