Country song bar man cheating5/3/2023 Shelton, a banjo player from Kentucky, recorded four songs that day, all of which end either with a nice girl leaving someone for a “low-down gamblin’ man,” or a ramblin’ boy killing his bride so he can screw around. The morbid “The Jealous Sweetheart,” by guitar duo the Johnson Brothers, tells the eerie tale of how said sweetheart stabs his girlfriend after he suspects her of cheating, while the last verse of “The Mountaineer’s Courtship,” by musical polymath Ernest Stoneman, reveals that the titular courtin’ mountaineer already has six children. Take the 1927 Bristol Sessions, widely considered country music’s public debut: they include, sprinkled among the religious tunes and corn-shuck jigs, a surprising number of betrayals. Many of the tunes were lifted, partially or wholesale, from old English ballads, which often dealt with faithless love. The advent of portable recording technology allowed labels like Okeh and Victor to send scouts to Atlanta and Tennessee to find and record “hillbilly artists.” The Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and other then-unknowns brought their favorite songs to the sessions, which were often held in strange places, like the Taylor-Christian Hat Factory.Ĭomb through any of these old recordings, and you’ll find plenty of cheatin’ strands. Although Appalachian bards had kept the songs of their European ancestors alive for centuries, strumming and picking on front porches from Texas to Tennessee, it wasn’t until the 1920s that anyone beyond the next street over took notice. (Photo: Nesster/Flickr)Ĭountry has had cheatin’ on its mind since the genre’s inception. She’s said it before and she’ll say it again, about a million times throughout her career. What is it about this type of music that draws all these straying and strayed-upon hearts? How far back does this tradition go? And now that so much of country comes not from the hearts of working-class heros, but from the guts of the Nashville music machine, is it in danger of being snuffed out by more palatable tunes? The Start of the Affair Or some angry soul carefully applying “a Louisville slugger to both headlights of his pretty little souped-up four-wheel drive.”īrian Mansfield quipped on country site The Boot, “nothing is certain but death, taxes and cheating songs,” and music journalist Colin Escott once wrote that infidelity is to country music “what the blues in B-flat is to jazz.” Don’t believe the hype? The numbers don’t lie-one study of a quarter-century of popular country songs found that “cheating situations” were among the most popular of all situations, and at least one nonplussed academic attempting to sort the genre has had to close out the cheating category “because a list of extramarital sex songs could expand almost indefinitely.” Or some desperate soul pleading a temptress not to take her man. (Photo: Tim Parkinson/Flickr)Ĭountry music and cheating go together like whiskey and water.įlip on any radio station-classic country, pop-country, alt-country, “ truck-driving country”-and mixed in with the love songs and the hoedown stomps and the patriotic ballads, you’re bound to hear some poor soul walking the floor over the loss of his woman.
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