CMT Blog: High School Diploma

Gretchen Wilson sets a better example with her life than with her songs. Beginning with “Redneck Woman,” many of her songs seem to suggest that you can be happy and emotionally fulfilled by embracing the squalor, ignorance and low expectations into which you were born. Fortunately, she’s never followed her own lyrical counsel. She dreamed big, worked hard and became a superstar. Now she’s taken time out to earn the high school diploma she had to forfeit back in tougher times. That’s a monumental act of courage and good sense — and it’s the kind of value she should be extolling in her songs rather than the dead-end charms of Skoal rings and Jack Daniel’s.

Read more…