|
February 25, 2007
An interesting article on country music at American Prospect----When Country Went Right by J. Lester Feder. He says that though country music is now married into the conservative movement -- it wasn't born there.
Country music's roots are as much populist as reactionary. Always fiercely allied with working people, the earliest country stars were old enough to have campaigned for populist champions like Tom Watson; FDR was celebrated in songs of the Depression; and Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash were feted by liberals for speaking up for the downtrodden in the '60s. Country music only became synonymous with mainline conservatism -- indeed, only became consistently political -- in the late '60s, a shift that not only helped buoy Richard Nixon into the White House, but reshaped the media landscape. The wars of the Dixie Chicks are the legacy of these years, but so are Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Fox News -- the conservative noise machine itself. The idea of values-based marketing to conservatives began with country music.
Feder misses Woody Guthrie, who was aligned with leftwing populism in the 1930s and 1940s. THe was such a contrast to the the hard-working farmer, love-rich poor folk, patriotic fighting men, and devoted Christians make the music "the voice of your 'Silent Majority'" of the 1970s and 1980s.
|
There is frequent confusion among liberal-minded listeners between the common-man advocacy of someone like Merle Haggard and the liberal values such listeners may assume are the natural outcome of such beliefs. Haggard claimed his right-wing hit "Okie from Muskogee," in which a Vietnam soldier railed against war protest as a form of betrayal, was a caricature of ignorance, but it was an anthem for the right, and he followed it up with "The Fightin' Side of Me," which was a quite straightforward justification for beating up hippies.
Despite his championing of the economic lower class in the early 1970s, I really don't see how he qualifies as "speaking up for the downtrodden," and sincerely doubt this occurred in the 1960s. Haggard only began recording music in 1965, and was part of the late '60s movement which solidified the conservative voice as the singular voice of late-twentieth-century American country music. Populism and conservatism are by no means exclusive, and the Left maintains this illusion at its peril.