Home » Daddy’s Got His Blue Jeans On: A Deep Dive Into Country Music’s Pants

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Daddy’s Got His Blue Jeans On: A Deep Dive Into Country Music’s Pants

Blue jeans are ubiquitous in country music. Yet dads (and kids) often choose the comfort and flexibility of “soft pants” over the rich history and unforgiving fit of denim. In this episode, the dads explore how blue jeans fit in our kids’ active lives, on dads’ expanding waistlines and in country music tropes. They’re joined by author James Sullivan (who literally wrote the book on blue jeans) to dive deep into the history of blue jeans in America, culture and music. If you’ve ever wondered where our blue jeans obsession comes from, or whether you’ll ever fit into your suddenly “tight-fitting jeans” again, this is the episode for you.

To wrap things up, Dave spends the “Change My Mind” segment trying to convince Donnie that even aging dads should embrace the discomfort (read: suffering) of country music festivals in pursuit of growth and, perhaps, the fountain of youth.

Show Notes

3:32: Should Our Kids Wear Jeans? In a Scary Mommy article, a pediatric occupational therapist suggested that kids should not wear jeans. The dads discuss the merits of blue jeans in the lives of active, knee-skinning children.

7:17: Should Dads Wear Jeans? When the size of your pants is a moving target, pants selection gets tricky. The dads weigh the requirements for “dad pants” from ruggedness and cool-factor to flexibility and comfort.

9:44: The History Of Blue Jeans: Donnie kicks off an initial history lesson by reading the Levi’s website with the voice of an old-timey movie narrator.

13:46: Blue Jeans in Western Wear: A western wear aficionado, Donnie, weighs in on denim’s role in “the scene” and encourages Dave to check out the rancher pant (or maybe a nudie suit).

16:37: Do Stretchy Jeans Still Count? The dads discuss the current trend toward stretchy (but less rugged) jeans-like materials and whether that matters in the world of blue jeans.

20:05: Blue Jeans in Country Music: Of the many mentions of blue jeans in country music, the dads hone in on two common tropes: the funny yet often cringey sexual innuendo of “tight fittin’ jeans” and the more family-friendly images of nostalgic Americana and simpler times.

28:02: Author James Sullivan on Blue Jeans and American Culture: James Sullivan joins the podcast to share a more in-depth look at the history of blue jeans, based on his work writing Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon.

38:41: How the Hatred of Laundry Led to a Resurgence in Blue Jeans’ Popularity: James Sullivan tells the story of how the Denim Council reversed blue jeans’ “juvenile delinquent” reputation with a clever marketing campaign.

46:25: The Dad Life Sound Check: Donnie discovers a sad country song about laundry: Rebecca Porter’s “The Laundry Pile.” Dave looks forward to finding his “Chattahoochee” this summer, though he’d prefer not to wear jeans in the lake like Alan Jackson does in the music video.

49:06: Change My Mind: Dave changes gears and encourages Donnie to “choose discomfort” in an effort to change his mind about whether aging dads still belong at multi-day country music festivals.

Thank you for listening. The best way to support us is to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or whatever podcast platform you use. If you want to see new episodes and more content delivered straight to your email inbox, please subscribe to our newsletter: countrymusicdads.substack.com. You can find everything we do on our website: countrymusicdads.com. And we’d love to hear what you think, so send us comments, suggestions, friendly banter on Instagram @countrymusicdads, or via email countrymusicdads@gmail.com.

Mentioned in the Show

References:

Transcript

This is Country Music Dads, the parenting podcast with a twang.

We’re driving a highly subjective, comically contrarian, often irreverent conversation about fatherhood and country music for people who have a passion for both.

My name’s Donnie, and I’m a country music dad.

My name’s Dave, and I’m also a country music dad.

And on this episode, we’re talking about our pants.

Blue jeans are a stalwart of all American fashion.

Stylish, functional, cool, and also really uncomfortable if you’re, say, a bendy, wiggly little kid, or if you’re a middle-aged dad trying to squeeze into your suddenly tight-pitten jeans.

Country music loves its blue jeans, though, so is it possible to be for country music and against hard pants like jeans?

Let’s find out.

The blue jeans we know today were invented over 150 years ago by a tailor named Jacob Davis to make a more durable version of work pants.

He soon partnered with Levi Strauss in San Francisco, and the rest is hard pants history.

Over the years, jeans have evolved to fit the tastes and styles of the times, from the rebellious cool James Dean and Marlon Brando’s 1950s denim, to the distressed look of the hippie 60s, to the modern styles like low-rise, skinny jeans, and, my personal favorite, stretchy, athleisure pants that look like jeans.

Jeans are a symbol of rugged, simple, western cool, and they’re also a functional part of life for the most rugged types in our society, the cowboy, the farmer, and the blue-collar worker who need pants that withstand a hard day’s work.

Country Music loves stories about those people, so it makes sense that country artists would gravitate toward blue jeans in their attire and in their lyrics.

I love Country Music, but I’ve grown to hate hard pants like jeans.

And, turns out, so do some pediatric occupational therapists when it comes to blue jeans on our kids.

So, that’s the dilemma we’re faced with for this week’s episode.

True to form, the intersection of Country Music and parenting is going to drive a conversation for us.

Later in the show, we’re going to bring on an expert, James Sullivan, who wrote a book on the topic of blue jeans for a little more insight.

But until then, Donnie, what are you wearing?

Thanks for asking.

I’m wearing my Levi Strauss denim shirt.

I love this shirt very much.

It’s very appropriate.

Pearl snaps.

I wore it for the occasion.

It has Country Cutler embroidered across the chest.

I think it looks cool.

It’s super fun.

I got this done at the Ameripalton Awards show down in Austin in 2024.

And I just have always really liked the look and feel of jeans.

So I’m not a hard pants hater, though I wear them less and less, I must admit.

But I do like the way jeans look, and I like the way I feel in them.

So I think I might be the good counterpoint to your hatred of the hard pant.

