The Sound of Patriotism
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It's time for Country Style USA. Country music today is linked with a certain kind of rah-rah patriotism, but that wasn't always the case. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Onger. On this week's show, how the U.S. military gave the genre formerly known as hillbilly music...

a much-needed boost during the Cold War. You have Uncle Sam, arguably the most powerful promotional partner in the world, pushing that onto the airwaves.

Plus, how the myth of the Confederate lost cause has been fought over in a song written by a Canadian. Songs never really belong entirely to the person who writes them or the person who performs them. There's always this very complex negotiation between, you know, audience and composer. It's all coming up after this. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Comparison rates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. Go to a rally for Donald Trump these days, and there are a couple songs you're almost guaranteed to hear. Like Toby Keith's Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue, and this one, Trump's Walkout Song.

God Bless the USA by Lee Greenwood. God bless the USA. Thank you very much. Wow. And you know...

These are the kinds of songs that you might have also heard at some July 4th barbecues this week, depending on your host's taste in music and their politics. Because today's country music industry is deeply associated with a certain kind of jingoistic, rally-around-the-flag, support-the-troop spirit.

In this hour, we'll explore the connections between music and politics, and specifically, how roots influence white-coded music became the sound of a particular kind of conservative pro-military Americana.

We sort of take for granted that country music is a patriotic genre, and I think we've missed the story of how that happened. Joseph Thompson is an assistant professor at Mississippi State University and author of the new book Cold War Country, How Nashville's Music Rowe and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism.

He begins the story in the 1940s with a man named Connie B. Gay, dubbed by the Washington Post as "country music's media magician." Gay got his start in the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal program.

He starts from really humble roots. He's born on a dirt farm in a little town called Lizard Lake, North Carolina. During the Depression, he gets a job at a radio station in Raleigh, North Carolina. And there he begins kind of understanding the power of what was then called hillbilly music, what we would now call country music, and understands that matching that hillbilly music with

with the information that he needs to relay to North Carolina farmers who are suffering during the Great Depression, that that makes for a powerful pairing of message and music.

He gradually becomes involved with the Farm Security Administration during the New Deal years in the early 1940s, moves to Washington, D.C. So the Department of Agriculture puts him to work writing and hosting something called the Farm at Home Hour Radio Show. And that's a show that's used to promote the agency's farm improvement programs.

So while working for this show, Gay figures out that if the accompanying music has anything with what he calls a rural flavor, then he gets a lot more participation from the listeners, a lot more mail than ever before. So he uses this observation to launch a country music radio show in the Washington, D.C. area after World War II. He begins in 1946 on

on station WARRL in Arlington, Virginia. And he actually offers to work as an announcer for the station strictly on commission if they'll let him play whatever he wants to play. It's town and country time. You're talking about his...

now legendary radio show and later TV show, Town and Country Time. In 1946, he begins hosting this show. Hi, neighbor. This is Connie B. Gay saying, pull up your mail keg and join us. In his recollection, he says, the phone started ringing and people were saying, Lord have mercy, why hasn't somebody done this before? Ha ha ha.

This was a typical barn dance radio show. There were these types of shows being broadcast all over the country. Of course, the most famous one that people will know of is the Grand Ole Opry. So it's sort of a variety show for different types of hillbilly music. So you might have a harmonica player. You might have some clog dancers. I think I might be watching Buck Ryan fiddling and the Echo Inn cloggers doing the dancing. Yes, sir. ♪

Then you might have a bluegrass style band. And then a honky tonk band.

It was a big deal both for Connie B. Gay and for Hillbilly Music when he managed to book a concert at D.C.'s Constitution Hall in 1947. I grew up in D.C. I've seen concerts there. It's a really nice venue. It was a big deal that he managed to get Hillbilly performers at the venue because of the stigma surrounding that genre at the time.

Hillbilly, obviously, comes with this connotation of someone who is perhaps unlearned, someone who's from a rural area, maybe from the mountains, possibly uncouth in a lot of ways that would not be welcome in the polite confines of a space like Constitution Hall. Yeah.

