Woke Country Music
Don’t let anyone tell you country music isn’t woke because that just ain’t true. Country music has always been woke. Progressive. Aware. Concerned with equality.
The best of it anyways.
Because of country music’s Southern roots, the genre is often conjoined with the white supremacy and right-wing politics of the South. In some cases, that’s accurate.
Tammy Wynette’s classic “Stand by Your Man” (1968) promotes the subjugation of her gender. Stand by your man through infidelity and, presumably, abuse. “If you love him, you’ll forgive him,” she sings. Lee Greenwood’s saccharine “God Bless the USA” (1984) is an anthem to Christian nationalism, the idea that the United States should be governed exclusively by Christians and Christian beliefs. Toby Keith’s dopey, juvenile, “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American” (2001) parrots and promotes the worst of America’s historic “might makes right” foreign policy. Worst of all is Hank Williams Jr.’s “If the South Woulda Won” (1988) which, in glorifying Dixie, fails to mention that if the South would’ve won the Civil War, slavery would have remained legal. Unconscionable.
But for every one of those cringers, there are a dozen country songs promoting women’s liberation, highlighting the inequalities of America’s so-called “criminal justice” system, and promoting the value of working people in the face of corporations. They are sung by legends.
Legends like Willie Nelson, cofounder of Farm Aid, a fundraiser benefiting family farmers in the face of industrial – big business – farming. Woke.
People over profits.
Legends like Johnny Cash. The man in black was so progressive he could be considered an activist singer. He wore “the black for the poor and the beaten down/Living in the hopeless, hungry side of town/I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime/But is there because he’s a victim of the time.” “Man in Black” (1971). Woke.
Awake to America’s historic inequality. It’s mistreatment of the poor, the hungry, prisoners. Calling out America as an “incarceration nation” long before that was a popular notion.
Legends like Kris Kristofferson who courageously showed solidarity with Sinead O’Connor in front of 20,000 jeering fans at Madison Square Garden in 1992 after O’Connor, heroically, tore up a picture of the pope on “Saturday Night Live,” calling out the Catholic Church’s silence on its global child sex scandal. Woke.
Legends like Loretta Lynn who sang about women’s reproductive freedom. Woke.
Legends like Dolly Parton who supports Black Lives Matter. Whose “9 to 5” (1980) is an anthem for working women. Women working against the patriarchy, working again asshole male bosses, against glass ceilings, and a society believing their place is in the home.
Willie, Waylon Jennings, and Kenny Rogers participated in the “We Are the World” U.S.A. for Africa recording in 1985 raising money for famine relief in Africa. Acknowledging a world beyond America. Awake to its problems. Woke.
Legends like The Chicks who were the Number 1 act in country music in 2003 when they criticized George Bush II’s war in Iraq. A war ultimately proven unjustified. There were no “WMDs:” weapons of mass destruction upon which Bush sold and based the war. Woke.
Their career was effectively over. Country music would never be the same again in all the wrong ways.
Country music’s legends are mostly woke, mostly progressive; being an artist requires empathy. Woke is nothing if not an ability to appreciate the circumstances of others. Country music fans are the opposite. They are overwhelmingly right-wing, regressive. They always have been, as have been the radio stations playing the music.
Chickenshits like Jason Aldean will try making you think it’s not OK to be woke and be a country music fan. Don’t believe it. Country music has always been woke.
How woke? This woke:
Johnny Cash: The King of Woke
The lyrics to Cash’s “Man in Black” lay out his sympathies to the underclass. Until the sick and the poor and the weak and the oppressed are taken care of, he’s going to wear all black as a sign of mourning. He wants more social services, a greater social safety net, affordable healthcare, free meals. Cash considers that humane. Others call it socialism.
“The Ballad of Ira Hayes” (1964) highlights Pima Indian Ira Hayes, a war hero who helped raise the U.S. flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima. When Hayes returns home, the nation initially makes a big deal of him, but America is not a nation set up to support its Indigenous people.
“The water grew Ira’s peoples’ crops/Until the white man stole the water rights/And the sparkling water stopped/Now Ira’s folks were hungry/And their land grew crops of weeds.”
His tribe’s land in Arizona having been plundered, there’s no life there for him, or his people. He falls into despair and alcoholism, dying in a ditch.
“One Piece at a Time” (1976) amusingly tells the story of a union assembly line worker who steals a Cadillac one piece at a time over many years from the factory. The union member is the hero. Stealing from the greedy company is justified.