What kicked off the thought behind this whole episode was a post by Scary Mommy.

It covered a TikToker who was also an occupational therapist.

In her professional opinion, kids should not wear denim because of sensory issues and their need to move around.

What do you think, Donnie?

Do you think that kids should wear denim?

Do your kids wear denim?

Anybody who says all kids should do something or all kids shouldn’t do something, that really gets you into kind of dangerous territory.

My oldest refuses to wear jeans.

He hates it, and it’s a sensory issue, and it’s a fit issue.

He’s a very tall and broad kid, and he doesn’t find jeans to be comfortable.

He doesn’t like wearing jeans, and we don’t really force him to because we’ve found pants that look good on him and fit and are appropriate at the more dressed-up level.

They’re softer, they’re more comfortable, elastic waist.

So he’s not wearing hard pants ever.

But my younger son loves wearing jeans because he thinks they look cool, and he loves his Western attire and his cowboy outfits, as he calls them.

He’s got two pairs of boots.

He’s got a cowboy hat.

He’s got a couple pearl snaps and a bunch of jeans and bolo tie and a belt buckle and all that good stuff.

He just loves it, and he thinks it’s super fun and cool to be a part of.

I read through that article over on Scary Mommy’s Post.

The reason the occupational therapist got deeper into this was really about comfort and flexibility and being able to move and being comfortable in yourself as you’re learning and expressing yourself at school and in kind of social settings.

But the real kicker was about sensory issues, and for children who are dealing with that, it’s really not fair to add another layer of discomfort in their day.

Why overwhelm yourself with your pants if you can avoid it?

And I think that’s something that we should probably be in favor of for our kids.

We shouldn’t push our kids over the limit by putting them in pants.

Seems like a pretty noble…

That should be a rule for everyone.

Don’t get overwhelmed by your pants.

If you are, change your pants.

Yes, don’t get overwhelmed by your pants.

It seemed like her perspective also was coming from the assumption that people were putting their kids in jeans primarily for the look, because they look cute in jeans.

And they do.

It does kind of dress up little kids, put them in little mini pairs of jeans.

But if it is affecting how they’re experiencing their day, that’s a big bummer.

One of the comments was actually quite interesting, is that they couldn’t put their kid in soft pants because they’d come home looking like they got into a motorcycle accident.

The fact that they run around and fall over on the cement during recess or whatever the case may be, there’s a reason for those jeans.

They still live up to their reputation as protective equipment.

For the most part, if you fall over wearing swishy pants that you got at the sporting store, you’re going to rip them and probably skin your knee.

But if you fall over wearing jeans, it will probably protect your skin.

So there’s benefits to it as well, and they’re the same benefits that have always been there for a working person wearing those pants.

I just did a little mini inventory of my five-year-old’s pants to go up a size.

These have been through two kids now.

That’s where the holes are.

They’re at the knees, and the pants that are not jeans are the ones that have paid the price dearly.

So there is definitely a need for a rugged pair of pants when you’re rolling around the asphalt playground for half the day.

Dave, do dads need a pair of rugged pants to roll around the playground?

Should we be wearing denim anymore?

That is such a tough question, because I agree in the need for something rugged, because with my small kids, I am on the ground and in the dirt a lot.

Just this weekend, I changed the diaper at a park in the middle of this muddy field, and if I was wearing some nice slacks or some chinos or something, I would have hesitated a little bit, but in my pair of jeans, and these were stretchy jeans, so I could actually physically get down in that position on the turf to do this diaper change.

I didn’t think twice about it, because I knew they could handle it.

So there is some need for the ruggedness.

Sometimes I do feel like a kindergartner in how I need to move about the world.

Like I am chasing these small humans and trying to get down on their level.

Flexibility and comfort is a very important requirement for my pants.

And coming out of the COVID era, as we are, the work from home era, I’m an at home dad, so I don’t have a need to dress up.

A lot of us working from home don’t have a need to dress up.

And we’ve gotten used to our soft pants.

I would imagine that for people that are going back into the office, it’s probably a tough transition, especially if you’re reluctant to size up.

What I’m starting to realize here in middle age is that fit seems to be a moving target for my pants, because you always think, I like that pair of jeans, those are my favorite pair of jeans, they don’t really fit me anymore.

But if I only drop a few pounds, that’s all it’ll take.

So you don’t throw them out, you just wear sweat pants until you sweat your way into your old jeans.

Yeah.

So it’s a tough place to be, but I think it depends on the objective.

That’s fair.

And what you’re using them for.

I think there can still be pants for different scenarios in your life.

But it’s that combination of a need for something rugged that’s going to withstand you being an active dad, getting after it with your kids, and getting dirty and not ripping, and also not ripping because they don’t fit.

And that kind of rip is not what you want either.

You want to protect your knee and your ego.

That’s right.

But I do want to give a little bit of history, a little history from Levi’s.

And I think it’s important that we do this in the old timey, like newsreel sounding voice.

So I apologize to anyone who has their earphones in just a little too loud because this is going to sound like you’re in like the 20s, 30s, maybe even 40s in your movie theater.

So here we go.

Can’t wait.

What started as an invention for American workers became the uniform of progress, worn by miners, cowboys, rebels, rock stars, presidents, and everyday men and women.

These functional pieces were the clothing the people not only worked in, they lived their lives in too.

But Levi’s are more than that.

They are the purest, wearable form of authentic self-expression.

They bear the markings of life, shapes of our bodies, and the memories of our adventures.

Thank you very much to Levi’s for their history page on that one.

You took me straight back to that era, man.

I heard a train just pull up right outside.

Yes, the whistle-top pound is happening right here.

I read that out loud and I was like, this is really one of those pieces of Americana.

And that’s kind of what I think of when I think of jeans.

There’s nothing more American than a pair of jeans.

What first comes to your mind when you think of blue jeans, besides discomfort?

Yeah, despite the challenge of squeezing into them.

First thing for me, they’re classic, they’re casual, they’re cool, they’re versatile.

