Chapter Two follows a restless Rogers’ attempt to find himself as a young man by going abroad to seek work as a cowboy. He first journeyed to Argentina, then South Africa, and finally, Australia. A struggle to achieve success led him into popular "cowboy shows" where his riding and roping skills made him an attraction as "The Cherokee Kid" and symbol America for foreign audiences. Returnng to the United States after a couple of years, and determined to continue a career in entertainment, he joined a popular Wild West show featured at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. When the show went to New York and found success, Rogers affirmed his determination to be a cowboy showman and professional entertainer.

For the past two decades, the cowboy who inhabits country music narratives has appeared with increasing frequency in a seaside setting or beach environment that appears to contradict the well-established conventions of place and space in the genre. Where rural farms and ranches, for instance, evoked codes of white, male working-class sustenance, physical labor, and pride in forging a symbiotic relationship with the land, the new beach imagery offered a different catalog of associative meaning: leisure, escape, travel away from one’s home and roots, and a sense of unbounded freedom. This chapter traces the rise of beach imagery as a setting and reference point in country music, both in song narratives and music videos, since the 1990s. Ultimately, this chapter suggests that, in spite of their ubiquity, these beach settings are only comprehensible to their audience because the underlying cultural meaning of country music has fundamentally changed.

Reconstruction ended in 1876 as railroads, mining, and agriculture grew. Robber Barons emerged as the leaders of these activities became rich. The Supreme Court in the 1880s eliminated the constitutional amendments passed during Reconstruction to help Blacks by either rejecting them or reinterpreting them. Jim Crow laws were passed in many Southern states after 1896 depriving Blacks of the vote and leading to a decline in Black education. I describe the movie, Birth of a Nation, to show the attitude of white people at the time of World War I toward Blacks and Reconstruction. Those views have been shown since to be totally false.