Country Music and the Gospel Impulse
Cantwell and Hughes on country, community, and writer Craig Werner
Back in 2019, David and Charles gave the following talk at the International Country Music Conference in Nashville. We did it to honor the retirement of Dr. Craig Werner from the University of Wisconsin-Madison after an esteemed career as professor in the African American Studies Department. Craig was Charles’ mentor and probably the single biggest influence on his writing, listening, and teaching. He’s also a good friend and trusted editor for both Charles and David, someone who has helped us tremendously in ways both large and small over the years. In 1998, Craig released his stunning book A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America, which David praised in No Depression and which Charles can say without hyperbole changed his life forever. To celebrate the book’s 25th anniversary, here’s a reprinted version of that 2019 talk. In keeping with the spirit of call and response, we went back and forth at the talk, a format that we’ve reproduced here. We’ve made a few small tweaks, but we haven’t updated or revised significantly. Maybe next time. Here’s to Brother Craig, who teaches us a lot.
DC - Country music is Blues Impulse music. By this, I do not mean that country music has been influenced by blues music—though of course it has been from the ground up. We could pass this entire conference, and likely next year’s too, just brainstorming specific instances of country music playing the blues or borrowing from it, one way or the other. As Merle Haggard put it, country is just a “White Man Singin’ the Blues.”
The Blues Impulse is related to the blues, of course—but distinct. Identified by the great Black author and critic Ralph Ellison, the Blues Impulse (as opposed to the blues genre) is a mode available not just to musicians but any artist working in any medium. Ellison’s Invisible Man, for example, is a Blues Impulse novel. And, beyond art, the Blues Impulse is a way of being in the world that is available to any human. Ellison described it as “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism…”
In his A Change Is Gonna Come, Craig Werner translates Ellison’s definition into a three-step process: 1) finger the jagged grain of one’s brutal experience; 2) express that pain in a tragi-comic voice; by which 3) you reaffirm your existence.
Step one of the Blues Impulse—to finger the jagged grain of one’s brutal experience, to feel and even to be injured anew by recounting the trouble you’ve seen—is easily grasped. So many blues and country songs do this—telling sad stories of the lover who left, the mother who died, the rent that couldn’t be paid. I think Step Three—reaffirming one’s existence—is also pretty straightforward. To paraphrase Werner, singing your blues reaffirms the value of life itself. You sing the blues so you can live to sing the blues.
Werner’s Step Two of the Blues Impulse, though… Singing your blues in a tragicomic voice? That, perhaps, needs elaboration. The Blues Impulse’s “near-tragic, near-comic” performative tone allows for the possibility that seeing your woes humorously, laughing a little in order to keep from crying a lot, embracing your tears unabashedly while also noting the absurdity and self-indulgence of all your boo-hooing, can help you endure.
James Baldwin was on a similarly tragic-comic point as Ellison and Werner when he wrote: “In the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double edged” that a lot of white folks miss. Most “white Americans,” Baldwin argues, “seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is the way most white Americans sing them.”
That Baldwin passage always reminds me of the pleasant-enough but one-dimensional vocals of Eric Clapton, a blues musician who’s mostly not a Blues Impulse artist. But one thing we can say for sure is that the best country singers and songwriters sing with exactly the double-edge Baldwin values: Their words and vocals express pain while also staying slightly on top of it, laughing at it—albeit often quite grimly. When George Jones leads us about his empty home and calls it “The Grand Tour,” or when he says at a dead friend’s funeral, “It was the first time we’d seen him smile in years,” those are bitter jokes. When Merle Travis and Tennessee Ernie Ford sing, in “Sixteen Tons,” that they’re so deep in debt they can’t even afford to die and go to heaven, or when Ted Daffan moans he’s “Born to Lose” but does it to an arrangement great for dancing the night away, they’re all making use of the Blues Impulse.
