Southern Music and the Confederacy

To honor April as Treason in Defense of Slavery Month, I will be running a series of posts on the Civil War, the Confederacy, and neo-Confederates.

I want to start out with a discussion of this poster, made for the country/metal musician Hank Williams III by Art Schmuck.

The image takes an old picture of Robert E. Lee, puts a Jason-style hockey mask thing on him, and has him holding the decapitated head of William Tecumseh Sherman.

The use of Confederate imagery in southern music has roots that began at least with Gram Parsons in the late 1960s and became famous with such 1970s artists as Lynard Skynard and David Allen Coe. For many of them, the Confederate flag was fairly disembodied from its racist roots, though all of this music was clearly made for white people. As Patterson Hood has pointed out, the flag and the southern identity was clearly misunderstood by the fans of these bands. However, I'm not sure that I agree with Hood on this point. I think perhaps the bands misunderstood, or perhaps their use of this imagery was overthought. Anyway, the fans knew what the flag meant and they were proud of it. It stood for white supremacy at a time when blacks were exercising their long-fought for civil rights.

As annoying as the Confederate flag is in these bands' identity, Hank III has taken it to a whole new level with this poster. I'm not surprised that Hank has done this. His whole thing is about taking the rebellion in country and southern rock music and stepping it up a notch. In fact, it's hard to believe that Hank is a southern boy because his attempts to identify himself as one are so hamfisted and heavy-handed that you begin to question whether he actually believes it himself.

In any case, onto the poster itself. The Lee image is iconic and many of the people who purchased that poster no doubt know where it comes from. Even if they don't, the artist and Hank III certainly do. By giving Lee that mask, they make connections between the Confederacy and terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. While the actual imagery may be different than the KKK, using the horror movie theme impresses upon viewers that Confederate leaders were as tough as Freddy Kruger and Jason and that anyone who gets in their way will be crushed like roaches. Of course, in reality the people this terror was turned upon was not Sherman or other Union leaders but African-Americans who escaped the horrors of slavery only to face a southern white populace determined to destroy all vestiges of black freedom and personal dignity. As Sherman played such a large role in freeing the slaves, the decapitation of him also serves as a decapitation of all he stood for, including the ending of slavery.

For many Southerners, William Tecumseh Sherman stands as the epitomy of Northern evil. How dare he come and destroy our homes? After all, what had we done? Well, other than cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, enslaved black people for over 200 years, and then broke up the union to defend that practice. Sadly, the image Hank gives us here is all too typical of how the war is remembered. Popular culture sees the Confederacy as paradoxically both the victims and victors of the conflict, while Sherman is the ultimate enemy. In some ways though, perhaps Hank and the other purveyors of neo-Confederate ideology are right. Maybe the South did win the Civil War in their way. They certainly won the battle for memory and it took another 100 years for African-Americans to have civil rights in this country.

There is no room for the story of African-Americans in this visual narrative. In fact, I wonder whether for Hank and others like him who claim to love black music, if African-Americans have any value for them except as cultural artifacts. Certainly their stories do not get told in this music.

Is Hank III a racist? I really don't know. I suspect he would never admit to it. I'm sure we'd hear the "I have lots of black friends" arguments. But by promoting images like this, he has played his part in promoting racism and has built another brick in the wall of neo-Confederate romanticization and reinterpretation of the Civil War as the Lost Cause.

Thanks to my friend and occasional commenter on this blog Scott for sending me this image.