I listen to a bit of everything, but most days you will find me listening to country during the day, and classical when I get home–really, I should say when I finish my work, which continues here–and pour myself one of those wonderful, cold beverages that I find make life so much more enjoyable.
Many people don’t get country. Many of the songs are sad to the point of being painful. As an example, I have George Jones “He stopped loving her today” as my ring tone. If you haven’t heard that song, I suggest you take just over 4 minutes and listen to it.
This song is intended to make you cry. It is intended to cause a welling up of sympathy and awe and grandeur at the mysteries of life, love, mourning, happiness and redemption.
Can you not picture this sad man, who knows he needs to let go, and just can’t figure out how to do it? It’s a mistake. It’s a pathology. Yet there it is. Are we not all like that, in our own individual ways?
This is the point of the best country music (and it doesn’t get better than George Jones): to teach you to release these feelings, to integrate them, and so perhaps if you are going to fail, to fail knowingly.
And it is cathartic, too. Did you not notice how the host was smiling as he pointed out there wasn’t a dry eye in the house? Sometimes when I’m feeling a bit bad in the morning I’ll listen Hank Williams “Alone and forsaken”, or “I’ll never get out of this world alive”. Both make me feel better. The latter always puts a smile on my face. Note the music is somewhat upbeat. He’s just sort of throwing up his hands and smiling rather than crying.
The point of tragedy is to strengthen your moral and emotional senses. The point of feeling pain in a ritualistic, theatrical setting is to prime your emotional pump. How can you love deeply if you are afraid of emotional pain? How can you walk through the world, open both to its pain and wonder, if you are constantly shrinking from it?
Our emotional, spiritual “bodies” (for want of a better word) need exercise too, and the best Country does that. If you want some practice, listen to this song. It will get you. And that’s a good thing.