History, Hopes, and Dreams: National Country Music Month and the Nostalgia Feedback Loop

Abstract

While President Richard Nixon is credited with issuing the first proclamation designating National Country Music Month in 1970, the idea originated in 1961 with the Country Music Association, a trade organization, and was championed by members of Congress and presidents over the next four-plus decades. In proclamations and remarks concerning Country Music Month, the politicians used language and imagery that mirrored the nostalgia employed in the lyrics, marketing materials, and iconography of country music itself. The texts ascribe to country music the power to valorize an idealized past, creating what Svetlana Boym (2001) calls restorative nostalgia, an attempt to reconstruct a past through traditions, monuments, museums, and ideologies. Politicians—Democrat and Republican—used the nostalgic imagery of country music—farms, ranches, dirt roads, family, and faith—to construct and uphold a vision of a particular past, glossing over how this past included oppressive power structures. Drawing on political records, contemporary accounts, and song lyrics, this article recounts the history of Country Music Month, examines the nostalgic imagery used in the texts, and interrogates the political and historical context for the attempts to nationalize a commercial product as a cultural one. I argue that the declarations of Country Music Month by politicians sealed country music as the signifier of a nostalgized (white, rural) American past. Doing so reinforced the tension between the country music industry’s forward-looking desire for growth and the political and marketing advantages of playing to the past, a tension that remains present in the genre today.