Really interesting essay from someone who is himself an excellent and unconventional country musician. It’s a bit too heavily steeped for my taste in the ritualized identity politics of 2020, but still very much worth a read.
The southern accent itself has, puzzlingly, taken on a second life as the voice of universal rurality. Why? Rurality clung on longer in the South than other places because of poverty―a poverty that was the result of the evils of slavery, the destruction of total war, and an ensuing era of brutal white supremacy and economic strife. The destitution of the former Confederacy served to preserve the use of instruments and melodies that were common in every corner of this country, until the tide of industrialization swept over these older music forms almost everywhere else, inadvertently isolating and enshrining the haunting songs of yesteryear in old Dixie.
The forgotten corners of the southeast harbored people singing and playing songs from distant centuries and even more distant continents. The seemingly incongruent traditions of Gaelic Europe, Native America, West Africa, Hawaii, Latin America and French Canada collided to create a kaleidoscope of vernacular music forms that coalesced into what we know today as blues, jazz, ragtime, Cajun, zydeco, bluegrass and, yes, country. By the time this music reached the ears of the rest of America in the early 20th century, crackling from primitive phonograph records and fledgling radio stations, these accidentally preserved remnants of speech patterns and musical traditions seemed archaic and novel.
