Joined: 25 Aug 2013 Age: 67 Gender: Male Posts: 35,887 Location: Long Island, New York
14 Jul 2024, 5:35 am
Editors Note: The Joan Baez cover version above is the most well known version of a song originally done by The Band. Looking back from 2024 it seems odd that Baez a singer associated with hippies covered a song that seems to glorify the Confederacy. There were no objections at the time. My take at the time(1971) was that it wasn't glorifying the "lost cause" but another in the line of anti war songs that were popular during the Vietnam era.
The following is another song that "has not aged well"
The American South is the birthplace of the Southern rock music genre. Charlie Daniels has worked with many of the Southern rock bands that defined the sound. Speaking with Songfacts, he explained: "This song is just about a bunch of bands that we played with and enjoyed working with. We started in '74, we brought them out, and we worked with Marshall Tucker, and The Allman Brothers, and Lynyrd Skynyrd - our good old bunch. We all came up basically in the same kind of situation, and most of the guys that I wrote this song about we felt very close to. We felt a kinship to, a brotherhood sort of thing. So it's just a tribute song to the bands."
The song uses a clever play on words to promote Southern rock music. The notion that "the South shall rise again" was a familiar sentiment and rallying cry for disaffected Southern whites after the American Civil War. The song co-opts that sentiment, but uses the statement to celebrate Southern rock acts contemporary to the song itself. The "it" that the South is going to do again, it is implied, is to produce additional popular rock groups.
Daniels factually bristled at more nefarious interpretations of what the "it" was. When the Ku Klux Klan used the song as background music for radio commercials for a 1975 rally in Louisiana, Daniels told Billboard, "I'm damn proud of the South, but I sure as hell am not proud of the Ku Klux Klan. I wrote the song about the land I love and my brothers. It was not written to promote hate groups."
The song did become an anthem. At the time the anthem was associated with pride in the "New South", the south of Jimmy Carter and cosmopolitan Atlanta. This was just a few years after his first hit "Uneasy Rider" a funny song where the protagonist is a hippie who walks into a redneck bar. No reason at the time to suspect he was a racist. In later years he did become a MAGA. That of course raises the suspicion that consciously or unconsciously it was really all about the old South. That suspicion still haunts the Southern Rock genre. There has never been the degree of nostalgia for that genre as other '70s genres.
As for me until I figured out they were homages to Southern Rock acts I was weirded out when confederate bumper stickers and decals started appearing all over Long Island and my college New York classmates' cars and dorm rooms many of them Jewish. Or were they about something else? I was and am not a mind reader.
_________________ Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013 DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity
“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman
Joined: 25 Aug 2013 Age: 67 Gender: Male Posts: 35,887 Location: Long Island, New York
22 Jul 2024, 9:31 am
They most certainly have
What do they say about the more things change the more they stay the same?
_________________ Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013 DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity
“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman
05 Jun 2024, 9:04 am
