Charlie Applewhite: It's time for Country Style, USA.

Music clip:

[MUSIC - Bob Wills: Stay a Little Longer]

Stay all night,

Stay a little longer,

Dance all night--

Brooke Gladstone: Country music today is linked with a certain kind of rah-rah patriotism, but that wasn't always the case. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. On this week's show, how the US military gave the genre formerly known as hillbilly music, a much-needed boost during the Cold War.

Joseph Thompson: You have Uncle Sam, arguably the most powerful promotional partner in the world, pushing that onto the airwaves.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, how the myth of the Confederate lost cause has been fought over in a song written by a Canadian.

Jack Hamilton: Songs never really belong entirely to the person who writes them or the person who performs them. There's always this very complex negotiation between audience and composer. It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Go to a rally for Donald Trump these days, and there are a couple songs you're almost guaranteed to hear. Like Toby Keith's Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue, and this one, Trump's Walkout Song, God Bless the USA by Lee Greenwood.

Charlie Applewhite: It's time for Country Style, USA.

Music clip:

[MUSIC - Bob Wills: Stay a Little Longer]

Stay all night,

Stay a little longer,

Dance all night--

Brooke Gladstone: Country music today is linked with a certain kind of rah-rah patriotism, but that wasn't always the case. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. On this week's show, how the US military gave the genre formerly known as hillbilly music, a much-needed boost during the Cold War.

Joseph Thompson: You have Uncle Sam, arguably the most powerful promotional partner in the world, pushing that onto the airwaves.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, how the myth of the Confederate lost cause has been fought over in a song written by a Canadian.

Jack Hamilton: Songs never really belong entirely to the person who writes them or the person who performs them. There's always this very complex negotiation between audience and composer. It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Go to a rally for Donald Trump these days, and there are a couple songs you're almost guaranteed to hear. Like Toby Keith's Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue, and this one, Trump's Walkout Song, God Bless the USA by Lee Greenwood.

Music clip:

[MUSIC- Lee Greenwood: God Bless the USA]

God bless the USA.

Donald Trump: Thank you very much. Wow.

Micah Loewinger: These are the kinds of songs that you might have also heard at some July 4th barbecues this week, depending on your host's taste in music and their politics, because today's country music industry is deeply associated with a certain jingoistic rally around the flag, support the troops spirit. In this hour, we'll explore the connections between music and politics, and specifically how roots influenced white-coded music became the sound of a particular kind of conservative pro-military Americana.

Joseph Thompson: We take for granted that country music is a patriotic genre. I think we've missed the story of how that happened.

Micah Loewinger: Joseph Thompson is an assistant professor at Mississippi State University and author of the new book, Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism. He begins the story in the 1940s with a man named Connie B. Gay, dubbed by The Washington Post as country music's media magician. Gay got his start in the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal program.

Joseph Thompson: He starts from really humble roots. He's born on a dirt farm in a little town called Lizard Lick, North Carolina. During The Depression, he gets a job at a radio station in Raleigh, North Carolina. There, he begins understanding the power of what was then called hillbilly music, what we would now call country music, and understands that matching that hillbilly music with the information that he needs to relay to North Carolina farmers who are suffering during the Great Depression, that, that makes for a powerful pairing of message and music. He gradually becomes involved with the Farm Security Administration during the New Deal years in the early 1940s, moves to Washington, DC.

Joseph Thompson: The Department of Agriculture puts him to work writing and hosting something called the Farm at Home Hour radio show. That's a show that's used to promote the agency's farm improvement programs. While working for this show, Gay figures out that if the accompanying music has anything with what he calls "a rural flavor," then he gets a lot more participation from the listeners, a lot more mail than ever before. He uses this observation to launch a country music radio show in the Washington, DC area after World War II. He begins in 1946 on station WARL in Arlington, Virginia. He actually offers to work as an announcer for the station strictly on commission if they'll let him play whatever he wants to play.

Connie B. Gay: It's town and country time.

[MUSIC]

Micah Loewinger: You're talking about his now legendary radio show and later TV show, Town and Country Time.

Joseph Thompson: In 1946, he begins hosting this show.

Connie B. Gay: Hi, neighbor. This is Connie B. Gay saying, "Pull up your mail keg and join us."

Joseph Thompson: In his recollection, he says the phone started ringing and people were saying, "Lord, have mercy. Why hasn't somebody done this before?" [chuckles] This was a typical barn dance radio show. There were these types of shows being broadcast all over the country. Of course, the most famous one that people will know of is the Grand Ole Opry. It's a variety show for different types of hillbilly music. You might have a harmonica player. You might have some clog dancers.

[MUSIC]

Joseph Thompson: Then you might have a bluegrass style fans.

Music clip:

[MUSIC- Carter Family: My Little Home In Tennessee]

I'm always dreaming of a little home

Back among the hills of Tennessee

Joseph Thompson: Then a honky tonk band.

