I have a lot of feelings about music, and I have some feelings about Tyler Childers’ song, “Long Violent History.” Childers – he comes from Appalachia. He knows what goes on there. He’s no poser. He’s no Taylor Swift putting on a fake country accent for seven years (no hate). His accent is fully Kentucky – the kind that makes me wish I would have spent more time with my grandfather and talked to him more about his home.
The Dixie Chicks lost their right-of-center following a long time ago. Kacey Musgraves had a progressive following to begin with. They’re both women in country music, and female country stars have a tendency to be a little more radical – Miranda Lambert’s first single was literally about killing a man. Female country stars, unfortunately, never really expect radio play, either. In 2019, female country artists accounted for only 11% of radio play. What men are getting all this airtime? To put is softly, pop-country-bros. They still rule the charts. Not to say their music is bad, but they’re your stereotypes of country and of the South - the ones who sing about trucks, corny love, and scenarios about pretty girls drinking Bud Light.
But then, you have Chris Stapleton and Tyler Childers. They’re singing something a little too country to be considered folk, but a little too Americana to be modern country. They revive a feeling – a nostalgia. Mountain songs. Soul. Steel-string. Banjos. They’re rural. They’re not suburban, Southern neighborhood kids burning diesel fuel for fun. They’re an F-150 that doesn’t run. The one that sits behind a trailer of some forgotten interstate exit on the way through the mountains. They’re roots. They’re country at its most raw.
Childers sings about things that are very specific. And even for suburban Southern kids, he creates a beautifully-composed, brutally honest picture of what being rural is. Something they want to emulate. Music is for everyone, and just because you’re not from rural Kentucky doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy his music. What I’m saying is that he comes from a place of absolute truth, and he has a following that’s very proud of those real roots, either by proxy or by actual experience.
“Long Violent History” is a call-out, though. I want people who are proud of these roots – working class, rural roots, like my own – to really take a look at what they're advocating for and what they're advocating against, because this song seeks to embody the mutual struggles of rural folk and Black Americans and put them in perspective. Childers isn’t exactly trying to empathize, he’s refuting the idea that the rural struggle is comparable with being Black in America, but he is saying that Appalachia knows what it's like to be subjected to mistreatment by government offcials. He’s saying he’ll never know what it’s like to fear for his life because of his skin color, but asking his audience, "wouldn't you be up in arms if one of your own was murdered by those in power?" Why would he, as one of a group (that group being miners, poor blue-collar workers and Easter Kentucky in general) that's suffered tremendously at the hands of cops and abusive elites, be the one to state that Black Americans don't have the right to be angry?
I remember being at a NASCAR driver’s party who will remain unnamed (growing up in Charlotte, sometimes this happens). They began to play Childers’ music, singing along to every word. Previous to this, I’d been called out for being the only "progressive" in the room, and I ignored the political chatter that ensued. Later, J.Cole played, and I asked, “How can you sit here and listen to J.Cole and still be a Republican?”
I looked at my mutual follows on Instagram and Facebook with Childers. Most were either radicals or country kids I went to high school with. An interesting dichotomy representing the two sides of what radical rural America is. So now, as a white man in country music, he’s releasing this song that is very much against police brutality and pro-BLM.
The point is that Childers has a pretty large following who adhere to certain values. And he knows this. A part of his following very much holds on to the “values” argument of country – that progressive ideology is an attack on their hardworking, Christian values. They’re people who understand the working-class struggle but approach it from a different side. Then, there’s the side of country folk who approach the working class struggle from the side of radical class liberation and unionization. Class inequality is the root of every injustice, and if we can liberate and unionize the working class, then this is where we reach a more just society.
You have people who sold their souls to coal companies just to live – Childers sings about that. He sings about being redneck. He sings about miner strikes. He sings about Appalachia. He sings about the working class. He sings about drugs. I hope that people – specifically, Trump people – will really, really listen to this perspective of a man from Eastern Kentucky. A man that knows rural, who embodies country. He's not some Hollywood star or liberal elite telling rural folks how to live their lives. He’s not looking down, and he’s not patronizing. We need to reanalyze how we're looking at working class struggles, and we need to reanalyze how we view racial injustice based on this perspective. There’s a banjo and a fiddle behind it – just listen.
If you don't believe me, listen to Tyler himself.