To be or not to be a country boy? To Drew Bratcher’s ear, this has always been one of the animating questions in country music.

No country artist after Patsy Cline has so elegantly surveyed the fraught landscape of love as Charley Pride, who died this past weekend at age eighty-six.

Sure, a bee can sting you, make you swell, but bees make honey, and besides, a bee will sting you just the once. Wasps show no such restraint.

Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Experience” is about how to live when life itself comes under attack.

In the end, as in the beginning, what I loved first and foremost about Randy Travis was his voice. It was the whine that resonated, that wavering, wind-burred bellow, the sadness and the apathy of it, the pathetic beauty.

The philosopher hopes for a home she’s never seen while the country singer mourns for the home she may never see again.

On Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home.     What Novalis says about philosophy—that in reality, it is a homesickness—is true also of country music, though philosophers and country singers have different ideas about what home is…

    My buddy Nick swears that “Chiseled in Stone” by Vern Gosdin is the saddest country song ever written. “You ran crying to the bedroom,” it begins: I ran off to the bar Another piece of Heaven gone to Hell The words we spoke i…

  On YouTube exists a rare video of Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson performing the song “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” The segment, which was taped in Los Angeles as part of a 1978 prime-time special, made for a very public reunion—it …

  The other night, up late again listening to old records, I came across a song by the country singer Lefty Frizzell that, so far as I know, I had never heard before. It was the title that got my attention: “There’s No Food in This House.…

Christenberry’s photographs called attention, to quote Patrick Kavanaugh, to the “backward” places, the places where “no one important ever looked.”

I saw Garth—that’s what we called him, just Garth—with three friends when we were in the fourth grade, maybe fifth. He was touring in support of 1993’s In Pieces album. A Nashville native, I had been listening to country music for as long as I could …

The city is our best shot at escaping the city. Within the big, frantic city, we find places to breathe. Twice in the last month, dozens of times in the past year, I have taken refuge in the National Gallery of Art. Washington has beer joints. Was…

Before our fathers lost their jobs, before the kid at school collapsed on the practice field, before our grandmothers forgot our names, before the first big uprooting, the tug of bourbon, and the crises of faith, there was a shameless season along th…

The fall I moved to Washington from Nashville, Tennessee, the poet Jack Gilbert gave a reading at the Library of Congress. During my first days in the city, Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven had become for me something of a vade mecum. On wobbly Metro ride…