I appreciate Gibb Sahib's examination of how the partisan divide affects people's appreciation of Country, or Country and Western as I still think of it. I was raised dirt poor in Oklahoma, though born in Tennessee of hillbilly Missouri Ozarks parents and this music was practicaly all I knew until I got my first transistor radio. As Burns makes clear, C&W has always been marginalized, sometimes despised, and often ridiculed by many people in the folk community and beyond, with some exceptions for old-time, bluegrass and Americana, especially among liberals. Rural vs. urban explains part of it, but much of it is class prejudice where the customs and ways of working (and rural) people are simply seen as less sophisticated and inferior. As one who went to college (the first on mom's side of the family) and became a professional, I was always aware that appreciation of other culture's rural musics was acceptable, but my peers (including my current partner) disliked our own rural music. I hope Burn's series helps to change this. Like many of you, I stopped listening to commercial country music radio by the 1980s though old country and Texas-based Americana was always present for me, but with the last episode of the series, I saw that I had missed a lot by not giving The Judds, Randy Travis, Reba McIntyre, George Strait and others a chance, for despite the tension between commercialization and authenticity that has been part of the music's history since the Ralph Peer's Bristol recordings, there were and are artists who are telling stories that are relevant to many working class and rural people, as well as those who remember those roots.