What ‘Accidental Racist’ says about evolution of Southern identity
… where, in the song, he enters a Synagogue wearing his grand father’s Iron Cross. When asked, the performer said, “It was just something that I thought people should hear”.
Love, heartbreak, patriotism, and partying have helped make country music the top-selling genre in the US. Segregation and slavery? Not so much.
Yet “Accidental Racist” fits into a long tradition of Southern musicians trying in good faith to reflect on the region’s complicated past. Whether it was the “hillbilly” music marketed to whites from Appalachia and the Ozarks in the 1920s or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s response to Neil Young in 1974’s “Sweet Home Alabama, Southern musicians have sought to address the outsider’s perspective that Southern pride is tied to the legacy of slavery and the Civil War.
… .“I’m not sure if we were going to find any answers, but it was the idea we would ask the question. In the end, what I felt we had on tape was something we felt people needed to hear,” he told ABC News Tuesday.
