Pre-1960s, country music culture in America saw domestic politics through the lens of social class, within which its sympathies usually lay with the common man while deferring to the leadership decisions of those above—be it God or government—that represented him. By the early ‘60s, that order was disrupted as criteria of race and generation came to the forefront, forcing popular music cultures—and the nation at large—to answer the question: which side are you on? As folk and rock mostly joined the liberal left on civil rights and the Vietnam War, country aligned with the right, its decision-making bodies—radio, record companies, and the power-brokers on Music Row—ostracizing, excluding or ignoring those unwilling to do likewise.
These powers’ (unwritten) gatekeeping policies narrowed the ideological scope of country at a time when it was musically expanding as never before. Exciting hybrids like folk-rock and country-rock, despite often displaying traits of country music more traditional than those coming out of Nashville, were kept out because of their associations with the hippy counter-culture. When the industry attempted to be accommodating, as it did when the Grand Ole Opry invited the Byrds to perform at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in 1967, the attending audience showed their contempt for this conciliatory gesture by booing the band as soon as its long-haired members walked on stage. Feeding a generation gap that by then amounted to generational warfare, the band gave the “byrd” to an antagonist they encountered during this experience, influential DJ Ralph Emery, describing him as “the head of the Ku Klux Klan” in their retaliatory song of 1968, “Drug Store Truck Driving Man“.