Why I Love Americana

Lola Kirke helped me to understand that it is more than fine for an English person to want to be more Nashville. And that the theme running through country music is the struggle to conform, to follow the rules set out for us by society. Those girls in low places are endlessly alluring for all the wrong reasons. They drink and often too much, they can handle a weapon, they're hard as nails physically yet frail as tulips inside. They're tall and wear leather boots up to the knee, long dark coats and cowboy hats. If you cross them you will rue the day. Some of them even wear chaps, chaps.

For someone raised in the suburbs of a very minor northern English city at the end of a road to nowhere (well, that is an insult to the Netherlands) in the terrible decade overshadowed by the Falklands war, the Iran Embassy siege in London, the miners' strike, the four-minute warning and imminent nuclear holocaust, a hot rocky desert road with a broken down car on the shoulder, a beautiful woman standing in full sunshine and thumbing a lift next to the ruined car... well, that's just a normal night's dream, is it not? No, I could not even dream of weather like this.

The fairly obvious truth is that I have always loved country even when I did not know it. American rock and roll, the stars of the 1970s, were more country than they wanted to be. Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Steve Earle, John Mellencamp. They are all blues, country, rock cross-over acts. Bruce Springsteen. All of them men. Even Stevie Nicks.

The first time I became conscious of enjoying explicitly "country" music was when I was in a low place myself, heading towards Christmas of 1998. Somehow in those pre-streaming days, I became aware of the Dixie Chicks and Natalie Maines. These people were emphatically not my people. But they put the sun into each dark day and, more importantly, they were on minidisc and I had a new minidisc player.

Truthfully this was a different universe. Once I heard their cover of Maria McKee's Am I The Only One that was it. I was in. The album was Wide Open Spaces and it is now considered a bluegrass all-time classic. They put bluegrass on the map internationally and then, shortly after releasing the Stevie Nicks haunting Landslide they got themselves cancelled for denouncing George W Bush and his mental adventure in Iraq. What's not to love? (You might know that it was Iraq to blame for the Iran Embassy Siege in 1980.)

One of country's abiding assets and its relevance in 2025 comes from its total embrace of the female point of view. In country, women are allowed to take the lead, to be the keeper of the balls, to shout and rant and fight each other, perhaps even to shank each other, or their men. I learnt all this from Gretchen Wilson, the original Redneck Woman. Note that in the American South, redneck is one word. This is the world of NASCAR and Indianapolis, cars being another of my passions.

And even the American South has some sway for me. It is more like the British North. If Hull, East Yorkshire was in America it would be in Memphis. Nashville is of course Liverpool. Hull was a music city. Everyone I know, including my brother, my best mate, and my future wife, were all in bands. They were happy to fuck their ears while I was writing at the computer in a very dark and lonely room, smug in the knowledge that one day I would outshine them all in the music business by writing about it. The only difference was that I was determined not to grow up. Hull led to a band called The Beautiful South, an ironic name that nevertheless is interesting when you consider America. A lot of their music is either outright American country stuff or very heavily influenced by it.

Americana music has a large sense of humour. The songs are really stories in three minutes, typically with a very forceful female and a very weak man. There are frequently broken windows and broken noses. This is the language of the 1930s British or Chicago gangster. This is the language expressed in the movie Sinners. This, friend, is wall to wall and floor to ceiling excitement. If you combine the moonshine, the guns, the girls, the guitars, god (wait for that) and gasoline – yes they all love a car on a highway, and preferably a 1960s convertible, then you have something that is really quite interesting to a 7 year-old boy from Anlaby.

God appears in many forms. In Aubrey Dale's If Church Was a Bar we have a very particular example. What she is saying, I hope you will agree, is that church should be as welcoming as a roadside bar. It used to be. So why not now? This is political and very listenable. It's a lovely song.