I always remember when I used to wear jeans more often.

You could dress them up, you can dress them down, you can wear them working in the yard.

They’re an everyday piece of clothing.

The image that comes to mind, though, are all the commercials that I grew up with.

The first one that came to mind was actually a Brett Favre commercial, The Wrangler, one of the many Wrangler commercials.

But I remember him playing backyard football in his Wranglers.

Even back then, when I was, I forget how old I was, I was much slimmer and active myself.

I could not imagine playing football in jeans or doing anything sporty in jeans.

But Brett made me feel like maybe I could give it a try.

He made it look cool and it helped that he had the cannon.

Yes, it helps not to have to run and you can just throw it.

Cowboys, the Old West, big belt buckle, and even the Levi Strauss logo, the leather logo has the two horses on it.

It evokes an outdoorsy, rugged cowboy type image as well.

I agree with that.

Jeans are just, they’re so easy to wear.

They’re just so simple and they go with everything.

Are they easy to wear?

I think so.

Here’s the thing, you gotta find a pair that fit, and you have to admit, Dave, when you need to move up a size.

I think that might be a bigger part of this conversation than we’re willing to admit.

Yeah, maybe we’ll get into that later.

I would add, I’d assume so.

So yeah, I mean, those are the things that I think of too.

I think of the history of it as well, because if you take a look at the rise of Blue Jeans and when they came about, it’s pretty central to the Western expansion in the United States.

The gold rush in the kind of 1850s, 60s, 70s is when these kind of work pants became mainstream and necessary for a much larger group of people.

You had far more people in ranching and farming moving out into the West where there was rougher terrain and more things that you needed to last longer.

They needed to last much longer and work in really rugged environments when they were mining for gold and doing all these things on a much more independent way as opposed to working in a mining town where the company may have a company store with access to these things that you might need.

The jeans moving from the topless overalls to just what we know as like the five pocket jean today, I think it’s a really interesting part of California history and Western history and I think jeans are cool.

I always have thought of jeans are cool.

They are cool.

I won’t argue with that.

They’re definitely cool and I think you’re right.

I wish they fit better, at least the ones that I have at the moment.

So you, Country Cutler, are a Western wear aficionado.

Can you rock Western wear without denim or are they a requirement?

I think that they’re an important part of a Western wardrobe and getting dressed to go and be out in a place where Western wear would be appropriate, honky tonk, a rodeo, any of those type of places.

But you can also dress up a little bit further.

There’s the rancher pant by Wrangler.

They’re kind of that pleated, polyester-looking, higher-end jean, but they’re not jeans, they’re not denim.

They look like the 50s, 60s, 70s-style stage wear that a lot of kind of country acts would wear, but they were also the more formal wear of farmers and ranchers.

And they’re nice pants.

They have no give at all.

Those pants, I would argue, are significantly uncomfortable because you need to leave your ego at the door and move up at least a size from what you’re rocking in your normal life.

I need to jump up, too, when I put on a pair.

I have not pulled the trigger to buy one yet because I don’t want to admit the number that I would need to be hanging in my closet, but I also don’t need them, so I like my jeans.

But there are other stuff that you can wear.

There are suits, Western suits, like the nudie suit.

Most people aren’t going out and buying a nudie suit or even pretending to wear one.

But you can wear a suit and tie and still have Western attire on.

Putting on a nice pair of boots, a boot-cut pair of slacks, a classy belt, and a pearl-snapped shirt and a hat.

You’re dressed Western.

You don’t need to be wearing jeans to be Western.

I do think that it’s a big part of the identity, especially in modern Western concepts, and especially in Country Music and the country scene.

You can’t really get away with wearing a pair of khakis.

I don’t think that’s going to work.

But I think that there are other alternatives.

I think that as you get deeper into the culture and the way people wear clothing, there’s more than just jeans.

And the rancher pant is really, those are pretty cool.

If you can pull those off, you’re going to look pretty snazzy.

I think they would be really good for you.

Dave, with the mustache and the slicked back hair.

I was hoping you’d suggest that I’d try to bring back the nudie suit, because if I’m going to go, I’m probably going to go in on Western wear.

You got to go all in.

Well, go big or go home.

Yeah, there are a few really great artisans who have been creating beautiful suits in that genre, in that style.

Jukebox Mama out of Nashville does some really beautiful suits, and you could get on her list and maybe get yourself a little Country Music Dads style and nudie suit for you.

Oh, man.

That would be something else.

Yeah.

I don’t think they come with soft pants, though.

That takes me to the next question.

I mentioned my new favorite pair of jeans, they’re quote unquote jeans because they’re stretchy jeans.

They’re made with something, there’s some elastic type material that’s baked into the fabric that I’ve learned, it hurts the ruggedness of the jean by making them stretchy.

Do you think they still qualify as Blue Jeans if they are the stretchy kind?

If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and it walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

If it’s a rooster looking like a duck, it’s not a duck.

That is probably the most convoluted way I could possibly say is no, I don’t think that they are.

Look, I have a few pairs of those jeans that I bought quickly, I grabbed a pair at Costco and they were awesome.

They looked like a great pair of Wranglers and they were on sale.

I was like, cool.

They have my size right at the top.

I was like, awesome.

I’ll grab a pair of jeans.

I needed another pair of jeans.

These were a little bit wider boot cut style and I was like, these will be more comfortable for me because I was finally admitting that the skinny jeans I got almost 10 years ago now, that’s not a thing that I’m able to do.

I don’t think it’s a thing in general anymore, let alone how they might look now.

They might not have been as skinny when I bought them, but all the same, no one needs to see that and I don’t need to feel like that.

I got these jeans and I found out that they had some stretch to them and they’re rebuild, they’re like much more comfortable.

While I think they look awesome and I feel comfortable in them, they aren’t the same as the true hard denim that I have.

I have a couple of pair of old school Levi’s jeans that are hard and they have no give and they fit nicely and they fit me because I was honest with myself when I bought them.

That said, who cares?

