This post has a lot to do with bluegrass and country music---not completely, but if bluegrass and country music aren't your things then this post may not be for you.
Let's start by dispensing with the idea that "culture" is music, art, writing, and a matter of tastes that may or may not be cultivated and refined. I like an enlarged definition of culture that says that culture is how we operate within social contradictions, how we work with and transmit our understandings of the reality of which we are a part. There is the base of society---all the relationships tied to the means of production and distribution. And there is the superstructure that builds from that base and which ensures that one class holds hegemony and others don't. This is the state, cultural institutions, the way work is organized, school, religion, etc. But there is always---always---conflict running from the base through the superstructure, and hegemony never becomes complete domination, even with fascism. Change and conflict are inevitable. Both the base and the superstructure have irreparable cracks in them. The class conflicts and the contradictions and struggles that occur between races and between genders take place between real people in real time. Classes, races, and genders are verbs in the first place, not nouns; they draw their identities and reason and force---their most active dimensions---from action, not from being statistical categories. Culture is how we operate and what we do within that verb of active dimensions. It's one very important means of understanding and acting on what differentiates the "thems" and the "uses," part of the inevitable social conflict over either the ruling class maintaining or us gaining hegemony.
Have I lost you yet? You thought you were digging into a post about bluegrass and country and here I am going abstract on you. Hang on!
I think that the great photographer Yevgeny Khaldei best illustrated the role of the cultural worker. His photographs of the Great Patriotic War ("World War Two") are stunning, to be cliché but truthful. And there is one of his photos showing the USSR's soldiers marching over a giant nazi flag as they liberate a concentration camp and there is a building burning in the background. "People ask if I staged the photograph of the soldiers marching on the flag," Khaldei said. "I didn't. But I did set fire to the nazi office in the background." That takes a certain understanding of struggle, the push and pull of struggle and culture, to fully appreciate.
No movement for social change is going to stand alone, apart from society or as a subculture or as "in crowd," and win. Our movements for social change have used music for 150+ years, and things work best when that music reflects popular experiences and knowledge and is accessible. I don't see much discussion of music in my circles, or much appreciation of it. Maybe the pandemic has done some damage here, but I don't see a movement that sings the songs that reflect the lives of working people and that is fully accessible to them/us. It's been a long time since I've been to a picketline with live music that turned people on and had songs they knew the words to. Maybe I'm not going to the right picketlines. That said, there is some great music for us out there right now.
I'm liking Leyla McCalla's music these days:
and
That music speaks pretty clearly for itself, doesn't it?
I also like Sabine McCalla's music. Here's one of my favorites:
Is Sabine McCalla's song a protest song? In a sense it is---in the very cultural sense as described above---because it captures a sound and an attitude and a rhythm and comes from a creative lineage that are all very much at odds with the capitalist social (dis)order and the music industry itself right now. This is an expression of a southern Black woman's poetic sensibilities, something reaching for a new humanism and coming from a woman whose parents were political activists.
Cedric Watson and Leyla McCalla raise the intellectual bar by challenging us to think and feel together, which is to say that they challenge the capitalist order that separates thought and action. And they do this with real subversive tact.
Let's kick it up a little.
Kelsey Waldon nails so much of the timber of our lives in "High in Heels"--
If she stopped there she might make it in Nashville. But she goes much further:
and:
It isn't just that Kelsey Waldon is singing about our lives with solidarity and beauty or that she wears camo (the color of the United Mine Workers of America union) or that you can donate to good causes when you purchase records on her site (https://www.kelseywaldon.com/). It isn't just that she borrows from Hazel Dickens and Ola Belle Reed. It's also the ways that she smiles and frowns and takes control of the music and the ways that she speaks and the way she partners with some serious women musicians. If you know Appalachia and parts of the midwest and south you know what I'm talking about. You will recognize someone just like her on a picketline or at the Piggly Wiggly.
We're going to get some criticism for stereotyping working-class people as mine workers and industrial workers, and as men. I take the point that the working-class is multiracial and multinational and diverse and that we do all kinds of work---more on that below---but I want to draw out that coal production is increasing right now and that this increase in production comes with fewer permanent hires and more contracted workers and increases in black lung. In other words, it comes with suffering for workers and our communities.
Now, I'm not necessarily anti-Nashville when it comes to music, but for a long time Nashville has promoted music that feeds the far-right or that leaves politics and struggle out of the picture. I can't believe that Lady Antebellum got away with themselves for as long as they did. But Del McCoury gets in under the radar and gets his points across:
and
Now, someone is going to say that Del McCoury's gospel music has a reactionary side to it. I hear that line in "Free Salvation" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCRO88Hj-34) about school prayer, but I want to draw attention to the antiwar message and the underscored statement in the song that salvation is for people "with no exceptions." From the standpoint of a working-class Protestant in the so-called "non-conforming churches" these are not always intuitive positions. I also want to emphasize that the Del McCoury band is essentially a family band, a form of musical organization that Nashville did much to destroy. And who else is doing Woody Guthrie songs and a song protesting rural gentrification?
Del McCoury's "Amnesia" is full of working-class complaints about a relationship falling apart, and his "Streets of Baltimore" is a story I heard many, many times before I left Appalachia in the late '90s. Even then Baltimore had large Appalachian communities, and when I went over there I got away with quite a few traffic violations because the cops figured that I was just another one of the many moving in. I once got hired at a textile mill there without even filling out an application because the manager pinned me as a desperate West Virginian looking for work who couldn't read. "You look like a solid citizen," he said with a wink.
Billy Strings is moving into Nashville, I guess, but you can see that he has some of the same energy that Kelsey Waldon has and that he knows our working-class despair. Listen in to "Dust In A Baggie":
Logan Halstead gets it right most of the time:
And there are lots more.
This music has to take up some contradictions and hits some walls. All that despair will burn people out, even though it's a money maker. It's easy to get stuck there, and as you go through this music you will find one musician who has a number of songs about staying high and warding off people who carry "bad news" (like the Left) and Logan Halstead's offensive song that insults women in Pineville, Kentucky. This takes us to hipster irony, that just makes fun of working-class people, and to nihilism. And you know that describing our lives is not the same as singing or talking about changing life, but you also know that if we can't define what's happening then we don't have any power at all.
The bigger problem is that most music that puts forward justifiable white or Black grievances and that doesn't attempt to draw the two together somehow falls short and maybe turns back the clock as well. It's an old saying that there is nothing that Black people want that white people don't need. We need to hear that and work with it. Have you ever wondered why The Persuasions changed the ending of their "Willie and Laura Mae Jones" over the years?
Now, there is an old and very stupid joke about playing country music records backward and getting back your house, your wife, and your dog. I didn't get the import of the history of bluegrass nd country music until I read Keri Leigh Merritt's book "Masterless Men." It's not that she writes about music---she doesn't--but that she explores in this book the lives and cultures of the majority of dispossessed whites in the pre-Civil War south who did not own slaves and who had an ambiguous or oppositional relationship to the slaveholders and to slavery. Their misery has remained with us. It's a hard book to read, but I want you read it and Dr. Du Bois' "Black Reconstruction in America."
