Each week in\u00a0God and Country Music<\/a>, Nick Rynerson gives country music a chance and examines the world of Americana, folk, alt-country, and popular country music.<\/em><\/p>\n To know the music of a society is to know that society. While much musical analysis is focused on the music itself, music tells a story much bigger than can be contained in the meter of a song. I once had a professor who said, \u201cMusic was the language of the soul.\u201d Even the mass produced popular music of the FM stations is telling a story about who we are and where we are going. And with Americana\/folk music regaining a foothold in the American psyche with bands like the Lumineers and Mumford taking airtime from Beyonce, it\u2019s important to know where that came from and what it means about us, the consumers of American folk music.<\/p>\n Enter Greil Marcus, the music writer who changed the way I think about music and culture. Marcus is a cultural critic who has written a myriad of books on everything from Van Morrison to the Basement Tapes to The Sex Pistol\u2019s very last concert in San Francisco. The thing about Marcus that makes him special is that he sees music as the glue of a culture\u2019s ideology, practice, and politics. His essays and books are existential, but never disconnected from the tapestry of the culture the music was made in. His understanding of cultural movements and their impact on a society\u2019s music is critical to understanding the \u201cwhat\u201d and \u201cwhy\u201d of American folk music. In the same vein that Marcus would claim that Dadaism, Surrealism, Industrialization, and Individualism<\/a> begot punk rock, the structure of southern church and Christian thought did beget American folk music.<\/p>\n Not to say that it was only the piety of the South that created folk music, but the brokenness too.<\/p>\n But what is this world that birthed American folk music? One wouldn\u2019t have to look further than the writing of Flannery O\u2019Connor. The world O\u2019Connor presents in her novel Wise Blood,<\/em> about a man who can\u2019t shake Jesus, is a sacred yet deeply troubled world that dances between righteousness and wretchedness with a disturbing seamlessness. In the novel, Hazel Motes is the quintessence of the Southern psyche. Motes is attempting to avoid \u201cJesus swinging from tree to tree in the back of his mind\u201d in such vehement fashion that in his rebellion he turns himself into an ascetic hymn to his great enemy, Jesus. It is a wrestle to avoid the spiritual truth surrounding him and escape that dreaded Figure in the back of his mind. Now parallel this to one of the greatest and most influential American Folk songs, Bascom Lamar Lunsford\u2019s \u201cI Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.\u201d It is as if Lunsford and Motes are running from the same thing. Although the following video quality is poor, the audio is good:<\/p>\n