Country music has a history that is deeply rooted in traditional white Southern working-class values, patriotism, conservative politics, and lyrics that tell the unblinking truth about life. An old joke asks, "What do you get when you play a country record backwards?" The answer: "You get your wife back, your truck back, and your dog back." However, country music is much more than songs of hard luck in love and life. Those lyrics that face "the cold hard facts of life," in the words of a Porter Wagoner song of the 1970s, are more than a series of laments. They look at both success and failure, joy and despair with sentiment and realism. And though most country music and country music fans might advocate a straight and narrow conservative path, the lyrics of country songs deal with the dilemmas of life with a complexity not found...