If you want to wear pants that are more comfortable for you and still make you feel like you’re wearing a pair of jeans, go with God, my friend.

I don’t think that you need to get caught up in these definitions of if they’re cool enough.

If they’re comfortable and they do what you need them to do, that’s exactly what jeans were supposed to be, right?

These were utility uniforms that were created to protect you in your environment in the way that you needed to work and interact with things that were dangerous in your world.

You need something that you can bend over and change a diaper in the mine fields that are suburban and urban parks.

And if you need a little elastic in your pants to do that, my man, take a knee, wipe that butt, wear your elastic jeans in peace, my friend.

Breach, man.

That’s where I come down on it, too.

No one will ever know.

As long as they do a good job of disguising the stretchiness.

I haven’t been shopping for a true pair of jeans in a long time.

Maybe I do need something truly rugged in my wardrobe.

Our conversation has already gotten me excited to go shopping.

That doesn’t happen very often.

Yeah, and I think part of it is, you got to be real with what you need.

I think that part of it is that we get lost in this concept of the cowboy, the rebel, and these are like proper capitalized nouns.

But for a lot of it, these are just job titles.

Maybe not the rebel, but definitely the cowboy and the rancher and the miner.

Those are jobs, and you needed personal protective equipment.

You needed PPE for these jobs.

It’s not about the style.

It’s because they function.

They do exactly what they’re supposed to do, and the jean was developed for that.

This is really true in kind of a lot of pop country music, is that we get lost in the trope of what these things are versus what those tropes were based upon, what the actual experiences informed this definition of the rugged rebel cowboy rancher Western person.

Speaking of those tropes, there are a lot of tropes about Blue Jeans in country music, and a lot of it has to do with exactly those things.

People who are out there working on the farm, in the mine, in the West, on the ranch, on some horses, and they listen to country music.

What are the main kind of Blue Jeans tropes that you have identified in your research on country music and the Blue Jeans?

It was hard for me to come up with songs out of the blue about Blue Jeans.

But when I’m listening to just random songs on my stream or whatever, it is everywhere, the reference to jeans and the imagery.

Unfortunately, the first one that comes to mind since I’m like the resident bro country person in this relationship, is the sexual innuendo and talking about the tight fitting jeans because of the girl at the bar that you just saw.

This isn’t just the recent bro country either.

This is Conway Twitty, tight fitting jeans.

I saw right through her tight fitting jeans.

That is a line in his song.

Those songs haven’t aged that well.

Mel McDaniel, Baby’s Got Her Blue Jeans on.

The entire song is about checking out a girl and her blue jeans.

And basically the whole town stops and stares at her.

That’s the song.

It’s all about, how do I get in those blue jeans?

And just makes you shake your head.

The Ray Scott song, Those Jeans, I was listening to that as we were getting ready for this conversation.

And it’s funny.

It’s a good version of that, hey, you look good in those jeans type of song.

It’s silly.

It’s definitely offensive.

But it’s a funny song.

And that’s why those songs have always worked, because they are funny.

It’s clever.

There’s a little play on words.

And anyway, go ahead.

Yeah.

And I think that the difference between maybe baby’s gutter blue jeans on and those jeans, is that the protagonist doesn’t really lose in the first one, whereas in those jeans, the guy goes to the hospital because he asks a girl how she got into them jeans.

And like that’s, there’s a fine line in all this.

And it’s not to say that it’s better, but there’s a way to do it and still be offensive, while not being so offensive that you’re going to a place that, you know, you’d have to apologize for.

The Maddie and Tay song, Girl in a Country song, that I just looked at.

It’s actually a decade old now.

Seems like that song just came out.

But I don’t feel like there had been another song like that where they are directly addressing this caricature of a girl in a country song.

And of course, it’s like the second line about the painted on jeans.

She just wants to be comfortable.

Yeah.

Just like me.

Not that mine are painted on, but it feels like it sometimes.

Dave, how did you get in those jeans?

I’m wearing shorts right now, actually.

Yeah, there you go.

It’s nice and warm.

There’s this new song by Emily Love.

She’s a country artist out of Portland, Oregon.

There’s a line in it that just, it like, it stopped me in my tracks when I heard it.

It says, you look lonely up against the wall, and I like the way you’re wearing your pants.

It’s just, wow, what she’s talking about in that particular line, and it’s okay.

That was good.

And I think as we see perhaps a wave of empowerment, rightfully so, in country music, to talk the same way back to men from a woman’s perspective, it’s pretty solid.

And that song just made me smile when I heard it for the first time.

I was like, wow, this is right, Alan.

This is very fun.

It feels like the woman’s answer to You Look Good and Neon from Silverlight.

Good.

The other trope that I can think of is where they fold in Blue Jeans into kind of a romanticized memory of country living or simpler times or the way you grew up.

There’s a couple songs called Bury Me in Blue Jeans, one’s by Midland.

Yeah, there’s by Granger Smith.

And throw this old guitar in their place When you bury me in blue jeans They’re nostalgic.

The Blue Jeans, they’re just part of that, your desire to go back to when things were easy and simple.

And it just brings you comfort.

And it’s about that image of Americana and reflects that simpler time that I think they’re pining for and that we, as we go through our busy lives, can relay with.

The Jake Owen song, Barefoot Blue Jean Knight, falls into that category too.

I absolutely love that song.

My wife loves that song, so we listen to it a lot when we were driving.

It’s a four windows down type of song.

Shout out to the Country Country Music Podcast, our friends up in Canada for the Windows Down rating system.

It’s definitely a four windows down banger.

I like that song a lot.

It feels good.

Feels good.

It is a feel good song.

I see what you did there.

I know.

It takes me back to a time when wearing jeans made me feel good too, Donnie.

I want that time again, maybe someday.

I think that there are changes we all need to make in the order to make that work.

And some of them may just be related to not wearing jeans.

How do jeans fit into the larger history of Country Music, Donnie?

Boo.

Some of these I say on purpose, and some they just come out by accident.

