Country Music and the Souls of White Folk

“I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that puzzle me more than the Souls of White Folk. Not, mind you, the souls of them that are white, but souls of them that have become painfully conscious of their whiteness.”¹ So begins an early version of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of White Folk,” a prescient rumination on the problem of whiteness in the twentieth century. Du Bois continues, “Forgetting (as I can at times forget) the meaning of this singular obsession to me and my folk, I become the more acutely sensitive to the marvelous part this thought is playing today and to the way it is developing the Souls of White Folk, and I wonder what the end will be.”² This description of the twentieth century’s newfound obsession with whiteness provides a key to understanding the racialized discourses of musical authenticity that took shape in the early decades of the twentieth century and that continue to inform both critical and popular notions concerning the relationships between racial identities and musical forms. Of course, Du Bois had himself articulated an influential conception of African American racial identity grounded in the musical traditions of a racially defined “folk” in his “Of the Sorrow Songs” in 1903.³ In an important sense, the idea of a musical tradition produced by a racially circumscribed white folk is a corollary of this earlier idea. Underscoring this symmetry, though, is the line demarcating the boundary between these putatively separate traditions: a musical color line, to borrow Du Bois’s famous term.

Together, Du Bois’s investigations of the souls of black and white folk anticipate several current trends in thinking on the subjects of music and race and of the relationships between them. Ronald Radano and Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., for example, have each considered how ideological investments in racial difference condition contemporary understandings of vernacular musical forms. Both interrogate the concept of “black music” and reveal the role that ideological discourses of race play in producing what Radano describes as “a sound form expressive simultaneously of both the difference of blackness and the relation of black to white.”⁴ While Ramsey investigates how ideas of racial difference work to produce musical difference, Radano illustrates how such notions obscure “the sameness that accumulates in American sound forms.”⁵ The rethinkings of the equation of racial identifications and musical forms that Radano and Ramsey offer demonstrate the limitations that racial categories pose in delimiting musical spheres. They reveal the ways that distinctions between the categories of black and white prove chimerical, as musical forms are mediated and creolized even as they are pressed into the service of racialist ideologies.

Echoing Du Bois, these investigations explore the “unresolved dialectical relationship” that “black” culture maintains with “white America, in a kind of stability in instability.”⁶ Such reconsiderations of the relationships between racial identities and vernacular musical forms have informed recent work that questions long-held notions about such key figures in twentieth-century popular music as Robert Johnson and “Mississippi” John Hurt.⁷ Elijah Wald’s systematic unraveling of the romantic racialist mythology surrounding Johnson, for example, undermines the seemingly intuitive notion that the blues is the exclusive product of an African American folk culture by focusing on the music’s interracial and commercial aspects. Such recent rethinkings of long-held ideas concerning the “blackness” of vernacular musical forms reveal how ideas of racialized folk purity risk being pressed into the service of a racist tautology: as Bill Ivey puts it, that “authenticity in music is an attribute of race and that Southern musical reality matched the ‘hillbilly’ and ‘race’ distinctions invented by the record industry in its early years.”⁸ These reconsiderations of “black” music have recast our understanding of the subject in terms of hybridity and reciprocal interracialism.⁹

The corollary “whiteness” of other forms of American vernacular music, though, has been subject to considerably less critical pressure.¹⁰ I want to address this imbalance by rethinking the emergence of hillbilly music as a white-identified genre in the...