Micah Loewinger: It was a big deal both for Connie B. Gay and for hillbilly music when he managed to book a concert at DC's Constitution Hall in 1947. I grew up in DC. I've seen concerts there. It's a really nice venue. It was a big deal that he managed to get hillbilly performers at the venue because of the stigma surrounding that genre at the time.

Joseph Thompson: Hillbilly, obviously, it comes with this connotation of someone who is perhaps unlearned, someone who's from a rural area, maybe from the mountains, possibly uncouth in a lot of ways that would not be welcome in the polite confines of a space like Constitution Hall. In order to overcome that stigma, Connie B. Gay labels his music as folk music rather than calling it hillbilly music.

Micah Loewinger: I read a Washington Post article from 1983 in which he claimed to have coined the term country music.

Joseph Thompson: I'm not going to give him that. [laughter] In addition to being this media mogul, he was also great at self-promotion.

Micah Loewinger: He was actually a great talent scout. People like George Hamilton IV.

Music clip:

[MUSIC- George Hamilton IV]

Micah Loewinger: Patsy Cline.

Music clip:

[MUSIC- Patsy Cline – Lovesick Blues]

Got a feeling because I'm blue,

Oh, Lord Since my daddy said goodbye.

Micah Loewinger: Roy Clark.

Music clip:

[MUSIC- Roy Clark]

Micah Loewinger: Johnny Cash.

Music clip:

[MUSIC- Johnny Cash: Big River]

Well I taught that weeping willow how to cry

Micah Loewinger: Andy Griffith.

Music Clip:

[MUSIC- Andy Griffith: The Crawdad Song]

You get a line, I'll get a pole, honey.

Micah Loewinger: All got career boosts from Gay. He discovered the accordion playing comedian Jimmy Dean in a Washington, DC beer joint.

Jimmy Dean: Howdy, howdy, howdy, good people everywhere.

Music clip:

[MUSIC- Elvis Presley: Blue Suede Shoes]

Micah Loewinger: He booked an up-and-coming rockabilly star named Elvis Presley on Gay's hillbilly cruise on the Potomac River. He took the yodeling banjo playing Lewis Marshall, Grandpa Jones, on a high profile tour of US military bases in Japan and Korea where they visited the front lines.

Music clip:

[MUSIC- Grandpa Jones: Going Down the Country]

Way down in the country,

there's an old Kentucky moon.

And an old sweetheart awaiting,

I'm going to see her soon

Micah Loewinger: This was, I think, one of Connie B. Gay's great country music innovations, as you write about in the book. He cultivated a new fan base among US troops stationed overseas.

Connie B. Gay: This is the Armed Forces Radio Service.

Joseph Thompson: This is during the Korean War. He books Grandpa Jones and his grandchildren, which was his backing band at the time. When Grandpa Jones and his grandchildren go on tour, they're not only performing these concerts for service members, but these are being recorded as well. Those recordings are then pressed onto records. Those records are then shipped to DJs within the Far East Network, the FEN, which is the Asian branch of the Armed Forces Radio Service at the time.

Joseph Thompson: Then that goes into circulation on DJs' playlists. There's a way in which the government and then these private promoters like Connie B. Gay and artists like Grandpa Jones are cultivating a real market and a real audience for country music amongst US service members, and we should mention international civilian listening audiences who can hear the AFRS, even though they're not part of the US military.

Micah Loewinger: In the early 1950s, the military was facing a personnel crisis. It needed more recruits. Tell me about Talent Patrol and the role it played in recruiting new soldiers.

Joseph Thompson: If you turned on the radio, the television or opened a magazine at the time, you were probably getting some a pitch to join the US military. Part of that was this show that you mentioned called Talent Patrol.

Music clip: Talent Patrol.

[MUSIC]

Joseph Thompson: Imagine Star Search or American Idol, but it only features service members from the US military as its contestants.

Music clip speaker: Accompanying us at our service tonight, we have the renowned 9th Infantry Division Band all the way from Fort Dix, New Jersey.

Joseph Thompson: They would go on and showcase their diverse skills, their diverse talents, and then be awarded first, second, third place. It was meant to generate goodwill toward the US military, but also serve as a soft recruitment message.

Micah Loewinger: Who were some of the more memorable acts who participated in it?

Joseph Thompson: This is where a country singer named Faron Young launches his career as a country music army recruitment singer. Now, Faron Young would go on to become a country music hall of fame inductee. He's maybe best known as the first singer of Hello Walls, a song written by Willie Nelson.

Music clip:

[MUSIC - Faron Young: Hello Walls]

Hello, walls (hello)

How'd things go for you today?

