The urban-versus-rural divide, and the antithetical moral characteristics projected onto them, is not unique to country music and has roots hundreds of years deep, at least. Raymond Williams's 1973 book, The Country and the City, analyzes this binary in literature dating back to the 16th century. The Bible contains cautionary tales against leaving home in search of indulgence, as described in the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
The discourse over city and country has evolved over time, and taken on its own identity within country music. Songs that pine for an idyllic rural past have been a part of country music since the genre was first invented as a marketing category for rural white Southerners in the 1920s. Some of the earliest country songs, like Fiddlin' John Carson's "Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane," recorded in 1923 and often celebrated as one of the first country records, yearns for a rustic home. Carson's song, like many others in popular music at the time, was a minstrel tune, commonly performed in Blackface, and written in 1871 and presented from the perspective of a former slave who longed for a pre-emancipation past. Carson also regularly performed at KKK rallies.
Animosity towards urban areas in country songs grew particularly pronounced in the post-World War II decades — just as the majority of country listeners urbanized. Songs like Ray Price's "City Lights" and Stonewall Jackson's "Life to Go" (both recorded in 1958) depicted cities as dirty, lonely, violent places. Cities outside the South were a frequent target, as in Bobby Bare's "Detroit City" (1963), Ben Peters's "San Francisco is a Lonely Town" (1969), Buck Owens's "I Wouldn't Live in New York City (If They Gave Me the Whole Damn Town)" (1970) and George Jones and Tammy Wynette's "Southern California" (1977). Most often, the city was framed as a place that led to immorality for women, as heard in Bare's "Streets of Baltimore" (1966) when a man takes his woman to the city but she's left "walking the streets of Baltimore." Elsewhere, one could only expect to find murder, heartbreak and decay in the city. The country, as described in hits like Dottie West's "Country Sunshine" (1973), Merle Haggard's "Big City" (1982) and up to more recent years in songs like Tim McGraw and Faith Hill's "Meanwhile Back at Mama's" (2014), continued to be depicted as idyllic.
The rise of anti-city songs during the affluent, post-World War II era coincided with a moment when the formerly rural and heavily white country music audience was rapidly suburbanizing and achieving social mobility through home ownership. At the same time, selective availability of home loans in suburbs and racially restrictive housing covenants in cities furthered white flight, making cities synonymous with non-whiteness.