This isn't the first time, of course, that country music has acknowledged the obvious point that being poor isn’t fun. Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors,” for example, walked the line between dreariness and glee, expressing pride in her mother’s coat of rags as well as stating the challenges of being broke. Hank Williams sang nostalgically of “The Old Country Church,” but he also sang, “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive”:

No matter how I struggle and strive,

I’ll never get out of this world alive. These shabby shoes I’m wearin’ all the time

is full of holes and nails,

and brother if I stepped on a worn out dime,

I bet a nickel I could tell you if it were heads or tails.

But even in earlier eras of country music, singers embraced their roots and expressed pride in the battles they fought to make rent: Johnny Cash, for instance, sang of his Southern roots and country life in “Country Boy” and “Southern Accents.” The rural, low-income life was presented as a freedom from materialism; Cash sings that he’s a “country boy, ain’t got no shoes; country boy, ain’t got no blues.”

In the early ’90s and into the mid-2000s, however, a brazen "hick" attitude developed in the genre, nourished in a time of relative economic health and the intensified post-9/11 nationalism of the early aughts. Rhett Akins released the much-beloved “Kiss My Country Ass” in 2005. Blake Shelton has since adopted it as his "theme song," with good reason: Today, Shelton is the poster boy for this particular brand of country music.

When the economic boom of the 1990s ended and the financial crisis of 2008 began, though, the profound gap between the rich and the poor—and often the rich and middle class as well—was exposed anew. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics put it in a report from earlier this month, the recession hit all of America hard; it caused unemployment rates to fall at equal rates in metro and non-metro areas in 2008 and 2009. But over the last few years, while employment rates in metro areas in America have begun to recover, job growth in rural regions and small towns has stalled.

Country has evolved along with America, of course, and so it’s only logical that today, the cultural climate in real-life rural areas has become visible in country music’s sentiments toward the rural lifestyle.

It didn’t seem out of place to embrace a simpler life when all it meant was going without a few new dresses or sharp ties. In Garth Brooks’ 1990 song, “Friends in Low Places,” Brooks sings “Blame it all on my roots, I showed up in boots, and ruined your black-tie affair,” as he addresses his ex. He is dressed inappropriately for a formal event and uses bad manners; unlike Hank Williams, who sang of his ragged boots as a point of frustration, Brooks revels in being rough around the edges, even if he is poking fun at himself. Similarly, in “Redneck Woman,” released in 2004, Gretchen Wilson sings that she can wear WalMart clothes half-price because she doesn’t need “designer tags to make my man want me.” She frames it as a choice. It’s not that she can’t afford champagne; she prefers beer.