What a stupid thing to think
I hear you're fighting off a breakdown
I myself am on the brink
I used to want to be a real man
I don't know what that even means
Now I just want you in my arms again
And we can search each other's dreams
And you ain't sleeping well
Uninspired
And likely mad as hell
But wherever you are
I hope the high road leads you home again
I've sang enough about myself
So if you're looking for some bad news
You can find it somewhere else
Last year was a son of a bitch
For nearly everyone we know
But I ain't fighting with you down in the ditch
I'll meet you up here on the road
And you ain't sleeping well
Uninspired
And likely mad as hell
But wherever you are
I hope the high road leads you home again
Dumping buckets overboard
There can't be more of them than us
There can't be more
And you ain't sleeping well
Uninspired
And likely mad as hell
But wherever you are
I hope the high road leads you home again
To a world you want to live in
To a world you want to live in
This October, Jason Isbell and his band, the 400 Unit, played an eight-night residency at the Ryman Auditorium – the 2,300 seat venue in Nashville know as the Mother Church of Country Music. The Ryman, with its imposing Victorian Gothic architecture and distinctive stained glass windows, projects dignity and history. It is largely a history of a White music genre.
Covering the event was Elamin Abdelmahmoud, curation editor for BuzzFeed News and host of CBC's pop culture show Pop Chat. He says about the residency …
“The occasion is a perfect marriage of artist and venue: Isbell is one of America’s most potent songwriters, and the Ryman is a cathedral of song. For Americana fans, the singer-songwriter’s annual residency here has become a coveted pilgrimage …
“It’s for good reason that Isbell has come to be associated with the Ryman: In 2015, he played four consecutive nights backed by his band, the 400 Unit. He expanded this to six in 2017. In 2018, he did another six and released a live album called Live From the Ryman. In 2019, Isbell and his band performed at the venue for seven shows. This year, they’re doing eight. Every single one of these runs has sold out.”
(Elamin Abdelmahmoud. “Jason Isbell Is Tired Of Country’s Love Affair With White Nostalgia.” BuzzFeed News. December 16, 2021.)
Please read the entire
article by clicking here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/elaminabdelmahmoud/jason-isbell-ryman-country-music-mickey-guyton?utm_source=pocket-newtab
This year was historically different from Isbell's other years of residency. For seven of the eight evenings, he had a different Black woman opening for him. Abdelmahmoud concludes: “In an industry and genre that is consistently failing White women and is downright hostile to Black women, the choice to feature these openers is a small revolution.” Abdelmahmoud calls this decision “a necessary course correction.”
Between them, the opening ladies cover a variety of genres under the roots music umbrella, ranging from country to soul, blues to folk, Americana to rock ‘n’ roll. For many of them, it was their first time playing the Ryman at all.
Earlier this year, the country music industry was rocked by scandal after Ring camera footage leaked of rising star Morgan Wallen drunkenly shouting the n-word.
Wallen was dropped by his booking agent, and the all-powerful country radio stopped playing him. But a few months later, he is now sort of on parole, and radio stations are receptive to a new single. He’s rolled out a tour schedule after months of being MIA. The evidence suggests the appetite for forgiving Wallen is healthy.
When Abdelmahmoud first talked to Isbell on the second night of his Ryman residency, he seemed bothered by the relatively minor consequences that Wallen had faced. “I think it’s hilarious that people assume that making somebody less famous is like cutting their fucking dick off!” Isbell said. “We’re not calling for the man’s head! We’re just going, ‘This guy is an idiot. And he does not deserve to be put on a pedestal. So let’s take him off the pedestal and put him back down on the sidewalk with everybody else.’ That’s all anybody asked for.” (A publicist told BuzzFeed News that Wallen is unavailable to comment.)
(Elamin Abdelmahmoud. “Jason Isbell Is Tired Of Country’s Love Affair With White Nostalgia.” BuzzFeed News. December 16, 2021.)
Note:
Wallen had covered Isbell's song “Cover Me Up. When news of Wallen’s racial slur, Isbell announced that he’d be donating his royalties from the song to the Nashville chapter of the NAACP. “The mistakes that he made,” Isbell told Abdelmahmoud, “were enough to warrant giving somebody else that spot.” By “that spot,” he means the full lobbying support of the country industry: radio, TV, magazine covers, a push for a musical guest spot on Saturday Night Live, you name it. It’s the machinery that made Wallen the top-selling artist of the year. “The problem was they had already invested so much money in Morgan that when he made those mistakes, they didn’t want to lose that investment.”
