These last 30 years, the (Dis) United States has experienced some interesting internal migrations: Black African Americans are leaving depressed, violent Northern cities to return to the South. Likewise, many Midwestern, Eastern White Americans have moved to the South – the Sun Belt – in hopes of finding a nicer climate, more conservative politics or they are just trying to get away from Black criminals, crazy Lib/Min homosexual politics/culture in “Blue States”. Many are looking to find…. Mayberry, NC – “Andy, Barney, Opie”.
The OD comments section is filled with White Southerners complaining about “Yankee transplants”, these proud sons and daughters of the South oppose a second Northern/”Yankee” invasion of their beloved Southland. OK, there are always going to be some conflicts between different types of White Indo European people.
But, Whites in the South should study some fairly resent history and understand that there was a similar internal migration of poor Whites from the South to Northern Industrial cities during World War I and especially during and after World War II. Poor Whites in the South moved north to cities like Detroit in search of good paying industrial jobs and a better life and I think fair people would say that local Whites in Northern industrial cities tried to help their White kinsmen from the South.
Steve Earle – the Texas born and raised C&W/folk musician sings about this mass migration of poor Southern Whites moving north in search of a better life:
HillBilly Highway (click link to hear Steve Earle perform the song live)
“My grandaddy was a miner, but he finally saw the light
He didn’t have much, just a beat-up truck and a dream about a better life
Grandmama cried when she waved goodbye, never heard such a lonesome sound
Pretty soon the dirt road turned into blacktop, Detroit City bound
Down that hillbilly highway
That hillbilly highway
Hillbilly highway
Goes on and on
He worked and saved his money so that one day he might send
My old man off to college, to use his brains and not his hands
Grandmama cried when she waved goodbye, never heard such a lonesome sound
But daddy had himself a good job in Houston, one more rollin’ down
Down that hillbilly highway
That hillbilly highway
Hillbilly highway
Goes on and on
Grandaddy rolled over in his grave the day that I quit school
I just sat around the house playin’ my guitar, Daddy said I was a fool
My mama cried when I said goodbye, I never heard such a lonesome sound
Now I’m standin’ on this highway and if you’re going my way
You know where I’m bound “
(Source: http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/earle-steve/hillbilly-highway-2169.html)
Right up into the 1970’s there was a big out migration from South of the Mason-Dixon Line to the industrial cities of the North. Here’s the song that tells the tale:
Back in Eastern Kentucky where I grew up it was common for the men to work in Atlanta and Detroit, so this song hits the mark.
I’m nominating another SE song for the Cracker Nation National Anythm: Copperhead Road.
Remember the shitstorm from the neocon crowd over his song sympathetic to Muslims?
Wayne says:
August 25, 2012 at 4:23 pm (Edit)
Back in Eastern Kentucky where I grew up it was common for the men to work in Atlanta and Detroit, so this song hits the mark.
I’m nominating another SE song for the Cracker Nation National Anythm: Copperhead Road.
Jack Ryan responds:
Agreed. Copperhead Road is great. I highly recommend the album, CD – Essential Steve Earle – there are so many great songs, many with strong White American folk history themes.
One of my favorites is “Getting Tough” – which describes the life experience, fear of a White working man in the 80s – the refrain goes something like:
“I was born in the land of plenty, now it ain’t enough, sometimes it just don’t pay to be a good ‘ol boy”
Wayne says:
August 25, 2012 at 4:30 pm (Edit)
Remember the shitstorm from the neocon crowd over his song sympathetic to Muslims?
Jack Ryan responds:
Yeah, but my take is that Steve Earle went bad after he went down to drugs (I think that included heroin) and then he came up here to Chicago to be in/around the Lefty Old Town School of folk music and Steve Earle did some predictably nonsense opposing the death penalty against Black rapists, murderers here in Chicago – we have very many. So, the Lefty incarnation of Steve Earle opposes wars against Iraq, Muslim countries, profiling Muslim immigrants, Steve Earle is against RACISM blah, blah, blah.
