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Becoming animal: Race, Terror and the American RootsDick Hebdige

Online Publication Date: 01 February 2007To cite this Article: Hebdige, Dick (2007) 'Becoming animal: Race, Terror and theAmerican Roots', Parallax, 13:1, 95 - 118To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/13534640601094957URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534640601094957

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Becoming animal: Race, Terror and the American Roots

Dick Hebdige

An early version of the text reproduced below was first given as a mixed-media presentation at an

interdisciplinary conference on ‘‘Noise’’ held at the University of California, Santa Barbara in June

2002. The conference brought together a group of musicians, composers, visual artists,

ethnomusiciologists and film, TV and media scholars drawn from a range of institutions sited in

the States and abroad. What follows should be regarded more as the inchoate mapping or

approximate documentation of a performance than as a conventional piece of written scholarship or

criticism. Inevitably much is lost or at least significantly refigured in the translation from a ‘live’

real-time context complete with audio, slide and video inserts to the stereophonic silence of words

upon a page but it is my hope that some of those readers who persevere beyond this preamble and

who follow what follows will recognize or, failing that, will follow up/track down some at least of

the audio citations.

This essay is the second part of a trilogy I’ve just completed on mid 20th century

American roots music, roots culture, sub- and counterculture. Part One, entitled even

unto death: Improvisation, Edging and Performance (Critical Inquiry, winter 2000) is about

mid 50s jazz, beat, Zen Buddhism, and the idea and the practice of improvisation:

what Daniel Belgrad calls the ‘culture of spontaneity’.1 The third part, entitled un-

imagining utopia: Framing ‘the Sixties’ is about the late 1960s psychedelic and protest

countercultures of San Francisco and the Bay Area. This, the second part, functions as

the hinge in the trilogy and, as the subtitle indicates is about race, terror and the

American roots specifically the prefigurative tropology of white Southern rockabilly

music.

The trilogy as a whole is concerned with looking back to mid 20th century America in

order to try to work out how we got from there to here and to see whether by going

back – back to what Greil Marcus calls ‘the old weird America’,2 it might be possible to

find pathways into alternative futures, futures other than and different from the scary,

locked down, buttoned up futures that increasingly seem to be the only ones officially

on offer these days.

Finally it is my attempt as an immigrant from the UK (I moved to the United States in

1992) to make sense of America. These three essays form part of my attempt as an

immigrant to come to terms with America’s imagination of itself, with America’s myths

of national origin and destiny, ideas concerning how the nation was founded in the

early days of European settlement and where it appears to be going in the present age

of globalization, global US hegemony and the current US-led ‘‘war on terror’’. I want

parallax, 2007, vol. 13, no. 1, 95–118

parallaxISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online # 2007 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journalsDOI: 10.1080/13534640601094957

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to review again as an immigrant some of the foundational national mythologies – e.g.

the Jeffersonian myth of the small holder citizen army, the pioneer myth and the

Manifest Destiny myth that accompanied the conquering movement west, or the myth

of American exceptionalism, the idea that America is literally a New World, a world

made new in its rupture from the past and from (what Donald Rumsfeld calls ‘old’)

Europe. In other words it’s my attempt as an immigrant to grapple with the

apocalyptic drama of American becoming…

I go back into the past not to escape the present but to try to divine what lies hidden

inside the present moment – divination being related to prophecy and revelation,

modes of discourse and utterance not unrelated, as we know, to the

distinctive investments in religion and religiosity that make America from where

I’m coming from, from a European perspective, an historical paradox: insofar

as America is, at once dynamically modern, is fanatically devoted to technological

and product innovation and yet at the same time it is statistically at least, in

comparison with (old) Europe massively, overwhelmingly pious. One could go as far

as to say that the United States is polymorphously pious given it’s constitutional

commitment to religious tolerance (though the shadow of the cross, of course as we

all know and as will no doubt be clear in what follows looms large (larger now perhaps

than at any time in its history) across the riven backlit landscape of America’s

apocalyptic imaginary.

It’s a hard world for little things

And in the polarizing spirit of apocalypse I’d like to start this seance by citing a

sequence from the 1955 film version, directed by Charles Laughton of Davis Grubb’s

Southern gothic thriller Night of the Hunter which as many readers will no doubt know is

set in the American South during the Great Depression. In the scene to which I’m

referring, Robert Mitchum, who plays a satanic serial killing preacher named Harry

Powell, (the hunter of the title) has tracked down two young orphans, Pearl and her

older brother John Harper, who have been entrusted by their father with the proceeds

of a bank robbery before he was captured, imprisoned and executed for a homicide

connected to the crime at the beginning of the film. The bank robbery booty, now in

the protective custody of the two fugitive innocents (secreted, we later discover, inside

little Pearl’s rag doll) is the target of Harry Powell’s homicidal quest. He has already

murdered the children’s mother – after he married her to get at the loot – and he’s

tracked the two little runaways to the home of Rachel Cooper, a good Christian

woman, played by Lillian Gish who takes in the juvenile flotsam delivered to her

doorstep by hard times (this being the Depression) and by the river that runs at the foot

of her property.

Depicted in this scene as the lethal force version of Whistler’s mother, Rachel Cooper

sits on her rocking chair with a loaded shotgun on her lap, determined to protect her

little charges from Powell, the psychopathic wolf in sheep’s clothing who is sitting in the

moonlight on a tree stump in her yard singing the old Baptist hymn, ‘Leaning on the

Everlasting Arms’. Rachel Cooper takes up the counterpoint. Here the phony preacher

and the tough old bird are locked in deadly spiritual combat for the souls of the two

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children and all the other waifs and strays under her protection, like tempted, teenaged

Ruby drawn downstairs in the middle of this scene by Preacher Powell’s lilting

baritone. (Note that in this deadly serious duel, only Ms Cooper has access in song to

the name of Jesus).

When Ruby stumbles in, sleepy eyed, pursuing the duet to its source, one hand

clutching a glowing oil lamp, Preacher Powell takes advantage of her naked light to slip

into the darkness (only to resurface in the next scene as a shadow in a mirror). Ms

Cooper tells Ruby to bring all the children downstairs and as the child leaves the room

an owl swoops down from a tree outside the window and, as we hear the off-screen

screech of a rabbit being taken, the camera closes in on Ms Cooper who provides a

motto for this scene: ‘It’s a hard world for little things.’

Goosin’ around with the honky tonk hepcats

I now want to go further back to July 12, 1952 to the Grand Ol’ Oprey radio show

broadcast from Nashville, Tennessee: Hank Williams doing a live version of ‘Honky

Tonkin’:

When you are sad and lonely and you have no place to go

Call me up, sweet baby and bring along some dough

And we’ll go hoooooonkey Tonkin, honky Tonkin

We’ll go hooooonky Tonkin, honey baby

We’ll go honky Tonkin round this town.

That song was broadcast one month to the day before Williams was kicked off the

show for missing Opry sponsored gigs due to drunkenness in the year, at the very end

of which, he turned up dead from a combination of rotgut whiskey, morphine and

chloral hydrate aged 29 in the back of a Cadillac driven by Charles Carr somewhere

between Knoxville and Blaine, Tennessee.

