that’s The Amazing Rhythm Aces’ “I Musta Died and Gone to Texas (Cause I’m Having a Hell of a Time)”, but of course there’s also:
- George Strait’s “All My Exes Live in Texas,”
- Brooks & Dunn’s “Texas Women (Don’t Stay Lonely Long),”
- Alabama’s “If You’re Gonna Play in Texas (You Gotta Have a Fiddle in the Band),”*
- Little Texas’s “God Blessed Texas,”
- and then there are city-in-Texas songs, like “Amarillo” and “Austin.”
Why Texas? Because Country music asserts—and often aims to restore—national cultural identity. In this sense the core project of Country music, as a genre or a movement, is analogous to that of the Irish Literary Revival surrounding the Abbey Theatre in the early 20th century.
Thus Yeats : Strait :: Galway : Texas.
Of course, in turning to Galway (and especially the Aran Islands) as the mother lode of authentic culture, Yeats &co. wound up having to invent a bunch of the culture they’d hoped to find. Country music looks to Texas as an outpost of authenticity and cultural purity, but similarly winds up constructing many of the cultural riches it wants to claim. And so we get the mythic Texas, where you gotta have fiddle and you don’t stay lonely long.**
*Apparently, if you’re gonna sing about Texas, you gotta have a parenthetical in the name.
**Full disclosure: I’ve never been to Texas. Should I take my fiddle?