Yeah.

That one was on purpose.

I really hope that one doesn’t make the cut.

I think jeans fit into the larger history and the large part for all these reasons that these songs span pretty much 50 years of Country Music history.

You can go back pretty far and start hearing about jeans, and they coincide with the rise of jeans in popular culture, and you can’t ignore the fact that some pop country music is pop music, and it is influenced by pop trends.

As we talked about in the intro, jeans play an important role in American culture.

They are our pants.

You go to Europe, you go to any place else in the world, people see those pants as American pants.

And during the 80s and 90s, you could take five pairs of Levi’s and go into Europe and essentially pay for your trip.

You could trade them for great dinners, and they were just so hard to get.

And jeans just play an important role in American identity.

And I think that’s why they play such a big role in country music history and in larger history, too.

It’s quite an American invention, I have to say.

As is country music.

Country music has the same that follows in that history.

It reflects the culture, like you were saying.

Country music is borrowed from lots of different cultures, and the fabrication and the design of blue jeans have done that also.

It’s a bunch of different traditions that all came together to make the work pants that became blue jeans.

Exactly.

Changing gears here, we wanted to go a little bit deeper into our blue jeans discussion.

To help us, we are joined by James Sullivan.

James is an author, journalist, and longtime contributor to the Boston Globe.

He also formerly worked as a pop music and culture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, and as an editor for Rolling Stone.

Perhaps most importantly for us today, he wrote the book on blue jeans.

The book is called Jeans, A Cultural History of an American Icon.

James, it is great to have you on the show.

Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me, guys.

Why did you choose to explore the history of jeans in your book?

In my career as a journalist, I’ve been writing about cultural convergences, and I’ve written a lot about classic American icons, style, cars, motorcycles.

I read about music and movies, and I’m always looking for convergences like that.

When this book idea fell into my lap, it was an amazing opportunity to look at 20th-century American culture and actually before that, through an unusual lens, through actually what kinds of pants we were wearing and multiple generations were wearing.

And the more I researched the book, I found all these fascinating sort of flashpoints.

A lot of culture involved, obviously, rock and roll and country music and blue jeans, the iconic thing that we know of them today.

But it was also about the development of America itself, westward expansion, the myth of the cowboy, a whole bunch of American themes all wrapped up in one.

So early in your book, you say that blue jeans have an Americana feel.

Where do you think that comes from?

They were initially created as workwear.

And we like to think of Americans as hardworking, rugged individualists who, as I mentioned a second ago, expanded the country past the Mississippi and out to the west coast in the 19th century and a lot of that was done by primarily men in work pants.

And the main form of work pants was denim because it withstood the tough work of building railroads, mining for coal and gold, and building cities.

It’s almost like the material and the product, the pair of pants itself, is sort of a generations old metaphor for American culture and sort of American sort of can do it attitude.

One of the reasons we’re having this conversation and exploring this as a topic is that I have a dilemma.

So my dilemma is that I like jeans, I like how they look, I appreciate the history like you’re talking about and the myth of ruggedness and the West, but they’re uncomfortable and they’re kind of a chore for me to wear and I think they might be the same kind of a chore for my kids to wear.

So do you think that this represents a cultural shift in how we’re thinking about our comfort and how we’re thinking about our clothes or is it more about how I’m getting older and out of shape?

Yeah.

I mean, so I’m older than you, I’m sure, and I’m still wearing them, but I’m used to it.

I mean, like I’m the guy who buys unwashed Levi’s and wears them for six months.

And then I literally walk into a pond after six months with the jeans on to shrink them to fit, which is the old fashion, very old fashion way of doing it.

So, you know, I can live with a little bit of discomfort.

I’m used to it.

I’ve been wearing jeans my entire life.

I will say that I have three sons who are all in their early 20s, and we had a very hard time getting them to adapt to Blue Jeans when they were kids for that reason that you’re talking about.

Obviously, there’s kids’ clothes, shorts or sweatpants or whatever that are more comfortable for kids to wear.

Try as my wife and I did to get them to wear them.

They will wear them occasionally now, but you know, it’s not a staple for my kids’ generation as it is.

Well, for them in particular, as it is for me.

I teach at the college level, and I’ve been heartened to see over the last several years that there’s a new wave of college students.

My son’s excluded, who are definitely wearing jeans again, which just proves the point that I made in this book.

Jeans are eternal.

They’re never going to go away.

In fact, when I wrote the book, which is about 20 years ago now, there’s a lot of talk in the fashion industry that between the sweatpants of the 90s, the track suits or whatever, hip hop track suits and stuff, and then there was a big return to tacky pants in the early 2000s.

People were predicting Blue Jeans are dead.

They’re going away.

And there have always been peaks and valleys in the Blue Jeans business, but they always come back.

Part of that, as I found in researching my book, was that they are almost inherently a blank canvas of sorts, so that every generation finds a way to wear Blue Jeans in a way that does not look like their parents’ version of Blue Jeans.

Whether we’re talking about torn and ragged and patched Blue Jeans that define the hippie generation to the upscale version of quote-unquote designer Blue Jeans in the early 80s, late 70s, to the baggy hip-hop jeans of the 90s and the skinny jeans of the 2000s, every generation finds a way to wear Blue Jeans because they’re so adaptable, that fits their own style, and, you know, sort of by default separates the look from the way their parents were wearing this product so that it seems like something totally new.

So to answer the question, my own kids, notwithstanding, Blue Jeans are not gonna be suddenly extinct anytime soon.

I did read that part of your book about the old-fashioned way of fitting your jeans.

You walk into a pond or a lake or something while you’re wearing them.

I was just watching the old Alan Jackson, Chattahoochee music video, one of my favorites, and I’m watching all these kids swimming in their jeans.

My first thought, of course, is why you made something already uncomfortable, even more uncomfortable.

Well, you can keep them on after you walk into the lake.

You just keep them on.

That’s how they shrink.

I mean, I wouldn’t swim around in them.

