As part of a monthly collaboration, DLMC and Sudwerk welcome local film makers Jesse and Glenda Drew and their outstanding music documentary “Open Country” to the Beer Hall Friday, March 7th. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers, and we’ll start things off with live music by regional bluegrass band Red Dog Ash. Tickets are available here.
Open Country is a journey into the roots of American Country music, reclaiming it as the creative musical expression of working people of all colors. Through archival clips, contemporary interviews, performances, and animated graphics, Open Country repositions country music into its rightful place as a people’s music. This film features interviews with Billy Bragg, Mat Callahan, Keith Cary, Davey D, Barbara Dane, Ryan Davidson, Hazel Dickens, Hilary Dirlam, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Bairbre Flood, Archie Green, Gerald Haslam, Toshio Hirano, Roger Knox, Jon Langford, Hannah Mayree, Morgan McDow, George Metesky, Yvonne Moore, Utah Phillips and Pete Seeger.
With the twang of a steel guitar, the whine of a fiddle and the plunk of a banjo comes an instant association; the pick-up truck, the cowboy boots, the rolling hills, dusty fields, lonesome highways and the flag. Lots of flags. The twang of Country-Western puts you into the American heartland, on the ranch, the farm, or in the honky-tonk or beer hall. For many, it has also come to signify conservatism, “traditional values,” American chauvinism, or even racism, bigotry and the confederate flag. Country-Western music has been prominently featured by every major contemporary Republican figure, from Richard Nixon to G. W. Bush. George Bush the elder claimed Hee-Haw as his favorite TV show. Consequently, no one is too surprised when Country -Western radio disc jockeys smash CDs or ban music from groups taking positions frowned upon by the right-wing.
Does Country-Western deserve this reputation? Like the flags they fly so fervently, the right wing likes to promote this claim to ownership. But history and facts do not bear them out.
Although one wouldn’t realize it from listening to today’s pop Country-Western radio stations, country music has been anything but a rightwing soundtrack. To the contrary, the roots of Country and Western lie firmly in classic American traditions of resistance to capital, freedom from government interference, and in defense of the right of workers, poor farmers, and the dispossessed to live their lives in dignity.
This film shows the origins of country music as being drawn from the same well as what was originally called “hillbilly” or “folk.” Much early country music was written from the perspectives of Southern tenant farmers, Appalachian coalminers, working Southwestern cowboys, Western farmworkers and other marginal poor folk. These tunes were passed along generation to generation, with the lyrics often evolving as times and conditions changed. As the radio and recording industries grew up around the music in the 1920s and 1930s, vested financial interests formed and developed a stake in the financial viability and political identity of the music. In the 1930s and 1940s, a star system arose, as country music developed a fan base and began to challenge the hegemony of tin pan alley and urban popular music. In the 1950s, McCarthyism played a prominent role in the extraction of Country-Western from that of folk music, with its left-wing associations with artists like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.