In election years, country music is as close as I get to advocating for a litmus test.

I don’t care for parties or platforms and tribalism has little appeal.

But, I doubt you can be a journalist operating in the public interest if you don’t include at least a little country music in your playlist.

If the scribbler’s creed is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, how can you not draw inspiration from the first popular music made by and for the poor and beaten down?

Ditto elected officials sworn to serve the entire community and officers sworn to dispense equal treatment under the law.

If you’re not in tune with songs about people who grow our food, mine, log and build the things we rely on, and truck our goods to within reach...how equitable is your view of equity? Are the working poor on your radar if you’re waving an air baton to music made by and for the children of surgeons and CEOs?

Obviously, I’m exaggerating, but not much.

And I want to be clear: this litmus test is about inclusion of America’s invisible poor, not exclusion of minorities who’ve been made unwelcome on country radio.

Blame Ken Burns’ new documentary on PBS for my zeal. His exaltation of country’s stories and story-tellers is just the kind of confirmation that hardens my bias against those who sniffily snub the mix of ballads, blues and gospel.

Country music is Abe Lincoln’s spare phrases made melodic.

The Emancipator distilled the American experiment down to “of the people, by the people, for the people,” a pithy contrast to the brutal stratification by which Europe codified the rotten dynastic system celebrated in every Ralph Lauren ad.

When Victrolas reached the mainstream, America’s taste-makers were shocked to discover huge demand for working class songs about love and death and nostalgia for life before the clock-punching drudgery of industrialization.

This was our first roots music to break through, doing so when only the likes of operatic tenor Enrico Caruso and the Boston Symphony Orchestra were thought fit for distribution. Scratchy fiddle tunes (recorded on a lark) flew off the shelves as people found music they wanted, instead of settling for the Europhilia gatekeeping deemers deemed proper.

It was country that smashed the Upper Crust’s lock on mass music, and right behind came blues (then called “race records”) then jazz and rock leading to the improbable million-selling jeremiads of Public Enemy.

Woven as it is into the lessons of The Great Depression, the best of country music reminds us of the ones who are held back despite Lincoln’s prayer at Gettysburg.

Hence my litmus test.

If you don’t bob your chin to Mother Maybelle Carter guitar licks (in any of the musical genres where her echo never dies), secretly yodel along with Jimmy Rodgers, shiver at the sound of Patsy Cline or Dolly Parton’s voice, search your soul over a Johnny Cash lyric or tap your feet to the African gourd sound of a banjo...maybe Lincoln’s idea of a government “of the people” isn’t your cup of Earl Grey.

I’m not saying you should love all country. The stadium cowboys who gin up hate to sell albums turn my stomach. And I’ll gladly stipulate Nashville’s institutions, like the CMA, were wretchedly slow to recognize their first black superstar, Charley Pride, and cowardly quick to cast out one of the great female voices of all time, k.d. lang.

But the CMA is to country fans approximately as the NRA is to gun owners: out of step and servile to corporate interests instead of the mission.

Meanwhile, journalists and public servants ought to pick up the lesson of this music: common folk’s stories matter.

Artists from Wyclef Jean to Elton John, Ludacris to Elvis Costello, Mick Jagger to Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong to Wynton Marsalis and more than a few Dylan-grade songwriters have dug into and appreciated country for its deep connection to broad swaths of America that are ill-served by Congress, stepped on in the courts and routinely sneered at by coastal elites.

Cross-over duets often reveal just how high-born and high-brow mainstream musical stars are. Better, those collaborations stun cool kids who have no idea how great the voices and instrumentals of country music are until they hear something like the sheer perfection of Louis Armstrong riffing alongside Jimmie “The Singing Brakeman” Rodgers on Blue Yodel No. 9.

So, while litmus tests are odious, I sure hope if you’re working to serve the public interest, your playlist includes some country music. Maybe if all of our playlists crossed more often, we’d be more tolerant of one another and less blind to the hopeless, hungry side of town.

(Miller is Editor of The Leader because he plays the guitar poorly, abandoned hope of a blues tenor sax career, and has an unreliable memory for anything but fragments of the lyrics to hundreds of obscure songs, from “Mamie’s Blues/#219” to “Bessie the Heifer.”)