The South Gunna Do It Again Song Meaning
A few days ago I ran into an old friend, an historian, who started in on the Partisan. "I've lived all my life in the South," he grumbled, "but I don't see what makes Southern life so wonderful that you and your friends want to impose it on the rest of the country." I did my best to reassure him that zero was further from our intention than any course of standardization—whether making the S similar New England or vice-versa. He seemed somewhat mollified. Nonetheless, his remark set me to thinking about the great gulf betwixt educated Southerners (like my friend the historian) and those plainly folks nosotros accept learned to despise as rednecks, grits, and crackers.
We are in a period of time, when most affluent and educated Southern people have come to place their interests with members of their own form in the Northeast and California, instead of with their region. They are, by and large, proud of urbanization (nonetheless more than of suburbanization), commercial civilization, and the values of liberation which narrate life in Atlanta and its Northern originals. Among such people, it is a race to see who can give up the nearly outset (a reversal of "Starting time with the Most" Forrest's strategy): collards are replaced by spinach and mushroom salad, Country Music by Rod Stewart and Paul Simon (if you're under 40), Wayne Newton (if yous're older), and regional dialects by a way of speaking that resembles a cantankerous between Dan Rather and a California car salesman. A very decent man of affairs confessed to me recently that he hated to hear his ain phonation on a record (sounded like a cracker) and ever preferred to hire an actor with a "neutral accent" for any promotions.
Simply meanwhile, down on the farm and up at the mill, the plain folks are turning on their radios and listening to songs that amount to a Declaration of Independence from Yankee urbanity. Mixed in with the usual odes to infidelity and divorce—pick-upward trucks and picking upwardly girls—are songs with a articulate-cut social message: everything skillful, true, decent, and enjoyable is Southern or rural; and everything bad, faux, rotten, and boring is found in Northern cities. It is non just Southerners who are getting this message, but all of rural and small town America.
Some of the songs are the usual tin pan alley stuff—in the same class with "Mammy" and "Rock-a-bye your babe with a Dixie Melody"—"Whispering" Pecker Anderson'south "Southern Fried" is a proficient example; others express a genuine and sentimental amore for the South—like Charlie Daniels' "Carolina," but many of them tin can exist taken equally a thoughtful and downright hostile commentary on the sectional cleavage. Charlie Daniels' "Ragin' Cajun," for instance, breaks out of jail to rescue his sis (in some far-off Northern town) from "the soul-destroying punk" that put a needle in her arm. Merle Haggard, who kicked off the genre back in the late 60s with "Okie from Muskogee" and "Fighting Side of Me" has not given up speaking for the rural South and West—despite being born m Bakersfield, California.
The most provocative country vocaliser appears to be Hank Williams, Jr., whose "State Folks Tin can Survive" is less Southern but more than explicit than the rest. The song is an apocalyptic vision of a worn-out and sterile urban culture, in stark contrast with people who tin can yet chase, trap, and brand their own vino. When the vocalist's friend gets stabbed in New York for $27, he comments: "I'd similar to spit some Beechnut in that dude's eye/and shoot 'em with my 45." Try to imagine what went through the audience's mind when Mr. Williams insisted on singing information technology on the David Letterman Show.
The song that all-time sums up the resurgent Southern feelings of a good many ordinary people is Charlie Daniels' "The South's Gonna Do It Once again." The song is, in fact, just a celebration of Southern Country-Rock groups like Lynnyrd Skinnyrd and the CDB, but the refrain is suggestive: "Y'all tin can be loud and be proud/Cause the South's Gonna Practice it Again." Practice what? It is ameliorate that he does not say. Merely there are more a few beer-swilling (or dope-smoking) rednecks, riding around in their choice-ups and listening to Charlie and Hank and Merle. Their discontent with the way things are is frequently expressed as complaints over high taxes, kleptomaniacal politicians, and our gutless foreign policy, but their feelings run much deeper. These people once had a culture, a manner of life (including an elite) all their own. Now they are fabricated to feel similar exiles in the land their ancestors carved out of the wilderness.
These people are beginning to believe that the ballot of Ronald Reagan was not, in any sense, a revolution. Not but does the social and moral disintegration proceed with no perceptible abatement, but even the much-heralded revenue enhancement cut is existence rolled back—with a special burden imposed on the Southern tobacco industry and on anyone rash enough to salvage his coin. Fifty-fifty if prosperity were just around the corner, sure people have been heard to wonder—out loud—what divergence it would make. America is already richer than Babylon and about equally moral as Sodom. It is non money our people crave, simply life "and that abundantly."
Of course, even rednecks requite the Republicans their due: they are a lot smarter virtually money than the Democrats. Some Republicans arc under the delusion that the want for money is the root of all goodness (read George Gilder and Michael Novak, if y'all won't take my word for it). The existent difference between the two parties is simply this: While Republicans know how to brand money, the Democrats only know how to spend it.
Sure cynics on the right—people like Kevin Phillips and our ain Samuel Francis—have been predicting an upsurge in conservative militancy, an activism born of despair. If increasing numbers of people become convinced that elections do not, cannot modify things in the U.S., the discontented middle and working classes may well turn to more than direct action, taking their cue from the tactics of other discontented groups: organize, demonstrate, and exert the sort of moral pressure no politician can resist— money and votes. If we can draw any conclusion from the evidence of country music, some Southerners, and, in fact, the apparently folks of the whole country, are waking upwardly to the fact that no one, just no one is going to lift a finger to help them, if they will not aid themselves—not their own Jimmie Carter and non the well-pregnant Ronald Reagan. If some sort of social revolution does take place in this land, information technology volition not be fabricated past discontented Chicanos, alienated radicals, or country club Republicans. It volition come from the dispossessed ordinary Americans of the S, West, and Midwest. The plain Southern folks have more than once in the past demonstrated their ability to brand trouble—in two revolutionary wars, for instance—and they could be unsafe again, if they ever decide but what it is the South is going to do again.
This article was originally printed in Southern Partisan magazine, Fall 1982.
Thomas Fleming
Source: https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/the-souths-gonna-do-it-again/
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