Not in any way a slam on country music, but demographics-wise it seems more popular where things aren't all that bad but people have unspoken fears. The periphery either still has real problems or the values and numbers reported to us are way wrong.
I think that we need to differentiate between genres of country/western/associated genres here. Like, Western swing, sure, it's mostly innocuous, but there's also stuff like House of the Rising Sun (likely first recorded in Appalachia), which is about, well, becoming a prostitute to make ends meet. Or most outlaw country...Steve Earle speaking about generational trauma and alcoholism on Copperhead Road, a large part of Johnny Cash's oeuvre (Folsom Prison Blues, Sam Hall, &etc.)...
The origin of a lot of this sort of music is raw and real: it's just that as it's filtered down and evolved, it's lost some of that edge. A more recent parallel would be hip-hop, especially gangsta rap. It started as a down-to-the-roots movement, describing the actual life on the street, unvarnished, through poetry. Then it got popular, glamorized, and basically became a gilt façade of what it started as...and then people started playing with it: taking it to 11 with horrorcore, or reinterpreting it through socially conscious lenses. But now it's a discussable art form, without the bite it might've had originally. Same thing happened with rock and roll, punk rock, metal, synthwave...industrial, black metal, and noise have mostly escaped such a fate, probably because musically they don't have the level of accessibility.
Hope this isn't too real-world for the forum rules, but for the Periphery...I'd look up the Renegades, from Botswana. African leather cowboy metal fandom. Taking something that's generally foreign and making it their own, which makes them feel like truer fans than most (myself included). I could see this happening out in the periphery, and it's beautiful.
