Farming roots of Country Music: Carrie Underwood

Country music means a lot of things to a lot of people. Some people instantly cringe when they hear the drawl and fiddle, some people jump up and start singing along. Personally, I have had multiple experiences with it. I used to despise country music, somewhere along the line, I started tolerating it, and now I actually have a few favorites from the genre. Carrie Underwood is one of my favorite artists. A lot of her music has heavy influence from her upbringing in rural Oklahoma. This is especially apparent in her song "I Ain't in Checotah Anymore" In this song, she makes a lot of stark contrasts between what she is used to in her earlier rural life, and her current "big city" stardom. On the other hand, I have a slightly backwards experience, from moving from a largely populated area with 5 lane freeways and malls and shopping centers to rural Roosevelt. 

A "reading" of Miss Underwood's song includes many comparisons to rural, agrarian America to industrialized, densely populated America. She talks about the distance you need to travel to go from a "local" store to home "on any given night, we'd drive a hundred miles between the Sonic and the grocery store.." This sounds like an exaggeration, however, when you live in a rural/agrarian community, you learn pretty quickly that is quite likely fact. Where I live, you have to drive 25 miles one way to get to a Wal-mart, and well over 120 miles to get to a shopping mall. The line "My hotel in Manhattan holds more people than my town, and what I just paid for dinner would be a down payment on a house" indicates the sparse population density of the home she is used to, as well as the lower cost of living that is often associated with a agrarian community. While there are many factors that are involved in determining housing costs, one of them is population density, as well as desirability of living. To give an idea of price differences, housing prices in Hollywood, Ca, Manhattan, NY, and Checotah, Ok are all vastly different, with an median price from low to high being $100,000 (Checotah), $566,400 (Hollywood), and $1,155,600 (Manhattan). The cost of living in any area is often tied to the home values, as what people can afford limits what is available for purchase in local stores. As farming tends to be a lower income source of employment, it makes sense that Checotah would be less than a tenth in the price market for housing. 


All in all, many country songs are a strong source of current folklore, which speak a lot of various aspects of farm living, whether it be culture, ideology, mechanisms of survival, or simply expressions about the difference between "them city folk" and "good 'ol country folk"

References:

Carrie Underwood. "I ain't in Checotah Anymore." Some Hearts. Sony Music Records (Arista), 2005. CD/MP3
"Home values for Checotah, Ok." zillow. Yahoo!-Zillow Real Estate Network, n.d. Web. 14 Feb 2014
"Home values for Hollywood, Ca." zillow. Yahoo!-Zillow Real Estate Network, n.d. Web. 14 Feb 2014

"Home values for Manhattan, NY." zillow. Yahoo!-Zillow Real Estate Network, n.d. Web. 14 Feb 2014