"Mississippi Cotton Picking Delta Town," Charley Pride (1976)

A WPA photograph set to music

Peak: #3 on the country chart, #70 on the Hot 100
Streams: 1.2 million

You know those WPA photographs from the Depression that distill what it was like to be hard-working and poor in America? Both country music and hip hop are rife with songs that create similar snapshots. When you listen to “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five or “Coat of Many Colors” by Dolly Parton, you get an evocative portrait of a struggle, and you get a sense of the souls who are trying to rise above that struggle through their art. This is one reason I’m surprised when people say “I listen to every kind of music, except country and rap.” Both of these genres are part of the folk tradition that helps us understand who we are. Listening is imperative.

I mean, sure… we might not learn anything about our national soul from a tune like “Baby Got Back” or “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” but both genres are filled with evocative texts that teach us how it is or how it was. And Charley Pride delivered an essential one of those texts when he recorded “Mississippi Cotton Picking Delta Town.”