Do the right twang: Country music in movies

When America goes looking for itself, it turns to country music: What's more comforting, after all, than a song about drinking, or prison, or Mama, or your truck? Sure, contemporary country has a lot less to do with Mother Maybelle Carter than it does "American Idol." But for reasons bad as well as good, country music says "America" in a way other genres don't. And it always seems to make its way into the movies, especially when times are grim.

The latest entry on the country music/movie carousel is "Country Strong," which opens Friday and stars Gwyneth Paltrow as a damaged singer on the road to redemption (alongside Tim McGraw, Leighton Meester and Garrett Hedlund). Whether it will start any kind of back-to-the-banjo movement, or move anyone into a theater, is hard to say. But it does uphold a sort of tradition: Every few years, a movie comes along that thrusts Nashville's most famous industry into the mainstream of the nation's cultural consciousness.

How long it stays there depends on the music, the movie and the same kind of intangibles that cause hemlines to react to the stock market.

Country music - especially under its defunct nomenclature "country & Western" - was a staple of '30s and '40s "oaters" starring the likes of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. But the cowboy movie, by definition, occupied its own cultural frontier, in the manner of "race" movies or Ma and Pa Kettle. It wasn't until the early '70s that the music was making incursions into a more urban consciousness - in 1972, New York City's WHN became a country radio station - and it was only a matter of time before big-time movies followed suit.

The grandpappy of country music movies arrived in the unsettled, immediate-post-Nixon year of 1975: Robert Altman's "Nashville," filmed when that city was already in transition from Tennessee's sleepy capital into a metropolis augmented by steel and glass. The city's music was changing, too: Not a lot of the songs in the movie - which took a few potshots at the bouffant-and-sequins image of Nashville's entertainment royalty - were hard-core country. No, the soundtrack to "Nashville" was as eclectic as the nation itself, something Altman tried to evoke via his "metaphor for America."

In some ways, Altman took the South out of a cultural ghetto, just as Jimmy Carter would lead it out of the political wilderness a year later. But the music was always part of the package. It may be coincidental, but the recent print ads for "True Grit," the Coen brothers' remake of the old John Wayne flick, are graphically identical to the cover art for "Wanted: The Outlaws," perhaps the most important album in modern country, the one that in 1976 introduced Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings (and Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser) to a hipster audience (and became the first million-selling country LP).

Country became cool. "Urban Cowboy" (1980) made it cooler still, even if the soundtrack featured as much Bonnie Raitt as Mickey Gilley.

But the purists would have their day: "Coal Miner's Daughter," released the same year as "Urban Cowboy," featured an indelible performance by Sissy Spacek as country queen Loretta Lynn; the movie felt so genuine it might have come with a bonus pack of GooGoo Clusters and a box of Martha White Cotton Country Cornbread. This was followed by "Tender Mercies" (1983), which earned Robert Duvall his only best actor Oscar for playing broken-down songwriter Mac Sledge, and "Sweet Dreams" (1985), in which Jessica Lange resurrected the great Patsy Cline. On the other hand, there was "Rhinestone" (1984), starring Dolly Parton and Sylvester Stallone, about which nothing need be said, except that it seemed to signify the closing of a very short era.

But country came back in the early '90s, again, thanks to the advent of the so-called "Hat Acts" - Clint Black, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and George Strait, who even starred in his own movie, "Pure Country" (1992). Strait's hat was not alone: Stetsons were everywhere: "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys" starred Scott Glenn and Kate Capshaw in 1991; "The Thing Called Love" starred River Phoenix and Samantha Mathis in 1993.

Clearly, for many, the acting thing faded away (Black had a cameo in 1994's "Maverick" and has been working it ever since), but the music never really did, even if the people who made it enormously popular have also detached it from its roots, to the point where the demarcation lines of country, rock and pop are all but invisible.

But defining "country," at the movies at least, presents a conundrum: What's a more country movie than "Smokey and the Bandit" (1977)? And is there a more mainstream movie than the Johnny Cash biopic "Walk the Line" (2005)? If there were something called "America: The Soundtrack" it would sound like someone spinning an old radio dial, trying to find the news: Rap, rock, reggae, blustery John Philip Sousa signifying state occasions, Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" invoking small-d democracy and, yes, the national anthem. Maybe with a steel guitar. And a bag of popcorn.