The Country Music Establishment Doesn’t Care if It’s Racist
A historian gives insight into the country music biz’s racist history beyond Jason Aldean, and why we shouldn’t expect it or its stakeholders to change their tune anytime soon.
Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
Country singer Jason Aldean’s song and video “Try That in a Small Town” has created backlash, with critics claiming the song promotes violence and anti-Black rhetoric. But Aldean is just the tip of the racist iceberg for the country music business, says historian Amanda Marie Martinez.
Martinez, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, came on this episode of The New Abnormal politics podcast to discuss the Aldean controversy with TNA co-host Danielle Moodie and share insight into the genre’s history—and present.
While Black people have played more of a role in country music than people think, the genre has had racist ideology embedded within it since the beginning, says Martinez.
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“When the record companies came in, they created this kind of artificial color line. And when they did so, it was very much rooted in a kind of racialized imagined white past,” she says.
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“The first country records recorded celebrated as such was a song by Fiddlin’ John Carson called ‘The Little Old Log Cabin In the Lane,’ recorded in 1923, which was sung by this artist who was a white man, but really with the perspective of a former slave. It was commonly performed in blackface and it was sung from the perspective of a slave who longed for a pre-emancipation past.”
Danielle points out how similar the history of the genre and the play-to-the-base attitude of its current stakeholders are to the rhetoric and players of the Republican party.
“This is the country music version of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Greg Abbott, in my humble opinion, which is playing to your base,” she says.
Given the backlash to the song, she asks Martinez if there is a chance the industry could change its tune.
If they do, it won’t be anytime soon, according to Martinez, who explains why in this episode.
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
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