The Arranged Marriage of Republicanism and Country Music

Photo by Oliver F. Atkins is in the public domain in the United States.

For a 1970 “Evening at the White House,” President Richard Nixon requested that country singer Johnny Cash perform “Welfare Cadillac,” a satirical song from the point of view of an undeserving welfare recipient. Cash refused to perform the song, which was aptly described at the time by the Tennessee Commissioner of Welfare as one that “degrades everyone who has found it necessary to become a recipient…and distorts the facts about the welfare program.”

Instead, Cash played from his repertoire of more progressive protest music. He performed “What is Truth,” which indicated Cash’s affinity with anti-Vietnam war youths; “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” which tells the story of a Native American World War II veteran whose hardships began with “the greedy white man [stealing the] water rights” of Hayes’ people; and “Man in Black,” a song in which Cash expressed his solidarity with “the poor and beaten down,” inmates, and the “fine young men” dying in Vietnam. 

The best-selling artist’s invitation to the White House and defiance of the President’s request, even if not an intentional political statement by Cash, demonstrate that today’s firm marriage of Republicanism and country music was an arranged one. Popular country music’s shift from progressive and dissentient to reactionary and jingoistic can be attributed to Nixon-era Republican strategists co-opting the genre to court white working-class voters. 

Country music has never been monolithic. However, Nima Shirazi of the Citations Needed podcast points out that, “[i]n its infancy, country music had connections to organized labor and social justice struggles.” He cites Harry McClintock as an example of an early country recording artist who was also progressive. McClintock was a member of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and his “Hallelujah I’m a Bum” became an anthem of the IWW. These ties can also be heard in the “hillbilly music” of Oklahoman and card-carrying communist Woody Guthrie, whose guitar was emblazoned with the slogan “This Machine Kills Fascists,” and whose radical messages can be heard in songs like the unionist “Union Maid” and “Tom Joad.” Even Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” which has since been sanitized as an ode to America’s natural beauty clean enough for use in advertising campaigns, initially featured a verse decrying private property. The since-excised verse went: 

“There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.”

Shirazi notes that the genre’s leftist orientation “would resurge most visibly in the 1960s.” Take the wildly popular Cash, whose solidaric music (as indicated above) aligned with the left on issues like prison reform and the war in Vietnam, as an example of this resurgence. Also in the sixties, countercultural American folk music rose to prominence. This saw the successes of artists like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan. Seeger championed trade unions in “Solidarity Forever.” Ochs bashed moderate liberals for being “ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally,” in “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Dylan scathingly criticized the military-industrial complex in “Masters of War.” 

The sentiments expressed in these protest songs were radically counter-hegemonic—so much so that a Republican Senator in 1963 labeled folk music as “an unidentified tool of Communist psychological or cybernetic warfare to ensnare and capture youthful minds.” Seeger and Guthrie were blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Ochs, referring to the FBI’s persecution of him and his peers, jokingly called himself “a folk singer for the FBI.”

Country music’s historical leftist streak makes sense, considering that the Democratic New Deal coalition’s deserved appeal to the working class created long-lasting Democratic strongholds in America’s heartland. However, in the 1968 presidential election, segregationist George Wallace ran as a third-party candidate, with his campaign winning endorsements from country stars like Hank Snow, the Wilburn Brothers, and Audry Inman. According to John Anderson of The Huntsville Times, in 1968, Wallace wound up having a “startling appeal to millions of alienated white voters” which “was not lost on Richard Nixon and other Republican strategists.” 

Inspired by Wallace, Nixon devised the “Southern Strategy” to pry away the white working-class from the New Deal coalition. As Jessie Montgomery writes in his doctoral thesis:

“The approach they devised was to mount a cultural campaign. Rather than make commitments to the material betterment of the working-class, the administration would pursue a politics of recognition and celebrate the worker as an ideal. This appeal to the ‘allegedly superior moral backbone and patriotic rectitude’ of the American worker, always defined against the non-productive protesters and freeloaders stereotypical of the left, led Nixon, as it had Wallace, to country music.”

Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” saw the formerly-dissentient and often progressive country genre become a cultural signifier used to shepherd white working-class votes away from a pro-union, progressive party that actually represented their material interests.

It was this strategy that led Nixon to invite country music stars like Merle Haggard, the Osborne Brothers, and Johnny Cash to the White House and to suggest politically-charged songs like “Welfare Cadillac” to Cash, evidently misjudging his politics. In 1974, Nixon appeared at the Grand Ole Opry, at which he claimed that “Country music radiates a love of this nation…It comes from…out here in Middle America.” In 1970, he declared October to be Country Music Month, and the Country Music Association (CMA) expressed its gratitude with an album entitled Thank You, Mr. President. The album featured narration from Tex Ritter, then-president of the CMA, who deemed country music “the voice of [Nixon’s] ‘Silent Majority.’” This recognition signaled the President’s success in co-opting the genre for his political agenda. 

Country music has since become viewed as synonymous with Republicanism. A Bush-era Gallup survey revealed that around 60 percent of fans of country music identify with Republicans. This explains why, in the early 2000s, Toby Keith’s chauvinist “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” was embraced by country listeners. Meanwhile, when singer Natalie Maines of The Chicks’s said that “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas,” the group was spurned by the country establishment. 

Nothing illustrates Nixon’s (unfortunately) enduring success more than comparing Cash’s “What is Truth” with Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.” The former, released in 1970, reached #3 on Billboard’s U.S. Hot Country Songs Chart. It is dissentient, highlighting the tragic nature of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam:

“A young man of seventeen in Sunday school
Being taught the golden rule
And by the time another year has gone around
It may be his turn to lay his life down
Can you blame the voice of youth for asking
‘What is truth?’”

The latter, released in 2001, peaked at #1 on Billboard’s U.S. Hot Country Songs Chart and is rife with jingoistic lyrics like 

“Soon as we could see it clearly through our big black eye
Man, we lit up your world like the Fourth of July…
And it feels like the whole world is raining down on you
Brought to you courtesy of the red, white, and blue…
[W]e’ll put a boot in your ass
It’s the American way”

Popular country music has shifted from Cash to Keith, from counter-hegemonic to blindly patriotic, from pro-union, anti-war agitprop to nationalist propaganda. The degradation of a formerly dissenting, and often progressive, artform marks the loss of an important American form of resistance. If we want to protect valuable dissident art, we should recall how the Right wronged country music with ‘My Country, Right or Wrong’ sentiments.