Dissecting the Country Lyric: Finding the “Religious Space”

Despite the disdain that many members of the “intellectual elite” seem to exhibit toward country music, academia’s scholarly journals publish a surprising number of excellent articles that thoughtfully examine the art of country music and its cultural and social impact. Search of the most common electronic databases reveals hundreds of insightful gems from the most unexpected sources: publications that are widely read by some of the most twang-phobic people on the planet. Despite the prejudice of some of the members of these articles’ audience, they exhibit surprising knowledge of and respect for the genre. By acquainting myself with some of these articles over the past year, I have gained valuable insight into country music that I may never have learned simply by listening to recordings or reading that material available to most country music listeners.

In this new feature on The 9513, I aim to present some of the best of these articles to the internet audience. Each post will consist of critical analysis that summarizes the article in a manner accessible to a broad audience and feature provocative questions about the state of country music today that will hopefully inspire interesting and informative discussion about questions that transcend individual artists and songs.

Due to copyright restrictions, we will not be able to link readers directly to the full text of each article. However, I will provide the full citation for readers who have or wish to purchase subscription access to the journal in question.

Read the first installment of this series below, in which a Univeristy of Maryland professor proposes a model for the role of religion in country music lyrics.

The explicitly and implicitly religiosity of country music lyrics is much celebrated by many fans and much derided by many critics. University of Maryland professor Maxine Grossman agrees with these observers that religion is a key element of country music, but argues that the religious element of country lyrics is increasingly non-Christian and permeates even the most secular songs. The key to this realization is identification of the “religious space,” Grossman’s term for the third and final verse of many country tunes that songwriters use to extend and universalize their messages.

Many country songs follow a familiar three verse structure that, even if not strictly narrative, is designed to achieve completeness. Grossman identifies two major types of three verse structures. The first pattern is exemplified by a song like Steve Wariner’s “Holes in the Floor of Heaven:”

• Verse 1: Focus on a single individual who is a child or adolescent
• Verse 2: Follow the individual into adulthood
• Verse 3: Locate the individual in the midst of some life-changing experience.

In Wariner’s song, the first verse spotlights a young boy whose birthday is marred by his grandmother’s death. The second verse finds that the same character, now grown, has just lost his young wife, while in the third verse the man is a father attending his daughter’s wedding as he is reminded of his wife’s passing.

While the first structure follows a single character throughout life, the second common three-verse structure is more concerned with gender balance and so shifts characters.

• Verse 1: Presents a man or a boy
• Verse 2: Shifts to a woman or a girl
• Verse 3: Applies the message to a married couple or humanity in general

Reba McEntire’s “What Do You Say?” is a good example of the second structure. In the first verse, a father ducks his young son’s inquiries about an adult bookstore. The second verse highlights a new character, as McEntire rhetorically asks “What do you say?” after describing a mother whose intoxicated teenage daughter has just taken her up on her offer to call anytime that she’s in trouble. The third verse serves to universalize the message, as an elderly man struggles to respond to his ill wife’s assertion that she is ready to die.

The importance of both of these structures is that they emphasize completeness. In the first, one character is followed in a manner that provides a beginning, middle and end, while in the second the message is equally applied to men, women and the world in general.

The third verse, or “religious space,” plays a vital role not only in ensuring completeness but also in rendering the message universal by appealing to transcendent, supernatural truths. It is often set in a location that is either explicitly religious (like the church in Wariner’s song), secular but representative of some profound transformation (the woman on her deathbed in McEntire’s song), or an idealized representation of a religious truth (a dream or heaven). These settings correspond to the high incidence of marriages, births, deaths or spiritual renewals at the end of country songs.

Perhaps the most significant feature of the religious space is that, because of the lyric’s emphasis on universality, the third verse is seldom explicitly Christian or even explicitly religious. Even when God is represented, as in the final verse of George Strait’s “Love Without End, Amen,” he is often unnamed; Strait presents Him as simply a voice from heaven that says the same words Strait said to his son. Those who seek a Christian message in the song will find it, but listeners less conscious of the song’s religious content may not perceive any overbearing proselytizing. The religious space of the country lyric uniquely universalizes the song’s message.

Grossman’s article was published in 2002, and most of her arguments are built upon song references from a very narrow timeframe. The applicability of the “religious space” to multiple eras of country music is not addressed, leaving the reader to wonder whether it might be only a neo-traditional phenomenon. Indeed, a look at the current country Top 40 reveals very few songs that follow Grossman’s structures. Craig Morgan’s “Tough” perhaps loosely follows the first structure, while Keith Anderson’s “Sunday Morning in America” might belong to the second, but neither is a good fit. Single releases seem to have shifted to attitudinal songs that attempt to explore and describe some universal emotion or situation but don’t really structure the lyric in a manner that proves its universality.

What do you think? Does Grossman present valid structures for many neo-traditional songs, and are these structures applicable country radio releases in decades before and after the nineties?

Check back soon for part two of my analysis of Grossman’s article, in which we will explore the boundaries of acceptable subject material for country songs.

Adapted from: Grossman, Maxine L. “Jesus, Mama, and the Constraints on Salvific Love in Contemporary Country Music.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70(1): 83-115.