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Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw: How Country Music Explains America’s Divided History

It’s never just about right versus left. In songs and in politics, things are more complicated.

Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler singing “The Ballad of the Green Berets” on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1966.Credit...Ted Russell/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images

Jon Meacham and

Mr. Meacham and Mr. McGraw are the authors of “Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation.”

NASHVILLE — On Jan. 30, 1966, Ed Sullivan went on the air with a typical program. Dinah Shore was there, as were the Four Tops. There were three comedy acts, including one featuring the Italian puppet Topo Gigio. But the most resonant performance of the evening came when Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler, a member of the Army Special Forces, sang “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” Standing ramrod straight, in uniform, before an image of the Green Beret insignia bearing the Latin motto “De oppresso liber” (“To free the oppressed”), Sergeant Sadler painted a portrait of valor and strength. Later that year, the song hit No. 1.

From Woodstock to the marches for peace in Washington, it’s easy to think that the soundtrack of the antiwar counterculture defined the age: John Lennon’s call to “Give Peace a Chance” has a more dominant place in the popular memory than John Mitchum’s prose poem to the nation of Richard Nixon, “America: Why I Love Her,” which was popularized by John Wayne.

Yet for every hippie, there was a hawk — and therein lies a useful history lesson. We tend to caricature and oversimplify the past, thus making the tensions and tumult of our own time seem uniquely difficult. But we do ourselves, and the past, a disservice by falling prey to the narcissism of the present.

By failing to appreciate the complexities of history, we risk losing a sense of proportion about the relative gravity of contemporary problems and our odds of success in overcoming them. If we can more intimately and accurately grasp the nature of previous eras, we are more likely to see that debate, dissension and disagreement are far more often the rule than the exception.

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Yoko Ono and John Lennon holding one of the posters that they distributed as part of a peace campaign against the Vietnam War, in 1969.Credit...Frank Barrett/Keystone -- Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

We’re always arguing, always fighting, always restless — and our music is a mirror and a maker of that once and future truth. “Battle Hymn of the Republic” versus “Dixie”; “The Ballad of the Green Berets” versus “Fortunate Son”; “Born in the U.S.A.” versus “God Bless the U.S.A.”: The whole panoply of America can be detected in the songs that echo through our public squares.

And country music — the ancestral lifeblood of our mutual home, Nashville — offers a divided America a revealing case study. Liberals may think that country music is hopelessly red, and conservatives may believe it is inexorably nationalistic, but the genre, like the Republic itself, has been more subtle and challenging.

In 1969, the country musician Merle Haggard gave Middle America — what Nixon called “the great silent majority” — an anthem with “Okie From Muskogee”: “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee/We don’t take no trips on LSD/We don’t burn no draft cards down on Main Street/We like living right, and being free.”

But was it the red-meat conservative song many fans made it out to be? Haggard could be ambivalent about it. In a 1970 interview in Rolling Stone, he was blunt about the counterculture protesters: “I don’t like their views on life, their filth, their visible self-disrespect.” But he also said he wrote the song as a satire, and in later years he said that he’d been “dumb as a rock” when he wrote it.

Haggard’s ambivalence was emblematic of how many people felt at the time: sometimes hawkish, sometimes dovish. And the best music of the era struck notes not only of strident patriotism but of lamentation about the human cost of war. There was Loretta Lynn’s “Dear Uncle Sam”; Jimmy Webb’s “Galveston,” popularized by Glen Campbell; and “Green, Green Grass of Home,” a haunting, fatalistic ballad told, it’s revealed in the final verse, by an inmate facing execution. For soldiers who themselves felt under a kind of death sentence, the song spoke volumes.

Or take Johnny Cash, whose complicated views on the war were fairly representative of his fellow country stars. Neither a ferocious hawk nor a reflexive dove, Cash toured East Asia for the U.S.O. But he harbored doubts about the war, and in “Singin’ in Viet Nam Talkin’ Blues,” he sang “about that little trip into living hell/And if I ever go back over there anymore/Hope there’s none of our boys there for me to sing for.”

In 1974, the year Nixon was forced from office, Cash wrote a more traditionally patriotic song, “Ragged Old Flag.” Seemingly sentimental, it’s in fact a complex piece — a defense of the flag at a time when it’s “been abused/She’s been burned, dishonored, denied, refused,” while also calling Nixon’s lies to account: “And the government for which she stands/Is scandalized throughout the land.”

The song captures Cash’s ambivalence about American glory and American sin: “But she’s in pretty good shape for the shape she’s in.” The same could well be said for the nation for which it stood, and stands.

As ever, Elvis Presley tells us much about the age. In concert in the 1970s, Presley popularized “American Trilogy,” which opened with a bit of “Dixie,” shifted to a section of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” moved on to a verse of “All My Trials,” and then climaxed with a return to “Glory, glory hallelujah.”

The turn to “All My Trials,” about the deathbed words of a parent to a child, is perhaps the composition’s most intriguing element: “Hush, little baby/Don’t you cry,” then concluding, “All my trials will soon be over.” The point of the trilogy, it seems, is that the clash of visions of “Dixie” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” — of, really, the clash between the blackface lyrics of Daniel Emmett’s “Dixie” and the ennobling “Battle Hymn” verses of Julia Ward Howe — may only end in the coming of the Lord.

In our own divided time, polarization can make it difficult for artists to enter the arena in the same way Haggard and Cash did. To sing explicitly about politics risks alienating nearly half of the folks a performer is trying to reach. But history tells us that the great songs (and great books, plays and other artistic vehicles) that speak to the current public moment have an enduring and vital role — all the more so when they are emotionally reflective rather than ideologically reflexive.

In the meantime — and that’s where so much of life is lived, in the meantime — the trials endure, the story unfolds, and music plays on.

Jon Meacham, a journalist and historian, and Tim McGraw, a country musician, are the authors of “Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: The Music of American Politics. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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