Country Music Vows Change After Suicides Kill Sales

WINCHESTER, TENN. – Scared as a long-tailed cat on a porch full of rocking chairs that a big dadgum reduction in sales figures was conclusively tied to skyrocketing suicide rates among its loyal listeners, the country music industry recently vowed to attack this horrific problem with all guns blazing. Although the link of country music popularity with a high suicide rate has been reported for many years in the mental health field, scant attention has ever been paid by country’s songwriters and singers themselves. Until one year ago, that is, when the Mother-of-All-Recessions combined with increasingly depressing and dreary country song lyrics to begin to induce listeners to seek that hoedown in the sky in record numbers.

When those deaths showed up as sharply lowered music sales revenues, industry executives knew that the prize billy-goat was out of the barn and it was time to saddle up for a serious fight. In a workshop led by grim-faced record industry bean-counters following last month’s Country Music Awards show, the morbid statistics were hung high for all to see. At the rate that its enthusiasts were dropping, pretty soon everyone in country music would be out of a job. The solution to this grave problem was as obvious to country’s leaders as a hound dog in cowboy boots, write new songs with upbeat lyrics and happy endings. Or else.

But country stars have always written and sung about the negatives in life, such as a spouse running off with the neighbor’s dog, hating one’s boss and job at the Bible factory, and getting drunk and puking all over that hot young barkeep.

Suddenly trying to hang a U-ey and write new country songs with warm and fuzzy, positive lyrics is proving to make life extremely difficult for today’s lyricists. Early attempts, rapidly and wisely discarded, included such titles as:

• Glad I Got Fired From That Stinkin’Job
• Feeling Great in This Ditch With a Black Eye
• Crazy in Love (With My New Hemi-Truck)
• Been Savin’ Big Bucks Since He’s Gone to Prison
• No Job, No Money, No Problem, Cuz I’ve Lost Weight

Though they may be still stuck at the old drawing board, country music’s lyricists and songwriters remain adamant in their promise to write joyful, uplifting songs to save their fans, or die trying.

09.29.09

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