CH - Alongside this, Werner develops a corresponding vision of a Gospel Impulse. This impulse not only to address the characteristics of gospel music from Mahalia Jackson to Kirk Franklin, but also its wider impact on artists from obvious inheritors in R&B and soul to fellow travelers in hip-hop, disco and even rock (like Bruce Springsteen). Black-centered but racially-inclusive, Werner defines it as “the belief that life’s burdens can be transformed into hope, salvation, [and] the promise of redemption.” While, like its blues parallel, the Gospel Impulse is rooted in individual experience – the crosses we bear – it calls us to rely on the strength of the community as central to the process of facing and ultimately transcending one’s burdens; think the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” or Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Cooke and the Staples each signal an additional element that distinguishes Gospel Impulse music: the connection doesn’t need to be with God, but can be just as powerful in interpersonal and even romantic relationships. In the blessed assurance of Curtis Mayfield’s “I’m So Proud” or Ben E. King’s prayerful “Stand By Me” (modified as it was, of course, from a gospel standard), the knowledge that we’re in this together means we can face the troubles of this world. If the blues foregrounds the assertive “I” as a means of survival, gospel insists on keeping “we” – however defined – at the center.
The core mechanism of the Gospel Impulse is call and response. Musically, this is the interplay between vocalists and instrumentalists, leader and backup, performer and audience that characterizes so much Black and Black-influenced music. “Can I get a witness?” means nothing without the “Amen.” “Holler if ya hear me” requires an affirmative answer or the MC better check their technique. As Werner notes, call and response “moves the emphasis from the individual to the group” and demands the “experience and insights of the entire community.”
In this shifting focus, call-and-response also motivates the political power of the Gospel Impulse. Black churchgoers have long used spiritual music, like the coded lessons of the spirituals or direct commentaries of the freedom songs, to assess the situation here on earth and envision and enact a more just future. Werner notes that, since Black people are justifiably “less likely than whites to subscribe to the facile optimism of America’s civic ideology,” the language of gospel – musical and lyrical – becomes a primary means of understanding and resisting those mythologies and the racist institutions they’ve supported. Accordingly, the Gospel Impulse motivated Black freedom struggles throughout U.S. history. It became especially important to the Civil Rights Movement, not just because of the church’s key role but also due to the Movement’s vision of what organizers like Ella Baker called its “beloved community.” This vision amplified the grassroots and de-centered traditional notions of leadership in ways that bore the significant influence of the witness-bearing and call-and-response of the gospel impulse.
Even when unmoored from the specificity of Civil Rights and the Black church, the gospel impulse offers a model for how music can help in this pursuit. It asks us to testify to the shared burdens of life in an unjust society and – collectively, actively – reach towards a world in which they might be transcended. Music which embodies the Gospel Impulse, then, seeks both truth and reconciliation, using gospel sounds and spiritual language (whether Christian-specific or not) to find a better place in the here and now.
Thus, country is not a fundamentally Gospel Impulse music. Sure, there are musical and thematic overlaps, but it is in this third crucial element: the link to the politics of beloved communities and transcendence through testimony that the divergence reveals itself.
DC - Typically, not even country gospel music embraces the Gospel Impulse. The country-adjacent vocal groups of so-called southern gospel music—“southern,” here, mostly being a euphemism for white people—entered a spotlight the country story primarily through Elvis Presley, of course, but also via groups such as the Statlers, the Gatlins and the Oak Ridge Boys. But the difference is that in so much country- and southern gospel there’s very little of the bearing witness, the sharing of the crosses we all bear, that Charles noted are so prominent in the black gospel tradition and in Gospel Impulse-inspired music, generally.
Instead, in southern and country gospel the emphasis is on personal gratitude, on how one’s burdens have been lifted, and tranquility achieved, with little or no looking back in wonder at how one got over—very little testifying, that is. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” is the most famous gospel song in the country tradition but, because it spends its verses fingering the jagged grain a la Ralph Ellison—following a dead mom to the cemetery; laying her corpse in its grave; returning home, lonely and sobbing—it’s also wholly atypical. Most country gospel focuses almost exclusively on sharing the Good News—there’s a better home a-waiting, in the sky, Lord, in the sky—without too much mention of this sorrowful world, let alone any talk of repairing or improving the world in the here and now. Rather, the goal in these songs again and again is to leave this world behind for a new one—notably, one that appears to replicate the structures of this one, infinitely. Think “Lord, Build Me a Cabin in Glory,” cut many times by everyone from the Blackwood Brothers to Charley Pride. Or, for that matter, such exiting-heaven-bound country classics as founding country-hit “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” and Stuart Hamblen’s oft-covered “This Ole House.”
