Johnny Cash was a country artist who sang protest songs, but the genre has mostly been associated with the right.
There are some bad people on the right - that's always been the orthodoxy in the music business. Conservatives, the poor lambs, have had to console themselves with political, military and financial power while the devil has kept all the best tunes. But at least they've always had country and western, though that could be changing if the Music Row Democrats' project to reclaim country and western for the Democrat party succeeds. It's becoming quite a trend with artists previously thought to be solid Republicans such as Toby Keith and Darryl Worley coming out as anti-war and pro-Democrat.
They're not the first, either. There have always been left-leaning country songs and controversy invariably follows them around. Neil Young's Southern Man earned the Sweet Home Alabama rebuke from Lynyrd Skynrd and country legend Loretta Lynn got banned from country radio for her unique brand of hillbilly feminism expressed in songs such as The Pill and Rated X (since reimagined by White Stripes).
And yet I'm not convinced that the left reclaiming country and western would necessarily be a good thing. I know the Democrat party owned Texas before 1980 and that the poor white working-class who listen to country and western are its natural constituents but I still like my rednecks steering cattle, chewing tobacco and toting guns. Upsetting the natural order of things leads to an imbalance in the artistic ecosystem. If you start having left-wing country artists you break the fragile homeostasis that exists in music. The conservative sentiment sprouts up elsewhere and you end up with weird hybrids such as Christian rock bands who have always given me the creeps.
And let's be fair - rednecks have a right to listen to their very own comfort music. The suicide rate for American farmers is double the national average. I only see that increasing if Johnny Muscovite and chums get their paws on his radio stations as well. The pro-death penalty, anti-gun control Christians aren't going to go away. Let's give them their country and western and have them stay in the Nashville ghettos where we can keep an eye on them. Take a redneck's freedom and his music and it's just a small step to him joining the militia. And nobody wants another Oklahoma.
