The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #136999   Message #3143373
Posted By: GUEST,JK23
27-Apr-11 - 09:37 AM
Thread Name: The Confederacy in Country Music (songs)
Subject: RE: the Confederacy in Country Music
A couple of googles show the Don Edwards album was released in January 2010. The song "Union Mare and Confederate Grey" (interesting hierarchical structure) was written by Paul Kennerly, an expat Merseyside advertising man who became enthrallled with American country music, particularly Waylon Jennings, eventually moving to Nashville, winning songwriter awards, etc., etc. Apparently locating himself at the nexus of the then-developing "outlaw" strain of country music, one of his first projects was "White Mansions," a concept album set in the Confederacy and featuring several stars of the biz such as Waylon, Jessi Colter, Eric Clapton, and wannabees Ozark Mountain Daredevils. Other Southern- or misunderstood-outlaw-themed albums followed ("Legend of Jesse James," "Sally Rose"), and he was central to Harris's move into the not-too-much-outlaw country field, they then marrying in 1985 (divorced 1993).

The Edwards album "American" is largely a collection of nationalistic works which packaging sleeve features the behatted East-coast folkie cum cowboy posed fiercely with guitar in front of a large American flag (always sells in this country), containing such as "Dixie/America the Beautiful," Steven Foster's "Hard Times," Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," and "There's a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere," a WW II song famously recorded by Elton Britt, among others.

The foregoing is only to illustrate what NIck Tosches, Richard Peterson, D. K. Wilgus, and others have observed: That much of what we consider to be representative of the South (or any indigenous culture for that matter) was largely co-opted, reinterpreted, and marketed by capitalist interests outside the entity (not to say Yankee Carpetbaggers), moving by processes (explicated at length elsewhere by Mudders) into the folk songbag. Thus did Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home," complete with racist explicities come from New York music hall stages to its present eminence as state song and Kentucky Derby anthem. Examples abound.

BTW, the above mentioned "Galveston" song, written I believe by the great Jimmy Webb, hit during the 1970s and is more often interpreted relative to the Vietnam conflict, rather than the much earlier Galveston Bay battle. In the '70s, we weren't that deep.