By the time that recording was made Williams had been performing the song for 7

years so at this point he and the crowd clearly knew it backwards and to breathe

fresh life into it or maybe just to stay awake (it sounds as if he’s had a few) Williams

mixes it up, growling and slurring the tag line to keep the audience’s attention and to

keep himself awake, clowning like a barroom drunk putting the hoooonk back in

Honky Tonk, placing the sound somewhere between a railroad whistle and a

farmyard animal impersonation – a cross between a goose’s honk and a donkey’s

bray.

Hank honkin like a good ‘un, putting the goose back in goosin’ around. The origin

of the word ‘honky tonk’ is obscure though pop culture critic, Nick Tosches has

traced it back in print to 1894 and in country music to Al Dexter’s ‘Honky Tonk

Blues’ from 1937.3 The word seems intended to convey connotations of unbridled

revelry, loud and boisterous behavior in a confined public space not unlike a

farmyard where the livestock just happens to be human. The honky tonk and the

secular, delinquent, hardcore versions of country music associated with it, took off in

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1933 with the repeal of Prohibition, the word ‘honky tonk’ being used to designate a

roadhouse dance hall and drinking establishment usually situated on a highway near

city or county lines particularly on the boundary between wet and dry counties – out

of the way places where tax rates were lower, and police supervision laxer, yet in

locations readily accessible by car, in the years at least before strictly enforced drink

driving laws.

The honky tonk was a literally liminal location: the place positioned symbolically and

geographically for the lower class wasps, what I’ll call the whips, i.e. the white working

poor protestants in a moral twilight zone on the far side of the tracks, a place set over

and against both church and home. It is in the raucous laboratory of the honky tonk

that country music becomes country music as it moves beyond the moral, lyrical and

instrumental constraints of traditional rural white music, gets amplified, electrified and

liquored up, and begins to open up to the wild side and the dark side of the working

class imaginary in a movement that parallels the modern migration of poor whites

from the rural South to the industrial North. It is in that context that guitar playing

bandleader vocalists like Ernest Tubb, Floyd Tillman and Roy Acuff develop the

barroom confessional or testimonial lyric in songs like ‘Born to Lose’, ‘There Stands

the Glass’, songs which served to articulate in the unguarded sincere tone which

becomes the signature of vulnerability for hardcore country singers, what, following

Raymond Williams, we might call the beer-sodden or dypsomaniac structure of feeling, a

structure of feeling steeped in the three m’s: maudlin, melancholy and miscreant.

What, after all as the old joke has it, do you get when you play a country song

backwards? Well, you get your wife back, you get your job back and the dog comes

home.

In the mid 50s just before rockabilly was assembled out of the mix of delta blues,

hillbilly music, black and white gospel, Appalachian mountain fiddling reels,

Pentecostal heteroglossalia, Kentucky bluegrass and hardcore honky tonk, just before

rockabilly was distilled out of that brew at the legendary recording sessions presided

over by the late Sam Phillips at Sun Studios in Memphis, there were a number of

country boogie novelty releases that swept briefly through the country music charts

– records like the McCormick brothers ‘Billy Goat Boogie’ (1955), ‘Red Hen

Boogie’ (1954) and Bernie Hess’s ‘Wild Hog Boogie’ (1955) which incorporate

respectively comic vocal impersonations of bleating goats, clucking chickens and

snorting hogs

Now listen to a record from 1956, just one year later by rockabilly Don Woody entitled

‘Barking up the wrong tree’. This does more or less the same thing for dogs that Hess

did for hogs only Woody does it this time rockabilly style with the full range of wired

verbal tics- the stammering plosives, hiccups, yips and mangled vowels and with the

strongly marked echo and reverb (the holler in the holler) that constitute rockabilly’s

exuberantly nihilistic trademark DNA:

Well I went to see my baby on bended knee

Said ‘Bebby, bebby, bebby will you marry me?’

She said ‘Sorry daddy, but what can I say?

I found a new love just the other day

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And you’re barking up the wrong tree (ruff ruff)

Well you’re barking up the wrong tree (woof woof)

Yes, you’re barking up the wrong tree’ (ruff ruff)

That’s what she said to me.

It’s that transformation, the sudden break from down home corn poke farmyard

country boogie to wired, edgy, carnivorous rockabilly music, from domesticated

livestock to hound dogs and wild cats that drives this presentation. The question that

concerns me is what was that switch in tempo, timbre, rhythm, totemic identification

and bestial mimesis in the middle of 1950s, ‘‘hillbilly’’ music all about?

Fork Tongued Speech

This talk takes off from that liminal or in-between locale – the honky tonk, the barnyard,

the quasi-rural hinterland, the weird becoming-animal space where country morphs into

rock. It takes off from the barroom stage underneath the pulpit and to one side of the

bedroom and the kitchen. It takes off flapping, as it were, after Hank’s inebriated honk –

pursuing the idea and the practice of goofy lowlife bestial mimesis as it gets modulated in

the passage across species and genres to what I argue is its origin in certain ingrained

patterns of articulated and in- or dis-articulated experience and expression.

I shall end by suggesting that the resort to honking like the slippage into pentecostal

talking in tongues and the slide into profane language, cussing, howling and hollerin’

that mark so much of the low down deep Southern gothic vernacular, reveals not so

much an inadequate mastery of proper usage on the part of low born Southern

speakers, as a particular class-specific disposition toward language, a particular lower

class take on the business of making (non) sense in the face of a rapidly modernizing

world through the auspices of emerging forms of low life modernism. I’ll suggest that it

indicates a particular lower class disposition toward revelation and strategic

concealment, to keeping stuff secret, hence sacred and safe, withheld from surveillance

even at the moment of disclosure: what, in keeping with the acronym introduced

above, we might call the whip-lash disposition to language and disclosure, the survivalist

subaltern instinct for staying mum when being asked by representatives of state and

expanding federal power to give an account of one’s self.

The original context out of which this talk grew was a presentation I made for a

conference in 2002 at UC Santa Barbara on noise and the contemporary arts, which

was conceived, in part, as a tribute to finish music critic, Jacques Attali; author of Noise:

The Political Economy of Music – a book which among other things presents noise as the

radical herald of social and political change. To quote the most frequently cited

passage from that work:

Music is organized noise and prophetic noise. It is prophetic noise because

music explores much faster than material reality can, the entire range of

possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will

gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of

things. it is the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future.4

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Attali’s idea of music as prophetic noise got me thinking about the nature of prophetic

utterance as a discourse which is always beyond and outside the time of its own utterance

because prophecy is, of course, a discourse which, like the riddling speech of the Oracle to

Oedipus about to set off on his journey or like the doubly coded, double crossing speech of

the three witches on the heath to Macbeth, means exactly what it says but can’t and won’t

say what it means – is singularly incapable of undoing its own doubling. Because unlike

pre-diction and pre-figuration which purport to reveal directly what is to come, to snatch

aside the veil that separates the unfolding present from the unrevealed future, prophecy, by

way of contrast is raveled in the cloth out of which the veil is woven.

