The Semiotics of Country: How Bourbon Became the Genre’s Sacred Drink

Country music functions as a symbolic economy, a system of recurring motifs that convert lived experience into myth. I’m talking myth in the philosophical sense of how the French philosopher Roland Barthes would describe the word. It also involves looking at country through the lens of Barthes’ theory of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. 

This essay is the first in a series called the Semiotics of Country that looks at the meaning of the motifs and symbols found in the genre.

What is Roland Barthes’ philosophy of myths and semiotics? 

First, let’s take a moment to understand who Roland Barthes was and his perspective on myths. Barthes earned recognition in the 1950s for his work called Mythologies, where he examined different aspects of French life and pulled them out of context to see how signs became a part of popular culture. The subject matter of Mythologies ranged from steak and chips to Citroen cars. In each essay, Barthes picked apart every motif and association that came with the object he wrote about.

For example, when writing about the futuristic Citroen DS 19, he compared the car to “great gothic cathedrals” and that “speed here is expressed by less aggressive, less athletic signs, as if it were evolving from a primitive to a classical form.”

In his essay Ornamental Cooking, Barthes prophesied the rise of mass media presentation. He described how ornamentation makes food look more appealing and sellable to consumers in photography, saying “ornamentation proceeds in two contradictory ways…on the one hand, fleeing from nature thanks to a kind of frenzied baroque (sticking shrimps in a lemon, making a chicken look pink, serving grapefruit hot), and on the other, trying to reconstitute it through an incongruous artiface (strewing meringue mushrooms and holly leaves on a traditional long-shaped Christmas cake, reflecting the head of a crayfish around the sophisticated bechamel which hides their bodies.” This brings to mind the exaggerated gloss of food photography on social media. 

Let’s take another example of a Barthes myth or sign in the context of the revolutionary Che Guevara. Guevara has become a symbol for rebellion and counterculture because of the signs that have been projected onto him by society. His ‘cool rebel’ mystique has nothing to do with his actual qualities because as a political revolutionary, Guevara was willing to kill people to achieve his goals. The society he ‘rebelled’ to create was just as oppressive as the society he brought down, and his public speeches were only rhetoric.

After his death, Guevara’s image became a sign to be moulded by corporations. His face was printed on a shirt to appeal to a consumer’s desire to identify with the perceived qualities of the rebel – youth and antiauthority. Guevara’s image has now lost all its real meaning and become appropriated as a new sign. So, when someone wears that shirt with Guevara’s face, they could think they are making a statement about individuality and raging against the machine. In truth, they have bought the shirt and have bought into conformity. This is accepted in popular culture because the image of a person with dangerous ideas has been turned into a myth. This is Barthes’ definition of a myth in that a popular idea has been drained of its original meaning and repackaged into something new or fitted into a fresh landscape. 

This same kind of thinking can be applied to country music. To catalogue its objects and signs e.g. bourbon and Silverados is to encounter a vernacular iconography that bridges the material and the metaphysical. Each motif isn’t simply descriptive but constitutive. It provides the genre with semiotic scaffolding or the mythologies through which country situates itself within the cultural imagination. The signs are at once tools, consumables and ritual symbols, and their persistence reveals country’s underlying philosophical commitments to authenticity and memory. 

With that in mind, I’ll now do a mythological study of bourbon to see how it fits into country’s wider semiotic legacy.

Bourbon as myth: the liquid sign 

To understand bourbon in country music through Barthes, we have to see it not as a drink but as a signifier emptied and refilled by cultural desire. Barthes reminds us that myth is not falsehood but a second-order semiological system i.e. a sign that has been lifted out of its immediate context and made to mean something larger and more natural than it really is. A bottle of bourbon in real life may be a distilled spirit, produced in distilleries, owned by multinational conglomerates and marketed with similar strategies. 

