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Country Music and Me: My Great Migration in the Wrong Direction Evan Gardner

Published

10 months ago

September 30, 2023

View of the Johnny Cash Bar in Nashville, Tennessee. (Valerie Macon via via Getty Images)

It’s Sunday night in Nashville, and my father and I wade into a sea of cowboy hats. Most of the 4,000 seats are filled—the women in denim cutoffs with matching hats and boots; the men in faded flannels. Almost everyone is sipping hard seltzer or whiskey out of Dixie cups.

Center stage, Dylan Marlowe from Georgia is strumming his six-string and crooning: In a world that’s changing, I sure as hell ain’t, son. The host, with his porkpie hat and salt-and-pepper soul patch, stands to the side. They’re enveloped by the red glow of the lights behind them and the sign, front and center, staring down at the raucous crowd: GRAND OLE OPRY.

This is where Johnny Cash once played. And Elvis. And Garth Brooks. This is where Vince Gill and Patty Loveless performed their emotional 2013 rendition of “Go Rest High on That Mountain.” This is where Merle Haggard, in his final 2015 Opry appearance, did “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink.”

This is where the gods of country make their name. This is Mecca, and tonight we’re making the pilgrimage.

As we take our seats, Marlowe wraps up his set, and William Lee Golden and the Goldens stride onto the stage.

With his white beard trailing down to his belt buckle, the frontman takes his place in the famous Opry Circle. The circle has a diameter of six feet, and it’s made of maple and white oak. It is a holy place in a holy place. This is where greatness happens.

As the opening notes of “You Are My Sunshine” pour from the stage across the audience, my dad and I glance at each other.

“Do you remember your mom singing this to you before bed?” he whispers.

“Of course,” I say.

The thing is, I’m not supposed to like country music. Country is the South, and the South is slavery and burning crosses and church bombings. Morgan Wallen, the reigning king of country, recently went viral for saying the n-word. And by the way, I’m black, and country music is white.

But country music isn’t truly white, because nothing in America is entirely white or black or anything else, and nothing that endures—nothing with value—is about race at all. It goes beyond that.

Sure, country is the music of trucks and whiskey and your hometown, which is usually, but not always, in a state that was once in the Confederacy. At first blush, it sounds a lot like white folk music.

But suppose you switch the Ford flatbed for a drop-top Lambo, the whiskey for Patron, and “Sweet Home Alabama” to “Straight Outta Compton”: magically, it begins to sound a little blacker. Or the sound: the heart of country is the banjo, the first iteration of which was a gourd with animal skins attached to wooden necks—imported from West and Central Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries during the transatlantic slave trade. Or the structure of that sound: country revolves around a three-chord progression not that dissimilar to the 12-bar blues, which is built around the first, fourth, and fifth notes of a scale.

And let’s not forget some of the country stars themselves: Charley Pride, a black man born on a sharecropping farm in Sledge, Mississippi, is a three-time Grammy winner and number 18 on CMT’s “40 Greatest Men in Country Music,” and Darius Rucker, a black man from Charleston, South Carolina, holds one of the top five best-selling country records of all time.

To insist on viewing country, or any other art form, through a racial lens is to obscure its history and to miss the beauty in that art form. It is to sap the art of its art.

My trip to the Opry began 14 hours earlier, very early in the morning, when my father and I left our apartment in lower Manhattan and headed down South.

As a kid, the city was all I ever knew.

Same for my father, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago. “Down South” was where his classmates went to visit family. It was rural and backward and mysterious. It was where Arthur Green, the manager at the bottling factory where my Dad worked as a teenager, came from—the place where Green lost his two front teeth and his two middle fingers in a wood-chopping accident that supposedly ended with his fingers jumping off the chopping block where some chickens ate them.

This is the South I pictured awaiting our arrival as the skyscrapers disappeared into plastic white crosses tucked between American flags and pine trees. Despite our ancestors upending their lives to flee the South, here were my father and I speeding toward it.

That afternoon, we crossed the state line separating Virginia and Tennessee, and pulled into a Love’s gas station to get a snack. I was in my Brown University sweats and a hoodie, clean-shaven, with a Nikon camera around my neck, and it seemed like everyone else in the mini-mart attached to the gas station was wearing a thick beard and an Under Armour Freedom t-shirt. Next door to the Love’s was a Quality Suites; on the other side was the perfectly groomed football field of a Catholic school. In the parking lot outside the mini-mart, I saw a sheriff pressing two men’s heads into the side of his squad car, and I tried to hurry out the door, but my dad stopped me.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Buying a lottery ticket,” he said. “Everyone who wins the lottery gets their ticket from a Piggly Wiggly down South.”

