Slavery: Ain’t No Big Thing - The Genesis of White Supremacy in Country Music
I mentioned earlier that the first real hit country song was one of racism, and I want to now take a closer look at it. It’s, you’ll be not at all surprised to hear, our old racist friend Fiddlin’ John Carson who made it famous, though to be fair to him, it wasn’t him who wrote it. It was though, of course, a white man. Originally penned in 1871 by a man with, I’m sorry to say, the name of one of history’s greatest writers, it’s not quite a celebration of slavery as such, but it does certainly afford it a non-committal shrug and a wry smile, as if to say “Sure, it wasn’t that bad, was it?”
William Shakespeare Hays (1837 - 1907)
I suppose his family had high hopes for him as a writer, saddling him with such a portentous name, and he realised those parental ambitions, becoming a poet and lyricist and writing over 300 songs, selling more than 20 million copies of his works. Oh right, I see the middle name was an affectation, given to him by his contemporaries due to his prolific writing and adopted by him into his name. Well. At any rate, his greatest claim to fame was his contention that he wrote the famous rebel song “Dixie”, but this could never be corroborated, and he died with the issue still under debate. For our purposes here though, he’s remembered as being the author of “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane”, which Carson recorded many years - almost ninety, in fact - later and made famous as the world’s first ever country hit.
Although as I say it had been around for almost a century before Carson got his bigoted hands on it, and Ralph Peer made it one of the biggest-selling records of the time, it’s pretty shocking to see how its white - and southern of course; Hays was born in Kentucky - author makes not only light of slavery but has his protagonist, the old slave, yearn for the old days and look back fondly on his enslavement. The lyric goes
Oh I'm gettin' old and feeble and I cannot work no more
The children no more gather 'round my door
And old masters and old mrs they are sleepin' side by side
Near da little old log cabin in da lane
Oh the chimney's fallen down and the roof's all caved in
Lettin' in the sunshine and the rain
And the only friend I've got now is that good old dog of mine
And the little old log cabin in the lane
Oh the trees have all growed up that lead around the hill
The fences have all gone to decay
And the creeks have all dried up where we used to go to mill
And things have changed of course in another ways
Oh I ain't got long to stay here what little time I've got
I want to rest content while I remain
'Til death shall call this dog and me to find a better home
And leave th' little old log cabin in the lane
And I guess that’s all you need to know about that song, and by extension, the soon-to-be-rigid grip of white artists on country music, as the contribution made by black artists was swept under the rug and became something we never talk about. There’s a very valid reason why there are few if any black country artists today, and why the obituary recently of Charley Pride made such a big deal of his being one of the few. White folks didn’t want black folks in their music, the music they had claimed as theirs, and as the lyrics began to take on, in many songs, harshly racist overtones, the coloured folks turned to blues and soul and jazz, and left whitey to it.
But it must, or should be a source of everlasting shame that music which was built on the backs of African Americans, both slaves and free people, would start on such a deeply racist footing, a stance from which it would never really shift. Which is, I hasten to point out before someone berates me on it, not to say that all country music was or is racist. But it certainly cannot be denied that it very quickly became, and remains to this day, as white as soul is black. And all started by a man who should have known better, or at least been better. While country definitely has a lot to be proud of, it’s one of the few music genres that also has good reason to be deeply ashamed of parts of its history, and it’s no surprise that, while it’s popular all over the world, it’s most popular with the “good ole boys” and the kind of men who remember, or whose fathers remember fondly hunting men through forests and when lampposts had a secondary use that had nothing to do with light, and everything to do with darkness.