Joseph Thompson: In the early '50s, he was this struggling singer from a dairy farm in Shreveport, Louisiana. He had started his music career in 1951 on a local barn dance show called Louisiana Hayride.

Music clip:

[MUSIC - Faron Young: Go Back You Fool]

You're heading down a lonely road

that someday you'll regret.

Joseph Thompson: By 1952, his career was on the uptick. He had signed a recording contract with Capital Records. He had made his debut on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. Then in November in 1952, he gets his draft notice.

Micah Loewinger: He tries to get out of service, right?

Joseph Thompson: Yes, he tried to convince a doctor that he had heart trouble, but the doctor reportedly said, "Yes, son. I can hear it breaking."

Micah Loewinger: That's so good.

Joseph Thompson: You can imagine, this is a 20, 21-year-old kid essentially who thinks he's got the world on a string, and all of a sudden it all comes crashing down because of military service, or at least that's the way he saw it at the beginning.

Micah Loewinger: Little did he know this might have been the best thing that ever happened to him.

Joseph Thompson: Absolutely. His luck really begins to turn around and January, 1953. At that point, he's still serving in basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, but his song called Going Steady, which he recorded before he entered the service breaks onto the billboard charts at Rocket Suit number two.

Music clip:

[MUSIC - Faron Young: Goin' Steady]

Well, me and my baby, we're goin' steady.

Joseph Thompson: The Army brass there at Fort Jackson realized that they have this potential resource on their hand to promote military service, and they put him to use. That spring, they send him off to compete on Talent Patrol, and lo and behold, he wins. That launches him on this career as someone who's tasked with both entertaining soldiers and then also being the voice of recruitments to lure others into the ranks.

Micah Loewinger: He was among a rotating cast of MCs on a show called Country Style USA.

Joseph Thompson: That's right. The Defense Department and US Army and Air Force recruiting service was casting this wide net for potential volunteer enlistees that was very important to them. They wanted more volunteers rather than draftees. One of the ways that they're doing that is through a show that begins on radio and then transitions to a television version called Country Style USA.

Charlie Applewhite: It's time for our Country Style, USA.

Music clip:

[MUSIC - Bob Wills: Stay a Little Longer]

Stay all night,

Stay a little longer,

Dance all night,

Joseph Thompson: Now, both the radio and television versions of this show were recorded by a Nashville country music legendary producer named Owen Bradley, the architect of the Nashville Sound. He's also the producer behind people like Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, just to name a few. The US Army and Air Force Recruiting Service links up with Owen Bradley and they begin producing this show called Country Style USA.

Charlie Applewhite: Hi there, neighbors. My name is Charlie Applewhite, and welcome once again to Country Style, USA.

Music clip:

[MUSIC - Ferlin Husky: I Feel Better All Over]

Well, I feel better all over more than anywhere else

Joseph Thompson: What Country Style did was present 15 minutes of country music with some of the top names in the genre at the time, along with a message about the career opportunities available through the Armed Forces.

News clip: Congratulations, John. You've got your high school diploma and now you are really ready to step out. These days it takes specialized training to get a really good job, but did you know that you can get that valuable training you need in the US Army and you'll be paid while learning?

Joseph Thompson: By the late 1950s, country music programming is really booming for the US Army. It actually accounts for more than 1/3 of the US Army's televised recruitment campaigns.

Micah Loewinger: Why country music? Why do you think the military found it so attractive as a recruitment tool, but also as a cultural force in the military's hearts and minds fight against communism?

Joseph Thompson: I think country music serves a couple of purposes this way. One is a demographic purpose. The recruiting service noticed this pipeline of young, white recruits coming from the south. They assumed that those white Southerners would enjoy country music. There was some evidence to back that up based on the success of people like Grandpa Jones and Connie B. Gay. In the mid 1950s, you have the country music industry beginning to really coalesce in Nashville.

Joseph Thompson: These songwriters, publishers, recording studios like Owen Bradley's, many of them on 16th Avenue South, which we now call Music Row, but also country music, particularly after its reputation has been burnished a bit and we're moving away from that style of country music and the reputation it had as hillbilly music. That begins to read as a particularly down-home safe, patriotic message that fits really well with the political climate of the Cold War consensus.

Micah Loewinger: That's interesting because Black musicians played a significant role in creating the sound of country music, right? Yet, they weren't as featured in these military recruitment campaigns.

Joseph Thompson: Yes, we should acknowledge that there's white supremacy baked into the country music industry really from its beginnings. There's a concerted effort on the part of record labels going back to the 1920s and '30s to create hillbilly music as essentially an all-white genre. Now that is overlooking the influence and the pioneering music of African Americans who played hillbilly or country music for sure. Particularly by the 1950s, that is definitely the case. At least when we're talking about the industry and the artists that are being promoted through this professional infrastructure of Nashville, it's all white. That's not going to change until the late 1960s with Charlie Pride.

