 The Southern diaspora, black and white, has spread Southern musical forms all over the United States and abroad. Southern music has presupposed both a rough ontology and an intact society. Southerners generally do accept the human condition (or did). Northerners with a New England mindset [1] tend to treat it as a cluster of technical problems to be cleared away by scientific study and political initiatives (this was the specific project of the 20th century). Finally, at the risk of showing intellectual alienation without first directing it at the South, I raise the danger that country music could be coopted to support American propositional-nationalist and imperial propaganda. (Certainly, the corporate opportunism of Nashville adds to the possibility.) In such a future, Tompall Glaser’s “Sold American” (1973) will take on considerably more meaning for wanderers in the ruins. As they meet with the artificially unintelligent humans of a new day, they will truly find none but rank strangers. On a more optimistic note, the Thomist philosopher Étienne Gilson asserted that “the Natural Law always buries its undertakers,” [2] and so may it be with country music. As the participants in the Country’s Family Reunion series (1997-2020), overseen by Whisperin’ Bill Anderson, repeatedly say, country music is about faith, family, real life, and real storytelling — and should be. Country music as a specific phase of the South’s musical inheritance has become a global phenomenon, suggesting that other agrarian peoples, not fully neutered and industrialized, find values in it that resonate with them. Here the music helps sustain social and familial memory in the face of a centuries-long assault on all memory, which derides any resistance as mere nostalgia or — even worse — rural nostalgia. But as John Lukacs put it, “History is a certain kind of memory, organized and supported by evidence.” And Lytle adds: “Memory, through recollection, into song, I believe is the classic inheritance the Western world has abandoned in its reduction of man to his physical dimensions.” [3] Rightly identifying country music as an expression of white Southern culture, the enemies of memory are not amused, as the recent concerted attacks on Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a SmallTown” (2023) and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” (2023) show. We may expect regular attacks on the music from the New York Times, the Guardian, the Atlantic Monthly, and other lofty places to continue until end of time. Short of receiving unconditional surrender, they will never quit. But country music has its strengths, as summed up in some common sayings. One is that a country song is three chords and the truth told in three minutes. Another holds that you don’t need therapy as long as you have country music. Currently, country music seems in somewhat better shape in Ireland and Australia. A simple YouTube excursion or two will provide evidence. Conversely, a YouTube inquiry into the most recent country radio offerings yields much disappointment. Even so, good American country music is still out there, and some younger artists are keeping up traditions and not just appearances. Whether it survives in the fiefdom of Nashville, and on its radio playlists, may be of lesser importance. The five thousandth Grand Ole Opry broadcast, which aired on October 30, 2021, [4] gives some reasons for hope. (The Opry seems a bastion of conservatism relative to country radio.) As David B. Sentelle wrote in 1981, “country music is not only popular it is irreplaceable …” [5] Let us extend the hand of friendship to all who wish to reclaim and sustain human (and rural) values, while we “take down the fiddle from the wall” as Andrew Lytle exhorted us, and “cultivate the arts of memory” as M.E. Bradford urged. [6] Country music, rightly done, helps us in these essential human tasks, even in the twenty-first century. And anyway, we just plain like it. This piece is an exerpt from the book Southern Story and Song: Country Music In The 20th Century by Joseph R. Stromberg, published by Shotwell Publishing, LLC, 2024. Notes
[1] We must thank our lucky stars that New England did not, along with literature and history, take over American music, and bury us under songs about logging, the Erie Canal, pig iron, fur trapping, maple syrup production, textile mills, herring, sealhunting, whaling, the slave trade, the opium trade, and the ivory trade, along with Puritan psalmod. [2] Étienne Gilson, quoted in Heinrich Rommen, The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998 [1947]), 237 note. [3] Lukacs quoted in Clyde Wilson, “American Historians and Their History: Scratching the Fleas,” in Clyde Wilson, ed., Chronicles of the South, II: In Justice to So Fine a Country (Rockford, IL: Chronicles Press, 2011), 214. Lytle, “The Long View,” in From Eden to Babylon, 175. And see Aaron Wolf, “Awake for the Living: Lee and the ‘Feeling of Loyalty,’” in Twenty Abbeville Institute Scholars, Exploring the Southern Tradition (McClellanville, SC: Abbeville Institute Press, 2019), 128-147. [4] Five Thousandth Grand Ole Opry Broadcast, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=w3X970e3czM. [5] David B. Sentelle, “Listen and Remember,” in Wilson, ed., Why the South Will Survive, 156. [6] Lytle, “Hind Tit,” 244 (at this point in time, the part about “throwing out the radio” may also apply). M.E. Bradford, “Conclusion: Not in Memoriam, But in Affirmation,” in Wilson, Why the South Will Survive, 222.
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