Was that action a form of “canceling” Wallen?
“I hear a lot of people say, ‘How dare you do this to this young man in the prime of his life?’” Isbell said impatiently. “This man is going to be fine. There’s a lot of people who are fucking doing awesome who are not singing country songs on Saturday Night Live.”
“Let's grant that there might be a path for Wallen to redeem himself. What could that look like? Perhaps he might go through some steps and try to craft some kind of way where he can show us that he has learned from this experience,” Isbell said. “But not even that happened.”
Abdelmahmoud says …
“Instead, what has happened is…nothing. Wallen pledged $500,000 to Black-led organizations. As of this fall, he has yet to donate much of his pledge. In many ways, it seems the appearance of redemption is more important than actually doing the work of proving you’ve changed. 'Listen to how they talk about George Jones,' Isbell said of the country legend. 'There’s a lot of shit that George did that was not cool, shit that you really should not be able to be completely redeemed from.' Jones has a well-documented history of violence, misogyny, and, racism. 'But everything ended well, according to the country music's narrative.'
“Isbell paused. 'I don’t mean to pick on George Jones. I think he’s the greatest country singer that ever lived,' he clarified. 'But he did a lot of really, really terrible, terrible shit.' This is the magic trick: to be able to hold both truths in hand at the same time, instead of rushing to the redemption.
“'Excuses have been made over and over to try to craft that same white male narrative. It’s just part of the story. It’s like, ‘Yes, sometimes, as white men who’ve been put upon, we slip and we make mistakes, but we can rise again! And that’s country music, folks,’” Isbell said. “For people who already believe it’s true in their life, it gets reinforced when they hear it on the radio. And they don’t have to question it, they can just enjoy the nostalgia of it.”
(Elamin Abdelmahmoud. “Jason Isbell Is Tired Of Country’s Love Affair With White Nostalgia.” BuzzFeed News. December 16, 2021.)
Isbell is direct and honest to his convictions. It has mostly fallen on women — Black women, in particular — to point out the ways the industry has overlooked racism. Abdelmahmoud says, “But then again, Isbell, 42, is far from the common figure in Nashville. Over the last decade, he has earned a reputation for being a straight shooter, a no-bullshit writer and performer, a mutineer with a microphone.”
Abdelmahmoud explains …
“Isbell has long been waging war against the way nostalgia has been weaponized. He has grown intolerant of the levels of racism and sexism entrenched in the industry. A white Southern man from Alabama, he is resentful of the ways a fictitious version of the past has been deployed to keep people like him – 'white Southern rural men,” in his words – from seeing how things really are.
“But this story is only a little bit about Jason Isbell. If Isbell does his job right, it’s not about him at all. It’s about what happens when white men attempt to unhook themselves from the tentacles of nostalgia and engage with the world as it is, not as they’ve been told it is. For the next week at the Ryman, it’s about cultivating a different vision of roots music in all its iterations. The only thing you have to kill is something that never existed in the first place.”
(Elamin Abdelmahmoud. “Jason Isbell Is Tired Of Country’s Love Affair With White Nostalgia.” BuzzFeed News. December 16, 2021.)
Abdelmahmoud discovered Isbell “doesn’t do elephants in the room.” (He has been outspoken about vaccine requirements at his concerts, earning some fans’ ire. Some declared they’ll never see an Isbell show again. “Sounds great!” he responded.)
Abdelmahmoud reports: “So when I asked how he decided to have seven different Black women opening this Ryman run, there was a hint of exasperation in his voice. “First of all, I just love the music these women make,” he said. The choice of openers was neither some performative move nor an after-school special. “None of these people should be available to open for me,” he added. “They should all be too big for that. Hopefully they won’t be opening for people like me for too much longer.”
Abdelmahmoud writes …
“The breadth of talent opening for Isbell in this run is extraordinary …
“Perhaps the most recognizable name on the list is Mickey Guyton, a Nashville veteran who earlier this year became the first Black woman to be nominated for a solo country music Grammy. Guyton’s career is the perfect representation of how country’s corporate machinery regularly silences Black women. After weathering a decade of her label’s attempts to slot her into an R&B box, she stood her ground. Finally, in September, Guyton released her debut album, Remember Her Name. ('Thank God that Black don’t crack,' Guyton, who is 38, told me with a giggle. 'Because I’d be screwed.') …
“As is tradition, the first night of every Isbell Ryman residency is reserved for his wife, Amanda Shires, an award-winning singer-songwriter with piercing specificity, who also founded the country supergroup the Highwomen and plays fiddle in Isbell’s band.