Figure 1. Aline McGlocklin photographed by Jim Neel. Photograph from Dennis Covington’s Salvationon Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia (London and New York:Penguin, 1996).

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Prophecy is a two-faced, fork-tongued speech that snakes its way in time back along the

rippling of its own encircling syntax. Prophecy is speech that spells itself upon the open

ear of an acoustically dyslexic and self-centering world: a world that always strains to

hear and through that very effort is rendered deaf to what it’s being told. Please bear in

mind that image of the serpent turning back upon itself when we get to spin these

tapes, to spin that racing double helix, the bio-code of interracial projection, merger

and repulsion at the core of rockabilly music. Remember this taking up of serpents, this

image of the snake coiling back upon itself to devour its own taiil, t-a-l-e…

Another French theorist, Gilles Deleuze, wrote in his book Nietzsche and Philosophy:

It’s not a question of being this or that sort of human, but of becoming,

of a universal animal becoming – not seeing yourself as some dumb animal,

but unraveling your body’s organization, exploring this or that zone of

bodily intensity […].5

What I want to do here is take up Deleuze’s suggestion by pursuing the idea of

becoming animal across a range of mid 20th century US roots and popular music

recordings, across the gothic landscape of US race relations, and across a slew of

images and stories that deal with everything from the white mob’s projections onto a

figure still known in the 50s as the ‘‘Negro’’ to the dramatically violent transformations

of that figure that occurred through the agency of the Civil Rights movement. I want

to pursue this idea of bestial mimesis across US culture through a variety of formats:

through song and story, fiction and film.

But before we get to rockabilly’s rabid pack of stray cats, hound dogs, bird dogs, and

hillbilly hepcats, I want to back up for a moment and refer to a video clip that marks

the national debut of country music on American TV in the appearance of Roy Acuff

and the late June Carter of Carter family and later Cash family fame as they lead a

troupe of barn dancers from the Grand Ol Opry through their paces. That debut in

turn, is used to frame the TV debut of Hank Williams, again, coincidentally in 1952,

the year of his death (the image rendered blurred and ghostly by the ancient pre-video

storage technology), Mr Country Music here dressed literally in a suit composed of

musical notations, on the nationally broadcast Kate Smith Evening Hour… a prophetic

sign-bearing, if ever there was one, given the phenomenon of rock that Williams

portended, and prefigured in his hillbilly showmanship, blues inflected rhythms and

early rock star overdose death – beamed from the rooftop garden of a skyscraper in the

heart of Manhattan, decades before the emergence of countrypolitan and the full

integration of this music into mainstream pop culture, the program sparks a

classification crisis.

Swamp Modern

How and where were these raw country cousins and their music to be placed in the

streamlined, forward-thinking imaginary of the 1950s? Where were they to be inserted

in the prevailing cultural and entertainment hierarchies? Are they to be honored as a

living link back to the Jeffersonian pioneer heritage or dismissed as embarrassing,

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quasi-bestial throwbacks? The ambivalence is there in the clip, in the framing and

the staging (hay bale seats and a barn interior stage set), in the affectionate but

patronizing tone of Kate Smith’s introduction, in the contrast between the host, Kate

Smith’s genteel Eleanor Roosevelt persona, and formal evening gown and the guest

performers’ hillbilly and gaudy western attire. It’s there in the self-parody,

particularly in June Carter’s hysterical medicine show comedy routine which

includes a virtuoso country dance exhibition and a Minnie Pearl-style comic

exchange with Roy Acuff which ends with a breathless Carter switching from excited

babble to hog grunting. Acuff responds: ‘A lot of us men down in Tennessee are

hogs about our women’, before Acuff introduces Hank Williams who serenades

Carter with ‘Hey, good lookin’.

Of course, just 4 years after that was aired, an even more acute sense of crisis for the

tastemakers and cultural gatekeepers in the U.S marks the reception of Memphis

rockabilly. What gets drowned out in the moral panic that’s so often stressed in

accounts of the reception of rock in Eisenhower’s America-is that somehow under Elvis

Presley’s (or more accurately Colonel Parker’s) aegis in the middle of the early Cold

War period, the gaudily attired hillbilly rube gets wrenched out of the social-sexual

margins of American society and repositioned as the very embodiment of raw post-

WW2 New World energy and freewheeling American expressionism with the

rockabilly style taking its place alongside the New York school of abstract painting

as an exportable, if somewhat puzzling, even dangerous emblem of America’s hence

US corporate capitalism’s commitment to the new.

Figure 2. Hank Williams and June Carter, on the Kate Smith Evening Hour, 1952.

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Rockabilly is a kind of vernacular modernism. It is the low born country cousin to the big

daddy high modernism of abstract expressionist painting, which, as is now well

documented, was promoted in the 1950s by the State Department and other US cultural

agencies abroad as a quintessentially American phenomenon. And both vernacular and

high US modernism could be used to represent the distinctive qualities of democratic

freedom, as examples of America’s unique but potentially universalizing democratic-

capitalist destiny as American as coca cola and gingham skirts and home baked apple

pie. And by the way do you remember what Elvis actually looked like back in 1956?

He looked like a carny god – ‘carny’ as in carnival, as in sexually carnivorous. He looked

like some kind of black-white, man-woman, cowboy-hillbilly, cow-billy, hill-boy

composite, some kind of bleached Yoruba king, a New World shango god-man man-imal.

Both vernacular modernism (rockabilly/rock ‘n’ roll) and high modernism (abstract

expressionism) are placed in the mid-50s simultaneously outside the mainstream and

beyond the pale. Both are regarded as primitive or atavistic yet archetypically modern.

Both trace out a kind of forward facing throwback dance of wild New World abandon-

the splashy dance of action painting, the flashy jive of rock n roll. Both are deemed

puzzling, scary even, ultimately indecipherable, and both are seen to embody a

uniquely American cultural dynamism which is counter posed against the slow moving

stratified cultural traditions of western Europe. Even more important, they are

presented as absolutely unassimilable to the locked-down imaginary of the communist

world.

Figure 3. Elvis as bleached Yoruba king.

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Rockabilly precipitates a classification crisis because it points simultaneously in two

directions at once. It points back and down to the embarrassing atavistic origin- to the

holler and the still, to Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett the confederacy, mass

illiteracy, the slave states, Civil War, the literal origin of the nation, to lynching, rape

and racial murder, back and down to the ultra-charged, hyper-patrolled binaries of

race and sexual difference in the South. It points directly back to the figure in which all

this gets compacted and personified, the hillbilly, a creature described in a review of

hillbilly music in Variety magazine in December 1926 as:

[…] a North Carolina or Tennessee and adjacent mountaineer type of

illiterate white whose creed and allegiance are to the Bible, […] and the

phonograph […] The great majority (of hillbillies), probably 95%, can

neither read nor write English. Theirs is a community all to themselves,

illiterate and ignorant, with the intelligence of morons.6

The Without Sanctuary project consists of an exhibition of photographs of postcards of

spectacle lynchings in the South in the early decades of the 20th century: close-ups of

the crowds, gathered round the strange fruit tree: Printed captions on the backs of

some of the cards giving the who (name of the victim at least though not of course the

lynch mob members) the where and the when along with handwritten messages.7

Half human and half bestial the monstrous liminality of the hillbilly is concentrated

in the word itself – hill-billy – a composite of man and animal (i.e. billy goat) like its

sister word ‘cow boy’, the term used to designate the hillbilly’s more genetically

viable and ultimately more resilient and marketable western sibling (the two types

merge, of course, in country in the prophetic persona of Hank Williams). The

hillbilly – a kind of inbred Dionysian satyr or monstrous centaur – half man, half

goat.

