SKEETER says he lives in Hall, Georgia, up near the Tennessee line. But Hall, Georgia isn't on any maps and a curious stranger might spend an entire afternoon driving through the area without ever finding it.

Only after Skeeter says he knows you well enough will he let on that Hall, Georgia is no more. In the thirties, it was flooded over by a T.V.A. damn and the townspeople have moved into the surrounding hills, only to regroup on Saturday nights in Mountain City for the square dance and country music shows.

Skeeter and his friends start down late in the afternoon to buy beer (hard liquor isn't sold in north Georgia after sundown because of the region's astronomical murder rates) and then stop to eat supper at the Brazier Burger. After eating Skeeter gulps down several cans of beer and begins to smile, "Gotta get loose, so I can daince ever' daince," he says.

Inside the cavernous, wooden hall the dancing and singing go on without breaks until the town folk get either worn out or too drunk to stand up. By then, though, it's usually about midnight and the crowd starts heading back to the Brazier Burger.

Skeeter and I sat in the front seat of his '62 Chevrolet and he pointed out some "real good boys" he had gone to school with. "Good fighters too," he bragged, "throw a real quick punch." Then he stopped smiling and said it. "You know any of them goddamned hippies?"

The violence, the undisguised prejudices, the conservatism, the hard drinking-they're all of a piece somehow. Once it was called hillbilly, and for years only politicians, raised to a new social class on their flatbed trucks and pointing to their necks, yelling, "Look, it's red," a couple of songwriters in Nashville and a bevy of Skeeters took them seriously.

About the same time Huey Long and Eugene Talmadge were coming to power, country music was evolving its unique sound, each feeding on the same poor white traditions. Without question discs pressed for political organizations by country musicians helped to shape the ideology of the still new audience.

In 1925 a label called KKK, showing a fiery cross on a scarlet background, featured the 100 per cent Americans playing Why I am a Klansman. Today a comparable mood can be observed in Reb Rebel records whose anti-black jokes on NAACP Flight 105 reportedly sold over a million copies in the southeast..

As important as outlaw record companies was the impact of radio and major recording studios moving into the South. By 1930 country music claimed a rabidly loyal following that traveled to political rallies as much to hear Jimmie Rodgers yodel as to see "The Kingfisher." Even today a rising Southern politician can't consider running for office without a popular country act-perhaps Porter Wagoner and his Po Boys or the Fruit Jar Drinkers-to introduce his speeches. In style and message, the two have become inseparable.

MERLE HAGGARD is representative of the current synthesis of country music and its white, lower middle-class politics. Born into the depression in southern California, Haggard learned as a teenager how to steal and strip cars. Not very much later he was in San Quentin on a burglary charge when he heard Johnny Cash and decided to take up the guitar. By 1964, five years after he was released from prison, he had two records that sold over a million copies and in 1970 his Okie from Muskogee topped a million inside two weeks, won for him the country artist of the year award and a special invitation to the White House.

Haggard now lives in a ranch-style home in Bakersfield, California, and drinks Old Grand-Dad warm out of the bottle.

His music insists on gut-bucket lyrics that embody the simple, almost parabolic forces behind rural southern culture. In the liquor-making, nigger-hating, broad-fucking, communities that spawned country music they wanted to hear it straight and with guts and if that meant doing away with qualifying, complicating details that was O.K.

Haggard's Mama's Hungry Eyes and Okie from Muskogee locate themselves in the center of this ethic, songs he sings without a breath of irony or wavering self-consciousness. His bearing, mannerisms, even Haggard's cocky smile reflect the poor southern white's defiant pride. Constantly faced with social and historical pressures that threaten his social position, the country music has been able to confer on its audience a heroic dimension missing in their lives and politics.

The roots of country music can be traced to the minstrel shows that toured the South in the late nineteenth century. Tony Russell in his book Black White, and Blues found most of the groups were make up of blackened-faced white singers who played "coon ballads," songs most musicographers have followed back to ante-bellum field ballads. The premier groups of the time, The Christry Minstrels and the North Carolina Ramblers, played for both black and white audiences. To set themselves apart from common medicine shows and folk singers, a Christy Minstrel's advertisement read: "Anything appertaining to vulgarity is strictly excluded."

The same moral pretensions have traditionally been a part of country music, persistent themes of infidelity and violence are passed on in a didactic spirit. Until the mid-twenties a considerable stock of music existed that was played by both races ( John Henry, Corinne, Corrina or Dark Town Strutter's Ball ) but only the white singing groups attached to their music an ethical message.