“In addition to Guyton and Shires, there’s also Brittney Spencer, the breakout country singer who burst onto the scene about a year ago with her transcendent voice and skillful songcraft; Allison Russell, whose solo debut Outside Child was released in May and is one of the year’s best albums; Amythyst Kiah, who should be a household name by now; Adia Victoria, who deftly subverts a listener’s idea of what modern blues should sound like while breaking their heart; Shemekia Copeland is blues royalty, with seven Blues Music Awards to her name; and Joy Oladokun, whose career has finally been accelerating at a pace that reflects her talent.”
(Elamin Abdelmahmoud. “Jason Isbell Is Tired Of Country’s Love Affair With White Nostalgia.” BuzzFeed News. December 16, 2021.)
Abdelmahmoud analyzes Jason Isbell and his music …
“Isbell stands as an inconvenient challenge to what he calls a 'con,' the trick of using nostalgia and white resentment to keep rural white Americans believing that they are victims, that something has been taken away from them. You know the coded rhetoric. It’s the one that says America has to be made great again. It’s the kind of narrative that explicitly tries to use nostalgia against you, in Isbell’s parlance.
“It’s also a narrative that has many champions. 'They got their [Hillbilly Elegy author and Ohio Senate seat candidate] J.D. Vances, people who can cover a large group of people, for example in Appalachia, and convince them to fall for the grift,' Isbell said. He knows it’s a grift because he’s had the opportunity to see the truth.
“'I didn't realize until I got in my 20s and started touring around the country what poor in America really was,' Isbell said. 'We got out into some of the Indigenous territories, and I was shocked that this existed in America because that looked like a country that I had read about and not the one that I had lived in.' It didn’t cohere with the story he had been told about his own poverty. 'When I was a little kid, we were all the same. So I didn’t think we were poor. And then I got a little older and I thought, Oh, I grew up poor, and then I got out there and I thought, No, I was just fine.'”
(Elamin Abdelmahmoud. “Jason Isbell Is Tired Of Country’s Love Affair With White Nostalgia.” BuzzFeed News. December 16, 2021.)
Conclusions
I'm sitting here typing this blog entry and considering my love for Jason Isbell. I've got most of his music, and I've seen him in concert twice. I consider him the best of the new songwriters and performers. And think of it – here is a guy with a formidable group of talented musicians rocking the foundations of the Mother Church of Country. Not only is Isbell a great musician, but also he is a force for needed change.
Isbell speaks truths that may offend traditional country fans; however, his purpose for revealing the dark side of the music is to evoke necessary transitions. Morgan Wallen was wrong. Many of the things the revered George Jones did were wrong. Covering up the truth and simply moving on does nothing to make the music stronger. What Isbell calls “the same white male narrative” should be exposed.
I'm sure some will call this exposure of the truth “teaching critical race theory” or some other such nonsense. To pioneers like Jason Isbell, that doesn't matter. He has transcended criticism through his beautiful, evocative and highly responsible music.
Biographical Postscript
Isbell grew up in North Alabama. His grandparents lived on a farm down the road next to the school that Isbell attended; they looked after him while his parents were at work. Isbell's paternal grandfather, who came from a musical family, was a Pentecostal preacher and played guitar in church.
Of racism, Isbell says, “Nobody should really have guilt or shame about something they can’t control. I’m born a white person. The guilt and shame would come in if I didn’t use my privilege to try to make the world a better place for other people. That’s where the guilt and the shame comes in, if you’ve spent your whole life just enjoying your privilege and never actually working for it by trying to level the playing field for other folks.”
“The older I get the more I think I should have said something every single time I heard the N-word in elementary school or every time I heard someone make a joke about women or Mexicans in a bar when I was growing up in Alabama. If there’s any regrets as I’m getting older it’s that I didn’t stand up for people as often as I could have and I think really that’s what I’m talking about in that song is, since all these doors are already open for me, being a white man, my job is to try to hold them for the person behind me or the person in front of me, to try to open them for someone they might be locked for.”
(Baynard Woods. “Southern Exposure: Jason Isbell Talks About His Reckoning With White Southern Masculinity on His New Album.” Washington CityPaper. June 30th, 2017.)
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