Rockabilly precipitates a classification crisis because it points straight back to the

hillbilly figure, a metonym for the raw, crude, pioneer origin and, at the same time, it

points forward via Elvis and the other rockabilly pioneers, to the new internationally

mediated and youth-fixated entertainment culture and the emergent youth market: the

very figures of post WW2 modernity.

According to his biographer, Colin Escott, the first song Hank Williams played as an

11 year old boy to his new friends at school on his arrival in Greenville, Alabama after

the family moved there from the one horse railroad town of Georgiana, just south of

Montgomery in 1934 points prophetically, Janus-like both ways at once. The song

consisted of this simple ditty repeated:

I had an old goat

She ate tin cans

When the little goats came

They were Ford seed-ans.8

It points back down in a southerly direction to Dionysius, the goat, hence to the very

birth, as it were, of the American tragedy and, at the same time, it points forward and

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north up to Detroit and Henry Ford – up to the manufacturing plants of Michigan to

which so many poor blacks and whites from the rural South migrated to find work.

Hence, by association, it points at once to the Birth of the Nation and, via Ford’s famous

proclamation ‘‘History is bunk’’ to the virtual end of History.

I had an old goat

She ate tin cans

When the little goats came

They were Ford sedans.

Consumption, defecation and birthing swampily conjoined in an 11 year old’s own

origin myth.

(G)/Race land Modern

Incidentally it should be noted as Richard A. Peterson ably demonstrates in his book

Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity, that Henry Ford was, un tin-cannily

complicit in the revival and dissemination of old time mountain fiddle music in two

ways, one direct, the other indirect. First, indirectly, he helped it spread by delivering a

technology – the affordable car that brought mobility to formerly isolated and

inaccessible mountain communities thus giving them literal access to the urban world,

to the modern market place, the world of goods and to the cultural market place where

country music would eventually be concocted, in part, from their own contributions.9

And secondly, and more directly Ford was an enthusiastic promoter of mountain fiddle

music which Ford himself, as a prominent and active racist, believed was the great

white hope - good, wholesome, Anglo Saxon music – a pure Aryan weapon in the war

against imported vice – against alcohol, tobacco, sexual license and jazz, the last of

which he deplored it’s ‘degenerate, lascivious and foreign [read African and Jewish]

qualities’.10

To this end, as Peterson details, Ford announced in 1925 he would lead a crusade in

favor of square and round dancing over close-couple jazz dancing. He enrolled

company executives in dance classes and brought 200 dance instructors and 39

fiddlers from Michigan and Ohio to Dearborn over a period of 18 months in the

mid-1920s to drill the workforce in acceptable dance floor deportment. Peterson goes

on to describe how in the book Henry Ford wrote to publicize this initiative, which,

included a national fiddle contest one year later which attracted nearly 2,000

contestants he applies Taylorist rationalization principles to the dance floor declaring

that ‘we [the fiddlers] wish to study so that we can standardize our revival of the old

time dances’.11

Meanwhile in the 1920s, radio was playing its part in the creation and promotion

of American folk music genres and mass markets for these musics as stations

equipped, like Chicago’s KYW, with powerful transmitters capable of reaching

national audiences began broadcasting shows like George Hays’s National Barn

Dance. Hays moved from Chicago to Nashville’s WSN in late 1926 and refined the

format of his ‘Barndance’ show into the Grand Ol’ Opry: the laboratory which

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distilled the music we now call country out of the mash of traditional Irish and

Scottish folk songs, blues, fiddle music, Western swing, Hollywood cowboy ballads

and the popular inter-war fad for Hawaiian slide guitar: an ultra-modern cocktail if

ever there was one.

The image of the hillbilly is equally concocted and synthetic, as much a product, as

Variety magazine has it, of the phonograph, the Model T and the radio as the Bible and

the Appalachian dirt. The original Beverly Hillbillies, for instance, were a mountain

music band, all pro and semi-pro musicians based in Los Angeles and attached to LA’s

KMPC radio station who performed on air at one point with a young migrant from

Oklahoma named Woody Guthrie. Nonetheless this band of metropolitan based LA

pros were presented as authentic rural throwbacks who it was alleged had been

discovered by KMPC station manager Glen Rice. Rice claimed to have got lost while

on a road trip in the then undeveloped Santa Monica mountains and to have stumbled

across an entire hillbilly community complete with log cabins, blacksmith shop and

church which, he went on to report on air, had had no contact with the outside world

for more than a century.12

The same mix of baffled pride, embarrassment and horror at the revelation of the

squalid if innvented origin, the same compound of affection, fascination and disgust

carries over into industry responses to the television version of the Beverly Hillbillies

which, despite being America’s most popular network TV show and its most successful

TV export throughout the mid 60s never received a single industry award. Indeed, it’s

telling that the concept of the show still functions as a litmus test for latent and abiding

public concerns about raw Americana, and pioneer, mountain man or rustic

sharecropper forebears. Witness, for example, the outcry in 2002 in the first frenzy of

reality TV when Appalachian culture and southern anti-poverty lobbying groups

protested CBS’s plan to make a reality TV version of the Beverly Hillbillies with an

actual family of poor white southeasterners transplanted to a video-cammed mansion

in Beverly Hills proper.

It is certainly possible to see the original early 60s TV show itself as a kind of deadpan

comic transposition of the crisis in cultural values engendered by the sudden

international rise of rockabilly and rock ‘n’ roll with Jethro Clampett cast as Elvis (he

had the same haircut), Jed as Vernon Presley, Elvis’s Dad, Grandma as well, Grandma

and Graceland as the mansion in the Hills.

There’s a direct line of connection from June Carter’s hog warbling farm girl on the

Kate Smith Evening Hour in 1952 to Ellie May, the rustic ingenue of the Beverly Hillbillies

transplanted ten years later to LA where she merges with her morphing menagerie

of critters, a sometimes literally Ovidian chorus that includes in various episodes a

pack of mutts, a pet raccoon, even, in one episode, a boxing kangaroo which

grandma predictably mistakes for a giant jack rabbit. This bestial menagerie

accompanies and, on occasion, effectively merges with Ellie May (and others) as she

assumes the role of Circe in reverse turning her critters into a sort of surrogate

extended family so that the animal and human occupants of the mansion on the

hill form part of a holistic and reversible continuum – a proposition with

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thoroughly pagan implications that is no doubt, anathema to God fearing

Christians of all denominations everywhere.

