One Nation Under Elvis: An Environmentalism for Us All

The biggest wilderness I've ever been in -- a roadless area roughly the size of Portugal with about fifty contiguous watersheds and the whole panoply of charismatic macrofauna doing their thing undisturbed -- is another story. This one is about what happened afterward, when I and the Canadian environmentalists I'd been traveling with arrived at the nearest settlement, a logging town in the far northeast corner of British Columbia consisting of a raw row of buildings on either side of the highway to Alaska.

We were celebrating two weeks of rafting down the central river in that ungulate- and predator-rich paradise at the outpost's big honky-tonkish nightclub, where the DJ kept playing country songs, to which all the locals would loop around gracefully, clasped together. But my compadres kept making faces of disgust at the music and asking the DJ to put on something else. He'd oblige with reggae, mostly, and we'd wave our limbs vaguely, dancing solo and free-form as white people have danced to rock-and-roll since the mid-1960s. Everyone else would sit down to wait this other music out. It was not a great movement-building exercise. How far were you going to get with a community when you couldn't stand their music or even be diplomatic about it? I've been through dozens of versions of that scene over the years and got reminded of it last year by my letter from Dick.

He really was named Dick. From a return address in the exorbitantly expensive near-San Francisco countryside, he sent me a typewritten note about a section in a recent book of mine. He declared, "The country music parts of the US you love so much are also home of the most racist, reactionary, religiously authoritarian (i.e., Dominionist) people in the country. You don't have to go far: just look @ voting patterns among rednecks descendants of the white yeomanry, if you wish to be polite) in the Central Valley. They love Bush and are very backward people by the standards of the Enlightenment. The Q might be, what is the correlation between country music and political backwardness, if any?"

My first question for Dick might be: which country music? You could cite Johnny Cash's long-term commitment to Native American rights and stance against the Vietnam War (he called himself "a dove with claws") or the song about interracial love that Merle Haggard wrote (but his record company refused to release, though the minor country star Tony Booth had a hit with "Irma Jackson" in 1970) or "I Believe the South Is Gonna Rise Again," boldly sung by Tanya Tucker in 1974:

Our neighbors in the big house called us redneck

Cause we lived in a poor share-croppers shack

The Jacksons down the road were poor like we were

But our skin was white and theirs was black

But I believe the south is gonna rise again

But not the way we thought it would back then

I mean everybody hand in hand ...

In terms of political orientation, you could cite the Texas-based Dixie Chicks, who refused to back down from criticizing Bush on the brink of the current war. They were, as their recent hit had it, "Not Ready to Make Nice." Though corporate country stars like Toby Keith stampeded to support the so-called war on terror, alt. country musicians like Steve Earle charged just as hard in the opposite direction. Country music is a complex beast, sometimes in resistance to or mockery of the mainstream and the rural South, sometimes a mirror of or hymn to it, the product of many voices over many eras, arisen from a culture that was never pure anything, including white. (And its current listening territory includes much of the English-speaking world.)