Micah Loewinger: If you were a Black folk or blue singer, you would literally be marketed as making race music.

Joseph Thompson: That's correct. At least through the 1920s and '30s. That begins to change in the late 1940s when the label RnB comes around. Now, this is not to say that country music did not benefit from the labor and talent of Black musicians. In fact, one of the stories that I tell in the book is about Cecil Gant, a Black RnB blues pianist, singer songwriter from Tennessee who actually played on a lot of country music sessions back in the 1940s, but didn't get the credit that he really deserves, I think. Cecil Gant actually billed himself in 1944, '45 as private Cecil Gant. He had a huge hit with a song called I Wonder.

Music clip:

[MUSIC- Cecil Gant: I wonder]

I wonder, my little darling.

Joseph Thompson: He could not translate that wartime success and the labeling of himself as a military service member into a post-war success, because I think a lot of the racism that was baked into the record industry in Nashville where he was cutting records. One of the biggest stars of the Grand Ole Opry in the 1920s and '30s was DeFord Bailey, an African American harmonica singer. By the 1940s, he's actually fired from the Grand Ole Opry. When we're talking about this kind of Cold War era of country music in the 1950s and early '60s, it's an all-wide genre for sure.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, the relationship between the military and country music hits a bump in the road in the 1970s with the anti-war movement.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: This Is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger, picking up on my conversation with Joseph Thompson, author of the new book, Cold War Country. In it, Thompson explains how country stars, some of whom got their start in the armed forces, lent their sound and fame to us military recruitment efforts. In turn, as the Cold War kicked off in the 1940s and '50s, the Department of Defense became a major importer of country records and provided the country music industry with a captive audience abroad. By the 1960s and '70s, that dynamic was complicated by the war in Vietnam and the birth of a counterculture peace movement.

Joseph Thompson: Because of depictions of service members and country fighting in Vietnam and both fictional films and documentaries, there's a baby boomer sort of understanding of what that music was, and it was Creedence Clearwater, it was Jimi Hendrix, it was rock and roll songs.

Micah Loewinger: Thompson says that most soldiers were probably listening to country music. That was what was being pushed at the time to the vast majority of US service members around the world who were working menial jobs and not stationed in Vietnam. The war in Vietnam also marked a turning point when country music went from being patriotic to being partisan, as the war became less and less popular among Americans.

Joseph Thompson: If you still supported the military, you were seen as going along with this partisan agenda, and there's a sort of capturing of this idea of patriotism, very narrowly defined as supporting the troops no matter what by partisan actors. Richard Nixon and the Republican Party at the time were definitely part of that.

Micah Loewinger: Even as country embraced conservative pro-war messaging for many country artists, it was way more complicated than that. In fact, some of the musicians who helped create that image of country music were fighting against it at the same time, like Merle Haggard known for his two backlash anthems, Fightin' Side of Me, and especially, Okie from Muskogee. That was the kind of character study of what Merle Haggard and his co-writer thought that a small town person would think about the peace movement and the anti-war movement. If people know the song, it's, "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee. We don't take our trips on LSD. We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse," et cetera. He supposedly said that Muskogee, Oklahoma was the only place he didn't smoke marijuana in 1969.

Micah Loewinger: Of course, that kind of nuance is lost on not only country fans, but is lost on politicians like Richard Nixon who thought, oh, I have a essentially a spokesperson for my politics in which he wanted to beat up hippies and kill the peace movement. Richard Nixon invites Merle Haggard to the White House to perform. Merle Haggard describes that experience as one of the worst in his life. The people that he was performing for, including the president, didn't know his music, didn't like country music, and the only song that they responded to was Okie From Muskogee and Fightin' Side of Me, the other backlash anthem.

Music clip:

[MUSIC-Merle Haggard: Okie From Muskogee]

In Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA

Micah Loewinger: As you've observed, there were musicians who kind of tried to straddle the line with more complicated songs that in one way or another subverted the government's Cold War messaging.

Joseph Thompson: That's right, the person that I really hone in on is a country music songwriter named Tom T. Hall. He himself was a Army veteran, had served in Germany back in the 1950s, then launched a country music, songwriting career. He wrote songs that we now hear as a jingoistic anthem like, Hello Vietnam.

Music clip:

[MUSIC-Tom T. Hall: Hello Vietnam]

Goodbye my sweetheart, hello Vietnam.

Joseph Thompson: Or What we're fighting for.

Music clip:

[MUSIC-Tom T. Hall: What We're Fighting For]

There's not a soldier in this foreign land, who likes this war.

Oh mama, tell them what we're fighting for.

