ABSTRACT
Country rock star Jerry Lee Lewis knew how to say it best: Country Songs for City Folks read the cover of his album. In the 1940s and 1950s when country-music singers lamented the loss of rural life, they sang to lost brethren who had been driven to the great cities by the Depression. All the way from the mountains of rural West Virginia to the Rocky Mountains of the West, John Denver has pounded out a simplistic and recurring theme to a vast national audience. The generation that refused to go to war had no trouble hearing the message from rural America either. Urbanologists have had their ears cocked in the direction of rural America, and as a result their strategies include the notion of bringing rural America back to the cities. Greenbelts and rural corridors are the stuff of which urban plans are made. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
