Guns, Guilt, and Gospel Harmonies

This post is the second part of Batshit Crazy and Weirdly Touching: Notes on Culture, Violence, and Identity, a six-part series where I explore how the things we grew up watching, hearing, and laughing at quietly shape who we become.

What country music knows about pain (and what it won't admit)

In my last post, I introduced you to The Cold Hard Facts of Life — a Porter Wagoner murder ballad delivered with the emotional affect of a corpse. It's a story about betrayal, violence and consequence, set to pedal steel and broadcast as family entertainment.

But here's the thing. That song doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's part of a long tradition in American country music — a genre where people have always sung about the worst things that can happen to a person. Cheating. Drinking. Prison. Poverty. Prejudice. Regret.

It's music written by and for people who have seen things, lost things, and swallowed things they never told a soul.

And as much as I find the deadpan horror of Porter's performance surreal, there's also something deeply truthful in the tradition he belongs to. A raw honesty. A willingness to say, out loud, what more polished cultures might keep to themselves.

Not Just Violence — Loss

Country music isn't just violent for the sake of it. It's about loss. And powerlessness. And trying to hold your dignity while your world caves in.

That's why the genre is full of first-person narratives. The songs aren't moral lessons. They're confessions. We're not being asked to approve of what the characters do — we're being invited to understand why they might do it. Not to justify it. But to witness the desperation behind it.

Think of Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues, where the narrator shoots a man in Reno "just to watch him die." Or the countless songs about women killing abusive husbands, or men drinking themselves half-blind in grief. These aren't cartoons. They're emotional case studies. The violence, when it appears, is a symptom of something deeper — something unhealed.

The Honour in Being Broken

There's a kind of spiritual dignity in country music's broken characters. Not because they're right, but because they're real. They're people who have made mistakes, been abandoned, lived through losses most of us are too polite to name.

This is part of what makes the tradition compelling. It gives space to feelings many cultures try to tidy away — shame, rage, longing, powerlessness — and turns them into art. Not high art. But kitchen-table art. Barstool art. Art you can cry along with while driving through the middle of nowhere.

That's not nothing.

And when you look at it that way, The Cold Hard Facts of Life isn't just a shocking song about a murder. It's a cultural document. A painful one. A troubling one. But still, a glimpse into the emotional world of people who felt invisible — and found catharsis through narrative.

But Also — What Are We Normalising?

Here's the rub.

There's a difference between telling hard truths and normalising harm.

The problem with songs like Porter's isn't just that they depict violence. It's that they often depict it as inevitable. Unquestionable. Just the way life is. And that resignation can become dangerous — especially when it plays out again and again as background noise in people's lives.

When violence is never interrogated, it risks being absorbed as normal.

Some people grow up hearing these songs and find comfort in their honesty. Others grow up and internalise their fatalism — believing that pain is always personal, that retribution is righteous, or that violence is the only available language for grief.

And when those beliefs take root, they don't just stay in the realm of art. They show up in parenting. In politics. In how we handle conflict.

Which makes it all the more important to ask: what kind of emotional education are we receiving — and passing on — through the culture we consume?

Reflection Questions

1. How do the stories you grew up with portray pain and loss?

2. Did they offer room for complexity, or were certain emotions neatly resolved or punished?

3. When did you first encounter stories that depicted violence as "understandable" or even "necessary"?

4. How did that affect your view of justice or consequence?

5. Can you think of a time when music or media gave you language for something you didn't know how to say?

6. What made it resonate?

Activity: The Soundtrack of Struggle

Choose a song from your own cultural background that deals with pain, violence, or hardship. It doesn't have to be country — just something emotionally raw.

• Listen to it closely.

• Ask yourself: What emotion is this trying to express? What social or personal truth is it reflecting?

• Then, if you're up for it, write your own "verse" or imagined backstory for the narrator.

Next week

In What Counts as "Bad" Violence?, I explore how culture shapes which stories of violence get told. When violence is sung about by the dominant group, it's often seen as cathartic or noble. But when it comes from outsiders, it's criminalised or ignored. Whose pain is treated as serious, complex, or worthy of empathy? Who gets ignored, criminalised or erased?

Batshit Crazy and Weirdly Touching is a blog series about the strange, sometimes unsettling ways that popular culture, violence, and inherited stories shape our sense of self. Inspired by a single YouTube video of Porter Wagoner singing about murder on family television, the series unpacks how our childhood entertainment reflects deeper cultural values — and how becoming aware of those values can help us choose who we want to be. Read all six parts here.