Red State Sound

There's trouble brewing as Peter Crawley steps out for the CMA music festival in Nashville, Tennessee, and it's not just in the  barrooms. With the US at war, country music is enjoying a peak in its popularity but it's also having difficulties ensuring that its many voices are heard.

A certain tension is brewing in Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, long before the fight eventually breaks out. It's a hot June night in Nashville, Tennessee, and America's most famous honky tonk has become an accidental rendezvous for two irreconcilable factions of country music. Upstairs, the traditionalists suck from their beer bottles and pump their fists to the fantastically raucous and apparently indefatigable house band. Downstairs, lackeys from the ABC television network are clearing away non-ticketholders before a television special with the wholesome country pop stars Sugarland can get underway.

As more and more punters are herded upstairs, away from the relief of the bar and the restrooms, the temperature climbs higher and tempers start to flare. As physically unimposing as The Ticket is, either the honky or the tonk has temporarily rendered us fearless, and so we follow the fight as it rolls and stumbles backwards through the bar, across the dance floor, past the band who have now paused their rendition of Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues to allow the brawlers pass (this is the custom). Later, on Broadway, the main drag of Music City, two interviews are conducted side-by-side. One is held by the Nashville police, taking a statement from the injured party; the other is by an ABC camera crew, recording vox pops from Sugarland's suspiciously well-groomed revellers. There is no crossover.

Welcome to the CMA Music Festival, a four-day event better known by its original name, Fan Fare, which for 35 years has served as an elaborate get-together for country music artists and their followers. It is also, perhaps, the best place to experience the sound of a culture clash; the musical frictions of country, old and new.

The story of country music is essentially the meandering history of America's heartland: It begins with the wanderings of British and Irish folk songs; ethnic instruments, such as the fiddle, finding their twang and accent under the influence of a new land. It moves from the music of "hillbillies" in the 1920s, to the western fringe and Stetson hats of "cowboys", just as the national broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry radio show transform Nashville into a recording powerhouse and the centre of the music industry.

From Hank Williams to Johnny Cash, that industry has given us some of the most enduring folk songs recorded and it regularly throws up some of the most amusing song titles (I Still Miss You Baby, But My Aim's Getting Better), not to mention the most ostentatious costumes since Liberace.

Why, then, with this delta of influence and innumerable tributaries of development, does the flow of music on offer during the CMA Music festival feel so formulaic and stagnant?

Part of the blame may fall on David Allen Cole's shoulders. In 1978, the songwriter Steve Goodman offered him When You Never Even Call Me By My Name, claiming it was "the perfect country song". Coe told him it couldn't be the perfect country song, because it didn't mention "Momma, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or gettin' drunk". Undeterred, Goodman added a final verse: "Well, I was drunk the day my Mom got outta prison/ And I went to pick her up in the rain / But, before I could get to the station in my pickup truck/ She got runned over by a damned old train." You'd think that was unimprovable. But between deferential nods to Hank Williams and Johnny Cash (by the time you hear Folsom Prison Blues covered by a 12-year-old girl, or performed in an ice cream parlour, or squawked out in a Nashville elevator, you begin to wish the doomed man in Reno had shot first) it seems each new contemporary country song must first accommodate so many clichés that there's barely any room left over for a tune.

The Cheapest Motel may not be the perfect country song, but there's something admirable - time-saving, even - about good-time traditionalist Tracy Bryd condensing country's fixation on The Lord and Liquor into a single image: "They used the bible for a coaster". He follows with another song that encapsulates the soul of country music: unbridled patriotism.

"Pride is the biggest thing in Texas," he sings from the open air stage at the Riverfront Park, where the 84 degree afternoon heat is occasionally alleviated by a breeze that feels like a hundred hair dryers. "It's the only thing bigger than this land that we love."

When the Dixie Chicks began their plummet from grace in 2003, it was also a matter of pride. "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas," Natalie Maines told a London audience. The Chicks, it isn't easy for folks outside the South to understand, didn't become pariahs for attacking George W. Bush. No, Maines had used the words "ashamed" and "Texas" in the same sentence - and done so on foreign soil.

"Some former fans thought they heard her insulting Texans, and therefore Southerners, and therefore non-metropolitan listeners everywhere," explained Kalefa Sanneh in the New York Times.

"Anybody out there proud of where they're from?" shouted Jimi Westbrook of the Chicks-influenced Little Big Town, performing that evening from one of the behemoth stages of the LP Field football stadium. At this year's CMA Music Festival, one quick way of winning applause was to either bring on a special guest - as Brooks and Dunn did later when Keith Urban came onstage to play guitar for them - or to casually slam the Dixie Chicks, as loudmouth Hank Williams Jnr did more explicitly towards the end of the night.

