What's right and what's left about country music? Not that you need let it trouble you too much. I certainly don't, though naturally there are some limits in this matter as in nearly everything else. But anyway here's a guy - Bob Proehl - discussing the issue, and he says:
At a first glance, country music seems traditionally allied with the sort of down-home, small-town ethics and values touted by the Republicans... But the politics of country music has never been a simple red or blue. A genre that grew up with close ties to American folk music, country couldn't help but pick up a bit of early folk music's populist streak. While to an extent, the cowboy imagery and characters prevalent in a lot of country songs are inherently apolitical, speaking to a time and place located permanently elsewhere, outside any current political situation, the working class characters that also populate the genre often espouse a politic[s] that seems more in line with the economically compassionate aspects of the Democrats, even if it retains the cultural conservatism and small town values of the Republicans.
A sidelight here is that Proehl takes it for a possible qualification of Willie Nelson's 'populist' leanings that he teamed up with Toby Keith on 'Beer For My Horses' - which he, Proehl, takes to be (though only possibly) 'a hang 'em high call to arms against the perpetrators of the September 11th attacks'. Well, let's assume that that's what the song in fact was. I'd say it told you nothing about the leftward or rightward tendencies of Willie Nelson. You don't have to be a hand-wringer, root-causist or turn-the-other-cheeker to be a populist, or Democrat or (dare I say it?) left-winger.