In order to kind of overcome that stigma, Connie B. Gay labels his music as folk music rather than calling it hillbilly music. I read a Washington Post article from 1983 in which he claimed to have coined the term country music. I'm not going to give him that. In addition to being this media mogul, he was also great at self-promotion. But he was actually a great talent scout. People like George Hamilton IV, Patsy Cline...

Roy Clark. Johnny Cash. Andy Griffith. All got career boosts from Gaye.

He discovered the accordion-playing comedian Jimmy Dean in a Washington, D.C. beer joint. Howdy, howdy, howdy, good people everywhere. Well, it's one for the money. He booked an up-and-coming rockabilly star named Elvis Presley on Gay's hillbilly cruise on the Potomac River. ♪

He took the yodeling banjo playing Louis Marshall Grandpa Jones on a high profile tour of U.S. military bases in Japan and Korea where they visited the front lines. And this was, I think, one of Connie B. Gay's great country music innovations, as you write about in the book.

He cultivated a new fan base among U.S. troops stationed overseas. This is the Armed Forces Radio Service. This is during the Korean War. He books Grandpa Jones and his grandchildren, which was his backing band at the time.

So when Grandpa Jones and his grandchildren go on tour, they're not only performing these concerts for service members, but these are being recorded as well. Those recordings are then pressed onto records. Those records are then shipped to DJs within the Far East Network, the FEN, which was the Asian branch of the Armed Forces Radio Service at the time. ♪

And so then that goes into circulation on DJ's playlists. There's a way in which the government and then these private promoters like Connie B. Gay and artists like Grandpa Jones are cultivating a real market and a real audience for country music amongst U.S. service members. And we should mention international civilian listening audiences who can hear the AFRS, even though they're not part of the U.S. military. In the early 1950s, there was a lot of

the military was facing a personnel crisis. It needed more recruits. Tell me about Talent Patrol and the role it played in recruiting new soldiers. If you turned on the radio, the television, or opened a magazine at the time, you were probably getting some kind of a pitch to join the U.S. military. So part of that was this show that you mentioned called Talent Patrol. ♪

So imagine Star Search or American Idol, but it only features service members from the U.S. military as its contestants. And accompanying us at our service star tonight, we have the renowned 9th Infantry Division Band all the way from Fort Dix, New Jersey. So they would go on and showcase their diverse skills, their diverse talents.

and then be awarded first, second, third place. It was meant to generate goodwill toward the U.S. military, but also serve as a kind of soft recruitment message. And who were some of the more memorable acts who participated in it?

This is where a country singer named Farron Young launches his career as a country music army recruitment singer. Now, Farron Young would go on to become a country music hall of fame inductee. He's maybe best known as the first singer of Hello Walls, a song written by Willie Nelson. ♪ I'd play for you today ♪

In the early 50s, he was this kind of struggling singer from a dairy farm in Shreveport, Louisiana. He had started his music career in 1951 on a local barn dance show called Louisiana Hayride. But by 1952, his career was on the uptick. He had signed a recording contract with Capitol Records. He had made his debut on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. And then in November 1952, he gets his draft notice. ♪

He tries to get out of service, right? Yes. He tried to convince a doctor that he had heart trouble, but the doctor reportedly said, yes, son, I can hear it breaking. That's so good. And you can imagine, I mean, this is a 20, 21-year-old kid, essentially, who thinks he's got the world on a string, and all of a sudden it all comes crashing down because of military service, or at least that's the way he saw it at the beginning. Yeah, little did he know this might have been the best thing that ever happened to him.

Absolutely. His luck really begins to turn around in January 1953. At that point, he's still serving in basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. But his song called Going Steady, which he recorded before he entered the service, breaks onto the Billboard charts and rockets to number two.

♪ Well, me and my baby her go hand steady ♪ - The army brass there at Fort Jackson realized that they have this potential resource on their hand to promote military service, and they put him to use. So that spring, they send him off to compete on talent patrol, and lo and behold, he wins. And that launches him on this career as someone who's tasked with both entertaining soldiers and then also being the voice of recruitment to lure others into the ranks.

And he was among a rotating cast of MCs on a show called Country Style USA.

