cry break

While stuck in the inexplicable traffic we encountered on our way home from the airport on Sunday, we tuned into one of my favorite NPR shows, Radio Lab. The theme of the program was "pop music" and one of the segments focused on the universality of some forms of music. Country music by the likes of Dolly Parton and Don Williams is being received with great acclaim in places as unlikely as Zimbabwe, Thailand, and South Africa. Don WIlliams is apparently packing stadiums in Africa.

Aaron Fox, an anthropologist of music at Columbia University and author of "Real Country: Music And Language In Working-Class Culture," suggests that Country music is gaining fans in these non-Appalachian locales because the story that the genre carries. His thesis is that Country arose in the US around the peak of industrialization as a response to increasing urbanization - that the guitar pickin' and twanging vocals embody the loss of and the idealization of rural life. As populations the world over move from villages to cities, the story of Country music gains resonance. Fox also suggests that common tropes of the genre, such as use of the pedal steel guitar and the familiar yodeling "cry-break" both which musically emulate the sounds of human weeping add to the universal appeal of Country music.
I couldn't help but draw the parallel between this notion behind Country music and the tale of Adam and Eve being evicted from Paradise. Both represent sort of artifacts of a major transition in human culture, with the story of Adam and Eve being an allegorical retelling of the shift from nomadic subsistence foraging and hunting to permanent agricultural settlements and the story of Country being a more literal description of the shift to urbanization and industrialization.