YAY! Dustin threw down!
For purposes of comparison, let me give some examples of what I had in mind as the pastoral theme in country music. These country music stars don't seem to let people embed their YouTube videos, so in several cases what you're watching is an amateur homage to the original song. And, like Dustin, I'm not making any claims about the literary or musical merit of this body of work. But here's the Man in Black himself:
A more recent variation on the pastoral theme:
Pastoral poetry is often subdivided into two further categories: pastoral (following on the tradition established by Virgil's Eclogues, which are all about shepherds playing their lutes and singing love songs on idealized hillsides) and georgic (following on the tradition established by Virgil's Georgics, which tell you how to farm and deal more closely with the gritty realities of rural life and making a living from the land. In that sense, Stephen Duck's "Thresher's Labour" is more georgic than pastoral, and so is this song:
(Finally, this isn't exactly pastoral, but click here to find out what happens when the Alexander Pope of Nashville imagines an encounter with a Stephen Duck on the road.)
What do you think?
Offer your reflections here on how pastoral poetry finds its way into contemporary music/verse/poetry (or feel free to make a post of your own making the case for other voices that are worthy of these laurels).
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As an irreverent homage to pastoral poetry I would have to offer up Kenny Chesney's She Thinks My Tractors Sexy. The entire song focuses on farming the land, fitting the Georgic style of pastoral poetry, with lines like "she's always staring at me while I am chugging along" and "plowing these fields in the hot summer sun". Chesney has a country song that reflects on hard work, while not ignoring the benefits of a farmers tan. He references working all day, and only at night thinking of the future- much as Stephen Duck did. This fun song about a farmer's labor not only has an upbeat rhythm, it also is a prime example of Duck's form of pastoral poetry.
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