Country’s gospel music lacks other elements of the Gospel Impulse as well. It eschews the transcendent power of a beloved community to stress individual salvation and a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. One telling example of this is the many southern gospel songs that find the singers eager, upon reaching Heaven, to shake their savior’s hand the way one would a neighbor who’d done you a solid. These country gospel tendencies—overlooking burdens and focusing on individual, rather than collective, salvation—have their mainstream country counterparts. Gospel-Impulse soul music sees romantic love, for example, as something that can help couples transcend a world that’s never going to cease throwing up obstacles to human survival. Very often, country music romance songs, by contrast—think Alan Jackson’s “Livin’ on Love,” Pride’s “All I Have to Offer You Is Me,” Haggard’s “Someday We’ll Look Back,” plus a few hundred more—tend to offer love as something that provides a correcting perspective: Those big problems aren’t problems after all, not really, not next to the private feelings and friendships that truly matter.
At the Pop Conference in Seattle earlier this year, Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Bernstein spoke about a contemporary radio trend that included big hits such as Tim McGraw’s “Humble and Kind,” Kenny Chesney’s “Get Along,” Luke Bryan’s “People Are Good,” and Florida-Georgia Line’s “People Are Different.” (I’ll add the earlier, and not as successful but more pro-active “Follow Your Arrow,” by Kacey Musgraves.) These songs all attempt to apply a remedy for today’s toxic political tensions, betting on civility in ways that connect back, Bernstein wrote, to “country’s long tradition of conservative, ideological nostalgia that winks, now in a twenty-first-century way to the genre’s white listenership” while also acting as “vocalization of progressive social norms that speaks to the genre’s increasingly young” audience. Bernstein calls this category “Country Universalism.”
Noting the absence of a Gospel Impulse and unpacking his sense of their something-for-everyone appeal, we might also label the category as a form of tolerant libertarianism—it downplays the world’s complicating troubles, focusing instead on individual choice rather than a community, or even nation-wide, struggle.
Tolerance beats intolerance, for sure. But as the older conservative country fans of these songs, as well as perhaps more progressive younger ones, likely already believe themselves to be pretty humble and kind and good, all the culpability for necessary change would seem to be handed over to… all the proud, cruel and bad people out there? Whoever they are.
CH - The Gospel Impulse reminds us that we’re all implicated, both in the burdens of our history and our shared responsibility to overcome them. Simply making a friendly connection isn’t good enough. And friendly connections are how the Civil Rights era, in particular, too often gets oversimplified. In pop music (country and otherwise), it’s become relatively common to reference this era by adding the sounds or language of the Movement period, but this is too often superficial – a sprinkling of musical authenticity or comforting nostalgia; an implicit suggestion that the bad days are over even as their good music remains.
Sometimes, it’s even more explicit, with images of Black and white musicians together as a seeming stand-in for racial progress in moments that invoke the Black-and-white-together imagery of the early Movement. (Or, more precisely, the rose-colored memories of that Movement.) George Jones’s collaboration with the Staple Singers on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” for example, or interracial pairings from Porter Wagoner & James Brown to Eric Church & Rhiannon Giddens. Such moments can indeed offer a powerful statement: Beyonce and the Chicks’ call-and-response at the CMAs in 2016, or the loving duets on 1994’s Rhythm, Country & Blues, offered joyous transgressions of borders both real and perceived.
But the belief that friendship alone provokes or represents societal change has harmful effects as well. And this notion – what Benjamin DeMott calls “friendship ideology” – represents not only one of the most pernicious elements of our racial politics, but also (as Werner suggests in his take on the “Reagan rules” of the eighties) a pernicious misreading of the Gospel Impulse. It minimizes the burden, as if to suggest that the depth of historical injustice can be reduced to misunderstandings between well-meaning people. Think of it as the “Accidental Racist” principle – the idea that problems can be solved by a good talk (in that case between Brad Paisley and LL Cool J) and a hug at the end. It sees “colorblindness” as a goal, rather than a consequence, of the project of justice, when even its value as a consequence is significantly if not fatally limited. And it distorts the call-and-response by suggesting that the work will end and we’ll all move on. This is the mistake Brad Paisley makes in “Welcome to the Future,” even as he cites Martin Luther King to claim that the election of Barack Obama heralded a new day in the racial politics of the country (and, by implication, country music).