In an episode broadcast in 1965, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, legendary bluegrass

pickers from the original 1940s Bill Monroe line-up, and the originators of the show’s

theme tune pay a visit, at the family’s instigation, to raise the spirits of grandma, who’s

homesick especially for mountain music, pining for the blue, blue grass of home:

In the scene from which this still is taken, Ellie May assembles a ‘critter orchestra’

consisting of xylophone pecking chickens, tail drumming dogs and a banjo playing

chimp in a failed attempt to cheer up grandma. Meanwhile Lester Flatt and Earl

Scruggs who have been summonsed by Jed to serenade Grandma with some authentic

bluegrass picking begin to play and Grandma, believing the pets are responsible moves

from homesickness to offended human(ist) outrage: ‘I ain’t listenin’ to no ape playin’ no

banjo…critter musicians!… hairy little show offs!’

Forget chimpanzees and typewriters and Shakespeare, the joke about animal

intelligence and banjo picking bluegrass virtuosity gets played back seven years later

in 1972 in the opening scene of the movie, Deliverance – at the beginning of that

harrowing trip down the Appalachian Congo – a journey to the Heart of Whiteness –

in the figure of the hillbilly savant mindlessly rocking back and forth in an autistic trance

on the porch while its fingers take off with preternatural skill and speed on the trail of

the melody from Dueling Banjos.13

Figure 4. Banjo playing chimp, Beverly Hillbillies, 1965. DVD: Mpi Media Group, 2005.

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The four urban(e) protagonists on a canoeing trip in the Appalachian Mountains stop

for gas at a rural river-side gas station and one of their number, Drew gets into a banjo

picking contest with a local inbred embedded in a rocking chair on the porch (‘Talk

about genetic deficiency’ stage whispers one of their number, Bobby, a pudgy

insurance salesman who is consequently sodomized in a later scene by an avenging

hillbilly river/mountain man). Despite Drew’s superior education and genial manners,

the in/un-human savant triumphs ‘I’m lost’, Drew acknowledges at one point (pre-

dicting the later and more profound geographical and cultural disorientation he

and his friends are about to experience on the canoe trip that will lead to his death) as

his barely socialized partner-rival takes off, grinning on a baroque high velocity solo

riff.

Remember that clever ole monkey, thet thar ‘hairy showoff’ playing the banjo.

Becoming animal, indeed-going back, going inwards, going under, going down, then

turning, spinning on that axis, going god wise up and out, up into a state of grace.14

In reference to the West African culture of spirit possession, French ethnomusicologist,

Gilbert Rouget writes:

In the case of the Hausa [...] in Niger, the woman in trance is said to be

the mare of god or to ‘have the gods on her head’ or again, to be in bori

Figure 5. Guitarist Worshipper in Bobby Acre’s Holiness Church, Virginia.

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which is to say in a state of ebullition [that is in a sacred boiling

turmoil.]15

By osmosis and example, through intimate contact, through contagion and

contiguous magic, the slaves made over not just their masters but the poor white

sharecroppers who worked alongside them and who bent as low as they did to wrest

with thick skinned fingers the creamy bulbs of cotton from their thorn-encircled

housing.

Melting Pots

The animal becoming becoming animal again. Compare two songs recorded in

consecutive years in the 50’s centered on the trope of a dance across the species. First

I’ll play a few bars of ‘Down on the Farm’ released in 1955 – by the (African American)

Big Al Downing band. This is in a recognizably rock ‘n’ roll not boogie woogie idiom

but nonetheless, as the title indicates, it keeps the livestock safely down home and

familiar, penned in by a comfortably raucous arrangement,

You may think I’m a crazy fool

But I saw a horse doin’ the hop with a mule

Down on the farm, down on the farm

Down on the farm, rock’n’roll takin’ over my barn.16

Now compare that with North Carolina-raised Hank Mizell’s edgy ‘Jungle Rock’,

recorded in 1956 in a garage in Chicago with wads of paper stuffed into Mizell’s flat

top guitar to get that thick slapping bottom heavy rockabilly sound

I was walkin’ through the jungle just the other night

Oh well I heard a big a rumble and I thought it was a fight […]

Oh well I moved a little closer just to get a better view

I saw a chimp and a monkey that done the Suzie Q

Oh well a ‘gator and a hippo was a doin’ the bop

While a great big frog was a makin’ me hop

It was a jungle, jungle, jungle, jungle rock.17

‘Jungle Rock’ is primitivist, jumpy, compulsive and, unlike Al Downing’s livestock, the

fauna it animates Chuck Jones fashion in the rumble in the jungle lyric, is exotic, wild,

carnivorous.

The racist subtext here, as in Warren Smith’s ‘Ubangi Stomp’, Hank Thompson’s

‘Rockin’ in the Congo’ and Joe Wallace’s ‘Leopard Man’, (the latter an admonition

to Jomo Kenyatta’s Mau Mau militia to ‘get away from me’) – is hardly sublimated

at all, any less than the intimations of impending violence which are audible

throughout the rockabilly jungle genre are in any way disguised: in any of these

songs. They are menacing premonitions on the part of the dirt poor young white

Southerners who for the most part sang this stuff, of the war which was about to be

joined across the South over Civil Rights and desegregation. Music as ‘prophetic

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noise’ indeed: an audible prefiguring, audible at least, in retrospect, of the coming

conflagration.

I crashed in the jungle while trying to keep a date,

With my little girl who was back in the States.

I was stranded in the jungle, afraid, alone,

Trying to figure a way to get a message back home.

But how was I to know that the wreckage of my plane

Had been picked up and spotted, and my girl in Lover’s Lane?

And meanwhile, back in the States…

Baby, baby, let’s make romance.

You know, your old-time lover hasn’t got a chance.

He’s stranded in the jungle, glad as he can be.

So, come on pretty baby, just you and me.

Meanwhile, back in the jungle…

The boys in the jungle had me on the run,

When something heavy hit me, like an atomic bomb.

When I woke up, and my head started to clear,

I had a strange feeling I was with cooking gear

I smelled something cooking, and I looked to see.

That’s when I found out they was cooking me.18

The double binding is here so tight, it creates a schizo instability across the hyphen

separating the African from the American as Aaron Collins, the Cadets’ African

American vocalist projects on to the surrounding human jungle the image of being eaten

by faraway savages, boiled in a pot for their supper by the terrifying archaic remnant.

And what, in the end, after all, is this melting pot that forms such a dominant motif in

America’s idealized rendering of the drama of its own becoming? And what is it that is

melting into soup and to what end is it being melted? Those New World travelers’ tales

that fixate on incidents of cannibalism in extremis – explorers marooned in the Antarctic,

shipwrecked whalers, pioneers snowed in on the Donner Pass, airplane crash survivors

forced to gnaw upon the bones of friends and loved ones, the endlessly repeated folk

lore of colonizing power, the abomination to end all abominations projected from the

center of the European heart of darkness.

