Brent’s Reviews > Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class > Status Update

The best-known farm song of the twenties, "Eleven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat," expressed one of the most crucial problems of American agriculture in its title and queried, "How in the heck can a poor man eat?" Blind Alfred Reed asked the same question for all working people in "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?"

When we listen to [Iris] Dement, [Merle] Haggard, and other country entertainers sing gospel songs, we may not be borne away to the realm of the old country church, either real or imagined, but we are often transported to an otherwise unarticulated place of innocence or spiritual yearning where we are free from preoccupation with the daily concerns of life. That special quality of religious music, which connects us..