16 August 2022 — 1140 mdt

It’s fair week in the Flathead — and
that means live big name country music

By James Conner

It’s county fair week in the Flathead — and that means country music; this year, South Carolinian Lee Brice’s country music. Example: One of Them Girls. He’s a competent musician, but had I booked the fair’s county music performer, I would have signed up Caleb Klauder and Reeb Willms Country Band, shown here performing a number made famous by Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton. It’s a relaxed performance, featuring classic riffs on the fiddle, pedal steel guitar, and mandoline.

Democrats who want to better understand rural culture should spend time at their county’s fair, and they should study country music and country music’s relationship to folk music (see Why Republicans Listen to Country Music and Democrats Don’t). Will Flathead County’s Democrats have a booth at the fair? Yes. The Flathead’s Democrats are rural Democrats, not, as the Republican propagandists would have us believe, those apocryphal all too woke city Democrats with strange colored skins who allegedly live on taxes taken from white people.

According to Rolling Stone, Lee Brice performed at the 2016 Republican National Convention. If his pickin’ and grinnin’and singin’ there was more than just another gig, he should feel right at home in Kalispell.