I don’t mean to pick on Paisley. The fiction of post-racial colorblindness infects most of American culture (or at least it did before the era of #BlackLivesMatter and Donald Trump), and calling out country as an exceptionally bad example would be unfair and inaccurate. In fact, Paisley deserves credit for doing the work that many others refuse to do; even in “Accidental Racist,” he’s trying to acknowledge the burden, build a community, and envision a better future. Also, I don’t want to be too hard on others doing similar work, even when it seems more spectacle than substance, more appropriation than allyship. Country’s long race problem means that, even now, there is value whenever white country artists insist on those cross-racial connections. And even the weakest gestures towards a Civil Rights tradition are valuable in the context of a music that didn’t even used to go that far.
DC - “The real problem with country’s racial politics during the sixties,” Craig Werner writes, “was that they pretended not to exist.” That’s an overstatement, but only barely. There were mainstream country hits, in the Movement’s moment, that were certainly heard by at least some listeners as commenting upon the civil rights battles of the era. Some of these allusions were subtle—Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans,” with its anachronistic opening quote of the melody to “Dixie,” arrived on the heels of the Battles of Montgomery and Little Rock. Others were not subtle at all—Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans” follow up was “Johnny Reb,” a Top Ten country side in the fall and winter of 1959. Its nods to marching with Robert E. Lee, fighting not for slavery, and not in vain, but for pride and for your folks, plus a concluding verse where Honest Abe asks the band to play “Dixie” for all those good ol’ Johnny Rebs, came saddled with…normalizing potential…what with some white southerners just then waving Confederate battle flags while counter-protesting in Little Rock or OKC.
Did country DJs ever follow news reports of the latest protests with a pointed spin of Horton’s “Johnny Reb”? Did Horton ever make a connection on stage between the headlines and his hit? Though still on the lookout, I can’t prove it.
From February, 1960 through May, the Nashville Sit-ins occurred. James Lawson, John Lewis and scores of other mostly black students entered drug and department stores, sat at lunch counters where they were forbidden, and asked for a cup of coffee. These actions occurred throughout downtown Music City, Saturdays usually, and often just blocks from the Ryman. Did Opry members acknowledge the sit-ins—mocking them, supporting them—to audiences that had to be aware of what’d been going on nearby? On February 27, hundreds of students sat in at three Nashville stores, were beaten by white attackers, resulting in 80-some student arrests. At that evening’s Opry, just down the hill, did an Opry segment host chuckle, “I tell you what, we sure could use this next fella’s namesake to deal with that mess up town”— then announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, Stonewall Jackson!” That doesn’t strike me as unrealistic, but my research hasn’t turned up any written documentation.
This did happen: In early 1960, Jackson’s current hit—its chart life coincides almost precisely with the Sit-ins—was “Mary Don’t You Weep.” Yes, that “Mary, Don’t You Weep,” or at least that melody and title phrase. The #12 country hit is credited to songwriting legends Marijohn Wilkin and Mel Tillis. Was this an especially ugly instance of cultural appropriation in service of a potentially lucrative copyright? Were Tillis and Wilkin perhaps attempting to show subtle support for civil-rights protestors just then using this Gospel-Impulse number to gird their spirits, as slaves had done before them, at rallies and services throughout the South? Or were they attempting to poke a finger in the eye of civil rights protestors by stealing their song and replacing “Pharaoh’s drownded army” and “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water the fire next time” with the tale Jackson sings instead: A Confederate soldier leaves his young bride Mary to go kill Yankees.
The following year, 1962, “The Burning of Atlanta” became a Top Ten country hit for Claude King. Like “The Battle of New Orleans,” it begins with that “Dixie” lick and stars Johnny Reb—in retreat but calling during each chorus—“The South’s gonna rise again.”
A dozen years on, Tanya Tucker reframed that cliché: Predicting white and Black southerners would one day get over, together, she declared:
“…I believe the south is gonna rise again
But not the way we thought it was back then
I mean everybody hand in hand
I believe the south is gonna rise again"
“I Believe the South Will Rise Again” is a great Tanya Tucker record, a great Bobby Braddock song—and an even greater sentiment. Tellingly, it was more or-less a non-starter at country radio. Tucker’s first seven singles all climbed high into the top ten, but her Gospel-Impulse-adjacent “I Believe the South Will Rise Again” barely cracked the Top Twenty.
