"In Defense of Music Row" by Bruce Feiler, in the Oxford American (1998: No.21–22), P.O. Box 1156, Oxford, Miss. 38655.

Most country music critics condemn the sounds coming out of Nashville these days as watered-down, commercially driven, country pop-rock drivel. Country music, they complain, has lost touch with its roots—with hardscrabble places such as southern Appalachia and the Texas flatlands, and the folks who live there. But the critics, argues Feiler, author of Dreaming Out Loud (1998), miss the big picture: country music today simply reflects changes in the South— changes that, for the most part, have made the region a better place to live.

Today, even the people of southern Appalachia and the Texas flatlands have lost touch with their roots, Feiler says. "Regional identity is less important than ever. In an era when computers, chain stores, and cable television dominate American life, the sense of isolation and disenfranchisement that was once central to the South has all but disappeared." The old stereotypes of "barefoot, pregnant women and toothless, racist men" have receded, and other Americans are finding the warm and prosperous South an attractive place to live: more than 20 million have moved to the region since 1970.

"Country music has never had as its mandate the preservation of rural life," Feiler points out, and Nashville has always had its eye on the bottom line. Consumers—not critics, artists, or recording executives— determine what constitutes country music, he says. And the definition has changed over the decades, from bluegrass in the 1940s, to honky-tonk, the Nashville Sound, New Traditionalism, and today’s sound.

And the latest music is not all bad, Feiler says. "To be sure, much of what’s heard on country radio is the worst representation of Music Row—and the South. It’s bland, homogenized, and unadventurous." But the good news, he says, is the sophistication of the works of many contemporary artists, including Mary Chapin Carpenter, the Mavericks, and superstars such as Garth Brooks and Shania Twain. Twenty years from now, he predicts, future critics will be complaining that their contemporary country music cannot hold a candle to the music of those artists—"that is, to the Nashville of the ’90s."