Country Music and Alcohol
I’ve written about country music getting happier over time, and now the Washington Post investigates a specific case: alcohol in country songs has become less about drowning your sorrows, and more about about having a good time. How far would you get today with lyrics like this?
If I wait up at home I’ll only ask her questions
She’d probably tell the truth, so I don’t even ask
So I sit here on this bar stool feeling helpless
And I wonder just how long a man can last
The article quotes older singers talking about “Hank Williams Syndrome,” but the real predecessor of today’s “bro country” is Jimmy Buffett, who was a country singer himself until he found a better business model. He still had that bittersweet vibe in “Margaritaville,” maybe the happiest sad song ever recorded, but that album was “one of his last stands before plunging into a sea of parrotheads.”
Meanwhile, Nashville was about to be taken over by the “country hunks” of the ’80s and ’90s like Randy Travis and George Strait, who sang more about how much they loved you, and a bit less about alcohol. When Buffett returned two decades later to join one of them for “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” the message was clear: country had finally caught up to him, and drinking was fun again.
Today’s country bros have to do the Randy Travis songs and the Jimmy Buffett ones, switching from devoted boyfriend to drunken frat boy from one song to the next. Who can blame them for cashing in with their own branded spirits while drinking Gatorade from fake bars on stage?
In all seriousness, I have nothing against these guys, and the alt-country authenticity police (who I think of as “NPR country”) can be just as annoying. But there’s also no point in pretending that nothing has changed. And in terms of lyrics, it’s not just the subject matter, but a loss of ironic distance and self-awareness.
In the pre-bro era, it was harder than it looked to write a parody of a country song; you can’t wink at someone any harder than they’re winking at themselves. And when it comes to old country drinking songs, you can’t wink any harder than “wine me up, turn me on and watch me cry for you,” or “I’m the king of barstool mountain.”
But you also can’t cry much harder than “whiskey river, take my mind,” or “there stands the glass that will ease all my pain.” And notice how little divides the first type from the second, and how these singers (and writers) were able to straddle humor and pathos while they nursed their heartbreak at the bar, without giving in fully to either one. That smiling-through-the-tears effect is hard to define, but I think it’s part of what classic country fans are missing when they look at what’s popular now.
Those lines at the beginning were sung in 1974 by Gary Stewart, one of the last great traditional honky-tonk singers, whose other singles included “She’s Acting Single, I’m Drinking Doubles” and “She’s Got a Drinking Problem (And It’s Me).” His career stalled in the ’80s, he struggled with addiction, and in 2003 he shot himself after his wife’s death. “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” was at the top of the charts.
That might be a poignant ending to this post; it wouldn’t be an honest one. I’m sure that alcohol did Stewart no favors, but he had other problems, and it’s too easy to talk about someone like him “living their music.” The country genre has had no shortage of troubled drinkers, but they weren’t all honky-tonkers. One of the worst cases was Ira Louvin, who sang more about Jesus and clean living than the inside of a barroom. And of course there are other sad examples throughout popular music, with Avicii as the most recent.
So if anything, what once set country apart was not an obsession with alcohol, but the ability to show both sides of it in the same song. It’s easy just to laugh at lyrics like “the bottle won’t kill you, it’s the stuff inside,” but it’s also easy to take them very seriously. Either would be missing the point.