That's right. The Defense Department and U.S. Army and Air Force Recruiting Service was casting this wide net for potential volunteer enlistees. That was very important to them. They wanted more volunteers rather than draftees. One of the ways that they're doing that is through a show that begins on radio and then transitions to a television version called Country Style USA. It's time for Country Style USA. Don't I

Now, both the radio and television versions of this show were recorded by a Nashville country music legendary producer named Owen Bradley, the architect of the Nashville Sound. He's also the producer behind people like Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash. Welcome.

Willie Nelson, just to name a few. The U.S. Army and Air Force Recruiting Service links up with Owen Bradley, and they begin producing this show called Country Style USA. Hi there, neighbors. My name is Charlie Applewhite, and welcome once again to Country Style USA. You better all over for us.

And what Country Style did was present 15 minutes of country music with some of the top names in the genre at the time, along with a message about the career opportunities available through the armed forces. Congratulations, chum. You've got your high school diploma, and now you're really ready to step out. These days it takes specialized training to get a really good job. Hello.

But did you know that you can get that valuable training you need in the U.S. Army and you'll be paid while learning? So by the late 1950s, country music programming is really booming for the U.S. Army. It actually accounts for more than one-third of the U.S. Army's televised recruitment campaigns.

Why country music? Why do you think the military found it so attractive as a recruitment tool, but also as a kind of cultural force in the military's hearts and minds fight against communism? I think country music serves a couple of purposes this way. One is a demographic purpose. The recruiting service noticed this kind of pipeline of young white recruits coming from the South,

They assumed that those white Southerners would enjoy country music. There was some evidence to back that up based on the success of people like Grandpa Jones and Connie B. Gay. In the mid-1950s, you have the country music industry beginning to really coalesce.

Nashville. These songwriters, publishers, recording studios like Owen Bradley's, many of them on 16th Avenue South, which we now call Music Row. But also country music, particularly after its reputation has been burnished a bit and we're

moving away from that kind of style of country music and the reputation it had as hillbilly music, that begins to read as a particularly down-home thing

safe, patriotic sort of message that fits really well with the political climate of the Cold War consensus. And that's interesting because Black musicians played a significant role in creating the sound of country music, right? And yet they weren't as featured in these military recruitment campaigns.

Yeah, we should acknowledge that there's white supremacy baked into the country music industry really from its beginnings. There's a concerted effort on the part of record labels going back to the 1920s and 30s to create hillbilly music as essentially an all-white genre.

Now, that is overlooking the influence and the pioneering music of African Americans who played hillbilly or country music for sure. And particularly by the 1950s, that is definitely the case. At least when we're talking about the industry and the artists that are being promoted through this professional infrastructure of Nashville, it's all white. And that's not going to change until the late 1960s with Charlie Pryde. If you were a Black filmmaker,

folk or blues singer, you would literally be marketed as making race music.

That's correct. At least through the 1920s and 30s, that begins to change in the late 1940s when the label R&B comes around. Now, this is not to say that country music did not benefit from the labor and talent of Black musicians. In fact, one of the stories that I tell in the book is about Cecil Gant, a Black R&B, blues, pianist, singer-songwriter from Tennessee who actually played on a lot of country music sessions back in the 1930s.

40s but didn't get the credit that he really deserves, I think. Cecil Gant actually billed himself in 1944-45 as Private Cecil Gant. He had a huge hit with a song called "I Wonder."

But he could not translate that wartime success and the labeling of himself as a military service member into a kind of post-war success because, I think, a lot of the kind of racism that was baked into the record industry in Nashville where he was cutting records. One of the biggest stars of the Grand Ole Opry in the 1920s and 30s was Dee Ford Bailey, an African-American harmonica singer. But by the 1940s, he's actually fired from the Grand Ole Opry.

And so when we're talking about this kind of Cold War era of country music in the 1950s and early 60s, it's an all-white genre for sure. Coming up, the relationship between the military and country music hits a bump in the road in the 1970s with the anti-war movement. This is On The Media. On The Media.

