Music Review: Kacey Musgraves’s “Middle of Nowhere”

Everyone knows there’s something kind of funny about country music. The genre’s cultural identity is linked to a stylized and unapologetically old-fashioned vision of America, which can seem rather hokey. In 1975, the legendary country singer and songwriter David Allan Coe released his version of “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” a sardonic tribute to the genre that he loved. After the second refrain, Coe added a spoken interlude in which he recounts a conversation with Steve Goodman, one of the songwriters. (The other was John Prine, uncredited.) “He told me it was the perfect country-and-Western song,” Coe says, about Goodman. “I told him it was not the perfect country-and-Western song, because he hadn’t said anything at all about mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting drunk.” Apparently, Goodman agreed, because the final verse efficiently makes up for these omissions:

Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of 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 run over by a damned old train

This was the kind of country satire that country fans could enjoy, and evidently they did, because it became Coe’s first Top Ten country hit. Coe died last week, at the age of eighty-six, leaving behind a vast and varied discography. He is probably best known for his song “Take This Job and Shove It,” which was a No. 1 country hit for Johnny Paycheck. But Coe’s handful of hits were balanced by political songs, provocations (his lyrics included both sexual and racial epithets), and more than a few punch lines. “If that ain’t country, it’s a damn good joke,” he once sang, but his career was proof that a memorable song can easily be both.

Perhaps Coe would have enjoyed “Dry Spell,” an absurd song by Kacey Musgraves, which is full of double entendres about unwanted abstinence. “Ain’t nobody’s tool up in my shed / Ain’t nobody’s boots under my bed,” she sings, as if she is hoping but not expecting that things will change. (In an old Coe song called “Coffee,” he brags, “I’m the only male in her box.”) “Dry Spell” comes near the beginning of “Middle of Nowhere,” Musgraves’s new album, which is doubly conceptual, cleverly evoking two classic country themes at the same time. The album is full of songs about Musgraves’s state of birth, which is Texas, and her state of mind, which seems to be lonely. “Don’t tell me you miss me, I don’t care / I’m somewhere in the middle of nowhere,” she sighs, as if she’s decided that it’s not the worst place to be. And “Uncertain, TX,” a duet with Coe’s old friend and sometime collaborator Willie Nelson, depicts an imaginary small town full of romantic disappointment, as personified by “cowboys that just can’t get off the fence.”