"But I shot myself in Reno . . . "

Country music mega-star Tim McGraw, sporting the fashion-suicide combo of cowboy hat-and-argyle sweater (originally found here)

Not to worry, reader(s); the title of this post is a jokey reference to this (hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan):

Country music is hypothesized to nurture a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems common in the suicidal population, such as marital discord, alcohol abuse, and alienation from work. The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate. The effect is independent of divorce, southernness, poverty, and gun availability. The existence of a country music subculture is thought to reinforce the link between country music and suicide. Our model explains 51% of the variance in urban white suicide rates. (Italics mine)

It's of course easy to turn this into a joke. In all seriousness, though, this indeed bears pondering: given country music's origin--or, at the very least, one of its main roots--in the blues, a genre not without its own recountings of social despairs of various sorts but which also manages to transcend them, what caused country music to not retain that transcendence? As someone who grew up in a country-music-listening household and who still loves that music from the late-'50s through the '60s and into the mid-'70s or so and whose mother to this day knows only two kinds of music, "country" and "western," this is worthy of pondering.

But not right now--and that brings me to the other reason for this post: Finals Week is y-cumen in and, as usual, I will have grading out the wazoo to take care of. So, I'll be away from "here" for the next week. Hank Williams (Sr., of course) famously sang, "I'll never get out of this world alive;" rest assured that I fully intend to make it out of Finals Week alive.

See you on the other side.