For 20 years now, Williams's cry of "Are you ready for some football?" from his anthemic "All My Rowdy Friends" has been the Pavlov bell that brings football fans to their television sets. But not last night.

Why? Because earlier Monday, Williams shot his mouth off on "Fox and Friends." After being introduced as "the voice of Monday Night Football" who "knows a little about politics," Williams quickly embraced his new role as pundit, saying he didn't like any of the GOP candidates and referring to the golf summit between the president and House Speaker John Boehner as "one of the biggest political mistakes."

"It would be like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu, OK?" he explained. "Not hardly." Is it any wonder that on Monday's broadcast, even the reliably nonsense-minded hosts of Fox and Friends seemed unable to make heads or tails of what Williams was saying? When pressed for clarification, Williams said, "You know, they're the enemy. They're the enemy…" He then spelled it out: "Obama!"

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The independent record label has filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against McGraw, claiming the country superstar failed to provide a fifth and final album that met contractual obligations by an April deadline.

A statement from McGraw's spokeswoman says the singer turned in "Emotional Traffic" last fall and that Curb is holding the album "hostage" in an attempt to keep the singer "perpetually" under contract. The label contends some of the songs were recorded so long ago they violate terms of the deal.

Curb asks a judge to force McGraw to turn in new material for a fifth album, bar him from signing with another label and nullify a 2001 agreement that eliminated a sixth record from McGraw's contract.

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Online:

http://www.timmcgraw.com

http://www.curb.com

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The message was clear to anyone reading between the lines. If you liked country music back in the early part of the aughts, you hid that love, like a high-school girl who only listens to musicals. (Hey, I can relate.) The CMA even issued a statement, saying the quote was "a challenge to everyone who has ever connected with a country song or a specific artist but may not feel a current connection to the format as a whole or is reluctant to share their enjoyment of the music with others." Yikes.

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"Born This Way" also sounds (like most Gaga songs do) exactly like an early Madonna track. Which still doesn't explain why this morning the Internet was introduced to an alt-country version of "Born This Way" that sounds suspiciously like Gwyneth Paltrow's attempts at the genre during "Country Strong."

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But no riots have been forthcoming. The country establishment doesn't even seem to be all that riled up about the news. And for good reason: While Chely Wright is perhaps the highest-profile gay country musician, she isn't the first. In fact, though country music has a reputation for being ultraconservative, there's a long history of gay imagery in country songs predating "Brokeback Mountain," from Vernon Dalhart to k.d. lang to Rascal Flatts. In recent years, country legends like Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson have become vocal advocates for LGBT rights -- Nelson even recorded "Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond of Each Other)," a song that features lines like "What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?"

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Of course, as Jimmy McDonough writes in the new biography "Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen," Wynette didn't exactly follow her own song's advice, at least with the same man. In his book, McDonough tracks the tumults of Wynette's rocky love life -- five marriages and an affair with Burt Reynolds -- that made her the queen of tabloids in the 1970s, especially during her divorce with husband No. 3, Wynette's idol and duet partner, George Jones. But most of all, McDonough's book is about "a singer who lived her songs," a musician whose melancholy breakup ballads were inseparable from the heartbreak, addiction and pain in her own life. "I want you to feel this woman's presence as deeply as I feel her songs," McDonough implores. "I want you to stand by Tammy Wynette."

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"I don't know those songs," replied Cash, "but I got a few of my own I can play for you." Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of "Okie From Muskogee." With the nation still mired in Vietnam, Cash had far more than prison reform on his mind. Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer's rendition of the explicitly antiwar "What Is Truth?" and "Man in Black" ("Each week we lose a hundred fine young men") and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." It was a daring confrontation with a president who was popular with Cash's fans and about to sweep to a crushing reelection victory, but a glimpse of how Cash saw himself -- a foe of hypocrisy, an ally of the downtrodden. An American protest singer, in short, as much as a country music legend.

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There he and his wife, the photographer Dona Ann McAdams, began to raise goats. What was initially a brood of four and a lighthearted hobby has since expanded to 17 animals and a licensed operation that sells goat cheese to a few of New York's most cheese-famous restaurants. Kessler's memoir "Goat Song" is the story of this transformation.