Joseph Thompson: Then in 1971, Thom T. Hall releases his song, Mama Bake a Pie, Daddy Kill a Chicken. It's a story about a wheelchair bound Vietnam veteran who's coming home from the war. He starts out by saying that people are staring at me as they wheel me down the ramp toward my plane. The war is over for me. I've forgotten everything except the pain. In the chorus, you hear he's making a request for his homecoming meal. "Mama bake a pie, Daddy kill a chicken, your son is coming home 11:35 Wednesday night."

Music clip:

[MUSIC-Thom T. Hall: Mama Bake a Pie, Daddy Kill a Chicken]

Your son is coming home, 11:35 Wednesday night.

Joseph Thompson: Throughout this song, we hear the voice of this soldier and his interactions with his family and his acquaintances. People are learning that he's disabled. His drunk uncle makes this terrible suggestion about getting wooden legs. His former girlfriend who had been waiting for him is now no longer interested in staying with him, that he is disabled. He is self-medicating with alcohol that he keeps under the blankets over his wheelchair. I argued that Hall is using this to cut through the debates about the Vietnam War, the debates about what is patriotism. He's making people listen really to the consequences of war.

Micah Loewinger: This phenomenon you're describing reminds me of Toby Keith's 2002 anthem, Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue, The Angry American.

Music clip:

[MUSIC- Toby Keith: Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue, The Angry American]

My daddy served in the army

Where he lost his right eye but he flew a flag out in our yard

'Til the day that he died

He wanted my mother--

Micah Loewinger: Keith later felt pigeonholed. He told Billboard that he didn't want to seem like this Captain America right-wing lunatic. I didn't know this, but he was actually a registered Democrat at the time that he wrote the song.

Joseph Thompson: He did come to regret that, although it's obvious why he was pigeonholed as this Captain America, because Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue, The Angry American released in the wake of 9/11, it's, we're going to get revenge, we're going to put a boot up your ass, it's the American way.

Music clip:

[MUSIC- Toby Keith: Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue, The Angry American]

Hey Uncle Sam, put your name at the top of his list

The Statue of Liberty started shaking her fist

The eagle will fly--

Micah Loewinger: No subtlety whatsoever.

Joseph Thompson: Zero subtlety. It comes across as this ballistic anthem about let's just go kill a bunch of people in revenge. He wrote that as a character study of the way he thought his father, who was a veteran, would react to the 9/11 attacks. We often confuse the singer for the song, particularly in country music where ideas about authenticity are so highly valued. We could also acknowledge that Toby Keith wrote a song called The Ballad of Balad, which is about a recruiter who essentially suckers a high school dropout into joining the military, and then before he knows it, he's off fighting a war that he doesn't even understand what's going on.

Music Clip:

[MUSIC-Toby Keith: The Ballad of Balad]

I met an army recruiter down at the Winn-Dixie

He said, "Son you've no future, pack up and go with me"

The first place we landed was a base called Ballad

Joseph Thompson: President Nixon ended the draft in 1973. That signals the beginning of a shift in country music's relationship to the military. By the 1980s, there is less of a need for the country music industry to sell its products to soldiers service members, and they're using the military more to sell the idea of country music as a particularly patriotic genre to civilians. To me, this is when the relationship between country music and the military becomes a bit more symbolic, and I think that that's what really carries on into our current day. For artists nowadays, if they want to garner more listeners, if they want to really tap into country music's culture, then they play to that version of patriotism that was defined way back in the Cold War days. Lee Greenwood is the perfect example of that.

Micah Loewinger: Lee Greenwood wrote God Bless the USA, Proud to be an American as a wartime song in search of a war.

Joseph Thompson: That's right. In September, 1983, a Korean airliner was shot down by the Soviet Union. It contains U.S citizens and Lee Greenwood assumed we were about to go to war. He wrote this song out of this kind of impulse to write a song that would express his trepidation, but also his support for the troops with this impending war on the horizon or so he thought.

Music clip:

[MUSIC- Lee Greenwood: God Bless the USA]

I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free

Joseph Thompson: Then nothing happens, so he is stuck with this wartime song, this wartime anthem and no conflict to support it, but he releases it anyway in 1984, and so it then becomes about just a general patriotism that supports the military in a very traditional way. That hearkens back to Cold War Consensus days of the '50s and '60s, a kind of pre-Vietnam patriotism, and that is ripe for the Picken for Republican politicians. People like Ronald Reagan adopt Lee Greenwood's song as his anthem.

Joseph Thompson: He begins to inject the lyrics into his speeches. Then George H.W. Bush actually does deliver the war Operation Desert Storm. Of course, that is a very short-lived conflict, but Lee Greenwood nevertheless capitalizes on that and becomes surrogate for the Bush administration and for the U.S armed forces overall with that song during the early 1990s. He's going to reprise that after 9/11, but the first Iraq war is the one that really gives him the war that he was in search of back in 1983.

Micah Loewinger: In a way, former President Donald Trump has also capitalized on Lee Greenwood's legacy.

