"Bill took out his guitar and began to sing country-and-western
songs. The music too was something of a revelation to me. Country music
when I was growing up in a redneck town seemed mostly about truckdriving
and reactionary Okies from Muskogee, and in the metropolis I moved to,
it never intruded itself much on my consciousness. My parents were
immigrants' kids, with no more relationship to the culture of the
American outback than to the landscape in which they raised us. I had
dismissed country as a syrupy retrograde stuff, but the songs Bill sang
had a wit and rancor that caught me by surprise."
Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams.