“Folsom Prison Blues” is better known, but “San Quentin” (1969) is more activist. More woke. Prisons not as part of the solution, but as part of problem.
“San Quentin, I hate every inch of you/You’ve cut me and have scarred me through and through.”
“San Quentin, what good do you think you do?/Do you think I’ll be different when you’re through?/You bent my heart and mind and you warp my soul/And your stone walls turn my blood a little cold.”
“San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell.”
America incarcerates more people than any other democracy on earth by a wide margin. Its system of “criminal justice” from policing to prosecution to punishment has always been rigged against poor people and minorities and continues to be. Cash saw this. He was awake to the injustice. Woke.
“Jacob Green” offers an even fiercer indictment of the prison system. In this song, a young man busted for the simple offense of possession of drugs is humiliated and abused by the guards and ends up committing suicide. “The Wall” (1965) approaches a similar theme.
“Don’t Go Near the Water” (1974) spotlights water pollution. Thank American corporations for that.
“Flesh and Blood” (1970) is a love letter to nature as essential to the human spirit, not a resource to be defiled, abused, exploited, and profited from. Thank American corporations for that.
The list goes on, and on, and on.
Johnny Cash was the soul and conscious of country music, perhaps the soul and conscious of American music. He was woke as hell.
Women’s Liberation
Women’s equality. Sexual freedom. Reproductive freedom.
Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton fought for them in the 60s and 70s, and American women are having to fight for them again in the 2020s in the face of Republican assaults.
Lynn’s “The Pill’ (1975) will always be the standard bearer in this category. Sick and tired of being barefoot and pregnant, Lynn’s protagonist tells her husband she’s stepping out “now I’ve got the pill.” Reproductive freedom equals freedom.
Parton’s “It’s All Wrong, but it’s All Right” (1978) and “Two Doors Down” (1978) are both hook-up songs, promoting a woman’s right to have flings, one-night stands, to enjoy having sex without commitment – just like the men. Woke.
Reba McEntire’s “Is There Life Out There” (1992) dares to suggest a family and a home may not be all there is to life for a woman. Don’t tell J.D. Vance. Her “She Thinks His Name was John” (1994) is even bolder, sympathizing, humanizing a woman who had a one-night stand and ended up contracting HIV/AIDS and dying from it.
Ronald Regan and conservatives mocked AIDS for a decade, believing it punishment from god for gay people, restricting funding, shaming the disease, aiding its spread. Reba knew better.
McEntire was the biggest female singer in country music at the time. This song peaked only at #15 on the Billboard “Hot Country Songs” chart; the singles which preceded and followed it – neither all-timers – both went top five.
Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” (1993) blasts the patriarchy, blasts women as second-class citizens, blasts pay inequities in the workplace. It was recorded live at the Country Music Awards ceremony with Patty Loveless, Trisha Yearwood, Kathy Mattea and Suzy Bogguss providing backing vocals. Carpenter’s “I Feel Lucky” (1992) can also be considered woke for its role reversal of sexual objectification. Carpenter, the woman, objectifying Lyle Lovett and Dwight Yoakam, men.
The Chick’s “Goodbye Earl” (2000) similarly upends gender norms in country music and American society. Here, it’s the woman killing the (abusive) man without remorse and going on to live her best life.
Anti-War
America is a war monger. The nation has been involved in a near constant state of armed conflict at home and abroad ever since it was founded. It’s war machine – the production, export, and profit of military weapons – fuels war around the world, most recently and prominently Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinians.
Speaking out against war has come to be thought of as un-American because war is so American. It has been done, however, a time or two, in country music.
Most prominent among the anti-war country songs is The Chicks’ “Travelin’ Soldier” (2002). It details the pen pal relationship between a high school girl and a U.S. soldier in Vietnam. At a high school football game, the girl hears the soldier’s name read among those having lost their life that week in the war. An achingly beautiful song highlighting the human tragedy of war. Shockingly, demonstrating how popular The Chicks – formerly The Dixie Chicks – were, this anti-war song went to #1.
And speaking of that name. The Chicks are a great example of how “woke” isn’t necessarily born, it can be learned. The Chicks saw no problem with “Dixie” until they did. I wouldn’t have considered myself “woke” five years ago, but I am proud as hell to say I am now. I am awake. I’ve been awakened to America’s historic and ongoing abuses against women, minorities, homosexuals, the poor, Native people, the environment and am committed to calling it out and fighting it.