Joseph Thompson: Yes. The God Bless the USA Bible is a Bible that Lee Greenwood is selling. It contains the lyrics to the song. It contains copies of our founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, and then a King James version of the Bible. Then yes, back in March of this year, people started sending me the commercials for God bless the USA Bible with Lee Greenwood and Donald Trump lending his endorsement.

Donald Trump: Partnering with my good friend Lee Greenwood, I encourage you to get this God Bless the USA Bible. Let's make America pray again.God bless you and God bless the USA.

Joseph Thompson: To talk about his move from a utilitarian use of country music and recruitment campaigns to this more political and symbolic connection, I think that's a prime example of what I'm talking about.

Micah Loewinger: I noticed in your book, there's this tension between an anti-big government ideology that many of us might associate with country music and the role that the big federal government played in helping popularize the genre. Do you think that's an important part of the story of country music?

Joseph Thompson: I do. I grew up in a small town in North Alabama in the 1980s and '90s at a time when that small government conservatism was sweeping the South, this idea that government was the problem, big government needed to get out of their lives. At the same time, I was looking around and seeing people who drove an hour every day to work at Redstone Arsenal or to work at one of these engineering firms in Huntsville, Alabama. They were essentially government employees by another name.

Joseph Thompson: That federal money was just being filtered through a private contractor, even though they were building weaponry and software and this kind of thing for the defense state. I think there's an irony in that country music, so associated with conservatism, rightly or wrongly, so associated with the white south, rightly or wrongly, gets affiliated with that small government politics and people's imaginations. What I hope to show is that the very industry that makes the music that so many people latch onto from those communities was actually also built in a way by big government spending during the Cold War.

Micah Loewinger: Joseph Thompson is a history professor at Mississippi State University and author of the new book, Cold War Country. Joseph, thank you very much.

Joseph Thompson: Thank you, Micah.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, how the myth of the Confederate Lost Cause has been fought over in a song written by a Canadian.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. In June, Republican Congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, took the stage at the Turning Points USA conference in Detroit to repeat what many on the right have been saying for years.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: There was nothing wrong with protesting the election on January 6th. Any Democrat, and any person from the mainstream media, and anyone that wants to continue to shame us for January 6th can go to hell.

Brooke Gladstone: Refraiming the events of January 6th, that's a brave stand against tyranny, has echoes with another dark chapter in America's history, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, a potent narrative of grievance after the Civil War, recasting the South's stand as patriotic and heroic. Undergirded by racism, the Lost Cause apologia would stymie reconstruction, justified decades of lynching, and throughout the South, prove as impossible to uproot as kudzu. When it comes to art identified with The Lost Cause, the silent film, The Birth of a Nation, directed in 1915 by D.W. Griffith, is probably the most famous, but the song The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, by The Band, may be pop culture's most celebrated and misunderstood contribution.

Music clip:

[MUSIC - The Band:The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down]

Virgil Kane is the name

And I served on the Danville train

'Till Stoneman's cavalry came

And tore up the tracks again

In the winter of '65

We were hungry, just barely alive

By May the 10th, Richmond had fell

It's a time I remember, oh so well

The night they drove old Dixie down

And the bells were ringing

The night they drove old Dixie down

Brooke Gladstone: The song is rock and roll cannon listed as one of the best of all time by Time Magazine and Rolling Stone, despite its charged subject matter.

Back with my wife in Tennessee

When one day she called to me

"Virgil, quick, come see,

There goes Robert E. Lee!"

Now, I don't mind chopping wood

Brooke Gladstone: On paper, these verses read as if lifted from the Lost Cause playbook, a nostalgic retelling of the end of the Civil War, seen through the eyes of a downtrodden Southern farmer, laden with grief, but not a trace of white supremacy, but the song is not what it seems, or at least what it seemed when it was first loosed upon the world. The Band's lead guitarist, Robbie Robertson, a Canadian, hadn't logged much time in the South when he penned The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down in 1969, but in the ensuing decades, some have claimed it as a neo-Confederate anthem.

Early James: I do want to say before we start the song was kind of a scary song to play, and today's political climate, I guess.

Brooke Gladstone: That's Early James, a 31-year-old Alabama-born country musician speaking before performing at an annual star-studded tribute concert for The Band, live streamed back in August 2020.

Early James: I felt the need to revise some lyrics to make it a little more palatable, and I hope we piss off the right people by changing those words.

Brooke Gladstone: Inspired by the racial reckoning in the summer of 2020, James sang about toppling Confederate monuments. Here's how he changed the chorus to The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. He sang, "Tonight, we drive old Dixie down."

