Our neighbors in the big house called us redneck
’Cause we lived in a poor share-croppers shack
The Jacksons down the road were poor like we were
But our skin was white and theirs was black
But I believe the south is gonna rise again
But not the way we thought it would back then
I mean everybody hand in hand . . .
Or you could just mention medium-sized country star Charley
Pride (thirty-six Billboard No. 1 country hits), who also doesn’t
>t Dick’s redneck designation because he is African American.
In terms of political orientation, you could cite the Texas-based
Dixie Chicks, who refused to back down from criticizing Bush on
the brink of the current war. They were, as their recent hit had it,
“Not Ready to Make Nice.” Though corporate country stars like
Toby Keith stampeded to support the so-called war on terror, alt.
country musicians like Steve Earle charged just as hard in the
opposite direction. Country music is a complex beast, sometimes
in resistance to or mockery of the mainstream and the rural
South, sometimes a mirror of or hymn to it, the product of many
voices over many eras, arisen from a culture that was never pure
anything, including white. (And its current listening territory
includes much of the English-speaking world.)
Another set of questions might be why Dick despises the
people and places that spawned the music, and what larger rifts his
attitude reveals. Answering them requires digging into the deep
history of American music and American race and class wars, and
into the broad crises of environmentalism in recent years.
Those wars about race and class are peculiarly evident in the
stories we tell about Elvis. I was raised on the tale that Elvis stole
his music from black people. The story told one way makes Elvis
Presley a thief rather than someone who bridged great divides by
hybridizing musical traditions and brought the lush energetic
force of African-American music into white ears and hearts and
of sound that came out of the South long before Presley. Despite
segregation, black and white musicians learned from each other
and in?uenced each other. (Another view of Elvis, from Billboard
magazine in 1958, stated, “In one aspect of America’s cultural
life, integration has already taken place.”)
The particular song Elvis was supposed to have stolen from
R & B singer Big Mama Thornton, “Hound Dog,” wasn’t a vernacular expression of African-American culture, and it wasn’t
her creation anyway; it was written by two New York Jews, Jerry
Leiber and Mike Stoller. Elvis’s >rst single featured a cover of the
song “That’s All Right Mama” by Delta blues singer Arthur
Crudup, but the B-side was a cover of bluegrass star Bill Monroe’s
“Blue Moon of Kentucky,” as perfect a mix of southern musical
traditions as you can >nd. Elvis was repeatedly charged with
being a racist—most famously in rapper Chuck D’s 1990 song—
on the basis of a comment he never actually made. James Brown
and Muhammad Ali thought otherwise, and some Native
Americans claim the part-Cherokee Elvis as their own.
The story that Elvis stole his music from African Americans
as told by, for example, my now-deceased, uber-leftie, America-hating, and otherwise wonderful aunt, turned rock-and-roll into
a mostly white child miraculously born to a purely black family. It was a way of saying that cool and correct white people
could love rock-and-roll—white music with roots in the South—
but dodge the sense that they had any a;nities with white southerners; they could imagine them as wholly other and hate them
with ease, with a fervor and disdain that spilled over pretty easily
to all blue-collar rural people, to the white American peasantry,
basically. That hate had and has wide currency. Ask Dick.
The story that racism belongs to poor people in the South is a
little too easy, though. Just as not everybody up here, geographically and economically, is on the right side of the line, so not
everyone down there is on the wrong side. But the story allows
middle-class people to hate poor people in general while claiming
to be on the side of truth, justice, and everything else good.
I grew up surrounded by liberals and leftists who liked to play
the idiot in fake southern accents, make jokes about white trash
The result of all this has been a marginalized environmental movement,
loins. It ignores his many white in?uences, from bluesy Hank
Williams to schmaltzy Perry Como, his genius in synthesizing
multiple American traditions into something unprecedented,
and the raw power of his own voice and vocal style. It ignores,
too, the lack of an apartheid regime in American roots music.
White country blues and white gospel were part of the rich river
and trailer trash, and, like the Canadian enviros, made gagging
noises whenever they heard Dolly Parton or anything like her.
If Okies from Muskogee thought they were being mocked, they
were right, in part. This mockery was particularly common during
the 1970s and 1980s, but it has yet to evaporate altogether—after
all, Dick, who judging by his typewriter was around then, wrote
