Michael Bertrand, Tennessee State University – Why Southern Music Matters

The music of the Southern United States is intertwined with the history of place.

Michael T. Bertrand, professor of history at Tennessee State University, examines why.

Michael T. Bertrand is a historian of the American South and the modern United States and teaches at Tennessee State University. He has taught at the University of Memphis, Middle Tennessee State University, and the University of Mississippi, where he worked in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

Professor Bertrand’s teaching and scholarship focus on the interrelationships between race, class, gender, region, and generation, particularly as they have evolved within the dynamics of popular music, popular culture, memory, and social change from the late 19th through the 20th and 21st centuries.

Bertrand co-founded and moderated H-Southern-Music and served as a music editor for the African American National Biography. He has appeared on PBS, Sky Arts, and History Channel documentaries produced by Henry Louis Gates, David Upshal, Bruce Sinofsky, and Michael Rose. He has written for CNN, The Conversation, Southern Cultures, Historically Speaking, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He has contributed chapters to numerous book projects; his latest, “Old Habits Die Hard: Elvis, or the Burden of a Southern Identity,” will be included in the forthcoming Rethinking Elvis published by Oxford University Press. The author of Race, Rock, and Elvis, for the “Music in American Life” series published by the University of Illinois Press, Bertrand recently completed Southern History Remixed: On Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Dilemma of Race, published as part of the “Southern Dissent” series for the University Press of Florida.

Why Southern Music Matters

Southern history and southern music are not mutually exclusive. To understand one requires comprehending the other.

This truism is not always evident in general histories of the American South. Prevailing accounts of the region usually discuss popular music apart from the main narrative.

The reasons for this are numerous. Yet the exclusion of popular music for any reason — whether it is deemed unimportant fluff, exacerbates mass culture fears, represents top-down manipulation of passive consumers, violates taste, or that it evades inclusion because historians lack formal musical or cultural studies proficiency — makes any southern history that omits it incomplete.

The South developed a rigid hierarchical system that entitled an oligarchy. This elite expected the region’s masses, both Black and white, to accept their place at the bottom of society.

As a form of expression detached from wealth, status, or political prerogative, southern music countered this mandate. Working-class genres like the blues, jazz, country, gospel, rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, and hip-hop allowed creators and consumers to express how they saw themselves. It confirmed that their lives mattered and that they were more than what their “betters” presumed.

Andrew Young recognized this dynamic. As he advised 1965 voter registration volunteers headed to the Deep South, “Pay very close attention to the music…It expresses much of what [people] can’t articulate in any other way.”

My research follows this advice. Focusing on popular music performers and audiences, it suggests that constructing accurate accounts of the past and the present requires listening to these historically silent voices. What we hear might surprise us.

Read More:
[Chapter 16] – All Shook Up
[University of Illinois Press] – Race, Rock, and Elvis