Fake Twang: How White Conservatism Stole Country Music [View all]

[orangecrush]

This reflects a larger problem: The story we tell of ​“Rural America” in this country is a largely white story, and the rebranding and proliferation of country music to fit a universal rural audience inevitably whitewashed its diverse history and ignored the fact that much of the rural south is anything but white. Take, for example, the life-story of the most American of instruments. What we call a banjo today is an amalgamation of West African gourd instruments that made their way here in the hands of forcibly enslaved people brought to the U.S. in its colonial infancy. Once an instrument of the most oppressed rung of American society, the banjo gained national exposure when racially demeaning black-face minstrel shows toured the country, singing and playing music from the southern cannon by way of parody, inadvertently creating a national craze for the instrument. Decades after this fad had waned, the majority of banjo players that were documented by the folklorists of the 1930’s and on were white players in the upland South, where rugged isolation and poverty had preserved aspects of vernacular banjo traditions rooted in their distant African origin. This selective documentation created the lasting and baseless connotation of the banjo with rural whiteness, ignoring the nuance and reality of the actual meeting between European melodic structures and the rhythms and mechanics of West African music.

As a result of this whitewashing, our culture has largely surrendered country music to the domain of white conservatism. This association creates an understandable view of country music fans as right wing militants, blind patriots and adamant racists or, more generally, celebrators of nostalgia and rigid whiteness―in short, an image that garners suspicion and mistrust from coastal contemporaries and rightfully wary minorities.



What we think of as ​“traditional country” did not originate with white conservative men — far from it. And yet, as a consequence of marketing, that is the dominant perception people have of the genre: That it’s not made for everyone and that it stands not for combating disenfranchisement but for preserving it.




https://inthesetimes.com/article/country-music-southern-accent-conservatism-confederacy-ken-burns-blues



Great article.

I live in red rural western Pa..

The same people who brought us Fox news and the Sinclair network have bought 90% of the radio stations in the U.S., and have syndicated them.

This includes most country stations. Anyone who rocks the boat doesn't get played.

The Dixie Chicks were a perfect example.

They have created a total immersion alternate reality for the republican base.

The power this has over the minds of the lemmings can be seen from the events of January 6th.

Calls of alarm to the democratic party have gone unheeded.

No bills to break the media monopolies.

No attempts to restore the fairness doctrine.

On January 6th, we started reaping the rewards of this head in the sand posture.