Leigh Ann Parente

Part 1: Soul

You have to understand where I’m coming from.
The Gods of my childhood were Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder. There were none above. They were the pinnacle, and Motown was their Olympus. My hometown Philly had it’s own Olympus, Philadelphia International Records, and it’s own Gods, Gamble & Huff & Bell. My earliest and happiest childhood memories all have Motown and TSOP playing in the background. Sinatra was there too, which, if we’re talking about lush arrangements and the finest session players in the world, it’s really not much of a departure.

When I was 5, my mom married a musician. He played drums, and while they were married, he went back to college, ultimately becoming an orchestral percussionist. There was a lot of jazz, and a lot of percussion-heavy classical music in the house. In my soul, these genres – Jazz, Classical, R&B, Soul, and even Disco – blend seamlessly.

I didn’t – I do not – listen to country music.
It makes my skin crawl.
There. I said it.
For one thing: I can not stand the violin, or fiddle, or whatever you want to call it. As part of a full arrangement: fine, okay, I’ll allow it. On it’s own, it’s shrill, whiny, and likely to trigger a migraine. But not all country music features the fiddle, so that can’t be the whole story.

I lean too heavily on the quote, attributed to Duke Ellington, “There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.” In my mind, “the other kind” is a lot of jam bands, people who can’t play their instruments, and country. All country. Occasionally I would hear someone absolutely tear it up on the banjo, and think, “Hm. That’s not bad!” but never enough for me to actually run to the record store.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to be less judgy.
I don’t yuck other’s yums. And I have learned to identify my own biases.

Part 2: Ignorance

Honestly, I think I made it to the age of 50 without knowing more than one Dolly Parton song. I knew “9 to 5” and that was it. Okay, yes, I knew Whitney’s version of, “I Will Always Love You” but I didn’t know that it was a Dolly Parton song for at least another 20 years.

Now, looking back, I’m curious how this is possible. How could I have lived through the entire decade of the 1970s and not know anything about Dolly Parton except for boob jokes?

My ignorance of all things Dolly has something to do with where America finds itself, politically, today. I find great significance in the fact that I was born in 1971, exactly one year and twenty-one days before Roe v. Wade was decided. I was born into a culture war. Trying to explain why I grew up believing that “country music” = “right-wing” sounds very second-wave and reductive now, but until recently I believed that if you listened to country music, you must agree with Phyllis Schlafly, Ronald Regan, and Jessie Helms. Now I know this isn’t true and has never been true. Still, I’m not pulling this association from thin air. How many photos have you see of Regan on a horse dressed like a cowboy? Politicians and activists on the right claimed country culture as their own. So even if, as a child, I had been curious about the music itself, it carried the taint of regressive politics, hate mongering, and willful ignorance.

I guess I have Lil Naz X and Beyoncé to thank for opening my eyes.