Tag Archives: country music

John Hennings on How Country Music Got More Racist

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I really liked this comment John Hennings left last week about Brad Paisley’s “Accidental Racist”, so I thought I’d highlight it here.

Noah, I agree in general with your points about this song, and I enjoyed this essay, but I think you got the title wrong. You correctly assert that country music got more racist, but you don’t explain how. At the risk of stating the obvious, I think it was an unfortunate side effect of the polarization during the Civil Rights Movement. But I don’t think that’s the whole story of what happened to country music, and I don’t think racism, per se, is the problem with the song.

You and my fellow commentators are right to point to country’s current vacuity as one source of the trouble. Country music is far from uniquely Southern and Western, but it is identifiably so. Like other forms of music from the poor, rural places, it is borne of hard times. Despite the current economic struggles, times aren’t as hard for most of us hillbillies as they were in Hank Snow’s day, so country music now has less to say. We’re also not as isolated, so country music is less distinctive.

The culture that made Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong the men they were is severely endangered. The Starbucks reference in “Accidental Racist” is a good indicator. Prosperity and progress have made the lives in the flyover states (regardless of color) more similar to those on Long Island or in Orange County than to those of Roy Acuff or DeFord Bailey. Many rural kids listen to pop, hip-hop and rock growing up. They don’t start voluntarily listening to country until they get jobs and families. Country music now talks about the responsible grown-up lifestyle more than other music, so we mature into people for whom country music speaks.

Had “Accidental Racist” been the integrated, honest modern equivalent of “Blue Yodel #9?, Paisley and LL Cool J would have commiserated over the petty politics of their homeowners’ association, or the difficulty of getting your children into the best schools. Those aren’t compelling issues, but they’re genuine.

In the South, we also listen to country because it is identity music. So are related forms like southern rock, gospel, blues, dirty south hip-hop, and gangstagrass. We associate country with our traditional culture — the slower pace of Southern life; the connection to the land; and the greater emphasis on family, community, hospitality, and faith. The attraction is even more powerful if none of those things describe our lives anymore. The irony of this nostalgia is that when we were children, the homogenization had already begun.

I grew up in classically (not to say stereotypically) rural Southern surroundings and circumstances. I love “The Ballad of Curtis Loew” maybe more than any other Lynyrd Skynyrd song. For me, that is saying a lot. The Ballad is about a homeless, black, blues guitarist and the white child who would scrounge money and defy his parents to hear him play. It could easily have happened in the racially mixed town I grew up in. In my mind’s eye, it did. It is an honest song that makes a statement about human equality. That statement may not be quite as organic or “accidental” as the statement in Blue Yodel #9, but it is nearly so, and it is neither preachy nor flat-footed. “Accidental Racist,” in contrast, seems more like the narrative of a frustrated suburbanite, awkwardly stumbling through race issues for which his primary preparatory life experiences were those very special episodes of “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life.”

On second thought, maybe it is an honest song, after all.

I’ll add one more word of defense for Brad Paisley. When he and I were kids growing up, white and black Southerners considered the Confederate battle flag a symbol of the South and Southern culture. More defensively, it was a badge of our us-against-them attitude toward those who believed themselves our superiors. White supremacist groups actively re-branded the flag and made it a symbol of slavery and racism. Where I lived, that took effect a little before I graduated high school, much to our vocal lament. I don’t know if that was contemporaneous with the rest of our society. This was pre-internet; we were frequently behind y’all when it came to zeitgeist awareness.

Interestingly, with the notable exception of England, Southerners in many European countries also lead simpler, more agrarian, lifestyles than their more cosmopolitan countrymen. So when football teams from southern Italy or southern Germany play their northern rivals, you can expect some fan to fly the Confederate battle flag.

