ABSTRACT
Vernon Oxford looks through a box of photos. There are a lot of family shots: a few from back in Arkansas and some from Kansas, but most are from Nashville. There are many onstage shots, but surprisingly few with other country singers, emphasizing in a way that Vernon Oxford is something of a misfit. Too country for country music is a hell of a fate, but it is Vernon Oxford’s fate. Country music has always paid lip service to its past, but it must be a past that fits into the country music theme park. It must be a past that can be captioned in that special kind of English reserved for Cracker Barrel menus. A past that never really existed. When country music is confronted with a living, breathing specimen who embodies the confrontational truculence of its past, then it doesn’t know what to do with him.
