By Michael T. Bertrand, author of Southern History Remixed: On Rock ’n’ Roll and the Dilemma of Race
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Have you ever watched the Coen Brothers movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? Did you notice how music seemed to be everywhere all the time? Was that a soundscape that surprised you or did it confirm your expectation that the South was a place where music was important? For me, a native of the region, it corroborated how the radio, jukebox, phonograph (not to mention tape decks, CD players, and eventually the internet) and local television created a virtual and vital community of listeners.
Throughout a career teaching southern history, I have been dismayed that textbooks on the subject contain little serious discussion about popular or commercial music. I have been very disappointed in wholesale mass culture interpretations that dismiss music as “unimportant fluff,” “instantly forgettable,” or representative of formulaic commodities foisted upon a passive public. Such disclaimers make me wonder about the disconnect between my community’s experiences and how assessments of musical moments are incorporated (or not) into the larger historical narrative. It was this disconnect that compelled me to write Southern History Remixed: On Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Dilemma of Race.
Southern History Remixed goes beyond a mass culture framework to place popular music in a context that connects it to everyday life and the attitudes and behavioral tendencies distinctive to people of the South. It takes music seriously, assessing it as a voice for its working-class creators and consumers, Black and white historical actors generally sidelined and muted in the official telling of the southern story.
So yes, this is a book about popular music. But it is also a book about southern history. The two are not mutually exclusive. Ultimately, the book is an exploration which demonstrates that what occurs in the musical realm does affect and reflect what happens in the historical one, and that analyzing a society’s past musical activities helps us to understand that society’s past. My take here is not radical. In 1965, Andrew Young advised young civil rights workers going into Mississippi to pay close attention to the music of the communities in which they operated. Listen to the records and the folk songs and the church songs, he told them, because they expressed much of what the people could not speak about in any other way.
Listen to the stories, jazz great Charlie Parker once told a group of friends skeptical of his granting attention to country music, implying that if only you would open your ears and your mind you might learn something. Both Parker and Young had the right idea. But what might we learn about southern history by listening closely to southern music?
W.E.B. Du Bois predicted that the problem of the twentieth century would be that of the color line. The culture line likewise proved problematic. Southern History Remixed views the South’s past as one enjoined in a long-term conflict over the region’s cultural complexion. At the center of the struggle was the majority’s denial that bricolage characterized the culture. This denial was best expressed by historian U.B. Phillips’s infamous “central theme of southern history” that “the South shall be and remain a white man’s country.” Charles Joyner’s later corrective — “That the South has been and will remain a multicultural mix of European and African elements” — may confirm the region’s greatest historical legacy, but it also hints at a tension inherent in the earlier historian’s ostensibly enduring conflation of regional identity with white supremacy.
For those who chart popular musical and societal trends and the interrelationship between them, it is this tension that has often been most palpable, a push and pull along racial lines that calls into question the cultural efficacy of the region’s segregationist policies and conventions. The post-World War II popularity of Black radio programming, rhythm and blues, and eventual evolution of rock ‘n’ roll in a Jane and Jim Crow South, for instance, seemed to qualify, amend, contest, or contradict the scope and demonstrability of a central theme characterizing the region and its culture as “white.”
Going beyond the generic mass culture perspective allows historians to examine rock ‘n’ roll in such a regional context and also connects it to a changing South confronting the modern civil rights movement. Exploring it as one battle in an ongoing culture war likewise recognizes that for over a century popular music and racism in the South were engaged in conflict (and not always on opposite sides), with previous campaigns involving blackface minstrelsy and songs that promoted racial stereotypes, jazz, electronic barn dance frolics, post-World War II Black radio programming, and rhythm and blues.
Such battles were and are important and remind us that Southern History Remixed is not a book solely about southern music. It is a call to rethink how we reflect upon the history of southern history.
Michael T. Bertrand, professor of history at Tennessee State University, is the author of Race, Rock, and Elvis.
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