We liked him much better when Steve Earle was our guy – White populist, folk singer, telling our stories about our poor, working class White Americans with a Southern accent, perspective.
My dad moved from Phenix City, AL to Detroit after he got home from the Pacific Theater of WWII. All of the stories of Yankee riches that he heard from the guys he served with were too much for him to ignore.
He hauled my Tennessee Hillbilly mom and my Cracker older brothers and sister and all of his slaughterhouse equipment to Detroit in ’46. He drove a 1928 Ford Model A loaded down with the slaughterhouse stuff and furniture. My oldest brother, Perry, who was 11 at the time, followed the old man down the road in a 1936 Chevy Coupe with a rumble seat.
The stories they told me about that trip rival Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath”. They were broke down more than they were moving. They camped in fields along the way. They cooked over wood fires. They ran out of money twice and had to find work to earn money to keep going.
They ran into a couple of assholes and a whole lot of good folks along the road. They almost let a family in Somerset, Ky talk them into setting down roots right there, but the old man had visions of Detroit’s riches dancing in his head, so they kept on pushing North.
Listening to my family’s stories about that journey was like watching “Wagon Train”. No two days were ever alike.
My kin were simple Southern folks, so to them the sights and sounds along the road were like an endless carnival.
I heard their travelling tales so many times, from so many different mouths, that many of their memories became my own. I remember just like it was last week the flavor of the first chili dogs that any of them ever tasted, bought from a Taste Freez type of eatery along US 27 in Tennessee.
I still shudder when I remember looking down through the hole of toilet that a Kentucky sevice station’s owner had dangled out over a cliff. Bombs away. Nothing between me and those tree tops hundreds of feet below. The tiny shitter shivered when a gust of wind came along.
I wasn’t there, but the memories are. I still look for those places every time I travel on 27.
John Mellencamp was sorta the same way — passed himself off as a working-class Midwesterner, but turned liberal after finding mainstream success.
Still, I like his many of his songs — Rain on the Scarecrow, Jackie Brown, Eden is Burning, Just Another Day — sometimes you gotta just ignore the man and enjoy the music.
The good, white families we have moving into West Texas from states afar are hellbent on becoming Texans, just like us. Conservative politics, a deep hatred for the liberal carnival states they left, and Nordic children abound. I thank God for every one of them.
It is like they are all looking for America. And the only place left is the South, and parts of the midwest.
There is a storm a’ comin’. Mark my words.
Jimmie Rodgers heads for South of that “Dixon” Line:
Sorry about my comments, but I do have a strong female urge to protect people and it just comes out.
It’s just that —the way the cities are now– that local whites helping may be true, but not as prevalent as after WWII when the cities were a different story. Chicago isn’t even 30% white now and it’s definitely not post-WWII and 1950 anymore.
Most of the people I meet in the south were moved there by companies or military. Overall, it speaks to the transients people are forced to become in increasingly centralized, federalized economies— all trying to go where the State sends them, or where they hope jobs will be (where the State decides “development” will happen).
This has broken up families more than anything. People have to learn to have faith in God and stay where there is no work, and make a conscious decision for their own people, to be more financially unstable, imo.
I don’t know what it was like in other areas, but around Detroit hillbillies were treated like second class citizens. My older brothers had to fight almost every day in school because little Yankee pricks had something to say about their accent or the things they brought in their lunch. (NO, not possum innerds, just stuff like cornbread and beans.)
As they got older my brothers often had to sit in the balcony with the niggers when they went to watch a movie. They got profiled when they drove their old beaters around with Rockabilly blasting out of that one big speaker in the middle of the dash.
A lot of the same shit that we say about Mexican illegals nowadays was said about hillbillies back then: “They come up here to steal our jobs.” “Why pay us a decent wage when those goddamn hillbillies will work for damn near nothing.” “They breed like rats.” “No need to waste time sending them to school because they’re too damn stupid for anything to sink in.”
