Pre-1960s, country music culture in America saw domestic politics through the lens of social class, within which its sympathies usually lay with the common man while deferring to the leadership decisions of those above—be it God or government—that represented him. By the early ‘60s, that order was disrupted as criteria of race and generation came to the forefront, forcing popular music cultures—and the nation at large—to answer the question: which side are you on? As folk and rock mostly joined the liberal left on civil rights and the Vietnam War, country aligned with the right, its decision-making bodies—radio, record companies, and the power-brokers on Music Row—ostracizing, excluding or ignoring those unwilling to do likewise.
These powers’ (unwritten) gatekeeping policies narrowed the ideological scope of country at a time when it was musically expanding as never before. Exciting hybrids like folk-rock and country-rock, despite often displaying traits of country music more traditional than those coming out of Nashville, were kept out because of their associations with the hippy counter-culture. When the industry attempted to be accommodating, as it did when the Grand Ole Opry invited the Byrds to perform at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in 1967, the attending audience showed their contempt for this conciliatory gesture by booing the band as soon as its long-haired members walked on stage. Feeding a generation gap that by then amounted to generational warfare, the band gave the “byrd” to an antagonist they encountered during this experience, influential DJ Ralph Emery, describing him as “the head of the Ku Klux Klan” in their retaliatory song of 1968, “Drug Store Truck Driving Man“.
Another sub-genre that developed in the 1960s became one of country’s most popular in the ’70s. Countrypolitan, or the Nashville sound, was fostered within the industry to attract and appeal to the expanding urban and suburban fan base. One of the early harbingers of the Nashville sound was Charley Pride, a black crooner whose marketing, treatment, and reception offers insights into right-wing strategies of co-option at the time. The first black country singer ever signed to a major label (in 1966), Pride was also the first black member of the Grand Ole Opry since DeFord Bailey in the 1920s.
Pride’s success—which included 29 number one singles and two Artist of the Year awards from the Country Music Association—makes one question why so few other talented black artists have not been embraced similarly by the mainstream country music industry. A pawn played and used during divisive times, the acceptance, success, and awards for this “Jackie Robinson of country music” allowed Nashville to defend its stated position of being apolitical and accepting of all talented artists, whatever their ethnic make-up. Pride’s presence, too, says country music historian Bill C. Malone, allowed “audiences [to rid] themselves of racial guilt”. Then, using a process of projection common amongst the far right, those audiences could point fingers at black genres like soul and funk for their racial exclusivity.
Attempts by R&B singer Ray Charles and country music artist Mickey Guyton, and pop singer Beyoncé‘s Cowboy Carter released this year, and hip-hop artist Lil Nas X’s 2018 single “Old Town Road” show us that not all hot black performers singing country have been welcomed past Nashville’s gates. After all, it took a systematic whitewashing of Pride to make him “suitable for acceptance” to the mainstream country music audience. To do that, first, his race was downplayed or erased from early marketing materials; the artist was presented without a publicity shot and as “Country” Charley Pride. Country music historian Alice Randall calls this going “incognegro”, and the artist had little choice but to conspire.
Born in Mississippi, the birthplace of the blues, Charley Pride displayed little of the soulful vocal melisma of his contemporary Ray Charles and none of the sensual body movements common to black popular music at the time. He even sang a set of white country covers initially to ingratiate himself to white audiences and pacified their trigger-happy racism by emphasizing his American identity and joking about his color as a “permanent tan”.
In his 2015 book, Country Soul, country music historian Charles L. Hughes discusses how country and soul became “markers of racial difference” during the 1960s, despite their common roots, recording spaces, and pool of session musicians. With country as its “symbol of whiteness and soul of blackness, the political right co-opted country just as country had used the soul-free Charley Pride: as a symbolic weapon in its war against the Civil Rights Movement. Most flirtatious in their courting of country were two far-right contenders campaigning for the US presidency in 1968: Richard Nixon and George Wallace.”
While not without precedent, the 1968 presidential election saw politicians strategically adopting country music for their campaigns like never before. Hughes sees a transactional relationship of mutual interests, explaining, “The Nashville-based industry allied with conservative politicians and causes in the hopes of making their music the soundtrack of the post-civil rights backlash that propelled Richard Nixon to the White House in 1968 and transformed U.S. politics.” For Richard Nixon, country culture was ideally positioned politically to help him promote his so-called “Southern strategy”, in which Southerners—now a code word for white citizens from the South—would switch parties over their objections to the Democrats’ support for black civil rights. Country fans were no doubt envisioned when the Nixon team used the term “silent majority” to give voice to the Americans who were not protesting the Vietnam War.
Once elected, Nixon’s acts of pandering included officially declaring October National Country Music Month and inviting various high-profile artists to the White House. Among them was Johnny Cash, who performed there in 1970. Seeing an opportunity to have his conservative agenda implicitly endorsed by country music’s biggest star, Nixon requested that the artist play Guy Drake’s quasi-racist 1970 hit “Welfare Cadilac“. The man in black resisted, instead playing “What Is Truth” (1970), his song sympathetic to the youth counter-culture the president so despised. The host also requested—again unsuccessfully—that his guest play “Okie from Muskogee” (1970), to which Cash also declined because this Merle Haggard song voiced many stereotypes about the counter-culture coming from the administration.
