A few years ago I did a post on how country music seemed to have a Southern bias.  Well, Donald Federikovich Trump owes his victory to the northern counterpart of rednecks, whatever they are called, that won him the states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, which, as I said before, were last carried by a Republican in the last year that California was carried by a Republican, and, most notably, Wisconsin, which was not even carried by the Republican in that year of 1988.  So, now more than ever, it’s time for the North to get equal time in country music!  Fargo accents, baseball caps, snowmobiles, ice fishing, Scandinavian jokes, Garrison Keillor material, and Paul Bunyan now deserve to get equal space with Southern drawls, cowboys [actually a lot of cowboys are pretty far north], stock car racing, beach parties on the Gulf or in the Caribbean, etc., etc. Country music has pretty much gotten rid of the Confederate flag, but doing without it is all the more important now.  For many of these Northern working-class folks, if they were not post-Civil-War immigrants from countries bordering on the Baltic, are descended from people who marched through Georgia with Sherman.  No more should Bob Dylan, a Jewish boy from the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, have to imitate the Okie, Woody Guthrie!  [A word to the younger generations:  Dylan’s generation, and mine, are not particularly obsessed with ‘authenticity’, the way Generations X and Millennial are.]

On another point, I’ve found out that several young country stars, Kip Moore, Gary Allan, and Jake Moore are passionate surfers.  I always suspected that the Beach Boys, if they appeared today, would be classified as ‘country’.