Country Music: Too Dumb for New York?

After last week’s announcement that New York City would host next year’s Country Music Awards (cue Mayor Bloomberg in that great ten-gallon hat), the Times attempts to find traces of a country music scene in the Big Apple. Cue Columbia professor — hilarity ensues:

Adam Fox, an associate professor of music at Columbia University, has studied country music and its place in society. He has written three books on the subject, with a fourth on the way.

Mr. Fox said he considered the lack of a robust mainstream country music scene a positive because it allows for a variety of thriving subcultures, ranging from “hipster country” to “black Caribbean country.” He also says that country music does have stronger support in other parts of the city, including Staten Island, and in areas of New Jersey, where the music’s themes tend to resonate strongly.

In New York City, Mr. Fox said, “country music has risen and fallen with the fashionability of country in society.”

Over the years, some country music singers and their fans have had an uneasy relationship with New York. One song by the late singer Waylon Jennings, called “Too Dumb for New York,” includes these lyrics: “When you’re pushed and shoved and almost mugged/It ain’t no place to be/So I came to one conclusion/New York ain’t for me.”

In recent years, particularly after 9/11, country music has aligned itself with conservative politics, Mr. Fox said, adding that he was not sure that Manhattan and the Country Music awards make a good fit.

“There are more white, working-class fans to support a country scene in New York than most people think,” he said, “but they’re not concentrated enough to support a kind of scene you might find in Atlanta, Baltimore or Cincinnati.”

The international hand signal for “sliding inexorably into the abyss of elitism” involves holding one’s palm face down at eye level and tracing a steep slope in the air, adding an audible fading whistle for effect.