One of the most easily observable differences between the United States and Canada is that the former actually has radio stations while the latter does not.
When I drive from Barrie to Sudbury, there is nothing. I could find more music by rolling the window down an inch and letting the wind whistle in than I could by scanning the entire FM and AM ranges. Occasionally, I hit a few bursts of static-ridden French talk radio, and once I picked up CBC Radio 2 for about 10km, but aside from that, it's hopeless.
Driving through Michigan, on the other hand, going south to north over the course of an evening, I heard an hour-long classical program featuring some Liszt piano with orchestral accompaniment (meh), a quirky little strings trio doing gypsy folk dances (not bad), and a solo guitarist playing Bach (exquisite); a half-hour moralistic religious program consisting of a fictionalized dramatic narrative about an arrogant out-of-work actor who was converted from an angry, conflicted (and therefore marginally interesting) character to a passively smiling lamb of God by accepting Christ as his personal saviour; all the Bing Crosby and traditional Christmas carols I could stomach a month before the actual holiday; CNN news, repeating the same half-dozen stories over and over again - slow news day, I guess; the standard pseudo-edgy mainstream rock; an oldies station, on which a girl who couldn't have been more than 8 called in to request Elvis Presley's "Devil in Disguise" for her grandmother; and, of course, country music, filling every second interval of the dial, overflowing the airwaves like a ton of topsoil dumped in the bed of a half-ton pickup truck.
Country music is, I must admit, a guilty pleasure of mine. The vast majority of it is purely awful, of course, as far as musical quality goes. But it does have the distinction of being one of the few genres left these days whose songs actually tell a story. I've always been a sucker for story-songs, you can't grow up listening to Harry Chapin and the Fairport Convention version of "Matty Groves" without developing a bone-deep affection for the combination of music and narrative. It's an ancient tradition, really, and a proud one: before opera, before orchestras, before everything we knew of modern music, bards held smoke-filled meadhalls enraptured with sung tales of glory and trickery and love.
The bloodline of that heritage has been diluted considerably to reach its current embodiment in, say, Billy Ray Cyrus, which is why I would never own a country CD - it's not worth paying for. I couldn't even be bothered to download it. But when I've been on the road for 10 hours straight with another 6 to go, the sheer novelty of it can keep me going for a while.
It would be possible, I think, to write some quite good sociology on country music. To look at just what stories are being told now, or have been told in the past. To see how closely some songs mirror larger social trends, or how they refute them. The stereotype of country music, in the playgrounds where I grew up, was that it was all the same: "My dog died, my woman left me, and my truck done rusted out." There's still a lot in the dead-dog-rusted-truck vein, and also a lot of the bog-standard plaintive romantic bullshit that manages to infest every genre short of deathcore, but the content of some of the other songs can be interesting. Two that I heard on the drive dealt with the issue of the domestic workload traditionally shouldered by women: one was from a serious perspective, a man wondering at the strength of his cancer-afflicted wife; the other was a humourous piece in which the narrator loses his job, decides to stay at home all day and sit on his ass while his wife works, then realizes how much work is actually involved in the running of a household.
Not deep stuff, by any means, but you wouldn't have heard men singing about that sort of thing twenty years ago. Does it represent a genuine shift in social awareness of gender roles, or just an attempt to pander to the (slowly) increasingly affluent female demographic?
Some undergrad should write a thesis on that.
(But not me).