Connecting the Dots Between Hallmark Movies, ‘Detroit City’ and Troops in the Streets
President Trump’s suggestion this week that “dangerous” American cities be used as “training grounds” for the military drew the expected response from critics who wondered among other things just what kind of training he envisions, given the traditionally different missions of soldiers and urban police officers.
At the same time, the President can likely count on support from tens of millions of other Americans who take the opposite side in one of America’s oldest divides: the city vs. the country.
True, many Americans respect both city and country for the different things they offer and represent. America became strong and prosperous, they would say, because we have both concrete and cattle.
Yet the divide remains, for a couple of reasons.
A whole lot of rural residents think city folks consider themselves smarter and cooler, which some city folks do think. Perhaps consequently, a good number of rural residents say they wouldn’t want to live there anyway, seeing cities as petri dishes of corruption, crime, indifference, greed and immorality.
If you asked rural folks about American soldiers patrolling the streets of American cities, you might hear a lot of “It’s about time.”
Confirming the depth of that sentiment requires little more than noting the popularity of the several Hallmark television channels.
The programming backbone of Hallmark, and not just in its ultra-popular Christmas series, is hundreds of movies with a single plot: Lovely, good-hearted, winsome girl from the country has moved to the city and achieved what is considered success. Then something happens that sends her back to her hometown, where she meets a handsome guy who makes her realize something was missing, which was the good old-fashioned kindness, friendship, faith, joy and love that is, according to Hallmark movies, characteristic of every person in small-town America.
The root appeal here is simple and smart. Hallmark movies provide a warm, comforting alternative to pretty much every other drama on TV screens these days. But part of the conceit with which they sell it — big towns bad, small towns good — isn’t incidental.
It’s also not incidental that the same theme has run forever in an even wider-based corner of American popular culture, its songs.
Start, randomly, with Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City,” in which a small-town Southern boy followed the siren call of a good job and a better life, but found it brought no satisfaction: “You know, I rode a freight north to Detroit city / And after all these years, I find I’m just wasting my time.”
You can picture Bare sitting on a barstool next to Bill Anderson, who offers a similar take in “City Lights,” that is, the lights are selling an illusion: “They paint a pretty picture of a world that’s gay and bright / But it’s just a mask for loneliness behind those city lights.”
It gets even worse for Tompall Glaser in “Streets of Baltimore,” a story that begins with hope and ends with bone-chilling defeat.
The beginning: “I sold the farm to take my woman where she longed to be / We left our kin and all our friends back there in Tennessee / I bought the one-way tickets she had often begged me for / And they took us to the streets of Baltimore.”
Cut to the ending: He boards a train back to Tennessee “while my baby walks the streets of Baltimore.”
Things didn’t get quite that dire in Loretta Lynn’s “Blue Kentucky Girl,” but splitting for the city was still a bad call: “You left me for the bright lights of the town / A country boy set out to see the world / . . . . / Some morning when you wake up all alone / Just come on home to your blue Kentucky girl.”
It might not be safe to even visit the city, if you trust old-time banjo player Grandpa Jones and his cautionary tale “Stay In The Wagon Yard.” A farmboy drives his horses to town with his crop of cotton and sure enough, city slickers trick him into blowing his money on demon alcohol. “I should have bought me a half a pint,” he reflects the next day, “and stayed in the wagon yard.”
Buck Owens kind of seconded that lament with “I Wouldn’t Live In New York City (If They Gave Me the Whole Dang Town),” whose title leaves no need for further explanation. (Full disclosure: I once asked Owens about the song and he said he wrote it after his band flew to New York and the cabbie who picked them up at the airport took them to midtown by way of New Jersey. He good-naturedly allowed that over time he had come to admit maybe it wasn’t the whole city’s fault.)
In any case, it’s not only country singers who draw unfavorable comparisons between city and country.
John Mellencamp in “Small Town”: “Had a ball in a small town / Seen it all in a small town.”
Elton John in “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” where the high life of the big city bred dangers the listener can only imagine: “You can’t plant me in your penthouse / I’m going back to my plow.”
Not long after Bob Dylan landed in New York from the somewhat smaller Hibbing, Minnesota, he wrote the Woody Guthrie-ish “Hard Times In New York Town,” whose lines include “There’s a mighty many people millin’ all around / They’ll kick you when you’re up, they’ll knock you when you’re down.”
Okay, Dylan has been known to poke his tongue into his cheek. And maybe Phil Ochs did too in “Gas Station Women” when he lamented (like Bobby Bare) his naivete about the hollowness of urban life: “I never should have left my home / Never left the farm / But the city was exciting / How could it do me any harm?”
Bluesman Jimmy Reed, however, just sounded irritated in “Bright Lights, Big City”: “Bright lights, big city, gone to my baby’s head.”
Foreshadowing Hallmark movies by a half century, Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots laid it out directly in “Little Small Town Girl”: “Little small town girl / All your big-town dreams / Will come true in your own home town / . . . . / Each little dream that you’re looking for / Can be found in the arms of the boy next door.”
And who knows, maybe that boy could be John Denver, author of the high-spirited “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” even if the closest the real-life Denver ever came to agricultural life was singing at Farm Aid.
Perhaps tellingly, there aren’t a lot of songs on the other side in this divide, though fans of obscure rhythm and blues might remember the Flamingos’s lament in “You Ain’t Ready”: “I dressed you like a queen / Tried to make a lady out of you / I took you out of the country / But I just couldn’t take the country out of you.”
With or without musical ammunition, it’s safe to say the divide will remain — if only because neither side is completely wrong. Cities often have a dark side, just as anyone who buys the notion that all of small-town America is wholesome and pure needs to re-read William Faulkner.
Like all of life and all of humanity, the city and the country are complex. In many ways small towns are just smaller, and anyone who has lived in a big city knows it’s really a loose affiliation of many small neighborhoods.
If the President sends military troops to train there and they’re paying attention, perhaps that will be one of their takeaways.
