Something in his whiskey

ON A recent night at the “Grand Ole Opry”, a live radio show that is a country-music institution, the songs’ themes were familiar and unabrasive: homesick wayfarers, smoochy asseverations of love and the virtues of the simple life, God and corn whiskey. Until the guitars began twanging for “Church Bells”, sung by Carrie Underwood (pictured), the genre’s reigning queen. The ballad tells of a backwoods beauty who marries up, but to a violent man. After a beating she finds herself “covered in make-up…sitting in the back pew /Praying with the baptist.”

As Robert Oermann, an expert on country music, says, unlike the sanitisations of pop, “country songs reflect the culture from which they spring.” Parts of the South, country’s heartland, suffer badly from domestic violence. For example, proportionally more women are killed by men in South Carolina than in any other state. That blight has always featured in country lyrics—but traditionally from the perspective of male perpetrators, who are only sometimes punished or even regretful. In the 1920s tune “T for Texas”, Jimmie Rodgers sang of shooting “poor Thelma/ Just to see her jump and fall.” As late as 1994, in “Delia’s Gone”, Johnny Cash’s narrator “found [Delia] in her parlour…tied her to her chair,” and killed her.

For a long time, notes John Shelton Reed, a distinguished sociologist, country-music wives put up with their lot (as in “Stand by Your Man”); when they began fighting back, it was generally against the other woman rather than the creep, as when Loretta Lynn’s lyrics invited a love rival to “Fist City”. But gradually the reality of abuse crept in. The subject of a song by Reba McEntire from 1987 must “pretend that she fell down the stairs again”.

Eventually, these victims laid claim to country’s tradition of righteous vengeance. In the same year as “Delia’s Gone”, Martina McBride’s “Independence Day” depicted a mistreated mother incinerating her home—and husband—on July 4th. Later, in the Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl”, two friends see off the tormentor of one of them with a plate of poisoned black-eyed peas. In Miranda Lambert’s “Gunpowder and Lead”, a woman waits for her assailant with a shotgun and a six-pack: “He slapped my face and he shook me like a rag doll /Don’t that sound like a real man.”

Jenny’s liberation in “Church Bells”—she “slipped something in his Tennessee whiskey”—represents the apotheosis of this reversal. Pathbreaking as it was, “Independence Day” mixed its message with patriotism, a core country value, and, initially, some radio stations wouldn’t play it. “Goodbye Earl” is sardonic and, in its hymn to friendship, upbeat. “Church Bells” is triumphant—“How he died is still a mystery/ But he hit a woman for the very last time”—yet unflinching. And this time, no one is complaining or censoring it: on the contrary, it is wall-to-wall on country radio. As Beverly Keel of Middle Tennessee State University says, Ms Underwood is a crossover mega-star, who reaches “beyond the borders of country music to homes and cars across America”. (In another of her hits, “Blown Away”, a daughter lets her no-good father be swept away by a tornado.)

This self-assertion does indeed mirror a broader shift in the way society, and women themselves, respond to domestic violence, most obviously in new laws, facilities and tools like the restraining order taken out against the Dixie Chicks’ Earl. The trajectory of the overall problem is hard to gauge, since more reporting may signify lower tolerance of offences rather than a higher incidence; but while it remains an epidemic, affecting around 10m people annually, its most severe manifestation—femicide—has fallen in the past 20 years. Fresh portrayals in country music and other art forms may have nudged as well as recorded evolving attitudes. Judy Benitez of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, for which Ms McBride was formerly a spokesman, says that “hearing someone on the radio singing about your experience, when you feel like no one else has gone through this or can understand, can be life-changing.”

But country music captures some darker truths, too. The propensity of its heroines to kill in self-defence is atypical—but their disinclination to use shelters remains sadly realistic. For all the improvements, a study in Georgia found that, in the five years before their deaths, just 15% of those who died by domestic violence had contact with support agencies. Such crimes are overwhelmingly perpetrated with guns, despite state and federal laws meant to keep them out of abusers’ hands: at the last count there had been 394 such fatalities in America this year. Guns, of course, are another staple of country music. Indeed, on the night Ms Underwood sang “Church Bells” at the Grand Ole Opry, one of the show’s sponsors was a firearms superstore.