So, if the Yankee transplants don’t get welcomed with open arms, then I suppose some of it has to do with memories like those.
Technically, I was a transplant when I finally got around to heading south, but I never had a bit of trouble fitting in. I think that is due to the fact that I spent my whole time in Michigan and Minnesota feeling like I was behind enemy lines and it apparently shows.
I like the soundtrack to the movie “Next of Kin” (Ricky Skaggs, Charlie Daniels, George Jones etc…) where Liam Neeson and his family come up to Chicago from Kentucky and kill all those wops.
Many good comments. But, please listen to the Steve Earle song “Hillbilly Highway” – the subject of this post:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clrSTK6AOgc
We need more folk anthems of our people. Sweet Home Alabama is just one song – it’s a good one, but we need more than one.
I think this Steve Earle song “Hillbilly Highway” is another very good White American folk anthem – sure it has a Southern perspective, a southern “twang” but most White working class folks can relate.
“People have to learn to have faith in God and stay where there is no work”
Starve for Jesus!?! That’s about the dumbest thing you’ve ever said and that’s really saying something.
That strategy didn’t work before welfare and food stamps you stupid, stupid girl.
There are hundreds of counties South of the Mason Dixon Line that have populations not much larger than they had in 1860! Often these counties have everything you could want, and they are not cliff dwelling communities either.
One thing about rural life in the South or mid-West, as a friend of mine put it, “you have to drive 15 miles to get an ice cream cone”.
@Dixiegirl, I really don’t care for Northern big city types either. I just try not to show it.
There are hundreds of counties South of the Mason Dixon Line that have populations not much larger than they had in 1860! Often these counties have everything you could want, and they are not cliff dwelling communities either.
One thing about rural life in the South or mid-West, as a friend of mine put it, “you have to drive 15 miles to get an ice cream cone”.
@Dixiegirl, I really don’t care for Northern big city types either. I just try not to show it.
Rudel: “People have to learn to have faith in God and stay where there is no work”
I think Dixiegirl’s strategy helped CREATE welfare and food stamps. LBJ’s bleeding heart mentality formed when he was teaching in Texas. He had to endure trying to teach a bunch of half-starved kids every single day. If those kid’s folks had had the good sense to move to where the money was, then maybe Mr. Johnson wouldn’t have poisoned our society with his good intentions.
Having said that, I will now have to admit that what Dixiegirl said about folks sticking it out around family rings kind of true. My family is scattered all over the country and we don’t know each other. That may not suck as much as abject poverty, but it still sucks.
Here you go, Jack. This isn’t exactly a folk anthem, but I think it reflects what country folks throughout America feel about the festering cities in their region.
<"'cause they can't start their football till all wide receivers post bond"
Hahahahahahaha! (spewing coffee all over the keyboard)
First man on the moon dies. Oh well, we still have the first black president. That’s er “progress”. When is our first amoeba president? That’s progressing so far it’s regression.
@ John: LOL. that was a hell of a thought! I’m having a wheezing fit laughing at the idea of our first bacterial president! Equality! Finally!
jack ryan says:
We need more folk anthems of our people. Sweet Home Alabama is just one song – it’s a good one, but we need more than one.
Would this work for Y’all?
Check out Glenn and Reed when they were younger. Feel good video and setting.
Mixed feelings on Steve Earle. Copperhead Road, well, that whole album kicks ass. But Earle went big lefty on us and his song about Johnny Taliban, the lethal injection chamber in a Texas prison and that thing about being Kilrain from the 20th Main kinda makes me wonder. Not sure he is on our side–at least not anymore.
jack says:
August 25, 2012 at 10:31 pm
Mixed feelings on Steve Earle. Copperhead Road, well, that whole album kicks ass. But Earle went big lefty on us and his song about Johnny Taliban, the lethal injection chamber in a Texas prison and that thing about being Kilrain from the 20th Main kinda makes me wonder. Not sure he is on our side–at least not anymore.
