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We
are living in one of the most generative eras of Southern cultural
production since Dolly went pop and Designing Women said
“y’all” once a week on network television. From country music to digital and
print media, we are trying to ?gure out the American South…again.

I say “again” because American popular culture has an ongoing, cyclical

obsession with the U.S. South. “The South” is a stand-in for how the nation
wants to see it itself at any point in time. Debating the morality of Southern
cultures is one way that the nation reckons with empire and economics. We
are not well versed in international or global cultures in this country.
Therefore we do not have the vocabulary to talk about geo-politics “out
there”. Instead we talk about the geo-politics “in here” — in the
Appalachias, in Mississippi, in Texas. Extracting natural resources,
controlling the “borders”, policing what it means to be a “real American” —
we hash all of that out in our disdain of and attraction to the South.

The South does not stop existing when popular culture moves on. It is
always engaged in its own Civil War over what the place means or who is
even included in “The South”. Right now, The South is making sense of two
phenomena that are shaping how the region sounds and how it talks about
itself: people are coming “home” and they’re bringing their ideas about
home with them to a place that has its own ideas about what that all means.

Reverse migration is often talked about in terms of Black Americans

returning to their family’s Southern roots. But economic crises have also
pulled at white Southerners across the country, calling them home to
cheaper housing and built-in childcare. You can be forgiven for not noticing
it because mainstream media usually only refers to these returners in non-
racial terms like “young people” and “millennials”. A noteworthy proportion
of those movers are Black but a more signi?cant proportion of them are not.

Some returners are moving back to the South and others are a generation
or two removed from a direct connection to the area. No matter the
strength of their direct ties, new and returning Southerners are bringing a
range of political and racial identities with them. As one white woman told
me on Twitter, many of these Southerners wonder “if they can keep the
parts of the South they love and leave the parts that made them leave”. That
is not just the racism and classism but also ideas about gender norms and
nuclear families and religion. These folks are one reason why North
Carolina and Georgia are now “purple” states at election time.

Folks are moving back to a South that has a heightened signi?cance in

national politics and a cultural history it tries to map onto all this
change.That is how you end up with a burgeoning Black country music
landscape, a growing ?eld of liberal, progressive and radical Southern
media.

T
he country music changes are some of the most fascinating of the
cultural shifts happening around the South. Superstar Maren Morris
thanked the “Black women of country music” during her recent Country
Music Awards acceptance speech. Rissi Palmer has so much content about
Black, Indigenous and other marginalized country music artists that she has
an entire podcast on Apple Music (Color Me Country). That podcast is in
addition to the Queer and BIPOC-friendly Southern Craft Radio, also on
Apple Music. Even mainstream white country artists feel comfortable
enough to say the words “Black Lives Matter” and “racism”. That is a ?rst in
a genre that isn’t just conservative but that has aggressively cultivated
fearful artists and a colorblind ideology to placate their skittish white rural
listeners.

Even more interesting is the fringe country music, the music being
produced outside the big corporate Nashville music machine. Marcus
Dowling writes in Nashville Scene recently:

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Dowling goes on to introduce eight Black women country artists that are
more alternative than big country radio prefers. They include: Brittney
Spencer Adia Victoria, Reyna Roberts, Chapel Hart, Kären McCormick,
DeLila Black, Ashlie Amber, and Tiera. They join other new Black country
acts like The Ebony Hillbillies, Darius Ruker, The War & Treaty, Gary Clarke
Jr, Yola, Jimmie Allen and (bi-racial) Kane Brown in a wickedly diverse
group.

Love or hate the music, the expanded imagination of “country” re`ects a

desire among new and returning Southerners to account for the region’s
shifting demographics and economics.

Those shifting demographics and economics are spelled out more directly
in Southern media. Or, rather, in the ?ght for de?ning the South in media.
A 2017 New York Times article highlighted the region’s growing,
diversifying media landscape:

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Scalawag is far and away the most radical of these publications. It is also
helmed by the youngest and Blackest stae among those named in that New
York Times piece. The magazine explicitly troubles the idea of a “new”
South that can ever be disentangled from the slavery, apartheid, and
planation economics that created the South. At the same time, Scalawag is
similar to The Bitter Southerner in rejecting the mainstream culture’s
romanticizing the region’s eventual “progression” into something other
than, well, the South. These publications are for folks who return but,
especially in the case of Scalawag, they are also for those Southerners who
never left.

The Southerners who stayed did just as much to reshape the region’s
political fortunes — as Stacey Abrams embodies — as new arrivals. Those
are the Southerners who reckoned with the brutal con`ict over public space
and private pains and white racial violence and internal migration and
national expropriation of the area’s wealth.

They stayed and made the conditions for a new country music, one that
reconciles Nelly and Florida Geogria Line and Hootie and the Blow?sh and
Lil Nas X. Demographic and economic changes contour the directions of
this new Southern culture but they do not unilaterally shape its trajectory.
The changes in country music and con`icts between glossy odes to
Southern elitism and gritty reporting on the South’s working class and poor
mirror this tension.

That tension is about the South but it also about the nation. As is always the
case when Southern culture has a spin in the national spotlight, the
con`icts that make good culture are the con`icts oe-loaded from other
parts of the nation. This region warehouses our nation’s war with itself /%<#=0:=&0:=.

about citizenship, class, race, gender, immigration, history and future. The
soundtrack is just a bonus.

If you are attuned to the Georgia run-oes and the work that so many
organizations did to make a contested Georgia election a thing, you owe a
small debt to the work that Southern publications have done over the past
ten years. Garden & Gun has a wealthy new South customer keeping it
a`oat. Southern Living will never ever die as long as a single southern lady
anywhere exists. Scalawag and Bitter Southerner are less `ush precisely
because they are so important to the changing socio-political realities of the
South’s diverse population.

If a Georgia win will make you happy, send these mags a little love.
Subscribe and/or donate.

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A true story:

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