This study contains an examination of the lyrics of all of Billboard magazine's No. 1 country songs for the period from 1960-2000 (a total of 1,217 songs is all), in an attempt to identify and understand the political and ideological content therein. Every song that reached the number one position in a given year was included in the database. Explicit working definitions of politics and ideology were adopted. Using a simplified content analysis approach, 20 issues or concepts were developed for coding. A surprisingly small total of only 73 songs, or roughly 6%, were found to contain significant observations of a political or ideological nature. It is concluded that, contrary to standard notions, commercial country music does not regularly display religious, populist, patriarchal, or politically conservative views. Rather, the most successful songs have been explicitly apolitical, even anti-political, in their rejection and apparent unawareness of social and economic conditions outside the lives of the song characters themselves. In sum, it must be asserted that the best-selling country songs contain significantly less political sentiment than is typically assumed.
Introduction
Political thinkers at least as far back as Plato have recognized the persuasive power of music, including the power to convey desirable political and social attitudes. When lyrics are added to instrumental sounds, popular song becomes an even more potentially potent vehicle for the dissemination of political ideas. Not surprisingly, throughout Western history, rulers, social commentators, and political dissidents have routinely sought to employ both instrumental themes and song lyrics in order to foster desirable social and political attitudes and behaviors.
In the American context, the artistic and political messages contained in popular song are complicated considerably by their co-option by commercial forces (increasingly in the form of enormous multinational corporations), which obviously harbor their own imperatives that can perhaps trump the artistic or political intentions of the artist. Ironically, the contemporary United States has offered a wide degree of latitude for free musical expression at the same time that it has increasingly limited the availability of such expression through a system of economic arrangements. A country artist can say virtually whatever she wants to in her songs, but her chances of actually obtaining a commercial contract and having her songs played on the radio and on Country Music Television (CMT) are increasingly small (Kleder; Mooney).
In contemporary American society, country music has been a powerful force for the dissemination of political and social messages, although I will argue in this study that most often this comes through the activities and statements of country artists, rather than through the lyrics of their songs. For instance, since the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon sought to capitalize on the previous southern working-class support for the 1968 third party presidential candidacy of George Wallace (which included benefit appearances by Tammy Wynette, Webb Pierce, and others), country music personalities have increasingly been associated with Republican party causes and events. In Country Music U.S.A., Bill C. Malone asserts that Lee Greenwood's 1980s-era recording of "God Bless the U.S.A." has effectively become the theme song at Republican national conventions (246) and the song was a campaign theme in both the Reagan and Bush presidential campaigns during the 1980s. Performers who appeared in support of Bush Sr. included Greenwood, Tanya Tucker, Naomi Judd, and Ricky Skaggs (Ellison 232).
"Country" is now by far the most common radio format in the United States (Buckley 199; Saxe). Garth Brooks currently ranks as the biggest-selling solo recording artist in the entire history of pop music, and Faith Hill recently released what may eventually be the most profitable recording ever made by a female performer (Cry). As recently as 2002, country record sales were up 12.2%, while sales in every other musical category (as delineated by Billboard) were significantly down (Morris). In 2003, country record sales dropped, as did the figures for all styles of popular music, but country still fared better then the other categories ("Faith Hill, Sales Drop Nearly 10 Percent").
Popular music is a wonderful conduit through which to delve into and observe the body politic. Whether one defines politics narrowly as "who gets what, when, where, and how from government or more broadly as the "organized struggle over social values and limited resources," country music has, at least on occasion, addressed each of these sets of concepts in important ways. Further, country music is a style focusing on mainstream commercial singles, as opposed to an esoteric, self-reflective art form failing to appeal to the mass public. It takes no specialized knowledge or education to engage the messages and sentiments in country song.
Commercial country radio and video are explicitly targeted at the largest audience possible, and, while this has led to an arguable decline in the artistic excellence of the style, it has perhaps increased the need to understand the social impact of this form of mass communication. And, although the actual effects of the music's messages on listeners' beliefs and behavior are extremely difficult to establish empirically (Leighley 13; Saucier), this should be the ultimate goal of researchers.
This article is a first step toward this larger goal.
Theory
Ideology can be defined in a number of ways (Ball and Daggar 5), but two representative notions provide useful guidance here. First, ideology refers to the beliefs that people (usually unconsciously) hold about human nature, the structure of the world and of society, and about what is good and bad, worthy and unworthy, and right or wrong in terms of human thought and behavior. A second definition of ideology is equally, perhaps even more, useful. Many scholars implicitly use a two-part definition. This approach involves, first, a set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of human beings and of society and, second, a set of prescriptions for how the present society can be changed or reformed in order to approximate more closely to the ideal one. That is, ideology always involves a program of action, or at least a set of suggestions, for social change. Finally, it should be kept in mind that ideology has another dimension, not focused on here, which involves the imposition of a "proper" or acceptable version of the good society, often involving the dominant values of a political and social elite.
Regarding politics, it is perhaps surprising that there exists no single, all-encompassing definition (Patterson 2). However, there are at least two common approaches, both of which are based on the idea of power. Power refers to the ability to make someone do things that they would otherwise not do. In a democracy, it is necessary for political power to be accompanied by a public sense of authority and legitimacy. Taken together, ideology and politics involve people's deep perceptions and struggles over how their society is to be organized and toward which broad goals society moves.
Finally, it is worthwhile to consider also political culture when contemplating the content of country songs. A society's political culture is made up of the deepest values and expectations of its people, and is developed through an amalgam of history, religion, race and ethnicity, gender relations, economic factors, and so forth (Dahl 262; Dye and Zeigler 19; Landy and Milkis; Patterson 12). In the United States, values such as freedom, equality, individualism, community, capitalism, and self-government are key elements in political culture. These values are not necessarily "compatible" with one another; they exist in a constant state of tension when particular attempts are made actually to implement them.
The importance of culture is that it creates limits on political options and discussion, effectively shutting out some policy alternatives, while forcing political discussion into certain patterns. Here, even if the top-selling country songs are found to lack any explicit discussion of government and politics as we normally understand these, there may still be content which indirectly addresses politics via discussion about or allusions to these deeper cultural values.
Data and Methods