I just kind of wear them into the lake to break them in after the initial process where you’re literally supposed to not wash them for the first six months or so so that the jeans get used to your body.

In the old days, people used to just dunk into a bathtub if they didn’t have a leg candy.

You don’t have to swim around in them.

I get that that would be uncomfortable, and certainly you don’t want to keep them on after you walk out of the lake.

I’ll remember that when I jump into the pool later this afternoon in my jeans.

You mentioned that you wear the raw denim, the old fashion, just a pair of jeans, nothing but the denim.

When you start introducing other elements into the jeans, do they lose the gene factor?

Or is that part of the shifting reality and utility and everlasting awesomeness of jeans that they can incorporate?

Zippers or a little bit of elastic for those of us who need a little bit of that.

That type of thing, does that keep it as jeans?

Sure, you know, the extra pockets, the fashionably ripped jeans that come pretty ripped or whatever, button fly or zippers, the stretchability of synthesized fabrics that are instead of just pure raw denim.

None of that makes a pair of blue jeans suddenly not a pair of blue jeans.

They’re endlessly adaptable.

Just when you think they’re going out of style, somebody finds a way to bring them back into style by either reaching back to an older era.

I mean, how many times have you seen in your lifetimes people suddenly wearing bell bottoms again?

Laney Wilson is currently rocking the bell bottoms and talking about it and making songs about it.

Then after a couple of years, people think like, oh, that look isn’t for me or that’s our old house, but then comes back again 10 years later or whatever.

That’s just one example of many where, again, a pair of blue jeans is an endlessly adaptable thing.

Do jeans serve as a cultural nostalgic touch point or do they serve as a future-facing change point?

Kind of both at the same time, but at the core, I think that a good, a classic pair of blue jeans sort of always reminds us of some of those sort of American ideals that I just talked about earlier.

We certainly like to feel like cowboys, you know?

We like to feel like we’re ready to go out and, you know, stack the logs or whatever, you know?

I mean, whether you’re a suburban dad or an urban dad, for that matter, I mean, there’s great stories about why jeans became as common currency in the American mindset as they did around the 1930s.

It’s because the American West was closing.

A lot of cattle ranches and farms out west were repurposing during the 1930s as what they called dude ranches, which was enticing well-to-do Easterners.

And I’m from Boston, so I kind of get the territory.

But enticing fancier people from New York or whatever to go west to take a week’s vacation in the fresh air and learn how to horseback ride.

And those folks very often were introduced to Blue Jeans for the first time on those dude ranch vacations, which were very popular with a certain well-affluent set during the years of the Depression.

Those people went home to the cities and began saying, all right, if I had to do some gardening next weekend, I’m doing it with this new pair of pants that I just brought back from the West.

So there is definitely sort of a nostalgia factor.

When you have something that looks cool, it needs to have a touch point at some other place for something you aspire to be, for the most part.

Even if you are a cowboy, you want to be a better cowboy, you want to ride faster, you want to rope stronger.

The cool factor, I think, is always a little bit of nostalgia.

There’s great stories about Lee and Wrangler.

Rodeo was one of the biggest spectator sports around the country, including in places like New York City in the 30s and 40s.

It wasn’t football and basketball.

The biggest spectator sports at the time were baseball, boxing, and rodeo.

The jeans companies that were trying to knock Levi’s off the pedestal worked directly with some of the biggest rodeo stars of the day to just help them design more form-fitting jeans that worked for horseback riding, fucking Bronx, all of that.

Yeah, I mean, there’s plenty of function in the form.

So thinking a little bit about how these things were crafted in the culture, when have parents or families as a demographic played into the history and style of blue jeans?

Here’s one of my favorite stories about that from the 1950s.

Prior to the 30s or so, blue jeans were strictly bought and sold as workwear.

So if you’re working a job that needed a durable pair of pants, you might buy a pair of jeans.

The Dewbranch thing and also the popularity at the time of Western movies like sort of John Wayne cowboy movies, those two things combined helped sell the idea of blue jeans as sort of leisure wear or casual wear or that generation’s version of sweatpants basically.

So by the 1950s, the young adults of that generation that had grown up on Western movies were wearing blue jeans as kids because their parents, you know, how many pictures have you seen in your lives of little boys from that era wearing plaid shirts, blue jeans, and you know, with the fake pistols on their on their hips or whatever, right?

Like little cowboys, right?

Little buckaroots, right?

Exactly.

Those kids grew up in the 40s and early 50s to become the earliest generation of rock and rollers.

And they said, you know, we were both in these things when we were kids, because they were sort of like plaid clothes.

But now that we’re 20 or 25, we’re not going to stop wearing them.

So one thing that happened towards the end of the 50s was that blue jeans industry went through one of its periodic dips because there was sort of a panic about bad teenagers during the early years of rock and roll.

And parents started saying, well, you know, if your kid is wearing blue jeans, he’s probably running with the bad kids or those rock and roll kids.

And so to counter that, the blue jeans industry worked with the cotton industry, which obviously supplied denim and continues to supply denim to the blue jeans industry.

And there was it was an advocacy group or on behalf of cotton growers.

And they started running PSAs about how, no, moms, don’t be scared of blue jeans.

In fact, if you put your teenagers in blue jeans, they’re just going to save you on laundry time.

Because if they wear school clothes to school and then come home and change into blue jeans, you’re going to have to wash their clothes less often because the blue jeans can handle it when they’re running around in the yard or in the neighborhood in the afternoon.

And it worked.

So within a couple of years, the blue jeans industry was once again hitting peaks of selling clothes to families and concerned mothers who apparently put their laundry piles over the concern that their kid was running around crowd.

It’s a pretty great story.

Oh, man.

That is pretty great.

The denim council is what the cotton thing was called, by the way, that ran the PSAs.

It’s pretty great.

The denim council.

The hatred of laundry is universal and it spans generations, so it’s not just us.

So turning to music a little bit, why are Blue Jeans so often referenced in Country Music?

Do they mention pants in other genres, or is it just the Country Music?

