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The New Republic
How Country Music Soured on the War
by Michelle Cottle 

Country music prides itself on being the voice of red-state America. So it’s hardly surprising that, in the years immediately following September 11, country music artists came out loud and proud with a variety of fightin’-mad anthems. From Clint Black’s “Iraq and Roll” to Darryl Worley’s “Have You Forgotten?” to Toby Keith’s infamous “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” aggressive, defiant flag-waving made perfect cultural (not to mention economic) sense…

There were, of course, exceptions. On Christmas Day 2003, Willie Nelson penned an antiwar ditty called “What Ever Happened to Peace on Earth” that he performed nine days later at a campaign rally for Democratic presidential gadfly Dennis Kucinich. Fellow outlaw Merle Haggard has been making even bigger waves of late. Back in the 1970s, Haggard thrilled conservatives with anti-antiwar tunes like “The Fightin’ Side of Me” and “Okie From Muskogee.” Now, he’s tweaking those same folks with songs like “That’s The News” (less a protest song than a swipe at the media’s uneven war coverage), “Rebuild America First,” and, most provocatively, “Hillary.” (“This country needs to be honest / Changes need to be large / Something like a big switch of gender / Let’s put a woman in charge.”) Less famously, “alternative country” artists like Rodney Crowell, Allison Moorer, and Steve Earle have long been putting their liberal politics into their work.

For the rest of the story http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070618&s=cottle061807

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