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Did you know Radiolab has a new podcast for kids? Well, now you do. It's called Terrestrials, and it's hosted by me, Lulu Miller. On every episode, we take a walk into nature to meet a plant or animal behaving in ways that will stun you. Squirrels who hide secrets in their brain that might help us get to Mars. Bugs that make milk, and oh yeah, we occasionally sing about it. Search for Radiolab for Kids wherever you listen to podcasts and get the newest episodes of Terrestrials today.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger, picking up on my conversation with Joseph Thompson, author of the new book, Cold War Country. In it, Thompson explains how country stars, some of whom got their start in the armed forces, lent their sound and fame to U.S. military recruitment efforts.

In turn, as the Cold War kicked off in the 1940s and 50s, the Department of Defense became a major importer of country records and provided the country music industry with a captive audience abroad. By the 1960s and 70s, that dynamic was complicated by the war in Vietnam and the birth of a counterculture peace movement.

Because of depictions of service members in country fighting in Vietnam, in both fictional films and documentaries, there's a kind of baby boomer sort of understanding of what that music was. And it was Credence Clearwater. It was Jimi Hendrix. It was rock and roll songs. Thompson says that most soldiers were probably listening to country music. That's right.

That was what was being pushed at the time to the vast majority of U.S. service members around the world who were working menial jobs and not stationed in Vietnam. The war in Vietnam also marked a turning point when country music went from being patriotic to being partisan.

as the war became less and less popular among Americans. If you still supported the military, you were seen as going along with this partisan agenda. And there's a sort of capturing of this idea of patriotism, very narrowly defined as supporting the troops no matter what, by partisan actors. And Richard Nixon and the Republican Party at the time were definitely part of that.

But even as country embraced conservative pro-war messaging, for many country artists, it was way more complicated than that. In fact, some of the musicians who helped create that image of country music were fighting against it at the same time. Like Merle Haggard, known for his two backlash anthems, Fight Inside of Me and especially Okie from Muskogee. ♪

That was the kind of character study of what Merle Haggard and his co-writer thought that a small-town person would think about the peace movement and the anti-war movement. If people know the song, it's, we don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee, we don't take our trips on LSD, we still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, etc. But he supposedly said that Muskogee, Oklahoma, was the only place he didn't smoke marijuana in 1969. Ha ha ha!

Of course, that kind of nuance is lost on not only country fans, but it's lost on politicians like Richard Nixon, who thought, oh, I have essentially a spokesperson for my politics, in which he wanted to beat up hippies and kill the peace movement.

Richard Nixon invites Merle Haggard to the White House to perform. And Merle Haggard describes that experience as one of the worst in his life. The people that he was performing for, including the president, didn't know his music, didn't like country music, and the only song that they responded to was Okie from Muskogee and Fight Inside of Me, the other backlash anthem. Okie, Oklahoma, USA

As you've observed, there were musicians who kind of tried to straddle the line with more complicated songs that, in one way or another, kind of subverted the government's Cold War messaging.

That's right. The person I really home in on is a country music songwriter named Tom T. Hall. He himself was an Army veteran, had served in Germany back in the 1950s, then launched a country music songwriting career. He wrote songs that we now hear as a jingoistic anthem like Hello Vietnam. Goodbye Vietnam

or what we're fighting for. There's not a soldier in this foreign land who likes this war. Oh, mama, tell them what we're fighting for.

Then in 1971, Tom T. Hall releases his song, Mama Bake a Pie, Daddy Kill a Chicken. It's a story about a wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran who's coming home from the war. He starts out by saying, the people are staring at me as they wheel me down the ramp toward my plane. The war is over for me. I've forgotten everything except the pain. In

In the chorus, you hear he's making a request for his homecoming meal. Mama, bake a pie. Daddy, kill a chicken. Your son is coming home. 11.35, Wednesday night. Your son is coming home.

Throughout this song, we hear the voice of this soldier and his interactions with his family and his acquaintances. People are learning that he's disabled. His drunk uncle makes this terrible suggestion about getting wooden legs. His former girlfriend, who had been waiting for him, is now no longer interested in staying with him, that he is disabled.

So he is self-medicating with alcohol that he keeps under the blanket over his wheelchair. I argue that Hall is using this to sort of cut through the debates about the Vietnam War, the debates about what is patriotism. He's making people listen really to the consequences of war.