A few hours later, the Nashville skyline came into view. We were staying in a ritzy part of town, the Gulch. It was teeming with new apartment complexes and hipsters in athleisure, and as we made our way to our hotel, my dad remarked that it looked just like Williamsburg in Brooklyn.

There were superficial traces of the Old South: Rosa Parks Drive, John Lewis Way. (The next day, we went looking for what we thought was an old plantation, Belle Meade, but it turned out to be a gated community.)

My mother had always forbidden me from going down South. The racism, the violence, the not-so-distant past. So I stayed in the universe I came from: I went to Saint Ann’s (Lena Dunham’s alma mater) and to Brown University. I took classes like “Writing the Revolution.”

But then, one day last year, I heard Morgan Wallen’s “Sand in My Boots” and fell in love with country music. “Sand in My Boots” is lyrical and mournful—it’s a story about hope and promise in the land of “sunburnt Silverados” and “heart-broke Desperados,” and potholes and dogwood trees.

Around the same time, I started my nonfiction writing seminar, which started with a quote from the literature scholar Stanley Fish: “Some appreciate fine art; others appreciate fine wines. I appreciate fine sentences.” And that started me down the road of thinking more seriously about words, sentences, language, and the meanings behind them.

The more I listened to country—its lyrics and its poetry—the more I realized how much it applied to people like me. Country music, after all, is the music of the forgotten. Think of Luke Combs singing So just remember when you’re drivin’ through nowhere / To us, that’s the middle of somewhere.

Yes, I know: I’m from Tribeca. I attended a tony private school in the cradle of American power and prestige, and I’m a junior at an Ivy League university. I’m hardly “forgotten.” But in a summer when country music dominated the charts, a lot of people clearly felt like me. Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” spent 16 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. In the last week of July, the top three slots on that list were dominated by Jason Aldean, Wallen, and Combs. In August, upstart Oliver Anthony, with his “Rich Men North of Richmond,” became the most talked about music sensation on YouTube. On Thursday, NBC broadcast the first-ever People’s Choice Country Awards, live from the Grand Ole Opry, due to popular demand.

How could the music of so many also be the music of those left behind by everyone else?

The point is country is the music of those we don’t always see, those who don’t fit squarely into the categories of mainstream, contemporary America.

It was only in Tennessee, the land where Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, that I began to see the rigidity of those categories—and, more importantly, to imagine those categories falling away into something richer and more powerful. It was only there that I could begin to integrate all the apparent contradictions of music and race and history and culture.

Including the contradiction that is my mother.

When my mother drinks one too many glasses of rosé and lets herself travel back through memories buried below the Mason-Dixon line, she inevitably returns to her childhood in Texas. Backyard baby back ribs in a homemade vinegar sauce cooked by an auntie or cousin down the road. A block full of friends. A potbellied uncle. It is a wonderful place cocooned by a much more dangerous place shot through with lynchings and segregationists and people who pine for the old Dixie. It seems incongruous.

The South, maybe more than anywhere else in America, is where the old black and white cultures and heritages overlap, intertwine, become something transcendent. This is what I felt while enveloped by the sounds of William Lee Golden singing a song my mother once sang to me. This is where I finally grasped the ethos of country as explained by the great jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis—that even in the face of deep suffering, “optimism is not naive.”

Outside the Country Music Hall of Fame Museum. (Courtesy of the author)

One month after returning from Nashville, I found myself at a Luke Combs concert in Philadelphia seated next to a woman with a Blue Lives Matter tattoo.

That night, Combs was singing his cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” Over the summer, the song had risen to number two on the Billboard Hot 100, which had upset a lot of people on the site previously called Twitter, since a white, straight man (with a beard! from North Carolina!) was apparently appropriating or exploiting a gay black woman’s song.

In the arena, surrounded by 60,000 fans, there was no controversy. No manufactured anger. No one accusing anyone of usurping someone else’s lived experience. All I could feel was the warm sense of connection that makes this song so rich. It turns out that the desire to live outside other people’s boundaries was not just a Southern thing.

In Philadelphia that night, it seemed like the whole world was a Luke Combs fan.

Even as his accent tells you that his is a different story than Chapman’s, the words remind you that it’s the same. The car he and Chapman sing of is equal parts sweet chariot and Ford F-150. They are both racing to the same place, and that place is freedom and self-realization, both beautiful and uncontainable.

Evan Gardner is an intern at the Free Press. You can check out his previous story “Taylor Swift Unites America” here, and you can find him on X, formerly Twitter @EvanGardne9.

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Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

10 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

17 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

21 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641