“50,000 Names on the Wall,” as you might expect, references the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. The song was written and recorded by Jamie O’Hara in the ‘90s, George Jones found a little success with it as a single in 2001. This one, again, puts a human face and cost to America’s warmongering.
Any media not pro-war in America is anti-war. Woke.
Anti-Capitalism
Capitalism fixes in place America’s systemic abuses against women, minorities, working people, and the poor. For American capitalism to succeed, to produce winners, it demands losers. You can guess who they are.
Capitalism as practiced in America demands free and cheap labor. Government tax breaks and subsidies. Access to exploit natural resources. The ability to pollute with near impunity. A lack of regulation for safety or environmental protection.
American capitalism rewards those most willing to engage in it with the least ethics.
Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” (1977) is a rebuke to the working stiff existence. When “his woman done left and took all the reason” he’s been working for, he quits the job he hates, exiting capitalism. The song has become an anthem for everyone everywhere who hates their job and their boss and wishes they could say “take this job and shove it.”
Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson’s “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” (1977) similarly expresses a desire to exit capitalism having found “keeping up with the Jones’” a soul-crushing pursuit. Any sentiments expressing that there’s more to life than material possessions and consumerism are woke in America, a nation run less by a political system than an economic one.
Environmentalism
Democrats in America don’t do enough by half to conserve and protect the environment. Republicans and their corporate interests are at war with it. GOP stands for “Gas and Oil Party.” There are still Republican congressman, dozens, who deny climate change.
Developers, ranchers, mining interests, Big Oil, factory farms – the industries destroying the planet – are almost uniformly aligned with the right wing of America’s political spectrum.
John Anderson’s “Seminole Wind” (1992) highlights the destruction of the Everglades by land developers and Big Sugar and America’s historic mistreatment of Native people.
“Progress came and took its toll/And in the name of flood control/They made their plans and they drained the land/Now the glades are going dry.”
Woke.
The song made it all the way to #2 on country charts.
“Paradise,” written by John Prine and recorded by Cash, John Denver and Dwight Yoakam among others, depicts the devastation of surface coal mining.
“daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County/down by the Green River where paradise lay?/Well, I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking/Mister Peabody’s coal train just hauled it away.”
“the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel/and they tortured the timber and stripped all the land/And they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken, wrote it all down as the progress of man.”
Progress.
Progress in American capitalism requires exploitation.
Wake up.
Contemporary country music near as I can tell is ripped off beach music from Jimmy Buffett. Buffett was woke. He co-founded an environmental organization in Florida, Save the Manatee Club.
Poverty
As mentioned, for American capitalism to produce winners – billionaires – it must produce losers – poor people. The winners win by getting over on someone. Through manipulation, greed, exploitation, tax evasion, deregulation.
Perhaps more than anything else, country music is the music of the working poor. The people being gotten over on by the rich millionaires.
Think about Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1970), Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” (1971), and McEntire’s “Fancy” (1990). By any estimation, three of the greatest songs in country music history.
Lynn’s song is autobiographical, as is Parton’s. In Lynn’s case, despite her father performing one of the most dangerous jobs in history as a coal miner, his family is so poor she doesn’t have shoes to wear in the summer. Similarly for Parton, her poverty-stricken Appalachian family can’t afford coats so her grandmother has to sew rags together for warmth.
And this is a condition we should be proud of in America? Celebrating the resourcefulness, resiliency, and pride of the working poor instead of taxing the rich? Instead of taxing corporations?
In “Fancy” (written and recorded by Bobbie Gentry in 1969), McEntire’s protagonist comes from such a poor family her mother sends her – underage – into prostitution as a preferred outcome. That’s sick.
These songs shouldn’t be celebrated as poor people overcoming their “station,” they should be rallying cries for more humane conditions. For a greater distribution of wealth.
If a coal miner can’t afford shoes for his children in capitalist America, let me try some of that socialism.
Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto” (1969) exposed the hardships and realities of urban poverty and the cycle incarceration.
“take a look at you and me/Are we too blind to see/Do we simply turn our heads/And look the other way?”
“And a hungry little boy with a runny nose/Plays in the street as the cold wind blows.”
“And his hunger burns/So he starts to roam the streets at night/And he learns how to steal and he learns how to fight/In the ghetto (In the ghetto)
“Then one night in desperation/The young man breaks away/He buys a gun, he steals a car/Tries to run, but he don’t get far.”
And he ends up in America’s prison industrial complex where he might become another Jacob Green.
How woke is country music?
That woke.
