We sang songs of childhood Hymns of faith that made us strong Ones that mother Maybelle taught us Hear the angels sing along Will the circle be unbroken By and by Lord, by and by There's a better home awaiting In the sky Lord, in the sky
Down Interstate I-65 in Southern Alabama there’s a stretch of road called the Hank William’s Lost Highway memorial. You can drive down it on your way through Montgomery without giving it a second thought. But if you wish, you could drive down it all alone as dusk sets in and think of the man it’s named after, a man full of sorrow and pain and poetry, who met his death all alone one night on another southern highway seventy years ago.
You’ll find that the older generation of Alabamans treat Hank Willams Sr. as more than just a celebrity. At this point, he’s more of a culture hero.
You see, there was a breed of Southern American heroes that existed only for a short era. A time after the chivalry and rage and death of the Antebellum South and the War. Yet a time before all the institutions fell and Southerners forgot who they were and the band stopped playing Dixie. The post war South had a character all its own. From Lee’s surrender to the fall of Wallace, one hundred years, a time when “Dixie” would fade from a full brass band number to a sad guitar and a whisper.
In this century, the south had already been defeated. There were no more cavalier heroes and Johnny boy soldiers. The heroes of post-war Dixie took on a new form, they practiced a new art. An art that they could use to embody the sorrow and pain and longing and bittersweet death of their home.
The spirit of Dixie lived on in music, in what would be named “country” music. It was through this medium the South would survive, both its traditionalists and rebels. Country music artists would become more than performers, they would become legends.
Can the Circle be Unbroken
“Country” music usually gets painted as music for the poor working class. And it is, or that’s where it came from. But in the American South, it took on a deeper meaning. It became not just the music of the poor but of the entire society.
Music can act as a vessel for a cultural spirit, especially for a defeated people. There’s a reason governments through history will regularly ban the performance of national songs by a people group they have conquered. A culture can survive through a couple melodies and verses.
Its said a nation hasn't been totally defeated while grandmothers still sing its songs to babies in the cradle.
In the decades after the War, the South would cling to its music as the core of its identity.
Through a fusion of gospel, “hillbilly” pickers, early Appalachian bluegrass, Anglo-Cetlic folk tunes, cowboy tunes, Western swing, and rhythm and blues, the people of the South created a new genre, one birthed from all their defeats and struggles.
When you listen to the original mothers and fathers of country, you can hear something more than just their music. You can hear the ethos of a poor class of people, before the corporate world would begin the process of draining the art of its soul.
A.P. Carter, the man of the Carter Family, traveled around his home state of Virginia searching for folk songs to record and preserve. Many of the first country music hits in the early 1900’s were really reworkings of old Gospel songs, set to tunes that had been brought over the ocean hundreds of years before. This genre was defined by a specific people, in a specific time.
During the initial decades of recorded “country” music, what the genre did was solidify the legacy of Southern American folk music, turning it into an identifiable genre. The general term “country” would become the music of the South in general.
Local sub-categories wouldn’t go anywhere. On the contrary, the popularization of the genre is probably what saved all its different forms from extinction. Thanks to country’s popularity, we still have Appalachian hill-music, Delta blues, cowboy tunes from the West, and all the others. Under the umbrella of “country”, the different peoples of the South could all keep their legacy alive.
As a genre, country music would come to define the spirit of the South. Of course, the spirit of the South is not simply defined.
The South was an Anglo-Celtic royalist country of aristocrats and soldiers and priests and drunkards. Its highs and its lows reached levels that the stagnant Puritan North never could.
The ante-bellum South had a lively and vital spirit in both its upper and lower class. As the South’s identity was preserved in country music, this would remain the same.
The Grand Ole Opry
While the aristocracy fell, Southerners respect for order, tradition, and class did not. Country music would become a bastion of everything considered wholesome and proper in the South, despite the genre’s working class origins.
Nothing has embodied this more than the institution known as the Grand Ole Opry. The longest running radio broadcast in America history, it was dedicated to preserving the legacy of country music, and through that, the South as a whole.
More than just country music, it became a symbol for tradition, down-home, respectable Southern society.
The Grand Ole Opry plays the role of upholding tradition, no matter how uptight and irrational it may make them seem at time. They played a role in Southern culture similar to an aristocratic social class- not political of course, but culturally they decided what was good, proper, and presentable for the people. The Opry gained a reputation as Christian, family-friendly (mostly) entertainment.
The members of the Opry over the years were the stars of Dixie culture. They were polished, charming, Christian, wholesome. The Opry came to define respectable southern culture. No, it wasn’t as high-class as the fallen aristocracy, but they played a similar role.
In the current era, the Opry has fallen like the aristocracy before them. They no longer perform this role of cultural preservation, in fact they almost do the opposite. The preservation of traditional country music and of wholesome Southern culture is carried out by others.
But there is a second cultural line in the South.
Outlaws and Rebels
Just like the culture of the south as a whole, country music had a grittier, rebellious side.
