Does country music make you want to grab a lariat and hang yourself from the nearest old elm tree? If so, you’re not alone. Social psychologists Steven Stack and Jim Gundlach found that the more a city’s radio stations play country music, the higher the white suicide rate.
Seriously.
Theirs was a big study, encompassing forty-nine metropolitan areas, and was careful to control for factors like Southernness, poverty, divorce, and gun availability. In other words, all else equal, country music kills. This was especially true when country music represented a city’s sub- rather than its mainstream culture.