How country music made me a better copywriter

For effective business storytelling, your best role models come from those twangy old tunes everybody is secretly listening to.

Well, it finally happened. country music (C&W — Country & Western) has gone respectable. In the US, PBS ran 8 episodes about the history of country music. Originally it was called hillbilly music. Today you’re more likely to hear what’s called “country crossover” from singers like Kacey Musgraves and (in my opinion) Garth Brooks.

Most people don’t know that I am a big fan of country music — classical country, the real thing, with Hank Williams, George Jones (my fave!), Johnny Cash … the whole line-up. However, now that it’s a big PBS hit, I can come out of the closet and admit it’s one of my two favorite genres.

I discovered C&W while driving around the US a long time ago in a classic VW bug with just a radio. Country music filled the airwaves and frankly, those truck driver songs were just what I wanted to hear on those long, lonely highways. It’s my background music when I’m writing copy.

While PBS claims country music is “America’s own,” the genre has found fans all over the world.

I remember standing on a curb in Amsterdam, Netherlands, when a familiar Johnny Cash tune came from a BMW stopped at the light.

When I visited Ukraine as an exchange professor back in the nineties, a nice young man drove me to the Kyiv airport in a large van usually reserved for the medical exchange program. The van had a tape deck and I had some C&W cassettes. The young man’s face lit up when he saw them and I gave him a handful to keep.

Country stars have performed to sellout crowds all over the world. And in one memorable video, Vince Gill performs with a country singer who has her own band in Sweden.

Here are three copywriting lessons from C&W music.

(1) Go big on emotions.

If you’ve ever listened to real country songs, you probably know they’re heavy on storytelling, emotion, and everyday life. The lyrics tend to lean on the side of melodrama, sadness, and heartache. The first PBS episode explains…