Yet in a country song, the industrial fact is erased. What replaces it is bourbon as an eternal companion and bourbon as a personal sacrament. Bourbon occupies the same cultural role as steak in France or wine in Italy. Not only nourishment, but a statement of identity. Indeed, all kinds of whisky take on the same American identity within a country song. When Morgan Wallen drawls about lining up Whisky Glasses or Chris Stapleton croons about Tennessee Whisky, the drink becomes a metonym for a complex cluster of values: masculinity, endurance and melancholy.

Bourbon is the American South distilled. It’s a portable totem of grit and endurance and Barthes’ myth in its purest form. Bourbon mythologises masculinity not as bravado but as an ability to sit with pain and accept it rather than run from it. In this way, bourbon functions as a country analogue to what Barthes saw in French wine. It wasn’t just a drink to him, it was an ideology of the nation. Bourbon is much the same because country music presents it as a drink that transforms sorrow into dignity. 

We can gain further mythological insights about bourbon from the works of the philosopher Gaston Bachelard and writer Mircea Eliade. For the former, we can take inspiration from his idea of intimate immensity, a small container that evokes vast emotional landscapes and ties into reverie and contemplation. When a country singer describes bourbon, they release grief and longing. Bourbon becomes ambered time, a liquid archive of the past.

In this sense, it operates like Eliade’s concept of sacred and profane time. Eliade’s philosophy was about religion being based on hierophanies i.e. manifestations of the sacred. Thus, the human experience was split into sacred and profane time, and that was much closer to how our ancestors saw life. The sacred was the space for gods and ideals, the plane of power and immortality. The profane was a space for the mundane and the banal, the plane of random acts. 

Country music, for all its working-class realism, constantly stages this same dialectic through bourbon. To drink in a song is never to merely sip alcohol in ordinary time. It’s to enter a ritualised act that suspends the profane and ushers in the sacred. 

On the surface, bourbon belongs to profane time. It’s consumed after work, with friends or in solitude, and it contributes to the cycle of labour and leisure. It marks the passage of ordinary hours e.g. the Friday night drink that releases the week’s exhaustion or the late-night pour that measures out insomnia. In this register, bourbon is simply one more event on the linear line of days, a way of counting down until sleep or forgetting. 

But in country music, bourbon consistently exceeds this role. It becomes a sacramental liquid that draws the drinker into ritual and transcendence. To pour a glass it to re-enact a pattern older than the self, the heartbreak song in which sorrow is drowned and the mythic image of the lonesome cowboy with bottle in hand. Each time the act is performed, it reactivates a cycle or return.

Eliade wrote that sacred time rituals allowed individuals to return to what he called the mythical age, a golden age or time where life was authentic or things made sense. Through ritual, the practitioner actualises the mythical age by returning to this state. This is exactly what country singers do when they sing about bourbon. The heartbreak that drove Hank Williams to the bottle is the same heartbreak that Jay Webb re-enacts in a song like Bury Me With Bourbon. Bourbon links them across decades and collapses historical distance to draw the drinker into sacred time, where all sorrows rhyme and every glass poured is the first glass ever poured. 

Here, bourbon embodies Eliade’s concept of the eternal return. The act of drinking is a ritual repetition of primordial drama: man facing loss, man enduring grief, man reaching for relief through ritual liquid and gaining transcendence. It doesn’t matter if the specific loss is a breakup in 1950 or a divorce in 2025. The bourbon myth collapses them into one archetypical event. In sacred time, sorrow is universal, and bourbon is the ritual object that mediates between the individual and the eternal pattern.

Bourbon truly goes beyond a drink in country music. It’s a mythic liquid, emptied of its industrial fact and refilled with cultural yearning. Through Barthes, we see how it functions as a sign of masculinity and lamentation transfigured into nobility or destructive catharsis. Through Bachelard and Eliade, we glimpse how every pour becomes more than an act of consumption. To sip bourbon in a country song is to participate in an eternal return, linking singers and listeners into one archetypical act of endurance. Therefore, bourbon is country’s sacrament, the liquid through which the genre remembers, grieves, survives and adapts.