It’s awards show season, which means it’s both a good time to reflect on the year’s music — and the state of the industry. While LGBTQ+ and BIPOC artists have made huge strides in visibility, this is largely thanks to organizers like Holly G of the Black Opry and Rissi Palmer of Color Me Country. Often, marginalized artists are working in spite of organizations like Americanafest, the CMA, and the ACM. (Folk Alliance has work to do, too, but by all accounts they are way more proactive than any of the other orgs.)
For example, the CMA hosted the first official queer country showcase ever at this summer’s CMA fest. Using the blunt and indelicate tool of artist headshots on the site, CMA was also far more diverse than Americanafest, the supposedly more liberal branch of roots music…and then gave Morgan Wallen an award.
So with the conclusion of major industry festival season for the year, I thought it would be a good time to re-up the anti-racist roots music playlist. I define anti-racism as an active stance against racism that acknowledges one’s own complicity with it. As white people, we don’t have too many role models for this. In my opinion, the following ten songs provide an outline. I’ve embedded the new additions via YouTube here, and have the full Spotify list on the bottom of the page.
- “Blind Spots” by Abby Posner — Abby Posner mainly butters her bread with pop-inflected blues and folk, but “Blind Spots” is a more intimate affair. It’s a bold opening track for her most recent album, Kisbee Ring. What starts, at first, as a jangly and defiant folk pop song quickly evolves into a meditation on privilege and institutional abuse of power.
- “Settlers’ Town” by T. Buckley — Canadian roots artist T. Buckley brings a slightly different perspective to the conversation than most Americans. In the song, Buckley offers a meditative exploration of how he and his schoolmates bullied a Native girl in their class. It’s a tough listen, and you can hear Buckley’s regret and recrimination loud and clear — maybe it’ll remind you of your own elementary school days.
- “Down in the Streets” by Carsie Blanton — I first heard this song on Blanton’s Mountain Stage performance, during which she loudly lambasted Joe Manchin for scuttling the Build Back Better Act. Since Mountain Stage is based in West Virginia, it was pretty funny to hear them attempt to cover their tracks to avoid Manchin’s displeasure (he was in the audience.) It sure helps put that first lyric in perspective — a joyous protest song in support of Black Lives Matter in spite of the state’s attempt to repress those protests.
- “Prosser’s Gabriel” by Tim Barry — Tim Barry is nothing if not a son of Richmond, VA. This song is from 2009, but is no less electrifying. When Barry wrote this song, the Southampton Rebellion (as some historians refer to it) was mostly the province of historians. Barry’s ballad celebrating this lesser-known hero is as electrifying as it was back then, a strident tale of a man who resisted everything he knew, and drew others into the cause. Thanks to the tireless work of many, many activists, Gabriel has received his due in Richmond, and the movement to remove Confederate monuments has brought this uprising back into common knowledge. To learn more about the rebellion, check out this episode of Ben Franklin’s World.
- “Blueneck” by Chris Housman — Who says protesting has to be serious work? Chris Housman’s “Blueneck” is a song I return to a lot. It’s the perfect pop country song. And it carries some serious heft. Housman’s catchy melody and cheeky lyrics are, in some ways, more thought-provoking than a t ypical protest song. By using pop conventions to disarm us, Housman brings us all together for a fun little bop before getting instructive.
- “Machine” by Emily Barker — Barker’s hypnotic album A Dark Murmuration of Words was a standout of 2021. Barker is Australian, but her travels through the US brought her attention to the similarities between the two countries’ history. “Machine” is brilliant in its effortless indictment of capitalism, slavery, the prison industrial complex, and our feigned helplessness to do anything to stop it.
- “She Is On Her Way” by Aly Halpert Jewish folk singer Aly Halpert envisions the world we’re working towards. It might be mellow, but Halpert’s looping rhythms help us to feel that a better world is not only possible, but inevitable. The title comes from Arundhati Roy’s famous novel. With Halpert, we can feel her breath on our ears.
- “Our Finest Hour” by Benchmarks — It should be noted that Todd Farrell is one of the very few cishet guys on this playlist. (And he, Barry, and M Lockwood Porter all come from the same punk-to-Americana pipeline.) “Our Finest Hour” is an explosive release of frustration and guilt, the moment you, as a white person, realize it’s time to take a step back, even if you’re not sure what that means and you’re still figuring out how to do it. It’s a vulnerable moment to document, and a necessary one to realize we are not alone in it.
- “The Way It Was Before” by Della Mae — Bluegrass quintet Della Mae open their song with a familiar scene: a family moving to the city for a better life. As the song unfolds, we realize this is not a story of 200-year-old Appalachian migration, nor are the protagonists who you think of as the main characters of a bluegrass song. The cleverest trick here is Della Mae weaponizing our assumptions about who bluegrass is for and who it’s about — and turning them against the audience, building even greater sympathy at the song’s tragic and all-too-modern conclusion.
- “Tear It Down” by Amy Ray — This one is off Amy Ray’s latest album (out this past Friday) If It All Goes South. Ray is by no means a stranger to addressing the South’s racist legacy in song. But the fact that she keeps returning to it is compelling enough. On “Tear It Down,” Ray addresses the fight to remove Confederate monuments from the South. The slow ballad captures Ray’s love for the South and her sorrow for the legacy some people would like to perpetuate into modern times.
As promised, here’s the Spotify playlist.
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