 

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How Country Music Got More Racist

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Brad Paisley’s new song “Accidental Racist” is a sodden, self-pitying slog. Over surging, hookless country radio gush, Paisley’s anonymous vocals blandly wail about how he’s caught between southern pride and southern blame because the folks at the Starbucks don’t appreciate his Confederate flag T-shirt.  “I’m a white man/living in the Southland/just like you I’m more than what you see/I’m proud of where I’m from/but not everything I’ve done,” he declaims, then mumbles about how Reconstruction was bad (for who, exactly?) and how we can’t rewrite history so we might as well celebrate the symbols of slavery?  Then LL Cool J comes on and starts to bargain: “If you don’t judge my gold chains/I’ll forget the iron chains.” Hey, if you don’t judge my big schnozz, I’ll forget the Holocaust.  Can’t we all just get along?

Pretty much everybody has already weighed in on what a piece of shit this song is. But I think to really appreciate its badness fully, it might be helpful to listen to an earlier country music take on race.

 

That’s Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music, and the genre’s first major star, with Blue Yodel #9 from 1930. The piano player is Lil Hardin; the trumpeter is her husband, Louis Armstrong.

Rodgers doesn’t mention the Confederacy or race. Still, with Louis Armstrong standing beside him, the opening lyrics seem fairly pointed:

Standing on the corner, I didn’t mean no harm

Along came the police, he took me by the arm

It was down in Memphis, corner of Beale and Maine

He said, big boy, you’ll have to tell me your name,

I said, you’ll find my name on the tail of my shirt,

I’m a Tennessee hustler, I don’t have to work.

In “Accidental Racist,” Paisley sings ” I try to put myself in your shoes and that’s a good place to begin/it ain’t like I can walk a mile in someone else’s skin”  — a couplet that seems half lament and half excuse.  Rodgers, on the other hand, and with much less fuss, demonstrates that hillbillies and black folk have plenty of common ground. A half century before hip hop, this is, after all, a song about police harassment.  Rodgers could be speaking for a young Louis Armstrong, out there on the streets of Memphis — though Armstrong didn’t usually yodel.

Armstrong gets to speak for himself, too — and, to no one’s surprise, his trumpet is considerably more eloquent than LL Cool J’s lyrics. The song, in fact, is a conversation, with Rodgers throwing out a line and Armstrong’s horn answering with its mix of jaunty assurance and melancholy. The two performers couldn’t be much more simpatico; both are completely comfortable with the blues and the raggy swing of Hardin’s piano accompaniment.

“Accidental Racist” is an ostentatious declaration of difference and tolerance; you’ve got your traditions, I’ve got mine, but we can still tolerate each other. Rodgers and Armstrong, though, aren’t tolerating each other’s differences, because they aren’t that different. Their musical traditions and influences, and even, the song suggests, their life experiences are congruent — almost as if they come from the same country.

That country is not the one that flies the Confederate flag.  Paisley builds his marginal Southern identity on the symbols of slavery, identifying with a tradition of oppression. Rodgers builds his on the experience of being a hobo and a drifter on the butt end of the law. Paisley declares his Southern individuality by perpetuating completely anonymous country radio dreck. Rodgers declares his by demonstrating his links with the quintessentially Southern music of Memphis. “Accidental Racist” sees the south as white and the north as black; Rodgers and Armstrong, though, know their home, and their music, is integrated.

We tend to think about race relations in terms of progress. Once, we were benighted, but slowly we have crawled into the light.  And it’s certainly true that things have gotten better in some ways since 1930; we’ve gotten rid of Jim Crow, we’ve elected a black President.  But Paisley’s crappy track is a reminder that later isn’t always better. Once upon a time, there was room for a rural white identity which defined itself not in opposition to, but in continuity with, the black experience. Paisley’s track is a depressing reminder of how thoroughly Lynyrd Skynrd has replaced Jimmie Rodgers for contemporary country — and of how thoroughly that is a change for the worse.
 

