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. The two are not mutually exclusive. To understand one requires comprehending the other.
Unfortunately, this truism is not always evident in general histories of the American South. Prevailing accounts usually place popular music outside the main narrative and do not interrogate its larger societal impact.
The reasons for this are numerous. Yet the marginalization of popular music for any reason makes any southern history that does so incomplete.
Why? Because 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. Accordingly, the powers-that-be derisively referred to the South’s working people as mudsills.
Absent wealth, status, or political prerogative, the region’s disenfranchised countered this mandate through music. Working-class genres like the blues, jazz, country, gospel, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, and hip-hop allowed its creators and consumers to express how they saw themselves. It confirmed that their lives mattered and that they were more than what their quote unquote “betters” presumed.
The Reverend Andrew Young recognized this dynamic. As he once advised, “Pay very close attention to popular music…It expresses much of what [people] can’t articulate in any other way.”
My research and scholarship follow this advice. It focuses on so-called mudsills, whose historically-silenced voices found expression in popular music. To grasp fully the southern past is to hear the music and recognize the humanity and complexity of its many voices.
Read More:
[Chapter 16] – All Shook Up
[University of Illinois Press] – Race, Rock, and Elvis
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