The South was a land of cotton-pickers, railroad-men, dirt-poor farmers, doomsday preachers, hustlers, ramblers, the descendent of the Johnny Reb soldier- good ole’ boys.
While many of their brothers took the more family friendly route in the country music world, this other side of the coin of Southern culture was always present in Country music, it had to be.
If the “Grand Ole Opry” side of the genre discussed above was born by those like the Carter Family, the gospel and bluegrass family pickers, then the grittier side of country was born with men like Jimmie Rodgers, the singing brakeman.
Jimmie Rodgers didn’t just sing about traveling railroad brakemen broke and dying from tuberculosis, he was one.
The line from performers like Rodgers would lead to the “outlaw” brand of country, your Waylon Jennings and your Willie Nelsons. Your Merle Haggards, convicts turned rambler poets. The men of this strain did not grow up in the happy, family oriented South the Opry wanted to portray. They were orphans, or dirt poor farmer children. Sometimes they were convicts like Haggard.
This is the side of southern culture descended from the brawling, boisterous working class royalists fresh off the boats from England.
This was the side of country music that would preserve the South’s grit, its taste for adventure, for hard living, for rebellion, for freedom, for smoke filled pool-halls, for fast cars and fast women.
The men in this strain of country would often dip their toes in the more respectable world. They all have their gospel albums and appearances at the Opry. Is the South not defined by these surface-level contradictions?
Its because of these men that country music can conjure images of cowboys and drifters, hustlers in Atlanta, Jesse James and all the others. They were men that could not be contained by the proper stiffness of the Opry and had to express that other side of life, that of the Southern rebel.
Just like the South could never exist without them, neither could country music, despite the Opry’s hand-wringing.
It was also this side of southern culture that would birth rock and roll. Every early rockstar was just a poor Southern boy. A gospel choir kid with an accent, thrown under a spotlight with a guitar, belting his heart out.
Those early rockstars, why do you think their stories are all so sad? Why were Elvis and Johnny and Jerry Lee so tortured, so conflicted? Why are their stories ones of either great redemption or of early deaths? They could only have come from the South, through this fusion of Sunday gospel and dirty delta blues.
Only the hypocrisy and beauty of the south could have produced rock and roll.
When the British finished playing with rock music in the 60’s and it came back to America, you saw the rise of “Southern Rock” bands. Of course, “Southern Rock” is a redundant term. All rock and roll is southern in origin.
Just like the earlier country artists had fused hillbilly music with blues, the generation of southern rockstars took early rockabilly and infused it with all the passion and fire of soul, jazz, and the outlaw strain of country.
Especially in the 1970’s, you saw a return of the rebel-spirit of the South personified in these rock bands. This was the South’s last hurrah- by the 80’s it ethos was crumbling, and the vitality of its culture would never reach these highs again.
Ironically, it would be this side of country and the South’s spirit that would survive into the modern era. As the mainstream institutions crumbled and fell to corporate mockery, the independent country world has kept up the rebel sprit legacy. Its the independent artists who can still whistle Dixie.
A New Era: The Grand Ole Opry Ain’t so Grand Anymore
Today, a quick drive through the South will show you just how dead its culture is. Anything real is just about gone, replaced with plastic cowboy hats and fake accents and songs about pickup trucks and beer.
Reconstruction did its job too well. The South is a corpse, a mockery of what it once was.
The band stopped playing Dixie years ago.
If you want to understand the cultural state of the South, look no further than modern country music. The two mirror one another.
As the South’s culture deteriorated, so did its music.
The modern Grand Ole Opry is a joke. They host the dregs of the bro-country movement and ignore those independent artists that are actually working to keep some small sliver of Dixie alive.
So, it’s these artists that I want to promote.
Not only for what they do for music, but for what they mean to the South in a deeper sense.
Because it isn’t all posers in clean boots at the Opry. There’s still outlaw and poets and pickers and good ole boys who remember who they come from if you look for them.
As long as there’s still a few traditional bluegrass bands, a few gospel singers, a few honky-tonk bands, and some some modern country poets like Evan Felker of the Turnpike Troubadours, well, then maybe the South isn’t quite dead.
Through its music, if nothing else, the spirit of the South lives on, and it always will as long as there’s someone to sing it.
Beautiful essay. Going to have some bluegrass send me off to sleep
Over the past few years, I've gravitated more and more towards 'country' music, and it's now probably my favourite genre. I grew up with Johnny Cash but that was pretty much all the country I listened to until about three years ago, then I found musicians like Colter Wall, Zach Bryan, Charles Wesley Godwin and it snowballed from there. As you say, there's plenty of trash country music out there now, but there's also quite a lot of good stuff, from outlaw country to bluegrass. It's interesting what you say about the Anglo-Celtic roots of the genre, there's certainly a connection there but I feel like most British people now don't listen to much country or are aware of its roots in folk music. Back in the 60s British bands were interested in country, folk and rock, and it produced some great music, but today most British music is absymal. Most people listen to hip hop, grime and autotuned pop. The only British person that comes to mind who still draws from country music is Mark Knopfler.