Cowboys and Israelites
A Jewish Take on Country Music
News flash: I’m moving to Texas.
While being interviewed this week about my new position in the Lone Star state, I was delighted to be posed the following question (I’m paraphrasing):
There’s a lot of country music down here. And country music is about simple things: herding cattle, drinking beer, mourning a lost love, and sitting on the back porch. So how do you bring that brainy, academic world that you love down to the simple pleasures of country folk?
I loved this question, because its one that all thinkers and leaders should be asked — the country equivalent of “Will it play in Peoria?”
My own childhood in Virginia had a perhaps little of the country spirit. A vein of vinyl ran through the closet of the living room in my childhood home, and north of this river of records lay a lode of compact discs of folk and country music, especially the albums of Mary Chapin Carpenter. These down-to-earth, romantic sort of up-beat yet melancholic country songs were the soundtrack of dinner parties and kodak moments of silly, endearing “just-the-family” dancing. We weren’t cowboys —in fact, as Washington Football fans, we often rooted against them — but we were a sentimental sort that thought love might be one of the big answers to life’s questions.
I don’t speak about country music as a connoisseur, nor do I assume that everybody in my new Texan community is a huge fan of country music. But for those that are — as the saying goes—“This Bud’s For You.”
One could argue that country music themes lay at the foundation of the entire Torah, a five-book attempt to capture the wise words of Reb Andrew Carnes in the musical, Oklahoma!: “Oh, the farmer, and the cowman should be friends.” After all, the Jewish people transform over the Torah’s five books from wandering shepherds to landholding farmers. As I wrote previously, these poles of peoplehood represent contrasting ways of life: One wanders across God’s earth in search of green pastures; another puts down roots, both familial and agricultural. There’s a reason that the Egyptians of Joseph’s court held Israelite shepherds in contempt — not just for their dirty, unrefined ways but for their alternative intuitions about land and life. Yet Israelite religion — which became Judaism — ultimately aspired to a hybrid form, preserving shepherd ethics while embracing a settled agrarian lifestyle in Canaan. This meant preserving the shepherd’s norms of hospitality, the pastoral care of tending ones flock, and the spirituality of non-ownership while simultaneously holding land, tending crops, and building civilization.
In other words, the Torah teaches us how these two ways of life—the farmer’s and the cowman’s — can ultimately be friends.
The country music genre deeply relates to this biblical path. My Substack inspiration and colleague
captures elements of this in of my favorite essays, “The Origins of Country Music in the Neolithic Era.” Ted here demonstrates the connection between country music itself and the ancient cowman-farmer lifestyle:“Country music still adheres to the ethos of settled life that entered human society with cultivating and herding—in sharp contrast to the nomadic imperative of hunting and gathering societies. You couldn’t wander very far if you wanted to raise a crop while breeding livestock. Maybe that’s why country songs still celebrate static lives, sticking with your job 9-to-5, even if it’s lousy, and standing by your good-for-nothing man, even if he’s worse…
….That’s also true on the macro level: country first gained commercial success as the preferred music genre of those who refused to participate in the migration to the cities. Tens of millions of Americans left rural life behind during the course of the twentieth century, looking for new opportunities and ready to shed the traditional values of their origins. They ended up in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and other bustling urban centers. Those folks were never the core audience for country music. Eventually, demographics prevailed, and country music became citified. But that didn’t change the ethos of the genre, which still held fast to time-honored values and viewed urban trends with a large dose of skepticism.”
This rural-oriented country ethos simultaneously echoed the faith journey of our biblical forefathers: The Book of Genesis begins with a city slicker, Abram from Ur of the Chaldees, who ultimately rejects the worldview of that pagan metropolis, opting instead for a divinely-inspired westward journey to the rural wilds of Canaan. Both Torah and and country music reject their respective age’s urban attitudes and praise the ideal of the long-term, settled family home on the range — something which the Bible itself identifies as central to the transmission of God’s covenant from generation to generation.1
Even recent trends Jewish music reflects this country mentality. I shockingly rediscovered this while recently listening to Shlomo Carlebach recordings on a Friday afternoon. The following song came over the stream, which I recognized from my seminary days as a plaintive liturgical chant used by young, emotive seminarians.
But I had never heard the original.
Why did this sound so familiar?
Not only the melody, but the way of singing?
…the flute and guitar?
...the whistling?
My thoughts took me back to sitting and watching old TV shows with my dad, and then it hit me like a fistful of dollars:
This wasn’t just Shlomo Carlebach. It was Ennio Morricone.
