Today, I don't listen to country music (that was my mother's thing), and really don't like what passes for country music on the radio today. But in its day, country music was to poor white Southerners what blues music was to poor black Southerners -- the music of folks who had more troubles than joys, whose life was doomed to trailer parks and rusty cars and drinking too much beer and do stupid things that they regret, about loneliness and striving and everything else that makes people human.