Posted by Graham Hays
"Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?"
So reads the title of Mark Zwonitzer's biography of the Carter Family, the so-called First Family of Country Music. I'll admit up front, Kathleen Edwards, Kim Richey and anything else with an "alt" in front of "country" is about as far as my musical appreciation extends down that road, but Zwonitzer's book is a great read for the history alone.
More to the point, the title taken from a Carter Family song is also a fitting, if easily answered, theme for newly crowned SEC favorite Vanderbilt's Christina Wirth and Jennifer Risper.
Vanderbilt fans absolutely will miss Wirth and Risper when they depart after this season. But as it turns out, the two West Coast transplants will carry some of the Music City with them when they go.
Talking to Wirth and Risper on Tuesday for an upcoming story on how the Commodores hope to go about living up to their preseason support (a panel of SEC and national media members recently voted Vanderbilt as the preseason SEC favorite), Risper let it slip that she and Wirth, her roommate, are taking a class on country music this semester. A Californian from the Inland Empire outside Los Angeles, Risper was hardly a country music aficionado when she came to Vanderbilt, but a little time in Nashville can go a long way.
"I kind of like hearing all the history about that and everything that's going on with that," Risper said of the class. "I used to never, never want to listen to country music, but that's because I never really gave it a chance, either."
It didn't hurt that she quickly established a bond with Wirth, whose own well-developed love of country music emerged long before she left Arizona for the genre's heartland. Now the two human and organizational development majors have found a way to have a little educational fun (this is Vanderbilt, after all) with their musical interest, learning about everything from current country music to its roots at the turn of the last century and before.
"We have listening quizzes, and so Jen and I listen to country music in the room, so we can study," Wirth said. "So it's kind of an easy way to study for a test, just by listening to music. But it's just a fun elective, I guess. One of our assignments is to go to a country concert and write about it, so that's on our to-do list."
Who said there aren't any happy endings in country?
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