Volume 36, Number 5 · March 30, 1989
The Reddening of America
By Roger Shattuck
A Turn in the South
by V.S. Naipaul
Knopf, 307 pp., $18.95
All day, mechanics and construction workers across America keep a radio twanging next to the socket wrenches or hooked on to bare studs. [*] All night, the ghost army of workers and cleaners who service the offices and classroom buildings in our towns fill the corridors with the same music from their portable sets. To travel in this land today you need not only wheels but also a radio tuned to Country—one of the thousands of radio stations across the continent which now play country-and-western music day and night. Our samizdat is wide open, electronic, and commercially successful. Its wailing or driving rhythms ride on slide guitars and nasal voices. Behind the broken loves and honky-tonk lives celebrated in the lyrics, it doesn't take long to find bedrock. John Denver's bid for a new national anthem is entitled 'Thank God I'm a Country Boy.' It contains the essential code word.
Review, 3634 words
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