Other country songs of the period similarly helped the president promote his positions, such as Johnny Wright’s patriotic “Hello Vietnam” (1965) and Marty Robbins’ anti-hippy “Ain’t I Right” (1966). When Nixon was on the ropes, under assault from all sides during the latter stages of the Watergate scandal, found a welcome sanctuary in Nashville. His 1974 visit to the new Grand Ole Opry House was met with rousing applause.
Showing how politically far-right country music could lean, the segregationist governor of Alabama and independent presidential aspirant in 1968, George Wallace, also received enthusiastic support from many prominent country artists, including Tammy Wynette, Webb Pierce, and Hank Snow. Some even toured with the candidate, helping get crowds in the mood for Wallace’s incendiary white backlash rhetoric. When Wynette crooned “Stand by Your Man” (1968) to the governor, she captured his followers’ common yearning for a time before free love, civil rights, and anti-war protests, a time when young people, African-Americans, and women knew their place and stayed in it. Far from objecting to its stars being co-opted by an avowed racist, Nashville welcomed Wallace’s engagement as recognition of the rising cultural power of its genre.
With Wallace earning 14 percent of the popular vote yet Nixon still winning the White House, there was little to suggest that these candidates’ Southern strategy of co-opting country music was anything less than successful. Encouraged and emboldened, the even more extreme right followed suit, adopting country music as its cultural vehicle to disseminate messages of white supremacy. So was born “Hate Country”.
Emanating mostly from Deep South states on obscure independent labels like Rebel, Reb Rebel, Reb-Time, and Conservative Records, hate country records, according to journalist Neil Maxwell, were so offensive that they were sold either by mail order, at truck stops, or from under the counters of stores run by sympathetic owners. Some of these releases sold as many as 25,000 copies, thanks to the help of local Citizens’ Councils and KKK chapters. For these extreme organizations, songs like Johnny Rebel’s “Kajun Ku Klux Klan” (1966) and “Looking for a Handout” (1969) served as promotions for themselves and their racist beliefs.
Indeed, dehumanizing racist lyrics were ubiquitous to the songs, helping justify the separation of white citizens from black, the latter characterized as inferior and impotent without the help of the national government. Maxwell cites one verse from a song called “Nigger Nigger”: “They might as well give up the fight cos no Federal judge can make them white / This job is up to you and me; let’s beat the N-double-A-C-P”.
Essentially operating as the cultural tentacles of the KKK, acts with names like Son of Mississippi, the Klansmen, Colonel Sharecropper, and Odis Cochran and the 3 Bigots spread songs of hate, while the Klan itself activated that hate by intimidating those within country music culture who did not measure up to its requirements. Johnny Cash had already ruffled some feathers in the South for his open-mindedness about various social issues, but seeing the star with his dark-skinned wife (Vivian was of Italian descent) was the final straw for the Klan, who proceeded to burn a cross on his lawn and threatened to disrupt his shows.
Such racial terrorism reflected how much the far right regarded country music as its own and how determined it was to police its white identity. Another – albeit less extreme – manifestation of prejudice embedded itself into mainstream country music culture during the 1960s. Instead of using explicit racial epithets, artists like Merle Haggard employed code words in conveying messages not dissimilar from those propagated in hate country songs. His song, “I’m a White Boy” (1972) exudes white pride and defiance while slighting those (minorities) reliant on government welfare. T. Tommy Cutrer’s “The School Bus” (1972) romanticizes an earlier era of rural and racial harmony before the Federal government disturbed it with forced busing and integration policies. Hughes calls the song “a deft piece of backlash propaganda, cleverly crafted…to push buttons of white conservative resentment.”
Cutrer’s song was released by Plantation Records, which was also responsible for releasing one of the more controversial singles of the era, Terry Nelson’s “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley” (1971). Calley was a main perpetrator of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, but this song presented him as an American patriot just doing his job. Played on country radio stations, the song was embraced as a symbol for the “right” side of the political gap widening across the nation at the height of the war. With rhetoric ratcheting up on all sides and right-wing politicians increasingly looking for cultural support and validation, Malone is not exaggerating when he describes this decade of division as provoking “one of the ugliest chapters in country music history.”
Works Cited
Hill, Jeremy. Country Comes to Town: The Music Industry and the Transformation of Nashville. University of Massachusetts Press. December 2015. [Excerpt published here on PopMatters.]
Hughes, Charles L. Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South. University of North Carolina Press. March 2015.
Kingsbury, Paul, and Alanna Nash. Will the Circle be Unbroken: Country Music in America. DK Books. September 2006.
Malone, Bill C. Country Music U.S.A, 2nd revised ed. University of Texas Press. November 2002.
Maxwell, Neil. “The Bigotry Business: Racist Records, Books are Hits in the South”. Wall Street Journal. 20 April 1967.
Randall, Alice. My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future. Black Privilege. April 2024.