Kacey Musgraves, Harper Lee, and the Home-Town Dilemma

It’s almost definitional that country music should celebrate small-town American life, not skewer it. Plenty of country songs are depressing, but the flaws they recount—inebriation, infidelity, depraved-heart murder—tend to be personal, not systemic.

.. This is not exclusively a Southern problem. Artists of many extractions have struggled with the question of how much of their people’s dirty laundry they should air in public—see, e.g., Philip Roth’s “Writing About Jews,” or Dave Chappelle’s explanation, to Oprah Winfrey, of why he quit his show