For decades, country music has been a bastion of conservative culture, a seemingly endless stream of songs about God, rednecks, tractors, and American nationalism. But the truth is that country music has a long history of giving voice to the class struggle, especially in the South.
Country originally emerged from an amalgamation of musical traditions from European and Mexican immigrants and African slaves. Work songs, chants, and spirituals expressing the struggle of poverty and oppression were set to the music of banjos and fiddles, leading to the first iterations of the genre.
As late as the 1950s, Tennessee Ernie Ford could sing of struggling miners: “You load 16 tons, what do you get? / Another day older and deeper in debt.”
Singer-songwriter Hazel Dickens was even more explicit in her song “Fire in the Hole”:
Daddy died a miner and grandpa he did too.
I’ll bet this coal will kill me ‘fore my working days is through.
In a hole this dark and dirty, an early grave can find,
And I plan to make a union for the ones I leave behind.
Richard Nixon claimed Merle Haggard’s 1969 song, “Okie from Muskogee” as an anthem for the “silent-majority” who supported him. / Image: Dr Umm, Flickr
Rightwing pablum
Country’s rich class-struggle history was mostly forgotten after the genre was hijacked by conservative elements during the Vietnam War. Nashville record labels made big profits by marketing country as the loyal and patriotic alternative to the “protest music” emerging in other popular genres.
In 1965, Johnnie Wright had a hit with “Hello Vietnam,” a pro-war tune with lyrics like: “We must stop communism in that land / Or freedom will start slipping through our hands.”
A few years later, Richard Nixon claimed Merle Haggard’s 1969 song, “Okie from Muskogee” as an anthem for the “silent-majority” who supported him. It’s easy to see why Nixon enjoyed a song with lines criticizing the antiwar movement: “We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street / ‘Cause we like livin’ right, and bein’ free.”
Mainstream country has since become synonymous with rightwing pablum. No song exemplifies this better than Toby Keith’s post-9/11 hit, “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.” In it, Keith expresses support for imperialism’s military adventures, claiming “There’s a lot of men dead / So we can sleep in peace at night when we lay down our head,” and the song is probably best remembered for its crass nationalism: “We’ll put a boot in your ass / It’s the American way.”
In his 2020 song, “Long Violent History,” Tyler Childers expresses the horror of seeing Black Americans brutalized in the street by the police. / Image: Roberta, Flickr
Prophetic vision
But under the pressure of a dying capitalist system, some modern artists are bringing country music back to its class-struggle roots. In his 2020 song, “Long Violent History,” Tyler Childers expresses the horror of seeing Black Americans brutalized in the street by the police: “Could you imagine just constantly worryin’ / kickin’ and fightin’, beggin’ to breathe,” a reference to the 2014 police murder of Eric Garner.
Childers goes on to ponder what it will take for the working class to unite and fight back: “How many boys could they haul off this mountain / shoot full of holes … till we come into town in a stark ravin’ anger / Looking for answers and armed to the teeth.”
At its best, country concentrates the cries of working-class anguish, hope, and struggle and sets them to music. Rural America has a rich history of workers’ struggle, and Childers’ powerful vision of angry workers looking for answers will prove prophetic in the years to come.