Music clip:

[MUSIC - James:The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down]

Oh, tonight, we drive old Dixie down

And all the bells were ringing

Brooke Gladstone: In January 2021, right after the riot at the Capitol, I spoke to pop critic, Jack Hamilton, who'd written an article for Slate about the song. "I observed that 1969 was a big time for folksy, rootsy, bluesy-type music. Creedence Clearwater Revival released Proud Mary and Bad Moon Rising and Born on the Bayou that same year. Maybe Dixie was an effort to infuse a more authentic life experience than could be had in the suburbs."

Jack Hamilton: I think that that's an accurate way of putting it. Woodstock is 1969, Altamont is at the end of 1969, and there is an idea in that high '60s moment of popular music as a way back into authenticity. Certainly, a group like The Band, even though they were mostly Canadian, were very, very interested in the roots of American music and this mythic idea of the American past.

Brooke Gladstone: Which explains their association with Bob Dylan, who is on the same journey.

Jack Hamilton: Yes, the Band really come to prominence as the backup band for Bob Dylan in the mid-1960s. Certainly, Dylan himself is very interested in these ideas of American history and mythic Americana.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's also talk about what was going on politically. In '69, Washington, DC hosted the largest anti-war protest in US history. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King in '68, President Johnson signs the Fair Housing Act, also known as the Civil Rights Act.

Jack Hamilton: A lot of musicians saw their work as having a political resonance. There certainly was a big linkage in this era of the popular music of the day as being a soundtrack to certain activist movements.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, Joan Baez covered the song in 1971.

Music clip:

[MUSIC - Baez: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down]

Like my father before me, I'm a workin' man

And like my brother before me, I took a rebel stand

Well, he was just eighteen, proud and brave

But a Yankee laid him in his grave

I swear--

Brooke Gladstone: I'm guessing that she didn't see the song as mourning the Confederacy but as an expression of class consciousness. As you note in your piece, perhaps a protest against the conscription of poor and marginalized young men into fighting a war, the Vietnam War, that affluent people could get out of.

Jack Hamilton: Yes, Joan Baez, is obviously someone who is iconically associated with various protest movements of the 1960s, both the civil rights movement and also the anti-war movement. I do think that Baez probably heard in the song the idea of a young man being conscripted into this war machine and the devastation that is wrought by that. The Civil War in American history is the first real modern war that America fights. One of the aspects of that is its class ramifications and that the Civil War was famously referred to by many people who fought in it as a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.

Jack Hamilton: You could buy your way out of military service if you were an upper-class person in the 19th century on both sides, I believe. This is something that absolutely comes up in the Vietnam era. We could name many prominent United States politicians who got out of serving in Vietnam because they were basically connected. I think that The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down in the tradition of fictions of the Confederacy is drastically different than something like Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind, which are coming out of a very different historical moment that are putting the mythology of the Confederacy to a different use.

Brooke Gladstone: That said, do you think The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down is a stupid song?

Jack Hamilton: [laughs] I don't know that. I guess as far as stupid.

[laughter]

Jack Hamilton: I love The Band. They're one of my favorite artists of all time, and I think that the performance of it is just exquisite, like so many band performances are. It's this is beautiful musicianship. Levon Helm who sings the lead vocal is just a gorgeous singer. It gives a really great performance, but I do think the song has become a bit overrated. It has a lot of hallmarks of overwrought historical fiction. It's got a lot of cloying specificity [laughs] in terms of it almost reads like someone who has an encyclopedia-deep level of Civil War knowledge, which I think is true of Robbie Robertson.

Brooke Gladstone: I think there may be a generational issue here. I don't think that those of us who hummed along-- I was 13 or 14 when it came out. I was a junior high school protestor and I picketed for the rights of Mexican immigrant laborers. I don't think we saw the Civil War back then as living history the way that we do now.

Jack Hamilton: I think that that's true. I think our collective memory and our collective interpretation of the events of the Civil War in 2020 or 2021 is drastically different than where it was in 1969. That has to do with a sea change in the historiography of the Civil War that had already started happening in the 1960s, but it hadn't really trickled its way into popular consciousness yet.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you think that it may have something to do with the fact that African Americans didn't have access to what was the "mainstream cultural conversation" and didn't have the means to influence it?

Jack Hamilton: Yes, I think that that's absolutely true. By the mid-20th century, telling the history of the Civil War and its aftermath had become really the province of cadre of Southern white historians who were very, very invested in the Lost Cause narrative in the idea that reconstruction had been a failure, reinvigoration of this myth of Confederate virtue, and all of the things that comes along with The Lost Cause. There had been critiques of this. One of the most famous is in 1935, W.E.B Du Bois published a massive book called Black Reconstruction in America. One of the most famous formulations he puts forward is this idea that the function of white supremacy is to consolidate the power of the ruling class.