This phenomenon you're describing reminds me of Toby Keith's 2002 anthem, courtesy of the red, white, and blue, The Angry American. My daddy served in the army. We lost his right eye, but he flew a flag out in our yard. Till the day that he died, he wanted my money.

Keith later felt pigeonholed. He told Billboard that he didn't want to seem like this Captain America right-wing lunatic. And I didn't know this, but he was actually a registered Democrat at the time that he wrote the song. He did come to regret that, although it's obvious why he was pigeonholed as this Captain America, because courtesy of the red, white, and blue, the angry America, you know, released in the wake of 9-11, it's, we're going to get revenge, we're going to put a boot up your ass, it's the American way. Hey!

No subtlety whatsoever. Zero subtlety. It comes across as this ballistic anthem about let's just go kill a bunch of people in revenge. He wrote that as a sort of character study of the way he thought his father, who was a veteran...

would react to the 9-11 attacks. But we often confuse the singer for the song, particularly in country music, where ideas about authenticity are so highly valued. We could also acknowledge that Toby Keith wrote a song called The Ballad of Balad, which is about a recruiter who...

essentially suckers a high school dropout into joining the military. And then before he knows it, he's off fighting a war that he doesn't even understand what's going on. I met an army recruiter down at the Wendix Sea. He said, son, you've no future. Pack up and go with me.

The first place we landed was a base camp. President Nixon ended the draft in 1973. That signals the beginning of a shift in country music's relationship to the military.

By the 1980s, there's less of a need for the country music industry to sell its products to soldiers, service members. And they're using the military more to sell the idea of country music as a particularly patriotic genre to civilians.

To me, this is when the relationship between country music and the military becomes a bit more symbolic. And I think that that's what really carries on into our current day. For artists nowadays, if they want to garner more listeners, if they want to really tap into country music's culture, then they play to that sort of version of patriotism that was defined way back in the Cold War days. Lee Greenwood is kind of the perfect example of that relationship.

Lee Greenwood wrote God Bless the USA, Proud to be an American as a sort of wartime song in search of a war. That's right. In September of 1983, a Korean airliner was shot down by the Soviet Union. It contained U.S. citizens, and Lee Greenwood assumed we were about to go to war. ♪

And so he wrote this song out of this kind of impulse to write a song that would express his trepidation, but also his support for the troops with this impending war on the horizon, or so he thought. But then nothing happens. So he's stuck with this wartime song, this wartime anthem, and no conflict to support it. But he releases it anyway in 1984.

And so it then becomes about just sort of a general patriotism that supports the military in a very traditional way.

that harkens back to Cold War consensus days of the 50s and 60s, a kind of pre-Vietnam patriotism. And that is ripe for the picking for Republican politicians. People like Ronald Reagan adopt Lee Greenwood's song as his anthem. He begins to inject the lyrics into his speeches. And then George H.W. Bush actually does deliver the war, Operation Desert Storm,

Of course, that is a very short-lived conflict, but Lee Greenwood nevertheless capitalizes on that and becomes surrogate for the Bush administration and for the U.S. Armed Forces overall with that song during the early 1990s. He's going to reprise that after 9-11, but the first Iraq War is the one that really gives him the war that he was in search of back in 1983.

And in a way, former President Donald Trump has also capitalized on Lee Greenwood's legacy. Yes. So the God Bless the USA Bible is a Bible that Lee Greenwood is selling. It contains the lyrics to the song. It contains copies of our founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, and then a King James version of the Bible.

Then, yeah, back in March of this year, people started sending me the commercials for God Bless the USA Bible with Lee Greenwood and Donald Trump lending his endorsement. Partnering with my good friend Lee Greenwood, I encourage you to get this God Blessed USA Bible. Let's make America pray again. God bless you and God bless the USA. So

To talk about this move from a kind of utilitarian use of country music and recruitment campaigns to this more political and symbolic connection, I think that's a prime example of what I'm talking about.

I noticed in your book, there's this tension between a kind of anti-big government ideology that many of us might associate with country music and the role that the big federal government played in helping popularize the genre. Do you think that's an important part of the story of country music?

