Luke Bryan, Lady Antebellum, Carrie Underwood, Kellie Pickler, The Band Perry and Sugarland are all household names. Taylor Swift continues to be a maven for adoration as the country-pop princess released yet another best-selling album last October and on Nov. 28, Scotty McCreery lent his crooning bass to this year’s Rockefeller Center Tree Lighting. It’s safe to say that country is trending in the American consciousness.

That is not to say that the country and blues musical genres have not had their pockets of fans in past years, but the recent trend is unique in its pervasiveness; it seems as if country is everywhere. The best explanation can be summed up in everyone’s favorite catchall: the economy (and more importantly, dealing with it).

Like the stories of the Great Depression, country music often deals directly or indirectly with the economy and money.  Montgomery Gentry’s “Where I Come From” glorifies small-town honesty and community over a glamorous city lifestyle, a place where it doesn’t matter so much if one has money since relationships and people matter more than things.

Eric Church’s “Homeboy” shares the same mindset, though it also serves as a direct reaction to the excess glorified in hip-hop (“with your hip-hop hat and your pants on the ground/Heard you cussed out Momma, pushed Daddy around… Here you are runnin’ these dirty old streets/Tattoo on your neck, fake gold on your teeth”). Today’s country extols down-home virtues of hard work and immaterial joys, virtues that become much easier to appreciate without money to complicate them.

The mindset behind this southern trend is now deeply entrenched in American society and reflected in media other than music; country is now a huge and fashionable part of TV, movies and style as well as music. ABC’s “Nashville” and Reba McEntire’s new show “Malibu Country” are just a few examples of the country trend manifestation. The most telling, though perhaps more subtle, example is the recent emergence of cowboy and riding boots as particularly trendy; one can see such footwear worn proudly and often far north of the Mason-Dixon line, with Vogue magazine catching on and acknowledging them as a trend. Country’s influence can be seen in even the most unlikely of places.

Country is appealing in today’s world because it embraces having fun and raising hell without being rich or highbrow. The pathos of the argument can be appropriately summed up in the chorus of Church’s “Homeboy”: “You’re gonna wish one day you were sittin’ on the gate of a truck by the lake/with your high school flame on one side, ice cold beer on the other/Ain’t no shame in a blue collar 40, little house, little kids, little small town story/If you don’t ever do anything else for me just do this for me brother, come on home, boy.”

It is popular now because the idea that a small life can be just as important as “making it big,” a lesson that hasn’t been as close to home since the Great Depression. In many ways, country symbolizes making lemonade out of lemons (or in this instance, perhaps sweet tea).