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Deluxe: No Genres, No Rules - Southern Music In The 21st Century
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Get to know a new crop of Southern musicians who are taking their deeply rooted cultural influences into new territory in the 21st Century, defying all expectations of genre and subject matter. Featuring: Amythyst Kiah, B.J. Barham, Chris Casey and Tommy Prine.
TRANSCRIPT:
Chuck Reece: The English novelist Jane Austen included this sentence in her 1815 novel, Emma:
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
The same is true, I think, of the American South. Those outside this region often have a hard time understanding the pleasures of this place. That’s kinda why folks like me have a job!
To explain Southern culture (and probably any culture), you must understand four important things from that culture: its literature, its visual art, its food, and its music. In all these areas, the cultural output of the South is distinct from the rest of our nation — and the rest of the world.
Particularly in the 20th century, in literature, our region shaped legendary writers: Welty, Hurston, Faulkner. In visual art, painters like Nellie Mae Rowe, mixed-media artists like Thornton Dial, photographers like Sally Mann. In food, you can just start with fried chicken and pound cake and go in a thousand different, distinctly Southern directions.
And in music, you don’t even have to name names at all. Because Southerners defined most every genre of music that came to prominence In the last century. The blues. Jazz. Gospel. Soul and R&B. Rock ’n’ roll. And in the final years of the century came the genre that would rule the global musical universe: Southern hip-hop.
It was not difficult in the 20th century for any listener to hear a piece of Southern music and fit it neatly within one of those six musical genres.
But that has not been the case in the first 25 years of this century. Fried chicken is still fried chicken, but Southern music is no longer easily described.
Excerpt of "Black Myself" by Our Native Daughters:
I don't creep around, I stand proud and free
'Cause I'm black myself
I go anywhere that I wanna go
'Cause I'm black myself
I'm surrounded many lovin' arms
'Cause I'm black myself
And I'll stand my ground and smile in your face
'Cause I'm black myself
Chuck Reece: That voice belongs to a musician from East Tennessee named Amythyst Kiah. That version of her song “Black Myself” is from a project called Our Native Daughters, which featured Kiah and the Grammy- and Pulitzer Prize-winning North Carolina musician Rhiannon Giddens.
What did you hear in that? For one, you heard a banjo in a distinctly non-bluegrass song. Second, you heard a Black musician asserting her people’s proud role in the story of the South. Finally, you heard a young musician using her own experiences of this region to reckon with its history.
Amythyst Kiah: This part of the country has a, y'know, pretty tumultuous history.
It's kind of been easy for people to kind of see like the North was like the safe haven and the do-gooders, and the South was sort of like the evil power. A lot of, you know, civilizations, you know, have very complicated stories. With the Southern experience, um, I think it's, you know, a lot more complex than I think some people tend to give it credit for.
Chuck Reece: If you’re interested in getting past the moonlight-and-magnolias mythology of the Old South, the way to do it is to complicate people’s understanding of our region. That, to me, is the thread that connects the most vital Southern music of this century.
And Amythyst Kiah is hardly the only musician from down here who’s playing that game.
Today, we will take you on a tour of Southern music that challenges stereotypes. Y’all stick with us to hear music from several corners of this century’s Southern music scene. And listen in as we talk to folks who make that music.
I’m Chuck Reece, and welcome to a new edition of Salvation South Deluxe, a series of in-depth pieces that we add to our regular podcast feed. On Salvation South "Dee-luxe," we unravel untold stories of the Southern experience, and we introduce you to people who make this region truly unique.
ACT ONE:
Excerpt of "A Better South" by American Aquarium:
I’m sick and tired of listening to daddy’s generation
The byproduct of war and segregation
Still thinkin' they can tell us what to do
Who can live where and who can love who
BJ Barham: My name is BJ Barham. I am the lead singer of a band from Raleigh, N.C., called American Aquarium.
Chuck Reece: Since 2005, American Aquarium has toured the world playing music that sounds, as you just heard, kinda country, kinda rock and roll. Sonically, it sounds a little like the “Southern rock” that flooded out of Macon, Ga., back in the 1960s and ’70s.
But you are never going to hear BJ Barham, who writes and sings Aquarium’s songs, sing about how “the South’s gonna do it again.” Far more likely, you’ll hear him sing about how the South got a lot of things wrong.
BJ Barham: We are not a soft folk band. We are a loud, shit-kicking rock and roll band. We just happen to be fronted with a redneck that's read a couple books and likes to write words. So I'm not just up here mumbling about stuff, I'm screaming actual lyrids.
Chuck Reece: Barham grew up in rural North Carolina, and his point of view is shaped by how, in his opinion, country music lost its way back in the late 20th century.
BJ Barham: Somewhere along the line, I'm going to say '80s, '90s. It quickly became about, you know, "cold beer, dirt road, pretty girl, pickup truck." And it stopped being less about like, "hey, how about we unionize? How about we all have kind of the same benefits as everybody else? How about stop picking people out based on skin color and creed and religious preference?"