I do. I grew up in a small town in North Alabama in the 1980s and 90s at a time when that kind of small government conservatism was sweeping the South. This idea that government was the problem, big government needed to get out of their lives.

And at the same time, I was looking around and seeing people who drove an hour every day to work at Redstone Arsenal or to work at one of these engineering firms in Huntsville, Alabama. They were essentially government employees by another name. That federal money was just being filtered through a private contractor, even though they were building weaponry and software and this kind of thing for the defense state.

And so I think there's a kind of irony in that country music, so associated with conservatism, rightly or wrongly, so associated with the white South, rightly or wrongly, gets affiliated with that sort of small government politics and people's imaginations. And what I hope to show is that the very industry that makes the music pop

that so many people latch onto from those communities was actually also built in a way by big government spending during the Cold War. Joseph Thompson is a history professor at Mississippi State University and author of the new book, Cold War Country. Joseph, thank you very much. Thank you, Micah. Coming up, how the myth of the Confederate lost cause has been fought over in a song written by a Canadian. This is On The Media.

Only 116 people in all of history can say what it's like to be a Supreme Court justice. On the next Notes from America, we will meet one. I'm Kai Wright. Join me for a conversation with Associate Justice Katonji Brown-Jackson, the first ever Black woman to serve on the court. We'll talk about the generation of civil rights fighters who raised her, what SCOTUS means in this moment, and her passions, not only for the law, but for Broadway. That's next time. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. In June, Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene took the stage at the Turning Points USA conference in Detroit to repeat what many on the right have been saying for years. There was nothing wrong with protesting the election on January 6th. And any Democrat, and any

and any person from the mainstream media, and anyone that wants to continue to shame us for January 6th can go to hell. Reframing the events of January 6th as a brave stand against tyranny has echoes with another dark chapter in America's history, the lost cause of the Confederacy, a potent narrative of grievance after the Civil War, recasting the South's stand as patriotic and heroic.

Undergirded by racism, the lost cause Apologia would stymie Reconstruction, justify decades of lynching, and throughout the South, prove as impossible to uproot as Kudzu.

When it comes to art identified with the lost cause, the silent film The Birth of a Nation, directed in 1915 by D.W. Griffith, is probably the most famous. But the song The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by the band may be pop culture's most celebrated and misunderstood contribution. Virgil Cain is the name and I served on the den till Stalman's Cain

up the tracks again in the winter of 65 we were hungry just I made the 10th Richmond at fell it's a time oh so well the night bells were ringing

The song is rock and roll canon, listed as one of the best of all time by Time Magazine and Rolling Stone, despite its charged subject matter. Back with my wife in Tennessee, when one day she called him, Virgil, quick, come see, back over from her knee. I

On paper, these verses read as if lifted from the Lost Cause playbook, a nostalgic retelling of the end of the Civil War seen through the eyes of a downtrodden southern farmer, laden with grief but not a trace of white supremacy. But the song is not what it seems, or at least what it seemed when it was first loosed upon the world. The

The band's lead guitarist, Robbie Robertson, a Canadian, hadn't logged much time in the South when he penned The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down in 1969. But in the ensuing decades, some have claimed it as a neo-Confederate anthem. ♪

I do want to say before we start the song, it's kind of a scary song to play in today's political climate, I guess. That's Early James, a 31-year-old Alabama-born country musician speaking before performing at an annual star-studded tribute concert for the band, live-streamed back in August 2020.

I felt the need to revise some lyrics to make it a little more palatable, and I hope we piss off the right people by changing those words. Inspired by the racial reckoning in the summer of 2020, James sang about toppling Confederate monuments. Here's how he changed the chorus to the night they drove old Dixie down. He sang, Tonight we drive old Dixie down. Oh, tonight

In January 2021, right after the riot at the Capitol, I spoke to pop critic Jack Hamilton, who'd written an article for Slate about the song.

I observed that 1969 was a big time for folksy, rootsy, bluesy type music. Creedence Clearwater Revival released Proud Mary and Bad Moon Rising and Born on the Bayou that same year. Maybe Dixie was an effort to infuse a more authentic life experience than could be had in the suburbs. Yeah, I think that that's, you know, an accurate way of putting it.