Yes, Shlomo Carlebach was actually a Jewish country singer, unconsciously borrowing from the soundscape of the American Western. Maybe you could call him an old country singer. This is fitting, for he, even with his many faults, was a shepherd of the Jewish people, using the musical tools of the shepherd to reconcile estranged Jews with their flock and their God.
Country music was also originally conceived of as religious, moralizing music. The Carter Family, known as the “First Family of Country Music,” toured churches and schools with posters in the early twentieth century, assuring their audiences that: “The Program is Morally Good.”2 So too, Shlomo Carlebach’s concert tours and recordings fifty years later sought to bring people back to religious life, promising spiritual uplift through storytelling and song. This reminds one of the lyrics to an old American frontier ballad which could as easily apply to human flocks as animal ones:3
But the country songs of the American West don’t only line up with the lives of biblical pioneers and neo-chasidic songsters, but also with an early movement of Israeli music and film. Seeking musical inspiration from around the world, Israelis of the ‘40s and ‘50s found in country music a certain parallel to their own agricultural lives on the kibbutzim. This gave rise to Israeli country songs like Shir HaBokrim (“Song of the Cowboy” (1952) which even made it big in the United States, performed on the Ed Sullivan Show and covered in English by American folk groups.
Israelis also went gaga for foreign films in the 1950s, especially action films like slapstick and Westerns which didn’t require much translation. According to FAU scholar Rachel Harris, this led Israelis to develop their own Hebrew-language genre of Western-themed cinema. Often filmed in the Negev desert, these Israelis films shared pioneer themes with their American counterparts, although they focused more on the Zionist dream of taming the land and making the desert bloom than herding cattle. In the 1960s, Israel even began to position itself as a low-cost alternative to southern Italy for filming American Westerns, attracting films like Madron (1970), Carlos (1971), Billy Two Hats (1974), and God’s Gun (1975). Thus the world of the American Western and of country lore also nurtured the early Israeli imagination and the country’s pioneer spirit.
One of my favorite artists today who combine the Jewish imagination with country music is Joe Buchanan. Joe is one of the most “faithy” Jewish musicians I know — meaning he wears his love of Judaism and God on his sleeve. This is a quality that I associate with my favorite cantors and prayer leaders — in short, that I believe them.
Joe’s conversion story is one growing up in Texas on old country and classic rock, journeying to Judaism as an adult. It came first through a revelation of his wife’s own background, and then joining with her down the path towards Jewish faith and practice. Facing a lot of guilt growing up, Joe speaks of the spirituality of Judaism as taught to him by his rabbi in Houston, Steward Federow:
“He said, ‘Do you want me to distill Judaism for you?’” Buchanan recalled. “I said, ‘Yes, that’d be great,’ not realizing what I was asking, right? And he said, ‘OK, here it is: There is one G-d. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re loved by G-d exactly as you are. You don’t have to do anything to be loved by G-d. We do good because it brings more good in the world. That’s the reward, and that’s the only reward we should shoot for. We do good because it’s good.’ And he said, ‘You know whatever happens after this life happens after this life. This is the life that matters. This is the gift, and you’re living it right now.’”4
Joe is now a successful artist touring all over the USA, and his Jewish music still keeps kept that faithy, country feel that makes you feel right at home. And that’s perhaps the secret of country music and Jewish music — that wherever you may roam, you’re home with your people and your God. After all, appreciating the most important things in life — family, patience, dependability, faith, courage, and other time-honored values — doesn’t require a brainy theory. But it can take a good song to remind you.
For pre-Abrahamic, biblical skepticism of cities, see Genesis 4 (The Generations of Cain) and Genesis 11 (The Tower of Babel).
This was long before the outlaw country of singers like Johnny Cash and twenty-first century experiments which have pushed against country’s modesty and even the defining elements of the genre.
From the ballad “The Jolly Cowboy.” The early 20th century musicologist Alan Lomax opened his book, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1938), with this quote.
You can read this full interview with Joe, who sat down with the Cleveland Jewish News before coming to lead prayer and perform with my wife and me in 2019 at our synagogue in Akron. Earlier in the week, Joe and I (mostly Joe) wrote a song for the Summit FM radio called “Blessed is the One”, a riff on the Jewish morning prayer, Baruch She’amar. You can hear the radio interview and recording here:
Hi! I don’t think Shlomo’s adoptions were totally unconscious… Zalman was certainly adopting tunes conciously and Shlomo was deeply impacted by the folk music scene, which he was part of, etc. thanks!