CH - Two decades later, Garth Brooks offered the same call and received the same tepid response. In “We Shall Be Free,” Brooks used gospel-influenced music – a soulful organ, Black background singers – to support a Movement-invoking message. “We Shall Be Free” offers a similar, maybe even more pointed, lyric than Braddock and Tucker’s song, naming the burdens specifically (including racism, poverty and even homophobia) and urging the audience to build a new, more just community. Brooks, then at the height of his commercial powers, missed the Top 10 for the first time in years.
Brooks brought the song back in a new 2017 version, at the dawn of a new era of ugliness, and it still sounded exceptional. Even as the country charts are filled with love songs and inspirational messages, even as the language of sin and salvation remain central to the genre’s creative direction and cultural positioning, and even as Black music remains a key influence on country artists from the rootsiest Americana to the poppiest mainstream, the specific demands of the Gospel Impulse remain muted on the country-music landscape. When country gets political nowadays, it tends to do so through defiant declarations of individualism – Bernstein’s “country universalism” or Cantwell’s “tolerant libertarianism” – or by building a wall around an imagined, usually white identity. Kacey Musgraves’s noteworthy demand to “Follow Your Arrow” isn’t so much a statement of shared purpose as it is a friendly reminder to live and let live, while songs like Montgomery Gentry’s “Where I Come From” circle the wagons instead of widening the circle or rethinking who gets to be in it. And even as the music gets better at acknowledging both the racial past and present, it still minimizes the work required in creating and maintaining a beloved community.
I want to close with two snapshots from 2019, our post-post-racial moment in which reconciliation feels like both our most essential project and nowhere near enough. First is Rodney Atkins’ “Caught Up In The Country,” a single featuring the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the legendary choir from the historically-Black university just a few miles away. This is an auspicious choice. After Reconstruction, the Fisk Jubilee Singers popularized the slave spirituals and thus helped establish the sound and importance of what became gospel music. They even served as inspiration for W.E.B. DuBois’s influential conception of the “sorrow songs,” a key origin point for discussions of Black music by Ellison, Baldwin, Werner and others. Now, it would be unfair to expect that Atkins chose the Fisk Singers for any of this. And props to Atkins for giving them a credited role on a major country release. But it’s still dispiriting to realize that “Caught Up In The Country” is a standard-issue paean to the pleasures and authenticity of rural life, a celebration of country virtues in implied opposition to the big city. It’s not a particularly bad version of the cliché, but there’s no reason for the Fisk Singers to be there other than to add a touch of authenticity and flavor. (And, to be fair, perhaps offer a subtle commentary on the oft-forgotten presence of Black folks in rural spaces.) There’s no discussion of shared burdens, and – more significantly – no call for communal transcendence. So, while “Caught Up In The Country’s” happy vision of a rural utopia may contain gospel textures, it’s not an example of how the Gospel Impulse works.
You know what is? Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Old Town Road.” Musically, the song bears little resemblance to the impulse’s musical or thematic characteristics - its “can’t nobody tell me nothin’” spirit is thoroughly blues impulse – but the phenomenon actually suggests a realer version of the Gospel Impulse than many more gospel-y counterparts. Not only do Lil Nas X and Cyrus form a call-and-response through their musical partnership (a conversation expanded by the many remixes and crowdsourced versions that range from hip-hop queen CupcaKke to school kids), but – since joining forces – Cyrus has actively supported Lil Nas X’s attempt to force a broader reconsideration of country’s racial politics. And the wide embrace of “Old Town Road” as a celebratory and joyous anthem further affirms its surprising role as an illustration of one way that the beloved community can take shape. And Lord knows we need all of that we can get.
If you like what you’re reading here, please think of subscribing to No Fences Review! It’s free for now, although we will be adding a paid tier with exclusive content soon. Also, if you’d like to support our work now, you can hit the blue “Pledge” button on the top-right of your screen to pledge your support now, at either monthly, yearly, or founding-member rates. You’ll be billed when we add the paid option. Thanks!