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Crucially, his unease is only communicable in their presence. The authoritative doctor claims to see “country” written all over his patient—in his looks, his speech, his gait, and even in the fact that he drives a truck. ”38 In this song, then, “country” is a complex word that equates class standing with taste at the same time that it removes taste from the all-American realm of free choice. No matter what he does, this patient can’t learn to make his tastes conform to those of the tastemakers.

17 He often covered Hank Williams songs and claimed that “There’s A Little Bit of Hank (Williams) in Me” in a 1980 album cut. 20 By the end of his book, he asserts that there is little to hold back aspiring black country singers: “If a barrier exists now, it is most likely in their own minds and in their tastes and preferences” (287). Pride may well have suffered greatly from his hard times, but the character he presents to the world is an unquestionably successful one who suffers no incurable unease.

I want to return to David Allan Coe to summarize hard country’s encounter with its tourists. In “If That Ain’t Country” (1977), a barroom classic too long, too sad, and too profane for commercial airwaves, Coe evokes life in one of those houses with junk cars rusting in the yard. He says they look like tombstones. The head of the family was able to buy this house thanks to the GI Bill, but he claimed it “wasn’t worth all he had to kill to get it,” and it appears that maintaining it further strains the family’s resources.