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Dying at Home, and Found

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Satan Is Real is a dramatic title.  The album of that name, the Louvin Brothers 1959 gospel doomfest, lives up to the name, from the title song’s vindictively mournful recitative (“Preacher, tell them that Satan is real too,”) through a litany of terror, sin, remorse, and moral scolding, all the way to the closing prayer for death (I’m Ready To Go Home”).  And then of course there’s the famous album art, with its giant clearly cardboard, buck-toothed devil towering over the white-suited Louvins as flames crackle in the background — the hyperbolically campy package for the hyperbolically moralistic interior.  No wonder hippie authenticity-worshippers like Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris couldn’t resist the Louvins. Listening to this album meant you could bathe in the salt of the earth by listening to your lifestyle condemned in sublime harmonies, then turn to the record cover, toke up, and laugh your ass off.

 

Charlie Louvin’s autobiography is also called Satan Is Real, and it has the same cover photograph as the album.  It makes a go at the fire and brimstone in the text as well — the book opens with Ira Louvin drinking himself into a stupor, calling his mother a bitch, and getting cussed out by his brother.

 

Where the Louvin Brothers might turn a (cleaned up version) of that anecdote into a moralistic tale of repentance and/or eternal damnation, though, Charlie’s prose version never breaks out the flames or the cardboard devil.  It’s just a sad story about his sad drunkard brother.

 

That’s the case for the book as a whole, too.  There’s certainly a lot of unpleasantness; the Louvins dad beat them, especially Ira, mercilessly, and set them to work in the cotton fields till their hands were cut and bloody.  Ira was a temperamental artist and a mean drunk, breaking mandolins, chasing women, and generally behaving like a horse’s ass.  In one famous incident, Elvis came to the Louvin’s room to tell them that the gospel they played was really his favorite music.  Ira, in his usual people-pleasing way, grabbed the King by the throat and hissed out, “If that’s the music you love, then why do you play that nigger music!”

 

Or at least, that’s the story.  Charlie, who was there, insists that Ira didn’t strangle Elvis and wasn’t shouting. Apparently, his dickishness was sufficient to keep Elvis from ever recording a Louvin-brothers tune, though — not the first or last time that Ira cost Charlie a heap of money.

 

The brush with Elvis is in part well known because it’s emblematic.  Charlie and Ira were playing old timey brother duets at a time when country was morphing into rockabilly, grabbing up a whole new generation of listeners and leaving a generation of artists behind. Charlie grumbles a little about contemporary country and those damned kids on his lawn, but mostly you see the shift play out in his career.  Ira and Charlie wanted to be Roy Acuff, but they never got as famous as their idol. By the time they were on the Opry, the demographic gold was kids shaking their booties, not new urbanites looking to their radios for a reaffirmation of rural values.

 

As a result, Charlie was a second-tier star,  the less mercurial half of a moderately successful duo — and his autobiography reads quiet.  It’s not a rag-to-riches story so much as a rags-to-decent-comfort story. Charlie’s got a ringside seat to Ira’s mess of a life — the alcoholism, the serial divorces, the fights, the whining, the typical grinding, pointless stupidity of addiction, the early death (in 1965, on the highway where, improbably, it was the guy in the other car who was drinking.)  But a ringside seat isn’t  being in the ring, for which, I’m sure, Charlie was grateful.  He himself didn’t drink and managed his career carefully — he had a number of minor solo hits after he finally broke with Ira. He also had a long, happy, untumultuous marriage to his wife Betty.  In fact, the most affecting part of the book is practically the first thing in it; the dedication.

 

And for my wife, Betty.  I remember when the country singer Carl Smith’s wife died, and I went to her funeral.  Carl was the steadiest man I’d ever met, just as solid as a table.  But when they were doing the last eulogy, he absolutely went to pieces.  It shook me up so bad that I had to go out into the yard to get over it.  And right there in the yard, I prayed to God for one request, that whenever I go, I’d go before you.  I’m just not that tough that I could make it without you.  I know that.  Just as I know that I’ve needed you with me every step of the way.

 

Charlie’s God isn’t a God that throws drunkards into the pit. Instead, he’s a God who understands and forgives human love and human weakness.  It’s maybe not a God who makes for an especially dramatic song or book, but it does seem to be a God who makes for a decent life. And a decent death as well; Charlie got his wish.  He passed away shortly after he finished the book. His wife survived him.
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This first appeared on Splice Today.