It would be facile to stumble into convenient, "country mouse/city mouse" clichés about the urbane urbanite who on a whim sheds his sportcoat, loafers and book parties for work boots, shit-shoveling and irony-free trucker hats. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting: Kessler and McAdams were never at home in Manhattan, and longed for the feeling of remove they'd once cultivated at a rented farmhouse in West Virginia that burned to the ground. They'd been looking for a place in Vermont for five years before they found what they wanted: 75 acres of mostly wooded valley with an 18th-century white farmhouse the realtor described as basically a tear-down. It was a full decade between moving there and beginning their foray into animal husbandry.

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Sitting on the train, I pulled out my copy of Amanda Petrusich's "It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music," considering the parallels between the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based music critic's book and the juxtaposition of ancient sounds and contemporary landscape I had just witnessed. Every decade or so, Americana resurfaces, from Creedence Clearwater Revival in the late '60s to the Mekons 10 years later, to Uncle Tupelo, who ushered in the early-'90s alt-country movement. But as music increasingly becomes digitized, it's getting more difficult to feel a personal connection to the songs we listen to. The longing for old-fashioned forms, pastoral themes and nostalgic visions of the American dream seems more urgent than ever. "Living on a farm, the only thing to do at night was gather on the porch and have everyone play a song together," says Petrusich. "There's something appealing about the simplicity of it. Things have gotten so complicated."

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About six years ago I became "Charlie," as in the commercial -- the girl who breezes in alone, hugs, kisses on the cheek, waves hello ... the whole bit. I don't know how it happened really.

I'd never in my life been the popular one. I was in the marching band for goodness' sake.

In my late 20s I had my first child and gained a whopping 100 pounds. By my late 30s, and shortly after my last child was born, I began dropping the weight, naturally and effortlessly. In 18 months I'd lost 85 pounds and have kept it off ever since. I turned 40 in a size 6, and to quote the Divine Miss M, "I look good!"

A few years before the big weight loss my best friend moved 30 miles away to a small town and a gorgeous house. She started going to the local pub for what used to be our Friday girls night out. After a few weeks she invited me to come on down and join her. I could crash at her place if I stayed out too late and my husband was quite cool with that. He'd come along sometimes, have his own boys night out, or just stay home and relax.

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Just look at "Mississippi Girl's" cover: Hill's hair, straightened and bleached for years à la Paris and Lindsay, is now big, brown and curly. The form-fitting, sexy duds she wore on her last two album covers are gone (not to mention the lingerie she donned for the Playboy-esque liner notes that accompanied 1999's "Breathe"); the fashion model pout and heavy makeup have been replaced with a big grin and a healthy farm girl glow. The new Faith looks straight into the camera, thumbs hitched in the pockets of her blue jeans, with her legs and hips splayed in an attempt to look ungainly. In other words, y'all, she's a country girl.

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I first heard "Beer for My Horses" a few weeks back during another bout of channel surfing. Holed up in a Hampton Inn, I stumbled across a tribute to Willie Nelson in which various contemporary country artists sang duets with the grand old man. Toby Keith of American-boot-in-the-ass fame strode onto the stage, and as the two performed the song I thought, "Is this an old Willie tune unknown to me? It's catchy; I like it." (I also imagined PETA having a field day with the prospect of inebriated farm animals.) Two of the best male voices in country music today, Keith's rich baritone and Willie's contrarian twang, made an unlikely but oddly charming pair.

And then I listened to the lyrics.

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The singer is Darryl Worley, a good ol' boy from Hardin County, Tenn. The song is called "Have You Forgotten?" and it's a country radio phenomenon, barreling its way toward a certain No. 1 slot. (Commercially, the song won't be out until Worley's CD is released May 20; a downloadable single should be available this week.)