Jack (different Jack) Ryan responds:
I feel your pain Jack. It’s a lot like Andy Griffith – Steve Earle was our folk, C&W, rock voice and then….
fame is fleeting – especially when “the powers that be” identify you as the voice of millions of frustrated White working class Americans. Steve Earle went the path of hard drugs, dabbled a bit in same old, same old Lib/Lefty politics – well at least he opposed the Neo Con Jew wars, if only from a warped “understand the Muslims” angle.
In my book it doesn’t matter – I separate the artist’s work from the artist – same with Andy Griffith trying to get work later in life by going PC Lib/Min.
Get the Essential Steve Earle Album/CD – one of THE best ever.
14 Words.
One thing we are going to have to work on is getting an authentically White musical idiom going with a sizable repertoire of tunes. The old songs were often good, but there was a lot of dross and no small amount of poison in the musical soup kettle we have been handed.
The folk music movement gave us a lot of Communist songs and a lot of race mixing and that has become part and parcel of “The Lesser American Songbook”, a term meaning the old (pre-rock-era) songs that are not Tin Pan Alley/Broadway/Frank-Dean-Sammy(FDS) in nature. It’s tough to separate them out.
Country music, as such, is not something ageless and timeless: it’s as Jewish as show tunes and rock and roll. It was invented largely from whole cloth in the early days of radio broadcasting to be a musical style palatable to hillbillies, and often was performed by people from authentic hillbilly backgrounds, but it was carefully molded and shaped. The Auerbachs, who started Hill and Range to publish the music, and the people who sold the advertising on the radio stations were Jewish, and no big country star is more than one degree of separation from Jewish management to this day. Its initial purpose was to get the hillbillies to buy radio sets and listen to clear channel night blasters so advertising for flour and laxatives could be sold-not because Jews are scatological, though they are, but because hillbillies had bad diets and were plugged up from excess starch most of the time. But make no mistake, the medium became the Jewish message in short order. Johnny Cash recorded paens to racial harmony and diatribes against the rotten treatment of Injuns, Elvis and Carl Perkins and many others made R&B into rockabilly, and Jerry Reed sang and talked Negro as often as possible.
The Carter family was not Jewish and neither was Johann Sebastian Bach. I’ve never heard such outright nonsense since Joe’s last post.
I’m a big fan of Steve Earle’s music…it’s just a shame he’s so damn liberal.
And for all you Yankees up in Michigan:
The Carter family was not Jewish and neither was Johann Sebastian Bach.
True enough.
Classical music is what I am specifically not referring to, along with liturgical and military music. These are great and good things, but popular song is something different from these. When classical music was a big percentage of radio play, it was either in Jewish areas like New York or it was stations broadcasting snippets of the more popular movements of selected pieces in high rotation and intended as background music. I rarely listen to classical music personally, even though I acknowledge its greatness.
Yes, the Carter Family is considered a cornerstone of country music, but that’s in no small part to the fact that Johnny Cash and June Carter dumped their spouses for each other, and because Mother Maybelle’s finger style guitar playing became huge influences in later country through Merle Travis and Chet Atkins, in folk music secondhand via John Fahey and Leo Kottke, and in New York rock music thirdhand via Lou Reed(J, ne Rabinowitz) (Robert Quine,mother nee Cohen), Blondie (Chris Stein, need you ask?) and Sonic Youth. ( I was involved in the musical instrument business for years and know this. I knew John Fahey moderately well and recommend his books, which when read between the lines are most instructive. )
Johnny Cash himself was part Indian, tribe unknown, and this accounts for his appearance and his alternate religiosity and booze and pill issues. Not a Jew, but not quite White either.
