Country Fans are Never Indifferent to Technology
I was plowing through a cold, hard rain on I-81, somewhere around Staunton, Va., when an oldies station decided to cheer me up by playing “Convoy,” C. W. McCall’s rollicking tale about outlaw truckers. The song was a big hit in 1975-76 and eventually made into a movie. The element that gave “Convoy” its appeal was the nation’s fascination at the time with CB (citizens band) radio, a device that enabled motorists to chat with each other as they traveled the highways. It was a godsend for truckers and an irresistible gadget for everyone else. Naturally, it spawned its own colorful vocabulary, which McCall used with Olympian skill and fluency.
Listening to McCall chatter on, it occurred to me that country songwriters, singers and fans are never indifferent to new technologies. They may embrace them, reject them or make fun of them, but they’re never indifferent. Think back a few months to Brad Paisley’s triumph with “Online,” in which he lampoons the poor soul who uses the Internet to turn himself into a virtual superman. It fit neatly into country’s grand tradition. (Actually, Paisley was a relative latecomer to the topic. Cledus T. Judd spotlighted it in 1998 with his “First Redneck on the Internet.”) When cheap and portable fax machines began popping up in the early 1990s, Hank Williams Jr. responded to the craze with “Fax Me a Beer.”
In the late 1940s, Red Foley, among others, began viewing the nascent technology of television with considerable alarm, as well as down-home humor. Foley’s “Television” brands the intruder as “the devil’s doin’,” and announces flatly, “it’s got to go.” Radio seemed to be accepted as a more benign -- even a divine -- influence, as witnessed by the oft-recorded “Turn Your Radio On,” which counseled “get in touch with God, turn your radio on.”
The telephone, the phonograph, the atomic bomb, the answering machine -- country music had songs to address each one and help usher it into our daily lives. Of course the invention that never stopped giving lyrical inspiration, especially from the 1940s onward, was the jukebox. As late as 1990, Alabama scored a No. 1 with “Jukebox in My Mind.” Now we carry around our own personal jukeboxes. They’re handy, but they have no romance. Who wants to sing about i-Pods?
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B.W. LaRoy says:
Radio would be stooopid to help popularize a song about IPODs. Unless the song sings about how stoopid people look with beans and wires stucked in their ears. I’m thinking someone needs to invent a safety bumper for IPOD wearers to affix to their foreheads…I’ve seen way too many of them wandering around bumping in to people who look like they still have some sense about them.
Poycer says:
It’s not a whole song about an ipod, but Rascal Flatts does mention a “dude named Elrod jammin on an ipod.”
B. W. LaRoy says:
See, there are people who actually listen to and expose the lyrics to pop music.
monkeypants says:
I’ve never heard fax me a beer but it sounds like a fun thing to try. The song, not the actual faxing. But brad’s online makes me think of sexual predators pretending to be 14-year-old boys, so that is just wrong!
Brody says:
Billy Joe Shaver makes his own fax and cell phone references in “That’s What She Said Last Night” and Alan Jackson has another technology inspired song with “www.memory”.
william buck says:
brad pasiley being a WV boy might know how to help a person get into music. My wife has sang in wheelig many years ago and has an ear for music.any help would be nice ftb.