Most of my news this month has to do, one way or another, with country music. In a roundabout way, a story out of South Carolina last fall got me thinking about that particular contribution of the South to world civilization.

It seems the dean of student affairs at the University of South Carolina asked the band to stop playing “Louie, Louie” at Gamecock football games. The spontaneous dancing the song provoked threatened the structural integrity of the university’s football stadium.

Now, “Louie, Louie” is a grand period piece, a classic of the “Animal House” era. It’s got a great beat, you can dance to it, and obviously people do. But “Louie, Louie” is about as far removed from country music as an American popular song can be. A remarkable aspect of that song, almost its essence, is that you can’t understand the words. Moreover, it doesn’t matter.

With country music, if you can’t understand the words there’s no point to it. The best of it is just good Southern talk, set to what are usually some pretty banal tunes. Just listen to George Jones, or to Hank Williams Jr., or to Loretta Lynn. Two examples, off the top of my head, of the power of words in country music; if the story in Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” doesn’t make you cry, you have a heart of stone. And next time some judge is too scrupulous about defendants’ rights, you’ll find that Charlie Daniels’ “Simple Man” articulates your feelings so well that you may want to reconsider them; it is, in fact, a stirring invitation to lynch law.

The point is that country music is almost always about something—not just about feeling romantic or lustful, either—and it recounts its stories with attention to the telling detail and the just-right phrase. Remarkably, this is more true now than even a decade ago. After some years of wandering in the lush wilderness of “the Nashville sound,” a number of young singers have shown that you can turn back the clock. Among these neotraditionalists, my favorite (and apparently everybody else’s) is North Carolina’s Randy Travis, who rivals the great George Jones when it comes to tearjerkers. Kentucky-bred Californian Dwight Yoakum is also worth a listen, although he has become a little too mannered for my taste.

Even more interesting in some ways are a few young musicians who have not simply reverted to the classic style. Lyle Lovett, for instance, can do traditional country as well as anyone, and does it to startling effect on his version of Tammy Wynette’s hit “Stand By Your Man.” As that example indicates, he doesn’t hesitate to do the unexpected: one side of the album “Lyle Lovett’s Large Band,” for example, isn’t country at all, but big-band swing. But my point here is that Lovett turns a phrase and tells a story with the best of. the traditionalists.

So does another Texas singersongwriter, Steve Earle. He, too, is no traditionalist; for one thing, he writes the kind of tunes you go around humming. His politics are probably unsound (though not his contempt for politicians). But his lyrics present a far more vivid and sympathetic picture of the frustrations of small-town and blue-collar American life than anything you’ll hear from Bruce Springsteen. He sings about his “Sweet Little ’66,” oil-burning and gas-guzzling, but “made by union labor on American soil.” (This is not your generic Beach Boys car song.) He sings about the life of a traveling musician with “a three-pack habit and a motel tan.” And one of the all-time best lines in country music comes from a terrific song about a family man’s impulsive Mexican fling: “I threw the car-seat in the dumpster and I headed out into the night.”

Country music often presents little dramas, and sometimes it’s grotesque-like life. Let me record a few recent news items that could easily be the stuff of country music. (OK, a transparently flimsy transition. I know.)

Consider the story of an infant put up for adoption who grows up and inadvertently marries his own mother. Sort of a classic theme, wouldn’t you say? As it happens, that’s the real-life predicament of a Tennessean named Danny James Bass. Mr. Bass has now filed for divorce, and he’s trying to sell rights to his story to the producers of Dallas. But I say it’s a natural-born country song.

Or how about the saga of Mary Sue and Junior Davis? Last year a circuit court judge in Tennessee ruled that the dozen children of the recently divorced Davises were entitled to the protection of the state, notwithstanding that the offspring in question were embryos resident on petri dishes in a hospital freezer. Apparently Junior wanted to massacre the innocents to avoid having to pay child-support, while Mary Sue wanted to keep the little chaps alive, whether out of maternal feeling or spite was not stipulated. (Incidentally, the same folks who explained to me why only the mother’s wishes should be consulted were mightily displeased when those wishes prevailed, in a ruling based not on her rights but on those of the children.) Science and law march on, and I know there’s a ballad in there somewhere.

You think we may not be ready for songs about incest and infanticide (or whatever)? Well, maybe, but we already have a bunch about adultery and domestic violence, and at least one each about statutory rape (Hank Williams Jr.: “Knoxville Courthouse Blues”), homophobic violence (Charlie Daniels: “New Uneasy Rider”), and castration (Bobby Bare: “Big Dupree”). If you don’t know country music, incidentally, maybe I should point out that the last two of these songs are funny.

Country music can also be downright weepy, of course, especially after a few drinks. And it seems that listening to the “wailing, lonesome, self-pitying” variety of country music encourages drinking. After a ten-year study of a bar in Missoula and less intensive study of 65 other taverns in the Minneapolis area, James Schaefer told the American Anthropological Association that slower music means faster drinking, and he has the numbers to prove it. “I don’t think this warrants a surgeon general’s warning or anything,” Schaefer told the AP. “But people should be aware that they are more likely to lose their control and self-restraint in a country and western bar than anywhere else.”