Jack Hamilton: The ruling class can forge alliances with the white working class that would've normally been outside of the white working class, particular class interests that basically prohibited solidarity between Black and white workers. This is now one of the most influential books of American history probably ever written. At the time, Du Bois was seen as a radical, someone who was not in the club of the people who were tasked with telling the history of The Civil War. It takes decades for Du Bois's work to really get a foothold in academic Civil War historiography.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's assume that the Canadian lead guitarist of The Band and Robbie Robertson probably hadn't read W.E.B Du Bois.

Jack Hamilton: Probably not. [laughs]

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] His character is Virgil Kane. He's poor. His brother was killed in the war. He chops wood [laughs] to make a living. The song itself has a dirge-like quality. You quote Ta-Nehisi Coates saying that the song is just Pharaoh singing the blues.

Jack Hamilton: Yes. [laughs] I love that. I love that line from Coates. This is something I would offer up in praise or defense of the song. I think this song musically is actually extremely complex and nuanced. You mentioned that it does have these dirge-like qualities to it. The chorus on the other hand is entirely major key.

Music clip:

[MUSIC - The Band: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down]

The night they drove old Dixie down

And all the bells were ringing

The night they drove old Dixie down

And the people were singing

They went, "Na, na, la, na, na, la"

Jack Hamilton: You have this imagery of bells ringing and people singing. These are not images that we necessarily entirely equate with mourning.

Brooke Gladstone: The bells were ringing and the people were singing arguably because Dixie was defeated.

Jack Hamilton: Right. Yes. [laughs]

Brooke Gladstone: Virgil Kane suffered, but what he describes could be seen as a major chord event in a very dirge-like episode of American history.

Jack Hamilton: Are these voices singing recently liberated, formerly enslaved people? There's a lot of dimensions that you could potentially pull out of this song. I don't think it's a neo-Confederate song at all. I do think that there's a population of people who hear it that way, and I think that that's a mishearing of the song, but songs never really belong entirely to the person who writes them or the person who performs them. There's always this very complex negotiation between audience and composer and performer.

Jack Hamilton: Rolling Stone's interview with Early James after his revision of the song, his really rewriting of it, he talks about that; about how growing up in Alabama that this song was heard unambiguously as an anthem of neo-Confederate sentiment and lost cause celebration. Is that entirely Robbie Robertson's fault? Absolutely not. He's only got so much agency over how people hear it. When a song becomes this popular and this well-known, it loses a sense of strict ownership, I think, and it becomes something that can be repurposed. The Early James' example is another example of that. Someone taking this song and rewriting it and repurposing it for a different context.

Music clip:

[MUSIC - Early James: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down]

Unlike my father before me, who I will never understand

Unlike the others below me, who took a rebel stand

Depraved and powered to enslave

I think it’s time we laid hate in its grave

I swear by the mud below my feet

That monument won’t stand, no matter how much concrete

Tonight we drove old Dixie down

Brooke Gladstone: After reading your piece, I was really primed for the Early James version, but I like songs with unreliable narrators. I think that's why I'm such a fan of Randy Newman, you know?

Jack Hamilton: Right. The first line of the song is Virgil Kane is the name. [laughs] We're made very aware that this is a fictional character. You do lose that aspect, certainly in the Early James version. Yet at the same time, I think there's a reason that he chooses to sacrifice that which is the fact that I think that in his experience, this is a song where that aspect, the idea that this is either an unreliable narrator or an imperfect narrator has been lost.

Brooke Gladstone: Is lost. [laughs]

Jack Hamilton: Exactly. It's become that this guy is a hero, which is not what I think Robbie Robertson intended. [laughs]

Brooke Gladstone: We are in a time of heightened consciousness about the impact of history and the likely creation of a new Lost Cause myth about a stolen election. I just wonder, does a story about a Confederate grunt have a place among us anymore, or is it more than that?

Jack Hamilton: Yes, that's a great question. The context of this song is the Vietnam War, using the metaphor of this one Confederate soldier and his experience to make a statement about war more broadly and the Vietnam War, specifically. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down is written over 100 years after the surrender at Appomattox. It's written by a Canadian guy-- it's just so far removed [laughs] in many ways. The question then becomes is there going to be, if there is something analogous to the Lost Cause with Trump, what's that going to look like 100 years from now down the line? Are people still going to be making art that is referencing it or somehow steeped in it? I hope not. [laughs]

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much.

Jack Hamilton: Yes, thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Jack Hamilton is Slate's pop critic, associate professor of American and media studies at the University of Virginia, and author of Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll In The Racial Imagination.

Music clip:

[MUSIC - The Band: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down]

Virgil Kane is the name

And I served on the Danville train

Till Stoneman's cavalry came

And tore up the tracks again

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang, with help from Shaan Merchant and Pamela Appea.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Brendan Dalton, Katya Rogers is our executive producer on the medias of production of WNYC studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

[MUSIC - The Band: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down]

The night they drove old Dixie down

And the bells were ringing

The night--

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