Say Johnny Cash one more time...

While Jennings clearly cared whole-heartedly about country music and its significance in history and present day, I could not force myself to evoke the same connection or relationship to this seemingly foreign world and music. The audience of his book is someone at least vaguely familiar with the genre, and if an expert reads this book, he or she will be able to extract much more than a novice to the country lifestyle will. Perhaps my age or upbringing has generated too great of a schism between his "Southern" poverty found in New Hampshire and my personal life for me to gain anything from what he attempted to explain. Whatever the reason, the repetition of the same few great country singers over and over again for novices such as myself were enough to make the first 20 pages almost unbearable. I even tried to play some Johnny Cash I had on my iPod to attempt some feeble understanding and relationship to the music, but nothing worked. In the suburbs of NYC, we are physically ignorant of the lifestyle he depicts and therefore the personal stories are the only effective element in his book that evoke pathos from the reader. The anecdotes create a personal feel and allowed me to imagine how I would feel if I lived in a similar situation and needed an escape. I gleaned a greater figurative understanding of the significance of country music in the lives of those in the poor rural south.