Pants?

Probably not.

I mean, I love the word pants.

It’s just such a funny word, but I have to doubt, I mean, not just pants, any article of clothing, there cannot be any article of clothing that’s been mentioned as often in song as Blue Jeans or denim.

It just goes back to what we’ve been talking about, about how Blue Jeans are, you know, ubiquitously understood, and not just in America, but outside of America for generations.

You know, people from behind the Iron Curtain, or people in, you know, third world countries have wanted to wear Blue Jeans for generations because it represents this sort of ideal of freedom that we supposedly represent in America, and individualism, and the fact that you can cut your own paths in America.

And Blue Jeans just have over time taken on all of those ideas in the fabric itself.

There’s the great song that John Prine helped Steve Goodman write.

He never called me by my name.

I’m going to write a classic country song, but it’s got to have, you know, trucks, and mama, and trains, and all of that stuff, and jail.

And, you know, they should have added Blue Jeans because that’s another one of the top, you know, they didn’t, but they certainly could have because it is definitely another one of the sort of iconic touchstones of not just country music, but all rock and roll and all American popular music for the most part.

That’s funny.

So last question, do you personally have a favorite song about Blue Jeans?

I thought about this before we came on, and I mean, I wrote the book quite a while ago.

I did make a playlist at the time, which was so long ago that I made it on an iPod, and I’m not sure where that iPod is anymore.

But I used to, when I did like sort of bookstore appearances, I would play snippets of some of the songs that mentioned Blue Jeans, and there are tons of them.

I have a few favorites.

Classic country rockabilly artist Gene Vinson wrote a song called Blue Jean Bop.

So, baby, let’s dance.

It’s a 50s song, which was most certainly, you know, beloved by the same juvenile delinquents that we were discussing earlier from the 50s, wearing blue jeans, I’m sure.

Yeah, I’m a lifelong Springsteen fan.

Springsteen’s Cadillac Ranch opens with a great line, Hey, little girl, and your blue jean’s so tight, riding along through the Wisconsin night.

Jack Bryan has a brand new song, basically, a brand new earlier this year called Blue Jean Baby.

And then I’m going to mention a wild card.

Leigh Bird Stoller, who wrote some of the earliest rock and roll hits, songwriting team, they wrote a song in the 50s that wasn’t a huge hit.

It was by this group called The Cheers.

And now that I think about it, I’m not even sure what their story was, but it was kind of one of those juvenile delinquent songs from the 50s.

The song is called Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots.

And it’s a really cool song, and it definitely sort of captures that aura of kids getting into trouble in the 50s.

And of all people, Edith Piaf, who’s sort of the songbird of France in the first half of the 20th century, did a version in French that I’m pretty sure I own on 78 RPM record downstairs somewhere.

Check it out, you know, you don’t speak French, check out the Shears version, black denim trousers and motorcycle boots.

It’s a pretty fun song.

It makes me laugh to think of 50s juvenile delinquents when we have so many that run around our houses today.

It seems so quaint.

The universal subject, you know, every generation has its juvenile delinquents, just like every generation has its own version of Blue Jeans.

Oh, thank you very much, James.

We appreciate the insights.

We’re working on our listeners find you and anything you’re working on.

Well, my website is jamesullivanauthor.com and there are more people named Jim Sullivan or James Sullivan in this country than probably John Smiths.

So you sort of have to find me specifically under as jamesullivanauthor.com.

But I’ve written other books since the Blue Jeans book and I do a lot of journalism.

So I’m out there.

Thank you very much for joining us.

It was a fun conversation.

We appreciate your time.

Thanks for asking me.

So our next segment is a recurring segment that we call the Dad Life Sound Check where we each share a song that’s been hitting us recently as fathers.

What song has been hitting you, Mr.

Cutler?

There is this great Rebecca Porter song called The Laundry Pile.

And considering we’re talking about jeans and kids clothes, let’s talk about laundry.

This song is new this year, and it came out, and I just laughed through the first verse.

It’s essentially about lying to yourself about folding all of that laundry.

It gets into more of a traditional love, sadness, the lover’s going away, not coming back type of storyline.

But the first part is about laundry.

And I think that it is just so funny.

And as I was running out the door, grabbing a pair of clean baseball pants today for the 97th day in a row that we had a game, just couldn’t believe how much more laundry we had to do.

It’s never ending.

And this particular song, it just makes me smile.

Rebecca has a young kid too.

And I think that there’s some level of honesty that just, it’s so real.

It’s so incredibly real that it just makes me happy.

Not the love lost part.

That’s definitely not as much fun.

I can’t believe there’s a country song about laundry, but I’m glad that it sounds like it’s a sad one.

Yeah, it’s true.

Any story about my laundry pile is going to be a sad one.

Yes.

So the song I’ve been thinking about is Chattahoochee by Alan Jackson.

Summer is quickly approaching.

Chattahoochee, I feel like it is like the country music national anthem to kick off the summertime.

As the school year comes to a close and some of the kind of recurring activities for the kids and for us come to a close, they’re all great.

We all need a little break from the regular stuff.

We’ve been talking about Blue Jeans this episode and the Chattahoochee music video is an amazing music video.

And Blue Jeans feature very prominently in the video.

Alan Jackson is wearing the ripped jeans look on his water skis.

I think there’s even a scene of no skis, just red cowboy boots on the lake.

It’s a wonderful music video, fired up before summer starts.

Get yourself a grape snow cone.

That’s right.

So our next segment is called Change My Mind.

In a world where flexibility and opinion is seen as a weakness, we want to model good behavior to our kids and listeners as we respectfully and humorously try to change each other’s mind about a pressing issue of country music, fatherhood or other such nonsense.

So Dave, we are in the middle of music festival season.

We saw some big ones earlier in the spring.

There was some more throughout the whole summer.

I do not believe aging dads belong at multi-day music festivals.

Change my mind.

I will do my best.

Donnie, there are times in a man’s life when he needs to embrace discomfort.

