The fact that you were in a small town in Montana probably had something to do with as well.
That probably had the most to do with it, @ezwind . They played top 40 hits and old-goldies and C&W. They probably played Blowing In The Wind back then, unless it had some kind of bad rap of being a protest oriented song--as good as my memory is, I do not remember. My Mom liked different types of music--she was relatively open minded. Relatively. She bought the 45 rpm of Hey Jude because she thought it was beautiful when she heard it on the radio. She did like what she heard by Paul Simon, although she was a bit aghast by Kodachrome ("When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school . . .").
My Dad was different story. I remember playing an 8 track (I think it was a greatest hits) for my mom because I had just discovered Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da and I thought it was so cool, and my Dad walked by and was quite condescending. He liked Lawrence Welk and he also liked Kenny Rodgers. In the ’90s, after my mom died, he’d come to visit us for Thanksgivings and one year we all went to DC to see Lucinda Williams at the Oh Nine Thirty Club and that didn’t do anything at all for him. A year or two later we went to a local club to see Jill Sobule and Warren Zevon. Not impressed. I played him some Leonard Cohen on my system which was, even back in the later ’90s , not a bad system, and maybe you can guess how he felt about that. He wasn’t liking the Cowboy Junkies cover of I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry; "I don’t think that’s how Hank Williams meant for that to ever sound."
Which is all to say that different people have different thoughts about what is great and what is pathetic.