With the exception of Elvis (Gladys was a Jewess, her headstone bears the Star of David, and Elvis was eligible for aliyah to Israel under the Law of Return) and songwriter Shel Silverstein and gadfly Kinky “Texas Jewboys” Friedman, I know of no Jewish country performers. They have quite prudently stayed out of country music as performers. But as I have said: every really big country star has a Jewish manager or is connected to Jewish business associates. Now, of course, this statement lends itself to a True Scotsman challenge, but name ten big ones with any real legs (i.e., longevity) and in seven or eight cases it should be obvious in short order.
Old Nashville, aristocratic, does not like the country business and never much did, and this is a major reason, though certainly not the only one.
This isn’t to say all country music is Jewified, much of it is decent fare, but one has to be careful. To assume country music generally is pro-White is dangerous and nonsensical. Much of it is rot.
“I know of no Jewish country performers. They have quite prudently stayed out of country music as performers.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x05z27blg80
You sir, are a liar and an ignorant poltroon.
Brad Paisley’s BS about Rosa Parks and some line about a poor youf lynched over a white girl was enough for me to mark that POS off my radar permanently.
Your delusional or a liar Jack Ryan. Those poor Whites from the South moved north and got shit on by yankees. Ask the ones who moved up there. We have a regular posters here who mentioned his family’s experience about moving north. A history book dealing in facts and not propaganda would fix your lack of knowledge
They also didn’t go up there, try to change the place and look down on the native born. You are comparing apples to oranges on behaviors and attitudes
“the Carter Family is considered a cornerstone of country music, but that’s in no small part to the fact that Johnny Cash and June Carter dumped their spouses for each other”
The Carter Family were huge stars in the record business and on the radio back in the 1930’s and 1940’s way before Johnny and June were an item. The Carter Family made their first recordings on August 2, 1927 before June was even born. They were slated to be on the cover of Life Magazine the second week of December 1941.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Carter_Family_1927.jpg
There are a fair number of Jews in bluegrass and alt-country and so forth. Several pedal steel players, Joe Goldmark, Jim Cohen, Mike Perlowin I think-he does Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite on steel. Damn amazing actually. Bill Monroe had two or three Jews pass through his band. But that’s not mainstream country music, per se, and they aren’t stars. Grisman, who I suspect is homosexual, was a close friend of Jerry Garcia, who was a better banjo player than a guitar player, but the Grateful Dead weren’t country either as far as I know.
Asleep At The Wheel aren’t country as such either-not mainstream, radio accepted country. But:
Ray Benson, left, and Asleep at the Wheel perform at the Country Rendezvous festival in Craponne sur Arzon, France, in July 2008. Photo: Ruth Ellen Gruber
Photo: Ruth Ellen Gruber
CRAPONNE SUR ARZON, France (JTA)—Think Jews and country music and you’ll probably come up with Kinky Friedman, the cigar-chomping frontman of the iconoclastic Texas Jewboys, who is also a humorist, mystery novelist and failed but flamboyant candidate for Texas governor.
The real Jewish king of country music, however, is Ray Benson, the nine-time Grammy-winning leader of the country western swing band Asleep at the Wheel.
At 6-foot-7, Ray Benson has been described as a “Jewish giant” and “the biggest Jew in country.”
He literally and figuratively towers over the stage in a Stetson and fancy tooled boots, with a grizzled beard and long, thinning hair pulled back in a pony tail.
“I saw miles and miles of Texas, all the stars up in the sky,” he sings in his deep, mellow baritone. “I saw miles and miles of Texas, gonna live here ‘til I die.”
Now 57, Benson was born in Philadelphia but has lived in Austin for 35 years. He talks with a twang, plays golf with Willie Nelson, has recorded more than 30 albums and was named Texas Musician of the Year in 2004.
By his own estimate, he is the only Jewish singing star in the country western scene.
“Kinky’s not a country western singer—he’s Kinky!” Benson laughed during a conversation with JTA this summer at the annual Country Rendez-vous festival in south-central France, where Asleep at the Wheel wound up a five-nation European tour
http://www.jewishjournal.com/music/article/ray_benson_asleep_at_the_wheel_the_biggest_jew_in_country_music_20081006/
If “the biggest Jew in country” isn’t in country, country is something resembling Judenfrei.
