That is, songs not so much about a particular region but about a particular set of values. Songs that addressed their yearning for security, family, happiness and, above all, some sense of rootedness. What happened? He does not say in so many words, but Feiler fell in love with the kind of country music that made baby boomers feel comfortable. Growing up in south Georgia, he hated country music until he reached his 30s, when, he says, he developed a passion for the stuff. There is no one simple answer, but Feiler serves as exhibit A. To ask who Garth or Wynonna is, is to miss an important point.įor it's this first-name familiarity, with Reba and Willie and Hank and Hag and the rest of them, that makes folks comfortable with country music, which is now enjoying a boom longer than the stock market's but, like it, isn't sure about tomorrow.įeiler's report from the sequined frontlines of Opryland is an entertaining, perceptive assessment of how country, once the derided addiction of closeted hillbillies, became so all-fired popular.

So, for a year, Feiler hung out in Nashville, researching 'Dreaming Out Loud' (Avon, $24) by rubbing shoulders with country stars old and new, especially Garth and Wynonna and the fresh, hot Wade Hayes. Bruce Feiler is a guy who really gets into his work - a year as a circus clown produced the book 'Under the Big Top' and a year teaching in Japan inspired 'Learning to Bow.' In both, he was a bemused, affectionate, clear-eyed observer but also someone clearly passing respectfully through, hoping to make all the little things add up to something big.Ĭountry music must have seemed to him to belong in that same slightly foreign, vaguely familiar, lightly weighted field where art, taste, history, myth and commerce converge.

Learning to bow by bruce feiler