It was not reported whether Leonard Ray Lee was listening to country music but he certainly had been drinking when he lost his self-restraint last August and led police on a chase through Wilson County, North Carolina, that covered 50 miles in half an hour. (That’s an average of 100 mph, for those of you who are computationally challenged.) The chase ended after a cross-country run through a number of fences and a police car. An image worthy of The Dukes of Hazzard: at one point Lee’s El Camino got stuck in a ditch, but it was knocked free when a police car struck it from behind.

Lee told trooper Cecil Mercer that he’d always wondered what a highspeed chase was like, had enjoyed himself, and had no regrets. I’ll be disappointed if nobody’s immortalizing Lee in song right now; the outlaw ballad is a standard genre, after all.

Speaking of desperadoes, the Roanoke Times reported the arrest of five of them for catching bass with dynamite in Smith Mountain Lake. The arrests reportedly came after a “two-year undercover investigation.” This led columnist Dave Barry to wonder how an undercover agent penetrates a fish dynamiting ring. “Does he just show up at the lake one day, poke through his tackle box for a while, and then announce in a loud voice: ‘Darn! I forgot my dynamite!’?” If Jerry Reed can sing a courtroom song about alimony (“You Got the Goldmine, I Got the Shaft”), surely someone can do something with a fish dynamiting trial.

By the way, don’t get the idea that the drama in country music is all in the lyrics. Consider Grand Ole Opry star Little Jimmy Dickens, who was having his breakfast one morning last year when his wife read him an article in the Nashville Tennessean about Lydia Roberts. Mrs. Roberts had been in jail for 99 days because she had no money to post $2,500 bail on a bad-check charge. Jimmy turned to his wife and delivered this great line in iambic tetrameter: “Go get that woman out of jail.” She did.

In yet another Nashville court last year, bluegrass music legend Bill Monroe, 77, stood accused of hitting Ms. Wanda Huff, 51, in the mouth with a Bible and trying to kill her with firewood. (That’s all the newspaper said.) Mr. Monroe countercharged that Ms. Huff had harassed him by letter and telephone, made numerous threats, thrown her glasses on the roof of his house, and let his dogs out of the kennel. Charges against Mr. Monroe were dismissed when Ms. Huff was found to have brought a loaded pistol to court.

While we’re on the subject of guns, and potential country-music lyrics, the North Carolina Independent claims to have overheard this one at the Dixie Gun and Knife Show in Raleigh: “I only aimed a gun at one human being, and then I married her.”

Enough odds and ends. The point is just that, to coin a phrase, life imitates art, and country songwriters have a lot of raw material to work with—without even leaving Nashville, for that matter.

Country music still has a special relation to the American South, of course, but it now has fans, no doubt thanks in part to U.S. Armed Forces Radio, around the world. I have never personally heard the music at an establishment in Manila called the Hobbitt House, where all the staff are midgets (my informant caught a show that featured a midget Elvis impersonator), but I have heard Buck Owens as rendered by a Filipino band at the Intercontinental Hotel in Jakarta. More interesting than slavish imitation of American singers singing American songs, though, are what seem to be emerging indigenous country-music traditions. Some unlikely places are assimilating country music and making it their own. Let me close this overlong letter by telling you about the Thai Country Music Hall of Fame.

The Bangkok Post for last September 15 just recently made its way to the West, at least to my part of it, and a notice in the “Outlook” section announced that “the biggest event ever in Thai music history” was to take place the next day. Get this: over a hundred singers and composers were gathering for a festival to celebrate “Half a Century of Thai Country Music” and to name 50 of the all-time greatest songs to the newly established Hall of Fame.

Now, I had no idea that there was such a thing as Thai country music, much less that it had been around for fifty years. But the very first Thai country song, O Chao Sao Chao Rai (“The Farm Girl”—I’ll just give the translated titles from now on), was sung in 1939 by Kamron Samboonnanond (whose gilded guitar was to be displayed at the. festival). Obviously, “The Farm Girl” was one of the songs destined for the Hall of Fame.

Choosing the other 49 was harder. Not only did a song have to have staying power, but both its tune and its singer’s style had to be original, which ruled out a number of well-known songs, including the ever-popular “Love Faded at Bangpakong.” This festival was a government undertaking, sponsored by the minister of education, a fact that would have caused problems in the U.S., but if you’re going to have government patronage of the arts there’s a lot to be said for monarchy. The Thai Cultural Commission simply required that the language of Hall of Fame songs be “in good taste,” and so (I quote from the Post) “Lop Burirat’s Diew Kor Mum Sia Rok (I’ll Eat You Now), though very popular, failed in this category.” Similarly, a number called “Still Looking Good at Thirty” was excluded as not “in tune with the morale and culture of society.” No Thai Civil Liberties Union stepped forward to argue about the commission’s right to impose that criterion or the selection committee’s interpretation of it—even though it might seem to leave a good deal of latitude. Bangkok may be world-renowned for what is sometimes called its “sex tourism industry,” but at least a Thai Mapplethorpe or Serrano will get no recognition or support from his government.

To judge from their tides, Thai country songs deal with pretty much the same themes as American ones. “Still Looking Good at Thirty,” for instance, could be put up against Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Thirty-nine and Holding.” But one of the Hall of Fame titles shows that the East can still be mysterious, and that maybe Kipling was right about when the twain would meet. Among seven songs “chosen to be specially honoured,” and presumably thoroughly “in tune with the morale and culture of society,” was one whose title the Post translated as “The Odour of Mud and Buffalo.”