Woodstock is 1969, Altamont is at the end of 1969. And there is an idea in that kind of high 60s moment of popular music as a way back into a sort of authenticity. And certainly a group like the band, even though they were mostly Canadian, were very, very interested in the roots of American music and this kind of mythic idea of the American past.

Which explains their association with Bob Dylan, who was on the same journey. Yeah, the band really come to prominence as the backup band for Bob Dylan in the mid-1960s. And certainly Dylan himself is very interested in these ideas of American history and sort of mythic Americana.

Let's also talk about what was going on politically. In 69, Washington, D.C. hosted the largest anti-war protest in U.S. history. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King in 68, President Johnson signs the Fair Housing Act, also known as the Civil Rights Act.

Yeah, and you know, a lot of musicians saw their work as having a sort of political resonance. There certainly was a big linkage in this era of the popular music of the day as being a soundtrack to certain activist movements. Now, Joan Baez covered the song in 1971. Like my father before me, I'm a working man.

I'm guessing that she didn't see the song as mourning the Confederacy, but...

As an expression of class consciousness, and as you note in your piece, perhaps a protest against the conscription of poor and marginalized young men into fighting a war, the Vietnam War, that affluent people could get out of. Yeah, jumpstarting.

Joan Baez, obviously someone who is iconically associated with various protest movements of the 1960s, both, you know, the civil rights movement and also the anti-war movement. I do think that Baez probably heard in the song the idea, yeah, of a young man being conscripted into this war machine and the devastation that is wrought by that.

The Civil War in American history is the first real modern war that America fights. And one of the aspects of that is its class ramifications. And the Civil War was famously referred to by many people who fought in it as a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. You could buy your way out of military service if you were an upper class person in the 19th century on both sides, I believe.

And this is something that absolutely comes up, you know, in the Vietnam era. We could name many prominent United States politicians who got out of serving in Vietnam because they were basically connected. So I think that The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down in the tradition of kind of fictions of the Confederacy is drastically different than something like Birth of a Nation or Gone with the Wind, which are coming out of a very different historical moment that are sort of putting the mythology of the Confederacy to a different use.

That said, you think the night they drove old Dixie down is kind of a stupid song. Ha ha ha ha ha.

You know, I don't know that I'd go so far as to speak it. I mean, I love the band. They are one of my favorite artists of all time. And I think that the performance of it is just exquisite, like so many band performances are. You know, it's beautiful musicianship. Levon Helm, who sings the lead vocal, is just, you know, a gorgeous singer, gives a really great performance. But I do think the song has become a bit overrated lately.

It has a lot of hallmarks of overwrought historical fiction. It's got a lot of cloying specificity in terms of, you know, it almost reads like someone who has a kind of encyclopedia deep level of Civil War knowledge, which I think is true of Robbie Robertson.

I think there may be a generational issue here. I don't think that those of us who hummed along, I was 13 or 14 when it came out. I was a junior high school protester and I picketed for the rights of Mexican immigrant laborers. I don't think we saw the Civil War back then as living history the way that we do now.

I think that that's true. And I think our kind of collective memory and our collective interpretation of the events of the Civil War in 2020 or 2021 is drastically different than where it was in 1969. And that has to do with a sea change in the sort of historiography of the Civil War that had already started happening in the 1960s, but hadn't really trickled its way into popular consciousness yet. Yeah.

Do you think that it may have something to do with the fact that African Americans didn't have access to what was the quote unquote mainstream cultural conversation and didn't have the means to influence it?

Yeah, I think that that's absolutely true. By the mid-20th century, telling the history of the Civil War and its aftermath had become really the province of a kind of cadre of Southern white historians who were very, very invested in the lost cause narrative, in the idea that Reconstruction had been a failure,

reinvigoration of the sort of myth of Confederate virtue and, you know, all of the things that comes along with the Lost Cause. And, you know, there had been critiques of this. I mean, one of the most famous is in 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois published a massive book called Black Reconstruction in America. One of the most famous formulations he puts forward is this idea that the function of white supremacy is to consolidate

the power of the ruling class. The ruling class can forge alliances with the white working class that would have normally been outside of the white working class's particular class interests that basically prohibited solidarity between black and white workers.

