Ken Burns’ PBS series on Country Music raised our awareness of a particularly American genre of music. I’ve always loved the stuff for it’s downright affable and laughable way of portraying despair and desperation. Just take a couple of tell-all titles: “How Can I Miss You, If You Won’t Leave?” or “If the Phone Don’t Ring, It’s Me!”
Justin and Ryan Harris grew up right here in West End and are currently making quite a name for themselves on the Nashville music scene. They call themselves “McKenzies Mill”, taken from their name of the road where they lived as young boys. When they made their first album called One Hell of a Ride, their proud father Ricky slipped me a copy with this warning: “Preacher, this ain’t church music!” After listening to it, I took it back and let him know that “there’s more church music here than in church most Sundays.”
Someone defined country music as being just three chords and the truth. And if you knew where to tune your pickup’s radio a while back, you could catch Garth Brooks singing a tender melody about cowboys and angels that brought pathos to your soul if not tears to your eyes.
The song begins on the eighth day of creation when God realized that a cowboy could never make it on his own. So “God took passion and thunder, patience and wonder, then sent down the best thing that God ever made….” Then comes the chorus: Cowboys and angels, leather and lace; Salt of the earth meets heavenly grace. Cowboys and angels, tested and tried; 
It’s a long way to heaven, but one hell of a ride!
It’s a long way to heaven, but one hell of a ride! While Garth is not purported to be a theologian, some of his tunes do take on an air of transcendence with a touch of incarnation. His mellow voice sings a higher form of the gospel truth than he may realize as he uses the heaven-on-earth metaphors as a way of portraying genuine human affection. He even touches the hearts of the more finely sophisticated among us with his down-to-earth phrases. And while it may not be a familiar hymn of praise, it is a song of faith freshly aired which touches a chord of passion that runs clear back to Eden.
One of the most powerful ways we experience the love of God is in the mystery of that very human love between a man and a woman – a cowboy and an angel. And for generations, poets and song writers, artists and composers, have tried to demonstrate how this love is part of a creative force beyond earth’s domain. Maybe that’s why, when they were trying to decide which books to keep in the canon of our scripture, a bunch of saintly men [perhaps with a few would-be cowboys in pickups] said emphatically, “The Song stays!” The Song of Songs, of course. Another love song where earlier salt of the earth met the same heavenly grace.