ABSTRACT
Given country music’s ability to tell a story-simple and straightforward lyrics are still considered more important in a country song than complex or new rhythms, tempos and melodies-one would think that its adaptation to a short-form narrative music video would have been natural and easy. Country music also had the advantage of having appeared on screen since the time moves could first talk, from Jimmie Rodgers’ 1929 movie-short The Singing Brakeman through thousands of singing-cowboy movies, the national television exposure that culminated in Hee Haw and recent films like Honeysuckle Rose (1980) and Tender Mercies (1983) that attempt to embody and represent the ethos of country music. With a visual history and a classical narrative style, country music would have seemed better able than rock music to take advantage of the promotional opportunities that music videos represented in the early part of the 1980s.
