The Isbell Analysis
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While I thought it was pretty cool that Jason Isbell played “Something More than Free” at the DNC, my own view is that the meaning of entertainers at political conventions is pretty low. I mean, who is changing their vote based on this? But immediately CNN went to a commenter discussing the importance of having a guy like Isbell doing his thing, as a white rural southern liberal man. I thought, well, that’s kind of odd. But it’s kind of everywhere. Isbell and the Times had a longish conversation about it before the event. Also, Mickey Guyton played. I don’t particularly care for her music, but she’s a Black woman playing country music in a hostile Nashville, so all respect to her as a person. This contributed to the larger conversation about what this all means. Here’s a more in-depth discussion that is at least worth considering from Marissa Moss:
Last night, the first night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention wherein we’ll once again make a go for a female president, Vice President Kamala Harris, looked and sounded a whole lot different. There weren’t big popstar performances (though I am sure they are coming, and I hope they are coming! Who isn’t throwing pennies into the fountain to wish for a Beyoncé appearance?) but there was country: a country artist, Mickey Guyton, and a country person, Jason Isbell, singing “Something More than Free” with his unmistakable Alabama drawl in front of an image of a barn (!!!) with an American flag on it. There was even Ella Emhoff in a camo hat, the genius bit of merch the campaign is making that speaks 1000+ words on reclaiming rural and southern identity in one nifty cap. I would have one now if they weren’t sold out.
This feels like a new level of understanding from the DNC that liberals aren’t just listening to streaming pop hits (and these days, you’ll find country there too!), and that southern folks, Appalachian folks and small town people who listen to country and roots music often believe in things like basic human rights for all people and other things we consider to be democratic principles. The author Sarah Smarsh has done some great writing digging into to this in the context of selecting Governor Tim Walz as Harris’ VP running mate: “That people in small towns are often hopeful, cooperative folks who find creative solutions to local problems and are ruled by a sense of responsibility to community rather than by a fear of those outside it,” she writes in the New York Times. “In conveying the dignity and reality of what is casually derided on the coasts as ‘flyover country,’ Mr. Walz speaks plainly yet eloquently in the parlance of my place and thereby fills a decades-long geographic messaging gap for Democrats.”
It seems like the democrats are intent on further filling that messaging gap when it came to last night’s musical choices of Guyton and Isbell. There is a significance to picking these two – Guyton, who, as a Black woman in a genre that gives its entire all to make sure she does not disrupt the tidy male status quo, represents a country music fan who seldom has had a chance to see themselves on stage, at festivals and certainly not on the radio. And Isbell, who writes and speaks forcefully for a different version of the south and the southern person then what our stereotypes gleefully peddle. Not unlike what was happening with #HeAintFromHere, there is a furious reframing of not just who the democrats can reach, but who a democrat actually is. Meanwhile, it’s the Trump supporters who are actually getting country music wrong, something I spoke to NPR about last week.
I thought of the time I went to see Jason Isbell play the Ryman in October of 2021, with Mickey opening: she played the same song she did last night, “All American.” The experience struck me so much it became a pivotal point of my book: there are country fans everywhere, and country voters. Anyway, it is a brilliant song because of how it does this work of reframing on almost every level – it is the kind of song that white country artists have been singing for decades about the American experience, and about patriotism, but not centered only in the white experience as the only norm. She mentions back roads and dookie braids, asking a question that democrats (and those who have continually dismissed country music) seem to finally be answering in a different way than before: ain’t we all all American?
Again, I’m not sure that any of this really matters. But Democrats should be making claims in 2024 that they are the party of any American who is not an absolute scumbag. Decency, no matter where you live and what you believe, is a pretty big tent and one that the Republicans have no interest in having for themselves. So remembering that rural America exists and that there are Democrats in Alabama too at the very least doesn’t hurt anything.
Plus people should be listening to better music and so hearing Jason Isbell at the very least is a way to do that.
Tell you one thing, it’s been a long way from 2007 when I was seeing Isbell in small Texas clubs with maybe 75 people to performing in a full tux in prime time during the Democratic National Convention!