Country music often speaks to my preservation heart, the vernacular part of my preservation heart. There is a good chance that many of you reading this know of my love for country music. There is also a good chance that you do not love country music. Whether or not you appreciate country music, I am often reminded of preservation in some tangential form or another. Now, I don’t mean the songs that lament I lost my girl, my truck broke down…or whatever they say. I mean the songs whose lyrics sing of houses, country dirt roads, road trips down the lonely highways, community, small town America, and the like. It’s the kind of music that makes me love where I am and instills some sense of patriotism. After all, historic preservation partially owes itself to patriotism.
And then there is blue grass music. That twangy sound is synonymous (to me) with vernacular architecture and small town America. And fiddles.
You should listen to “Chicken Fried” by the Zac Brown Band. Click on the song link, which will take you to the album tracks. You can listen to it for free on the website – it will open in a new window. It’s my latest country favorite – a feel good, toe-tapping, sense of place and pride filled song. Let me know what you think. It’s also the perfect Friday song. You’ll hear why.
Preservation in Pink 
Well, Kate, this is just too funny. I have, perhaps because of where I’m living, become more open to country and bluegrass music — after all, I live just down the road from the Carter Family Fold. I heard this song at the laundromat (my attempts to drown it out with my iPod have failed), and I loved it! I also may be slightly obsessed with Lady Antebellum.
yes! I knew you’d crack eventually. It is funny how country music is always playing in stores down south. I’m so used to it now, but it thoroughly delighted me when I first moved south. That never happens on Long Island, if you can imagine.
And, the Zac Brown Band has a slight edge to them – as does Lady Antebellum. I love them, too!