"At the time the world was all upside down. The American people were beginning to move around a lot. The old hometown ties had been pretty much broken. The theme of Farmer Takes a Wife appealed to people. Everybody was homesick. And it sold and sold and sold"
About this Quote
Dislocation is doing the selling here, not artistry. Gould sketches a moment when the country feels physically and emotionally unmoored: people "beginning to move around a lot", hometown ties "pretty much broken". That plain phrasing matters. It treats mobility not as heroic frontier myth but as social severance, a quiet admission that the celebrated American habit of going elsewhere comes with a cost.
His real insight is commercial and slightly unsentimental: "Farmer Takes a Wife" succeeds because it functions like a portable hometown. The title alone promises a stable script - land, marriage, rootedness - at the precise moment those certainties are slipping out of reach. Calling it a "theme" is telling. Gould isn't romanticizing the work; he's describing a marketable emotional product. Homesickness becomes an engine of consumption. People buy the story because they cannot buy the past.
The repetition - "sold and sold and sold" - lands like a cash register. It suggests appetite bordering on compulsion, as if audiences keep paying to rehearse belonging. There's subtextual critique in that rhythm: a culture uproots itself and then pays entertainment to soothe the ache of being uprooted.
Contextually, the line fits an America transitioning into broader mobility and modernity, when movement (for work, land, ambition) strains local identity. Gould captures the paradox: progress creates longing, and longing creates hits.
His real insight is commercial and slightly unsentimental: "Farmer Takes a Wife" succeeds because it functions like a portable hometown. The title alone promises a stable script - land, marriage, rootedness - at the precise moment those certainties are slipping out of reach. Calling it a "theme" is telling. Gould isn't romanticizing the work; he's describing a marketable emotional product. Homesickness becomes an engine of consumption. People buy the story because they cannot buy the past.
The repetition - "sold and sold and sold" - lands like a cash register. It suggests appetite bordering on compulsion, as if audiences keep paying to rehearse belonging. There's subtextual critique in that rhythm: a culture uproots itself and then pays entertainment to soothe the ache of being uprooted.
Contextually, the line fits an America transitioning into broader mobility and modernity, when movement (for work, land, ambition) strains local identity. Gould captures the paradox: progress creates longing, and longing creates hits.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
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