He'll go get another one. That country music can teach us about Christian ethics may seem an odd claim. Yet, as Garrison Keillor's fictional character notes, country is a music of the poor. The first lesson we can learn, then, regards stereotypes. As the self-expression of a marginal group with whom academic ethicists and progressive Christian activists generally have little contact, country music offers a valuable perspective.
Country music is, of course, a commercial product.
During most of the 1990s, country music held the largest market share of all radio formats, and its audience became the most educated and highest paid of all radio audiences. But country music traces its roots to the dirt poor rural populations of Appalachia, the cotton belt, and the dust bowl, and emerged as a commercial genre during the urban migrations of rural Americans following the Great Depression. Elements of country's core values survive despite country's repeated drifts in and out of the cultural mainstream. Money is no measure of a person's value. The underlying affirmation of the equal dignity of all persons regardless of social class forms the basis of a tradition of social criticism from the perspective of the white working class.