In modernity, as Marx, appropriating Shakespeare, pointed out, ‘everything solid

melts’ though we might add that under capitalism what it melts into isn’t air (as

Shakespeare had it) so much as soup – stuff to be consumed in a system that eats itself

alive, dining dog on dog with no doggy bags to go. Which brings us back at a different

angle to becoming animal and shape shifting because the musical folk lore of the rural

southeast, host to the competing bestiaries of both West African and Northern

European folk belief systems, host, on the one hand, to archaic Scots-Irish and English

country ballads and, on the other, to the equally archaic West African griot tradition

and cosmology posited a fluid back and forth across the species where a metamorphic

slippage under other species’ skins might seem as effortless and natural (say in 1956) as

a trip to a segregated bathroom. From Bascam Lunsford’s 1928 rendition of the

baffling traditional Appalachian song ‘I wish I was a mole in the ground’ collected on

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Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music to Clarence Frogman Henry’s ‘Bear Cat’

a bawdy r & b inflected riposte to Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Hound dog’ (recorded in

1953, 3 years before Elvis’s version), from Bessie Jones’ interrogation of her flock in the

call and response spiritual ‘Sheep, sheep, don’tcha know the road?’ on Alan Lomax’s

Southern Gospel Collection for the Smithsonian to Jerry Lee Lewis’s sacriligious

transposition of Pentecostal piano thumping and sanctified hollering from the

Revival Tent to the cat house and the farmyard in ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ going on’

e.g. ‘Come on over baby/We’ve got the bull by the horns’, the distance from the

profane to the sacred was measured out in animal skins. Which skins, who was wearing

them or shedding them and how, was what mattered metaphysically.

Southern rockabilly, rooted in the dirt of the sharecropper’s hard lot – white boys Carl

Perkins, Charlie Feathers, Billy Riley, and Johnny Cash all left school before their

teens, all spent their childhoods picking cotton alongside black field workers – elected

overwhelmingly, like the snake handlers of rural Tennessee for proximity and merger,

electing – (what did they have to lose?) to ride the Beast out of the gate of Revelations,

like cowboys straddling a rodeo bull, one fist sinister thrust down between the legs

clamped around the pommel of the saddle, the right hand lifted upright and aloft like

the outstretched shaking palm of some ecstatic Pentacostalist in mid hallelujah seeking

out the Holy Spirit.

And behind everything, at the crucial point of genesis of each of the new American

lower class wasp – whiplash musical genres there is a secret sharing – a transmission of

accumulated lore and musical technique from black to white. Every hillbilly

hepcat has his dark familiar, the half forgotten, frequently anonymous liminally

positioned African-American mentor-musician who taught the white cat how to move

and how to play his instrument – one prototype for this clandestine agent of

transmission being Rufus Payne, nicknamed ‘Tee-tot’ a pun on ‘teetotaler’, a reference

to the home-brewed mix of alcohol and tea it was alleged he carried on his person in

a flask.

Payne was the black mendicant musician who taught the pre-adolescent Hank

Williams how to sing and play guitar. Payne, who died in a charity hospital in

Montgomery in March, 1939 aged 55 played the streets of Georgiana, the small

Alabama town where till 1934 Hank spent his early childhood years and, according to

Williams:

‘All the music training I ever had was from him. I learned to play the gi-

tar from [that] old colored man’.19

What distinguished Hank Williams from the hillbilly mainstream was what Colin

Escott calls ‘the insistent drive of his music […] the lazy swing and sock rhythm of his

up-tempo numbers (which) was almost certainly Payne’s legacy’.20

Escott goes on:

almost everyone’s memories of [Teetot] are vague. Most say that he had

a humpback and long simian arms that stretched almost to his knees: no

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one remembered any of the songs he used to play. Irene, (Hank’s older

sister) told the story that Payne once came to (his mother) Lillie’s house

and told her that Hank was going to get both of them in trouble by

following him around.21

The description and the amnesia about the details are formulaic. The same archetype

turns up in Richard Wright’s Native Son at the point where the novel’s protagonist,

Bigger Thomas, in his prison cell awaiting execution for the rape and murder of a

white woman, reads a physical description of himself in a newspaper:

Though the negro killer’s body does not seem compactly built, he gives

the impression of possessing abnormal physical strength. He is about 5

foot nine inches tall and his skin is exceedingly black. His lower jaw

protrudes obnoxiously reminding one of a jungle beast. His arms are

long, hanging in a dangling fashion to his knees. His shoulders are huge

and muscular and he keeps them hunched as if about to spring upon

you at any moment. He looks at the world with a slight, sullen from

down under stare as if defying all efforts of compassion. All in all, he

seems a beast, utterly untouched by the softening influences of modern

civilization.22

And according to research by Kenneth Kinnamon, that description, in turn, is based

almost verbatim on the description that appeared in the Chicago Tribune in 1939, the year

Tee-tot’s died, of one Robert Nixon, a black man convicted in that city of raping and

murdering a white woman.23

According to one researcher, Alice Harp, an Alabama librarian and blues historian,

interviewed by the LA Times on the 50th anniversary of Hank Williams’ death, Rufus

Tee-tot Payne, bore no resemblance to that stereotype, and was, on the contrary, a

compact, handsome, dapper man ‘who played the piano and sang the hit songs of the

day […] in some of the most elegant homes in Montgomery’.24 According to,

Henderson Payne, Teetot’s grandson interviewed in the same LA Times article: ‘Tee-tot

died in a poorhouse, but he wore a suit every day’.25

The Evolution Debate and Terror

The ‘last battle of the Civil War’, to quote the words of student president, Dick Morris

who was present at the battle scene took place on the night of September 30th, 1962,

when more than 2,000 white US citizens from as far afield as California flocked to Ol’

Miss (the University of Mississippi campus at Oxford) and took up bottles, bricks, metal

spars, phials of acid, two by fours, guns, crossbows and chunks of concrete against a

small corps of federal marshals who had been dispatched earlier that day by President

Kennedy and his brother, Robert, the U.S Attorney-General to secure the campus in

the name of the federal government and the rule of law because James Meredith, a

black US army veteran with copious transfer credits from the classes he had attended

at US military bases while serving his country overseas, was insisting on his right to

register for a university education in his own home state.26

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The riot that had lasted the entire preceding night might be legitimately dubbed in

addition to the ‘last battle of the Civil War’ the first unofficial battle in the current U.S-

led war on terror. It eventually necessitated the deployment to Oxford, on

President Kennedy’s instruction, of more than 20,000 US combat infantry,

paratroopers, and military police and the federalization of the entire Mississippi

National Guard. By dawn, two men, one a journalist for a British newspaper, the other

a local white lay dead and some 300 marshals, military personnel and civilians were

badly injured.

