There’s a temptation, in America’s coastal liberal enclaves and especially among our self-styled aesthetes, to separate our culture from their culture. Currently it’s popular to call these silos “America A” and “America B,” but the labels are really just a fresh coat of memetic paint. See: “flyover country,” “the bubble,” “‘real’ America.” The latter was a running gag on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, where Alec Baldwin’s Reaganite GE exec insisted that Tina Fey’s brand of feminist sketch comedy was fundamentally incompatible with the middle-American mind. You people still buy CDs?! Well, The Joe Rogan Experience is the country’s most popular podcast, Donald J. Trump is a two-term president, and a little ditty called “Choosin’ Texas” is on track to become the longest-running No. 1 hit in U.S. chart history. Maybe it’s America B all the way down.
Our new monocultural attaché is the 27-year-old Ella Langley. Raised Southern Baptist in rural Alabama, Langley grew up singing hymns around the piano at family reunions. She was already six years into her Nashville career when she put out “Choosin’ Texas” last October, as the lead single from her second album, Dandelion. Langley wrote and produced “Choosin’ Texas” alongside a crack team including Miranda Lambert, the rare country musician whose acclaim beyond Music City equals, if not exceeds, her respect within it. The song’s ascent commenced in earnest when Lane Gorrell, an Oklahoman farm-fluencer of sorts, posted a TikTok dancing to it in front of some cows. His moves are earnest, unselfconscious; the horizon is a straight line; the sky is impossibly blue, a shade of azure that seems to emanate from “Choosin’ Texas” itself.
Though Lambert’s signature is unmistakable, “Choosin’ Texas” does not sound like a Miranda Lambert song. It goes down totally smooth, with nary a speck of the vinyl crackle that coated Lambert’s 2016 breakup opus, The Weight of These Wings. Langley is also singing about a breakup, but all the sharp feelings—spite, rage, jealousy—have been sanded down, leaving behind a glancing wistfulness. The language of craftsmanship feels appropriate to discuss country music and “Choosin’ Texas” specifically. In every filigreed Stratocaster lick, I hear the product of an industry that is dedicated to producing hits, yes, but hits that last. They last because they have to—they’re expected to live in car stereo systems for months, if not years, without losing their luster. Even by those rigorous standards of quality control, “Choosin’ Texas” is a rare jewel, a family heirloom in the making.
Chalk that up, in part, to how out-of-time it sounds. The sole means of carbon-dating “Choosin’ Texas” is by the veritable crate of dusty country 45s Langley packs into its lyrics: Jerry Reed’s “Eastbound and Down” (1977), Ronnie Milsap’s “Smoky Mountain Rain” (1980), and George Strait’s “Amarillo by Morning” (1982). She’s a traditionalist consciously situating herself within a tradition; Dandelion opens with a rendition of “Frog Went a-Courtin,” an English folksong that dates back to the 1500s, and features a rollicking cover of Kitty Wells’ 1952 country No. 1 (the first by a female solo artist) “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” The plot of “Choosin’ Texas” follows the broad strokes of Sweet Home Alabama, starring Reese Witherspoon, with some genders and geography swapped. Who was it who said there are only seven stories in the whole world? “Choosin’ Texas” chooses one, tells it new, tells it well.