QED.
I saw Steve Earle Thursday night opening for John Hiatt. He sounded real good but he couldn’t keep the lefty liberal stuff to himself. He said “If you are thinking about not voting for Obama because some people say he is a socialist that is wrong. I am a socialist and he isn’t.” He blabbed on about how some people think the country is in trouble because of illegals but we all are immigrants, etc. And on and on. I didn’t pay fifty bucks to hear him preach. Finally him and John Hiatt teamed up and sang a Woody (commie) Guthrie song “I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Any More”. I sure wish he had just sang and kept the rest of that crap to himself.
Ralph… we live in a fallen world.
Steve Earle was a heroin addict – now he mouths some typical Lib/Lefty political nonsense – that’s life.
When he does this shout “Play Freebird”.
🙂
You haven’t demonstrated a god damned thing except that you are as slippery as a Jewish lawyer as you re-define “country” music in every post. And if you expect anyone to take Benson’s jokes about Kinky Friedman as serious statements about anything then you are the fool.
Anyway as everyone knows Kinky and Benson play Texas Swing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l7rLA9Jm1I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWXbVsMkz1U
Too bad you don’t like any of this music because it’s absolutely great. Go back and hang out with your Nashville “aristocrats.”
Tom Jones – Detroit City
My selection this time, real country music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PoWl6NmshY&feature=related
Couldn’t tell if this is posted above.
http://youtu.be/xvaEJzoaYZk
Thanks Pat Hines to the link to Steve Earle’s Copperhead Road video – another outstasnding Steve Earle White folk/history song.
This was what I loved about Essential Steve Earle songs – he tells real stories about our regular people and the music is outstanding. I think the bagpipes worked very well here in Copperhead Road.
Can’t play Copperhead Road without a tip of the hat to this:
I never said I don’t like bluegrass, western swing, or whatever.
My definition of mainstream country is who gets played on country radio on a consistent basis and has a sizable, self-defining-as-country fan base in the US outside college towns or one region. That is the same definition I have always used, although I was not sufficiently clear on that.
Radio airplay on country format stations and recognition with groups like the ACM is a primary indicator.
Willie Nelson is a country star. Kinky isn’t. Ray Benson isn’t. Totally apart from being Jews-they are niche artists critics and alt-country/Americana buffs talk about but no airplay, no shed tours, no Branson, no nothing like that.
Lucinda Williams is a good example who is not (AFAIK) Jewish. She’s written a couple of mainstream country hits but can’t get arrested in Nashville as a performer. Radio says she is not country. Most anyone under 70 being written up in alt-country, Americana or similar magazines isn’t country.
Dolly Parton is definitely country, but she also has a huge GAY fan base, and a gay Jew named Sandy Gallin (a male) was her manager for a long time. He also managed Michael Jackson and Bar-bra Streisand.
Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, country. Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, country. Garth Brooks, country. I quit listening very much to country radio a long time ago so I don’t know who’s big right now.
Bill Monroe was the singlehanded inventor of “bluegrass” music, and a member of the Grand Old Opry, but bluegrass musicians except for him and Flatt and Scruggs were never really considered part of mainstream country. There are, amongst others, all-Jewish bluegrass bands, klezmergrass bands, black bluegrass bands, Japanese bluegrass bands, the US Navy has an official bluegrass band, et al. They are not in the pantheon of country music by any definition either, even if they are all white and not Jewish.
I realize this requires non-Randian, A=/A thinking here, and am trying to be patient.
Writing a definitive, annotated textbook of “Statistical Measurement of the Jewiness of Country Music” was and is not my intent nor a goal I care to pursue fuether. If I’m wrong, then so be it.
How about the group “Alabama”? They have slew of awesome South-centric songs such as Tennessee River, Mountain Music, Dixieland Delight, Song of the South, High Cotton to name a few.