At the height of the mayhem, witnesses recall the spine-chilling rallying cry of the white

supremacists: the Confederate soldier’s rebel yell, described by one writer, Shelby

Foote as ‘a foxhunt yip mixed up with a banshee wail’.27

One last spin on going South, one last spin on the definitive rural American debate on

evolution, progress, the origin of the Nation, the origin of the Species. David

Bartholomew, an African American rhythm & blues singer, takes on Clarence Darrow

in a re-run of the Scopes trial as he takes the side of the simian contingent against the

social Darwinians in a recording from 1957 entitled ‘The Monkey Speaks his Mind’:

And three monkeys sat in a coconut tree

Discussing things as they are said to be

Said one to other now listen, you two

‘There’s a certain rumor that just can’t be true

That man descended from our noble race

Why, the very idea is a big disgrace, yea’

No monkey ever deserted his wife

Starved her baby and ruined her life

Yea, the monkey speaks his mind

And you’ve never known a mother monk

To leave her babies with others to bunk

And passed them on from one to another

Till they scarcely knew which was their mother

Yea, the monkey speak his mind

And another thing you will never see

A monkey build a fence around a coconut tree

And let all the coconuts go to waste

Forbidding other monkeys to come and taste

Why, if I put a fence around this tree

Starvation would force you to steal from me

Yea, the monkey speaks his mind

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Talkin’ ‘bout Lovin’

‘And suddenly’ writes Dennis Covington in his extraordinary ethnography of snake

handling in Southern Appalachia Salvation on Sand Mountain at the cathartic moment in

the narrative where he crosses over from observer to participant, steps himself inside

the ring and disappears into the taking up of serpents,

[A]nd suddenly there seemed to be nothing in the room but me and the

snake. Everything else had disappeared. Carl, the congregation, Jim –

all gone, all faded to white. And I could not hear the earsplitting music.

The air was silent and still and filled with that strong, even light. And I

realized that I, too, was fading into the white. I was losing myself by

degrees, like the incredible shrinking man. The snake would be the last

to go, and all I could see was the way its scales shimmered one last time

in the light, and the way its head moved from side to side, searching for

a way out. I knew then why the handlers took up serpents. There is a

power in the act of disappearing; there is victory in the loss of self. it

must be close to our conception of paradise,

I came back in stages, first with the recognition that the shouting I had

begun to hear was coming from my own mouth. Then I realized I was

holding a rattlesnake, and the church rushed back with all its clamor,

heat and smell. I remembered Carl and turned toward where I thought

he might be. I lowered the snake to waist level. It was an enormous

animal, heavy and firm. The scales on its side were as rough as calluses.

I could feel its muscles rippling beneath the skin. I was aware it was not

a part of me now and that I couldn’t predict what it might do. I

extended it toward Carl. He took it from me, stepped to the side, and

gave it in turn to JL.

‘Jesus’ J.L said. ‘Oh Jesus’. His knees bent, his head went back. I knew it

was happening to him too.28

Meantime, in another world not far away just farther east and South, in a series of

extraordinary recordings that span more than 40 years, hardcore rockabilly, Charlie

Feathers, born in Holly Springs, Mississippi in1932 and an early visitor to Sun studios

spent his performing life becoming animal in the Deleuzian sense invoked at the very

beginning of this paper, searching out intensities, taking off in song, becoming bird for

instance, breaking into bird song at the end of every verse on this track where he’s

‘Talkin’ bout lovin’.

My baby’s gone and I’m alone

Now my baby’s comin’ home

Talkin bout lovin’, lovin’, lovin’

(repeat twice)

When my baby’s home

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Ahoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoohoo (repeat)

When she’s comin’ home.

Whiplash Will and Testament

Charlie Feathers’ signature song ‘Stutterin Cindy’ (like the earlier ‘Tongue-Tied Jill’) is

a love song to the unraveling power of speech impediment. Language is broken down

into molecular components becoming pure sound – syllables get lassoed and hauled off

on a circuit of the ring, taken out of the herd of the sentence and released to run wild.

And it is here in this wanton disregard for linguistic propriety and for the hierarchical

and ordering functions of language – language’s command functions – that raw 50s’

rockabilly proved so scandalous and liberating because in its exuberant glossolalia –

awopbopaloobop …bebopalula ….bebbybebbybebby… – it both played with and exposed what

Jean Jacques Lecercle calls ‘the violence of language’29 by bopping in the margins of

communicable sense, by setting up the mics inside the unassimilable remainder, the

sounding out beyond noise of uninhibited vocal play, by tapping into the language that

precedes and succeeds every cultural fix, that precedes and succeeds every orderly

articulation, the language, in other words, without a lexicon, the illegible, unprintable

dictionary, in other words, of undomesticated animal becoming.

As Charlie Feathers himself put it reproducing in his own idiom Gilles Deleuze’s

injunction invoked at the beginning of this paper:

A true recording is like somebody sittin’ around talkin’ to their selves, [a

bit like this paper really] their mind’s so occupied. I always thought that

when you’re recording something, you wanted to get exactly what that

man is doin’ out there […] breathing, slapping his leg, patting his feet,

clapping his hands and that you sometimes have to mike the guy in

more than one place. That is the sound of this man no one other. It

seems awful to me you can’t record the sound of someone sweatin’- if

you can’t get the sounds of a man’s body, well, hell.30

well

hell

The dream of fully adequate representation, of doing justice to the original impulse is

just the other side of that same ambivalence toward the revelatory power of language,

that resistance to fluency and proper usage that has marked this whole talk and which I

asserted at the outset isn’t so much or not only untutored, still less anti-intellectual as it

is a recognition of all the things that language really cannot do – heal pain for instance,

banish death, eliminate carelessness, inequality and unnecessary violence, install social

justice etcetera – a recognition that is registered repeatedly on the lyrical surfaces of

popular North American subaltern song everywhere from the dozens in rap to a young

Elvis stumbling ecstatically over his double trouble negatives: ‘I ain’t never done you

no wrong’.

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And what gets transmitted in that mangling of syntax and polite expression is the

subaltern’s acknowledgement of how power operates in and through language, of

how power operates in a language that has been hijacked to serve interests other

than the subaltern’s own. This withholding from language and from utterance

audible in the forms of restraint and inhibition as well as in the forms of excess we’ve

been considering today represent a strategic and principled avoidance of

indiscriminate disclosure in a world where everything you say can be used in

evidence against you. In other words it provides a strategy for having your say while

remaining out of range in a world where recognition and visibility can prove

positively fatal, can light you up as a target in the sights of a lethal vigilant,

omnipresent power.

What all this might mean for us, for America and for the world that listens and is

increasingly compelled in shock and awe to listen to America, that increasingly is

compelled to watch its lips every time America speaks, at a point when we have a

president who strides around in cowboy boots, wears a stetson, owns a ranch near

Waco, Texas and seems at times incapable of completing a coherent sentence

unprompted is beyond the scope both of this talk and of my interpretive competence.

