Country music, suicide, and spuriousness

Stack and Gundlach (1992) tested and supported the hypothesis that the greater the air time devoted to country music in metropolitan areas, the greater the white suicide rate will be. We could not replicate this effect (Maguire and Snipes 1994), and Stack and Gundlach (1994) responded with a criticism of our methods, more specifically demonstrating measurement error in our construction of suicide rates. Here we show that this criticism sidesteps our most relevant critique of their study. Yet, we heed their advice, reattempt the replication using their own white suicide data, and still fail to produce a significant effect of country music on white suicide. Although the two are related bivariately, controlling for divorce, poverty, southern region, and gun availability results in a near-zero multivariate effect.