This is now one of the most influential books of American history probably ever written. But at the time, Du Bois was seen as a radical, someone who was not in the club of the people who were tasked with telling the history of the Civil War. So it takes decades for Du Bois' work to really get a foothold in academic Civil War historiography. Let's assume that the Canadian lead guitarist of the band, right?

And Robbie Robertson probably hadn't read W.E.B. Du Bois. Probably not. His character is Virgil Cain. He's poor. His brother was killed in the war. He chops wood to make a living. And the song itself...

has a dirge-like quality. You quote Ta-Nehisi Coates saying that the song is just Pharaoh singing the blues.

Yeah. I love that. I love that line from Coates. And it's actually, and this is something I would offer up kind of in praise or defense of the song. I think the song musically is actually extremely complex and nuanced. You know, you mentioned that it does have these dirge-like qualities to it. The chorus, on the other hand, is entirely major key. People were singing things

You have this imagery of bells ringing and people singing. Like, these are not images that we necessarily entirely equate with mourning. The bells were ringing and the people were singing, arguably, because Dixie was defeated. Right, yeah. Virgil Cain suffered. But what he describes is,

could be seen as a major chord event in a very dirge-like episode of American history. Are these voices singing recently liberated, formerly enslaved people? There's a lot of dimensions that you could potentially pull out of this song. I don't think it's a neo-Confederate song at all. And I mean, I do think that there's a population of people who hear it that way, and I think that that's a mishearing of the song.

But songs never really belong entirely to the person who writes them or the person who performs them. There's always this very complex negotiation between, you know, audience and composer and performer. And Rolling Stone's interview with Early James

after his revision of the song, his really rewriting of it. He talks about that, you know, about how growing up in Alabama, that this song was heard unambiguously as an anthem of, you know, neo-Confederate sentiment and lost cause celebration. Is that entirely Robbie Robertson's fault? Absolutely not.

He's only got so much agency over how people hear it. You know, when a song becomes this popular and this well-known, it loses a sense of, you know, strict ownership, I think, and it becomes something that can be repurposed. I mean, the early James example is another example of that, someone taking this song and rewriting it and, you know, repurposing it for a different context. ♪ Like my father before me ♪ ♪ Though I'd never understand ♪

I'm like the others below me Who took a rebel stand Depraved and proud to enslave I think it's time for late hate in its grave I swear by the earth beneath my feet My limit won't stand no matter how much concrete Oh, tonight we're driving location down

After reading your piece, I was really primed for the early James version, but...

I like songs with unreliable narrators. I think that's why I'm such a fan of Randy Newman, you know? Right, right. The first line of the song is, Virgil Cain is the name. You know, we're made very aware that this is a fictional character. You do lose that aspect, certainly, in the early James version. And yet, at the same time, I think there's a reason that he takes

Yeah, exactly.

which is not what I think Robbie Robertson intended. So we are in a time of heightened consciousness about the impact of history and the likely creation of a new lost cause myth about a stolen election. And I just wonder, does a story about a Confederate grunt have a place among us anymore? Or is it more than that?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. The context of this song is the Vietnam War, using the metaphor of this one Confederate soldier and his experience to make a statement about sort of war more broadly and the Vietnam War specifically. The Night They Dribbled Dixie Down is written over 100 years after the surrender at Appomattox. It's written by a Canadian guy. Like, it's just so far removed. Yeah.

In many ways. So, you know, the question then sort of becomes like, is there going to be, you know, if there is something analogous to the lost cause with Trump, you know, what's that going to look like 100 years from now down the line? Are people still going to be making art that is, you know, referencing it or somehow steeped in it? I hope not. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you.

Jack Hamilton is Slate's pop critic, associate professor of American and media studies at the University of Virginia, and author of Just Around Midnight, Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. ♪

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondio, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, and Candice Wong, with help from Sean Merchant and Pamela Appiah. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Brendan Dalton. Katja Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Lange. Good night.

They drove old Dixie down and the bells were ringing. You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper with people you really want to hear from, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney or the godfather of artificial intelligence, Jeffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well-informed colleagues at The New Yorker.

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