Against that figure, I would like to stage a rematch under different skins and in a

different time of the battle we saw at the very opening of this talk between Preacher

Powell and Rachel Cooper in The Night of the Hunter – the battle between good and I

won’t say ‘evil’, between, let’s just say, good and not so good or not good at all. This

time the battle is for the soul not just of defenseless children but for the nation and

hence, given the current configuration of global power, of this world by counter-posing

against the faux cowboy Bush a different kind of rural Christian backwoodsman. Ladies

and gentlemen, in the blue(grass) corner all the way from Kentucky will you please

welcome Mr Bill Munroe:

As soon as you enter the world of Bill Monroe you enter the world of

taking care of animals, speaking to animals, listening to all the sounds of

nature. I remember one time we were in New York City and we rode

on a hay wagon and the whole time we were riding, Bill was playing. He

said ‘now listen to the horse’s feet’ and sure enough the rhythm he was

playing would match the horse’s stepping and galloping. He really tied

everything up with the natural sounds and the ways of life he

remembered from the early part of the century.31

One last quote to close, from the final paragraph of Empire, the prophetic volume

by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri where these two theorists of postmodern capitalism

invoke St Francis of Assisi, a figure from capitalism’s embryonic phase: They write:

St Francis (of Assisi), in opposition to nascent capitalism, they write,

refused every instrumental discipline and in opposition to the

mortification of the flesh (in poverty and in the constituted order) he

posed a joyous life, including all of being and nature, the animals, sister

moon, brother sun, the birds of the field, the poor and exploited

humans, together against the will of power and corruption. Once again

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in postmodernity, we find ourselves in Francis’s situation, posing against

the misery of power, the joy of being. This is a revolution that no power

will control – because bio-power and communism, cooperation and

revolution remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence. This

is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist.32

It’s time to skin the beast and hang it on the wall so I’ll end with the Fendermen’s rockabilly

version of ‘Mule Skinner Blues’ a song that’s wild enough to close down any hoedown.

Well, good morning, Captain

Well, good morning to you

Do you need another mule skinner

Down on your new mud run

Ha, ha, hip, ee, ee…

[Chorus:]

Well, I’m an old mule skinner

From down Kentucky way

And I can make any mule listen

Or I won’t accept your pay

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha

Hee, hee, hee, hee, hee, ha, ha

Well hey, hey

Little water boy, come here boy

Bring that water bucket around

Ha, ha, ha

If you don’t like your job

Water boy, put that bucket down

Ha, ha, ha, ee, ee, ha, ha, ha

Notes

1 Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity:

Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1998).2 Greil Marcus, The Old Weird America: The World

of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (London: Picador,

2001).3 Nick Tosches, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ‘n’

Roll (Cambridge MA: Da Capo Press, 1996).4 Jacques Attali, Noise: A Political Economy of Music,

trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1985), p.11.5 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1983), p.11. Emphasis

added.

6 Quoted in Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country

Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1997), pp.7–8.7 James Allen, ed. Without Sanctuary: Lynching

Photography in America (San Francisco: Twin Palms

Publishers, 2000).8 Colin Escott, Hank Williams: The Biography, with

George Merritt and William MacEwen (Bridge-

water, NJ: Replica Books, 1995)9 See Richard Peterson, Creating Country Music, p.59:

‘the mass production methods of manufacture,

which at a stroke dropped the time of assembling

a Model T from 12 hours to 93 minutes […] and

drove down the price of the touring car to $360 […]

parallax

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showed the way for the mass production of all sorts

of merchandise, bringing affordable manufactured

goods within reach of the mass of the population.

Thus, as with music, which was increasingly

available via radio and phonograph records, goods

were increasingly store-bought rather than home-

made’.10 Ford was a prominent Nazi sympathizer. See

Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music, p.60.11 Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music, p.66.12 Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music,

pp.77–9.13 Deliverance. Dir. John Boorman, (Warner

Brothers, US, 1972). DVD: Warner Home Video,

2000.14 At this point of the presentation footage was

played of the shot inside Reverend Bobby Acres

Holiness Church in Hillville, Virigina for Beats of the

Heart: Chase the Devil, Religious Music of the Appalachian

Mountains. Dir. Jeremy Marre (Channel 4

Productions, 1984), of white parishioners ‘roiling in

the spirit’ to the rock ‘n’ roll inflected testifying of the

Reverend (accompanied by electric guitars, drums

and a Jerry Lee Lewis style hammered piano).15 Gilbert Rouget, Music and Trance: A Theory of the

Relations between Music and Possession (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1985), p.25. See also

inter alia, p.21: ‘Among the Gold the shaman acts as

the master of the spirits he embodies: he uses them

as ‘‘guides’’, he sits on the back of one of them, he

makes them harness his dogs, he converses with his

‘‘manservant’’. In order to return from the under-

world […] he rides one of his auxiliary spirits as

though it were a horse. Among the Ethiopians of

Gondar, on the contrary, as well as among the

Songhay of Niamey, the possessed person […] is the

one who is ridden.’16 Extract from Al Downing, ‘Down on the Farm’

(White Rock 1111, 1958).17 Extract from Hank Mizell’s ‘Jungle Rock’ (Eko

506, 1956).18 Extract from the Cadets’ ‘Stranded in the Jungle’

(Modern 994, 1956).

19 Colin Escott, Hank Williams: The Biography, p.11.20 Colin Escott, Hank Williams: The Biography, p.11.21 Colin Escott, Hank Williams: The Biography, p.11.22 Richard A. Wright, Native Son (London: Harper

Perennial, 2005), pp.279–80.23 Kenneth Kinnamon, ‘Native Son: The Personal,

Social and Political Background in Critical Essays on

Richard Wright, ed. Yoshinobu Hakatami (Boston:

G.K. Hall & Co, 1982).24 Alice Harp quoted from the article, Geoff

Boucher ‘Before he was Hank’, Los Angeles Times

(1st March 2003).25 Henderson Payne quoted from the article, Geoff

Boucher ‘Before he was Hank’, Los Angeles Times (1st

March 2003).26 See William Doyle, An American Insurrection: James

Meredith and the Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962

(Peterborough: Anchor Books, 2003).27 See William Doyle, An American Insurrection: James

Meredith and the Battle of Oxford. At this point in the

presentation an ‘authentic’ recording of the rebel

yell was played: eeeeyipyipyip eeeeeeyipyip. This

was vocalized by Thomas N. Anderson, a then 90

year old Civil War veteran of the North Carolina

Tarheels was allegedly recorded for a radio station

in Tennessee in 1935.28 Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain:

Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia

(New York and London: Penguin, 1996), pp.169–

70. Here are played the opening bars of Sam Cook,

‘Jesus Wash Away My Troubles’ recorded with

the Soul Stirrers in 1956 again this time in

Hollywood.29 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language

(New York and London: Routledge, 1990).30 Liner notes to Charlie Feathers, Uh Huh Honey

(Norton Records, 1982).31 Interview with Peter Rowan, in Gather at the River: A

Bluegrass Celebration. Dir. Robert Mugge (BMG, 1994).

DVD: Dakin Films, 1994.32 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire

(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000),

p.413.

Dick Hebdige’s published work on contemporary culture, art and music includes

three books: Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen/Routledge, 1979), Cut’n’ mix:

Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (Routledge, 1987) and Hiding in the Light: On Images

and Things (Routledge, 1988). In 1992 he moved to the USA where he served for 9

years as Dean of the School of Critical Studies and founding Director of the

experimental writing MFA at California Institute of the Arts before taking his current

position as professor in the Art and Film Studies Departments at the University of

California, Santa Barbara where he also directs the Interdisciplinary Humanities

Center and co-directs (with Kim Yasuda) the University of California Institute for

Research in the Arts.

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