The first country artist to champion recession-bruised working folks is...John Rich?

Look at the Billboard country singles chart right now, and you find parallel realities. Rodney Atkins' "It's America"—buoyant, Barenaked Ladies-style rock plus banjo—portrays "a ride in a Chevrolet" as part of the essence of our national identity, right up there with cute kids selling lemonade. Like a lot of other songs on the chart, it's powerfully sentimental.

A few spots down and climbing is John Rich's angry, steel guitar-laced anthem "Shuttin' Detroit Down," which makes burdened auto workers—the assemblers of those same Chevys—and willfully wasteful corporate CEOs into emblems of class inequality on a national scale.

"I know a lot of people out there know that I campaigned with John McCain and that I'm a conservative and all that," Rich says. "But let me tell you something—the message of this song supersedes Republican, Democrat, independent, red, yellow, black and white. You would be hard-pressed to find an American out there right now that's sitting in front of their television screen clapping their hands because they're so overjoyed at watching how their tax dollars are being spent."

No other act has had anything like "Shuttin' Detroit Down" on the country charts since the economic crisis hit, and yet, Rich says beating everybody else to the punch wasn't his primary motivation: "I didn't write this song because I saw that no one else had written it. I wrote the song because I was straight-up pissed off."

As singular as the song may seem at the moment, it's nothing new for country. During the Great Depression, modern country's hillbilly-singer predecessors offered escape by way of hot dance numbers and gospel songs about heaven, but they also addressed the abuse of coal miners, mill workers, sharecroppers and migrants. Even Woody Guthrie started as a hillbilly singer before becoming patron saint of the folk revival further north.

Well after the Depression, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash were among those still taking up for the working class. But ever since country music began drifting toward suburbs and soccer moms in the 1980s, most successful acts have kept righteous anger and grit at a safe distance. (That's not to say that nobody has attempted country songs of a timely and pointed nature. Alan Jackson and Toby Keith certainly did after 9/11.)

Currently, Liz Rose (co-writer of a slew of Taylor Swift's hits) has co-written a couple of economy-themed songs that have yet to be cut. One of them, a breezy song titled "Cotton Dress," depicts a waitress pining for the blissful scenes of open fields, sundresses, bare feet and pickup trucks that populate so many country music videos. You could take it as an illustration of how far the realities of listeners' lives (even white-collar ones) are from those images. Or—from Rose's more sanguine perspective—as a snapshot of attainable aspirations. "The girl in the cotton dress could just be a day off work," she says.

While "Cotton Dress" has garnered interest from those looking for recordable material, "Wait And See"—a song Rose co-wrote with Pat McLaughlin—hasn't yet. It's about sticking it out in a small northern town, even when jobs dry up and greater opportunities beckon elsewhere. Whether the song is ultimately commercial or not, Rose is convinced it was worth writing: "I mean, I would love for it to get cut, because I'd love to see that message," she says. "But it may be a little vague for country."

Rose's publisher, Clay Myers (vice president and general manager of Still Working Music) is by necessity more focused on the practical pressures his writers face. "The music industry has been going through a recession for five or six, seven years," he says. "So they're realizing that we're not in the album-selling business—we're in the single-selling business. So will writers write something different for whatever the [kind of thing] that people want to hear out there is? Yeah, I think they will."

Some formerly chart-topping country acts—who probably feel slightly less hit-making pressure these days—have put out recession-relevant music. Early last year, Kathy Mattea released Coal, a collection of old-timey folk ballads lamenting the coal miner's plight, inspired as much by the 2006 Sago mine disaster as by job losses. Aaron Tippin deemed this the right time to launch a trucker song revival with his album In Overdrive. (Besides hokey humor, it includes Jerry Reed's Smokey and the Bandit theme "East Bound and Down" and Haggard's "Movin' On.")

On Wynonna Judd's new album, Sing: Chapter 1, she covers Haggard's "Are the Good Times Really Over?," a song that waxes nostalgic for better-made Chevys, among other things.

Bluegrass has yielded the most potent album-length, anti-greed statement so far: Del McCoury's Moneyland. McCoury not only recorded three of Haggard's songs, he had Haggard sing on a couple. (Haggard's repertoire—not Guthrie's folk-identified one—is apparently the place contemporary country acts turn to articulate working-class worries.)

As for "Shuttin' Detroit Down," the facts that it cracked the top 20 less than two months after Rich wrote it with John Anderson and sped the release of his new album, Son of a Preacher Man (which came out this Tuesday, instead of in May, as originally planned), indicates that something out of the ordinary has happened. Major labels don't usually move that quickly.