And I know that sounds strange since I’ve been talking about how uncomfortable I am wearing my jeans this whole episode.

But sometimes it is worth it.

And it helps us, I think, break loose from the relentless pull of aging.

As we get older, our bodies get less and less resilient.

It’s natural and expected for us to seek the comfort of our soft pants or maybe the comfort of the couch and the festival livestream rather than going in person.

We drink more water in between our light beers.

Even when we’re at the country show, we try to find a seat when in our younger years, we’d be fine standing, maybe even dancing depending on who you are.

And instead of going to the Multiday Country Music Festival, we’re satisfied by the YouTube recap.

And I get it, it can get hot out there.

I’ve been to Stagecoach a couple of times.

It was over 100 degrees when I was there, which is miserable.

It’s expensive.

Our backs hurt.

The hangover lasts a week or more, and that’s just from the festival food.

That’s not even counting the alcohol.

Plus you were surrounded by young people, which might be a punishment onto itself.

But I think we should do it anyway, because suffering can lead to growth.

And the number one reason that you should go, even as an aging dad, to these festivals is that it gives you a live glimpse of a very wide array of all these country acts that you get to sample.

It’s like the sampler pack of little bags of chips.

You don’t have to buy and commit to a full bag.

But you know what?

Sometimes you’re going to find a winner.

You’re going to find the nacho cheese Doritos at the Country Music Festival.

And live music just, to me, it has always helped me feel more of a connection to the artists out there than they ever did in my headphones.

And I’ve been able to discover artists that I love at these festivals because they’re playing a side stage, I can get up really close, and maybe they’re in the shade, and I’m taking a little break from the sun.

The other reason is that I think the younger generations, they need to see that we still got it, Donnie.

Like even if it looks a little bit different, the it that we have is the wisdom to last an entire festival without ending up passed out in the porta potty.

And we can do it with our understanding of our own limitations.

We can drink the water.

We can sit when sitting is available.

And we can outlast the young bucks at the multi-day Country Music Festival.

We can take back the festival circuit for ourselves.

And while we’re at it, maybe we’ll recover some of the youth that we seem to be lacking these days, even just for a long weekend.

And we do that, Donnie, by choosing discomfort.

Yeah, I don’t think so.

Because, Dave, there comes a time in every man’s life when he has to say, I’m not going to share a porter potty with 10,000 drunk children.

It just comes time.

And that time came for me.

There’s a certain level of comfort that I’m willing to sacrifice in order to enjoy something and check something out and grow.

But I don’t think that I’m willing to suffer for it intentionally.

And I think the real problem for me comes in at the cost with the suffering, right?

It’s not just that your feet hurt and that your sunburned and that you’re surrounded by insufferable fools.

It’s that it costs you just a lot of money, just a lot of money to go to these shows.

And even if you say, get press passes, because we’re such luminaries in Country Music media, you still have to pay for food.

Water costs money, and you’re, it’s just, it’s nuts.

That to me takes away a lot of the fun of the shows.

And I’m not saying, I go to shows all the time, and I stand because there’s no place to sit.

You’re still a hero, man.

Take credit where credit is due, man.

Anyhow, I’m not going to stand for that long.

I don’t want to be in the sun for that long.

I also don’t really like nacho cheese Doritos.

You really lost me there because, and I think it’s a pretty good example, is like, I’d much rather have a really good tortilla trip with good cheese dip.

You know what I’m saying?

I want some good queso, maybe some white queso.

Yeah, I know.

Maybe I shouldn’t have used the chip analogy because chips can be polarizing.

There are people out there that like Fritos.

I like Fritos, too.

There’s a time and place for all this stuff.

But there are better options, and that’s really what it’s about for me.

Because here’s the thing, Dave, we’re not outlasting this.

We’re not outlasting the Young Bucks.

We’re just not doing it.

Because we might not pass out in the porta potty, but we’re not going to even make it back to the shuttle bus.

We’re gonna die.

We’re gonna die in the desert, alone, afraid and covered with $30 beer cans.

It’s just not gonna work.

There, it’s just too much.

And I think, like, there are certain festivals that I would love to go to, like the Whitefish Festival in Montana.

I’d love to go to that.

But I’m like, I’m not gonna go camping for three days with thousands of people.

It isn’t gonna end well.

And you gotta get to Montana, or you gotta get to India, or you gotta get to outside of Austin.

All of this is, it’s so extraordinarily expensive, and it’s so extraordinarily uncomfortable.

The return on investment just isn’t there for me.

So, well, I respect where you’re coming from, Dave.

And again, I shall say, go with God.

If you choose to go to another one of these festivals, I will sit on my recliner drinking some nice herbal tea as I watch the headliners and go, this sounds like ****, and I’m gonna turn it off now.

I haven’t been to one in a couple years now, so I’m feeling a three-day music festival-sized void in my heart that needs to be filled.

Oh, boy.

Thank you for listening.

The best way to support us is to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever podcast platform you use.

You can find everything we do on our website, countrymusictads.com, and we’d love to hear what you think, so send us comments, suggestions, friendly banter on Instagram at countrymusictads or via email countrymusictads at gmail.com.

Stay tuned to our next episode when we speak with Tony Camel, a country music dad who’s also a Grammy-nominated songwriter, claw hammer banjo player and guitar aficionado.

He’s a great guy.

We’re going to be talking to him and you’ll love the conversation.

Until next time, whether you’re at the dance hall, the playground or the schoolyard or just folding some laundry, thanks for tuning in.

We’ll talk to you soon.

Stay tuned for our next episode when we speak with Tony Camel, a Country Music Dad who is also a Grammy nominated songwriter, Claw Hammo.

That was tough.

That’s a great word.

I wish that was an actual word.

Claw Hammo sounds like a Batman villain.

The evil Claw Hammo.

Not Claw Hammo.

Robin, come on.

Gold.

Gold, yes.

Gold, Donnie, solid gold.

Okay, all right, I’ll stop.

Stop recording.

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