It seems as though country music has a wide appeal from people both rural and urban, particularly in a society that is looking for some tranquillity in such a violent and conflicted time that we live in. If you go out to a more rural and flat part of New York, such as the Tug Hill Plateau, you are likely to find as many as 5 or 6 country stations. In the Albany area, there is two country music stations that you can pick up in your pickup or office, and one of them is the most listened station in the area!

More people tune into WGNA to listen to country music everyday then tune into the local station that plays Top 40 hits or Rap Music, that would seem to be more appealing to the suburbanite or urban person. Only about 20,000 people in Albany County live in a rural area, and only a couple of hundred is involved in any kind of agriculture (from having a few goats to a full-size dairy operation). In a county of 292,000 people that makes a minuscule part of the population.

So it means that there must be some kind of classism deeply at root in deciding if people will tune into WGNA or another station in the Capital Region. Certainly many people work in construction, manufacturing, auto repair, or other blue collar work. One of the pipefitters I know and another bus mechanic whom I am acquainted with seems to listen to country music. Both live on the outskirts of town, and you could qualify them as possibly being rural. Many of those traditional blue collar jobs have left the suburbs, and are less often filled by rural people, but by blacks. A far as the author knows, few African Americans are country music fans. Country music has a message of implicit racism.

Many non-blue collar workers like Country Music. Many don't live in the country either. Instead, they enjoy it as an alternative to the intense and often offensive contemporary Rock 'N Roll. On the other hand, country music hints at sexuality, but it's rarely in truly explicit ways. Or maybe it's something deeper like a yearning for a more free society, one beyond the limits of suburbia. They want a little bit more wild west in a society that is overplanned.

Country Music is one part reactionary, one part appealing to the blue collar music, and one part a rejection of our overly sexual and violent society. Country music isn't everywhere, and particularly with our young generation it has a limited popularity. It seems as though the amount of Country music around is proportional to the amount of country around, and in urban areas it goes down but never disappears.