Key lyrics: "I hear people saying we don't need this war/ I say there's some things worth fighting for/ Some say this country's just out looking for a fight/ After 9/11, man, I'd have to say that's right/ Have you forgotten all the people killed?/ Some went down like heroes in that Pennsylvania field/ Have you forgotten about our Pentagon?/ All the loved ones that we lost and those left to carry on/ Don't you tell me not to worry about bin Laden."

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Hillsboro Village is where Nashville gets its modest but concentrated dose of upper-middle urban bohemia, a culture that has long since spread beyond the coasts into the American heartland. I've encountered it, to greater or lesser degrees, in such places as Reno, Nev., Utica, N.Y., and Lexington, Ky. All it requires to take root is a thousand or so undergraduates, a few dozen Harper's subscribers and a couple of espresso machines. No doubt it exists wherever you live too.

In Hillsboro Village you'll find two coffee shops (neither one a Starbucks), a used-book store, a kitsch-antique emporium, a used-clothing boutique, a sushi bar, a brewpub and a venerable breakfast eatery (the Pancake Pantry, legendarily patronized by Garth Brooks). Dyed hair and black leather are routine. Nobody assumes that two men dining together in intimate conversation must be brothers.

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By now everyone who cares even casually about true country music knows the story of how Nashville was taken over by evil robots -- it happened sometime in the '60s, '70s, '80s or '90s, depending on who's telling the story -- and of how country radio subsequently went to hell in a multimillion-dollar handbasket. A subthread of the story is the gradual flowering of alt-country, a movement pretty much defined by the pages of the magazine No Depression, which sprung up in the mid-'90s to champion the spirit of rough-and-ready old-time country as it was interpreted (loosely or otherwise) by bands like Uncle Tupelo and the Old 97s.

Meanwhile, "country" has come to mean so many different things to so many people -- is it Johnny Cash's weatherbeaten crooning or Shania Twain's prancing-pony burlesque? -- that at the beginning of the 21st century, particularly with the music industry as weirdly fractured as it is, very few of us know how to define it at all. "We know it when we hear it," is the best most of us can do.

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If this tally already wasn't impressive enough, the International Bluegrass Music Association and the Country Music Association just made "Oh Brother" their album of the year. On June 25, musicians featured on both the soundtrack and live albums will team up for Part 2 of their highly successful national concert tour.

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Trippy artists such as the Grateful Dead were "Truckin'" to banjos in California, but the music of the South, by the South and for the South was about maintaining the status quo -- with shotgun authority. Country music stars loved God, Mama, the flag and pork sausage. They were pro-Nixon and pro-war. As Merle Haggard reminded us, they didn't smoke marijuana in Muskogee or take their trips on LSD. Country fans were equally conservative, protectors of a Waltons version of America invented during the Depression and cemented in the paranoia and prosperity of the Cold War. Southern children were supposed to mind their parents, dress nice for church, and go to work at Daddy's car dealership when they graduated from high school.

Like arrogant Custers, most Nashville music execs were oblivious to anything that was happening on the mammoth rock scene just over the generational horizon. In reality, lots of Southern teenagers and college students were smoking dope in the back of the family's Impala on Saturday night, then spraying it down with Lysol so the smell wouldn't be there on the trip to Sunday school the next morning. But the good ol' boys who ran Music Row adjusted their white belts and dismissed the counterculture as some kind of evil beast seducing America's youth to an altar call of sex, drugs and (even worse) long hair. The Nashville establishment was recording tunes such as Donna Fargo's "Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.": "Shine on me sunshine/ Walk with me world/ It's a zippy-dee doodah day."

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The CMF is the not-for-profit organization that owns and operates the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tenn., which, besides being a tourist magnet, also houses the world's largest collection of country recordings and reference material. With Pugh gone, scholars fear there is no one left to steer them intelligently through this labyrinth of vital information. The foundation has yet to prove otherwise.

Pugh had been at the foundation 22 years, doing basic library work and assisting in special projects, when, on Sept. 7, CMF director Kyle Young summarily dismissed him. It was a bloody day all around. Also sent packing were Chris Dickinson, the much-admired editor of the Journal of Country Music, and three lower-level staffers. Young told Pugh and Dickinson he was doing away with the special projects department for which they worked.

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