Pop culture says 'Howdy, ma'am' to country music and moonshine

The Coen brothers' "True Grit," which plays out over rural Arkansas and the Indian Territory of the 1870s, is the duo's highest-grossing film to date, and last week it became the second-most-nominated movie in this year's Oscar race.

Earlier in January, Oscar winner Gwyneth Paltrow made her return to the multiplex via Nashville in "Country Strong"; in December, a jumpsuit worn by the late Johnny Cash sold for 10 times the expected amount at auction; and fashion lines from Ralph Lauren to Louis Vuitton are taking inspiration from pioneers and the Old West.

Moonshine has become as trendy as absinthe. Canning and raising chickens have become hipster hobbies. FarmVille was the most popular Facebook game of 2010.

It's as clear as a dust cloud on the horizon coalescing into a stampede of bison: Call it country, Western, country-and-Western or something else altogether, but popular culture can't seem to get enough of rural Americana.

"It's cool to be rural now," says Patrick Gottsch, founder and chief executive of the Omaha-based Rural Media Group, which owns RFD-TV, a cable network devoted to rural topics such as agribusiness and country music. "For a while, there was a stigma (about the country) — that you had to move to the city to make a living. And that's been changing."

Neilsen numbers back that claim: RFD-TV's weekly average viewership of 13,215,000 represents an increase of 74 percent since 2007.

The folks at Nashville-based CMT (Country Music Television) have similarly noticed an increased awareness of — and appreciation for — country. In June, the premiere of its annual Music Awards telecast pulled in 3 million viewers — up 19 percent from 2009, and the channel is in about 91 million U.S. households.

"I like to say we're in 90 million homes — and they aren't all trailer parks," said Dee McLaughlin, CMT's senior vice president of brand marketing.

But the growing appetite for country hasn't just been about entertainment options coming out of Nashville or Nebraska.

The thread runs through cyberspace, where FarmVille, a faux-farmstead game in which people harvest virtual crops and tend virtual livestock, has attracted millions of players. This month alone, nearly 55 million people played.

Backwoods America has even been distilled to its essence and bottled — in the form of moonshine (essentially unaged whiskey and variously known as hillbilly hooch or white lightning) that is being stocked in trendy watering holes in Los Angeles and New York.

Brad Beckerman, chief executive and co-founder of Stillhouse Distillery, which makes Original Moonshine Clear corn Whiskey, credits the trend to "the speed of everything.

"Thanks to things like the BlackBerry and the Internet, people are exhausted at how fast everything moves. People want to come back to center. They want to go to a moment in time when everything moved at a slower pace, back to their roots," he said.

The economic downturn and world events may also be a factor.

"The resurgence has really been going on for the past 10 years," Gottsch said. "After 9/11 was when people really wanted to reconnect with their roots, and I think most baby boomers either grew up on a farm or had a grandma or grandpa who had a farm before they moved to the city, so it's this yearning for things to go back to the way they used to be."

But trends don't last forever, and even before Jeff Bridges (who, by the way, took home an Academy Award last year for his role as a country singer in "Crazy Heart") rode into theaters as "True Grit's" one-eyed U.S. marshal, Rooster Cogburn, a game that rolled out in November had already pushed FarmVille down to the No. 2 spot.

It's called CityVille.