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Then something happened. Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered, OJ was on trial and the issue of domestic violence became a hot topic. "Independence Day" suddenly took off and, Peters says, "Martina became a symbol for domestic abuse." McBride embraced the role, campaigning for women's rights.
The problem is, the lyrics were reinterpreted, often intentionally, as a flag-waving anthem. After all, the "Independence Day" of Peters' song takes place on July 4. In the same way Ronald Reagan appropriated Bruce Springsteen's protest song "Born in the U.S.A." as a jingoistic conservative ballad, so did some conservative country fans with "Independence Day."
It was easy to do. Look at all the patriotic buzz words in the refrain: "Let freedom ring/Let the white dove sing/Let the whole world know that today, is a day of reckoning ..."
Despite those hot-button words, Peters believes most people understand what the song is really about. Thousands of women have written both Peters and McBride to tell them how the song gave them the strength to leave abusive relationships,
She acknowledges, though, that a certain percentage of country fans might think "Independence Day" is just another rah-rah, go-go USA song. Indeed, arch-conservative Sean Hannity opens his FOX news show to the chorus of "Independence Day." The song was also played constantly after 9/11.
Ned Sublette, a music journalist, musicologist and singer-songwriter from Lubbock, TX, says, "It's the game songwriters play. If you're manipulating a familiar symbol, you're challenging someone to listen." But ultimately, he says, "songwriters aren't writing cryptograms to be deciphered. They ask questions more than anything else."
One question Martina McBride's fans were left with was: What happens to the mother at the end of "Independence Day"? According to the "frequently asked questions" section on the singer's Web site: "Martina says her interpretation is that the mother does NOT die and that she couldn't have recorded the song if she felt that the mother dies."
It seems McBride herself missed the meaning of her own big hit. While Peters did leave the question up for ambiguity, she says in her mind the woman does kill herself. (It seems quite straightforward in the lyric, "By the time the firemen come, they just put out the flames and took down some names and sent me to the county home.") Suggesting that the woman in the song was bad to kill herself and leave her child an orphan is moralizing, according to Peters. "The whole point of the song is in the lyric, 'I'm not saying it's right or it's wrong,'" Peters says. "That's the point. Don't judge people who are in situations you can't even fathom."
If Martina McBride is viewed as progressive, it's only in comparison to the Clint Blacks and Toby Keiths of country. For an idea of what kind of fan base McBride has, the third most frequently asked question on her Web site is, "Do you and John have any children?"
What's more, on McBride's latest CD, Timeless, honky-tonk pioneer Buck Owens wrote in the liner notes: "If one could see Martina's heart I'm sure you'd find it to be red, white, and blue. Our kind of music, present and future, is in good hands."
Gretchen Peters stopped listening to mainstream country music five years ago. "My sense of it is that like a lot of American pop culture, it's just become junk food," she says. "There's not a lot of nutritive value in any it."
In the mid-2000s, the politically ambiguous outlaw seems to be making a comeback in mainstream country, according to WSOC's Stout and music director Rick McCracken. Fans are requesting Johnny Cash more than they have since before the country icon became a hero to the alternative crowd. And Hank Williams III's Straight to Hell, released this month, is "as gutbucket as country can be. That sound is something that young people are hungering for," says McCracken. Williams, the grandson of the legendary country pioneer and son of outlaw Hank Jr., divides his live shows between pure country and hard-core punk.
Other pioneers said to be on the progressive side of country are Big & Rich, the duo that brought "Redneck Woman" Gretchen Wilson to stardom. At the duo's recently performance at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre, they were very open about their liberal political views. During songs, images flashed of blacks and whites working together, and the duo talked to the predominantly white, mainstream-country crowd about the importance of tolerance and diversity.
But there's a difference between what Big & Rich say at their shows and what they say in their songs. Take this line from their 2004 hit "Save a Horse Ride A Cowboy": "And I wouldn't trade ol' Leroy/or my Chevrolet for your Escalade/or your freak parade/I'm the only John Wayne left in this town."