Even before the divine Sara Evans - whose own bid for the perfect country song is a number about Cheatin' - interrupted her set to allow two people to get engaged, or Lynyrd Skynyrd performed an aggressively patriotic Red, White and Blue in front of three impassive marines onstage, you'd have to accept that country is the soundtrack of American conservatism.

Indeed, every time country music is in the ascendancy in America, it's understood that this must be the result of a cultural shift towards conservative values. In 1991, for instance, with the Gulf War won and approval ratings for President Bush The Elder the highest they'd ever been, country music became the number one radio format in the country and line dancing became an international craze.

But that's only part of the story. The break-up of the USSR may have been significant, but it was no match for the arrival of Garth Brooks. Brooks proved that a country artist fluent in stadium rock dynamics, with a respect for traditional postures, could go multi-platinum. And even at the height of his fame Brooks was unpredictably political, defending gay rights in the 1992 song We Shall Be Free.

If this year's festival, which drew the biggest attendance in the event's history (over 160,000 - which, to put it in perspective, was more than double the turnout for this year's Dukes of Hazzard Festival) seemed musically disappointing at times, it was because it smoothed over the political friction that makes country music, and America, so interesting. It featured no one as internationally huge as Garth Brooks, no one as conservatively pugnacious as Toby Keith, no one as provocative as The Dixie Chicks and no one as shamelessly crossover as Shania Twain. The festival generally felt as airbrushed as the television interviews staged at the historic Ryman Auditorium, "the mother church of country music".

When Lonestar, neo-traditionalists who are actually from Tennessee, responded to toothy TV personality Lorianne Crook's probing questions on theirpersonal feelings towards Dubya ("Was that the pinnacle of your career and lifetime; meeting the leader of the free world?") their response was as innocuous as their new single; one which urges us to get up when we are knocked down, and which apparently moved Crook to tears, twice - once for each take.

"The occasional prophets who have virtually predicted the commercial demise of country music have not reckoned with the enduring American impulse to go back to basics, to live at least vicariously a simpler life," wrote Bill Malone in his detailed history, Country Music USA. And whatever complexities there are in the music tend to disappear further under the airbrush of pop.

This year, for instance, Carrie Underwood, the Britney-like winner of last year's American Idol, made her debut on the festival's main stage: easily the first country star to arrive with the imprimatur of Simon Cowell.

"Country is very image-conscious now," agrees Tammy Genovese, the straight-talking chief operating officer of the CMA. "We've probably been drawing outside the lines a little bit with that."

Indeed, Genovese has steadily been helping to rebrand contemporary country music into a hipper, more youth-oriented genre. Last year, for instance, she moved the CMA Awards from Nashville to New York. "We had more attention on us in New York City than we've ever gotten in Nashville." Now she'd like to see country reassert itself across the world.

"I do think that country is as strong now as it was then [ in the mid-1990s]," she says. "But right now I think the issue might be that we just do not have the artists travelling internationally, as Garth did. It's just not happening for whatever reason."

One reason, as the case of photogenic, clean-cut neo-traditionalist Brad Paisley may prove, is that you can have a huge, multi-platinum career in America, without ever troubling the rest of the world with your existence. "That's part of the problem," laughs Genovese. "If it is a problem."

If the CMA really want to grow the industry, they could do worse than listening to a compilation album made by Genovese's teenage son, Nolan.

There they would find the latest "white trash" anthem from Toby Keith, together with Top 40 reliables like Rascal Flats and Tim McGraw, rounded off with "all these rap guys" who clearly perplex his mother. Here they may find Cowboy Troy, who, apart from the indomitable Charley Pride, is one of the few black faces in country. Troy's music is a blend of country, rock and rap that he calls Hick Hop, which might also make a nice umbrella term for a new trend: McGraw's recent duet with rap-star Nelly, or even Trace Atkins's hip-hop-quoting party anthem Honkytonk Badonkadonk. You wouldn't immediately put them together, but country and hip-hop are America's great storytelling traditions, and both seem at home on the range.

Our money, however, is on Danielle Peck. She may look like a graduate of American Idol or Shania Twain's younger sister, and troublingly she too frequently claims to have shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but at least the accent of her country is undiluted by pop ambition. In I Don't, her first single, she unites two shibboleths of country - The Lord and Cheatin' - in one nicely succinct chorus: "You say I should stay with you, that Jesus forgives you. . . the difference is Jesus loves you - I don't." Whatever its political and religious hues, or its radio dominance or its mentions of Momma, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or gettin' drunk, country music, as Willie Nelson put it, is a place "where people tell their stories." The fights will continue, of course, but it's still the competing musical narrative of one nation under God, and a country divided.