Chuck Reece: Country music got away from Merle Haggard singing the “Working Man Blues” and John Prine singing about coal companies strip-mining mountaintops in Kentucky. And it moved to acts like Big & Rich singing “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy),” in which the narrator’s girl says he is a thoroughbred in his truck bed who is gettin’ buzzed on suds out on a country road.
Barham got it right: “cold beer, dirt road, pretty girl, pickup truck.”
BJ Barham: Music that came from the South was always some form of protest music. Country music used to be, you know, it would be called woke these days. What we consider country music and folk music, you're rallying against something bigger than yourself. You're rallying against oppression. You're coming together as people to sing about the problems you see in the world.
Chuck Reece: Here in the 21st century, the South is full of bands and songwriters — perhaps, like Barham calls himself, rednecks who have read a few books — who write tunes that aim to turn back the tide of the cold beer flowing out of the back of jacked-up pickup trucks.
Here’s a little bit of a newer song by American Aquarium called “Southern Roots.”
Excerpt from "Southern Roots" by American Aquarium:
Oh those boys back home are much too proud
Of this God-forsaken battleground
That flag that they still won't take down
After all this time
BJ Barham: We're starting to see a lot more inclusivity in country music, which I think is amazing because country music has always been the voice of the people. And I think for a long time, especially the last couple of decades, it's been the voices of, y'know, mediocre white dudes.
And so it's nice to see the tables kinda turn. As a mediocre white dude, I love that it's taking a turn to where it is quickly becoming the music of the the people again. And that's a beautiful thing to be a part of.
Chuck Reece: As another joyfully mediocre white dude, I can get behind that.
The inclusivity Barham talks about in 21st century Southern music comes along with some radical blurring of lines between genres. Styles are mixing in ways we’ve never heard before.
Excerpt from "Cow Killers" by Chris Casey:
Southeast Georgia
Nothin' but cows and blue-collared employment
Ain't nothin' to do but work and get pulled over
Not a lot of folks that look like you, but it's your home
So you try and enjoy it.
Southeast Georgia
Nothin' but red flags and mental disorder
Lotta hate and it's right at your doorstep
You be around bigots enough and get paranoid.
Chuck Reece: That’s Chris Casey — a 20-year-old independent artist from Savannah, Ga. Though he does rap in his songs, his music does not fit neatly into the hip-hop genre box.
Chris Casey: I do consider it rap, but also it's like, it is like very rock, you know? There's so many artists that I can point to that are rapping — just like straight-up rapping over, like, you know, distorted guitars and like there's drum breakdowns in there.
Like, some of them just have like straight-up rock songs; like, they're singing the whole time and they come in with a rap verse. They never like draw too much attention to it. It's kind of just like, "this is our song. This is the music that we make. We're rapping. We're singing. We're doing guitars like all this." And that was like the coolest thing ever. I was like, "if I could make music like that, then that would be like, tight."
Chuck Reece: Casey has being trying to make music like that since since he was a teenager, but he rounded up a larger audience early this year, when his song "Cow Killers,” which you just heard a bit of, came out and started getting passed around in social media.
Chris Casey: I've been releasing and making music since i was about 14 and like it didn't really start like taking off and like getting like serious traction until like earlier this year in like January. “Cow Killers” pretty much was it.
Those first lines in the first verse of “Southeast Georgia. Nothing but cows and blue-collared employment”, right? I was trying to just make myself laugh, trying to think of stuff that's funny to say, trying to be, like, a little funny and lighthearted with it. But like just saying like stuff that's like real to me, you know?
Excerpt from "Cow Killers":
Southeast Georgia
Nothin' but humid air and weather that scorch ya
Nothin' but cow killers that's tryna extort ya
That will say that you're one of them and pretend to adore ya
'Til they take you out back and torch ya
I can't blame them, they're just following orders
From daddy, grandpappy, everybody before ’em.
Chuck Reece: Casey released a series of short videos on YouTube to promote “Cow Killers.” In all of them, he wears a red gingham shirt under blue denim overalls, and a straw hat — sort of a hayseed character.
Chris Casey: Got the shirt from Goodwill. Just like really basic, like cartoon farmer, basically. One of the original ideas was like, I wanted to get my hands on like, a Confederate flag. That was like along the lines of like where I wanted to go. Like, lean maybe a bit more into like the shock factor of it all.
Because, you know, around where I grew up, like that was just so common to see, like people have it in front of their house or like on their license plate or, you now, just anywhere you can think of, like it's just a really common thing.
Chuck Reece: Although he got most of his schooling in Savannah, he did grow up in farm country west of that city.
Chris Casey: Technically, I'm from like a small town called Pembroke and it's like 30, 40 minutes away from Savannah.
When I was going to school in the like Pembroke area, the neighborhood i lived in was around like three farms. Just like straight up cattle, horses, like all that. And when I'd go to school, it would be often, I would probably be the only Black kid in my class — maybe one other person, but it was mainly just white people, very country.
And so I think being around that in the early, like, formative years of when I was a kid, it's just something you pay attention to, but you don't fully comprehend what that's like until later.
For the record, I don't think there was ever an experience I had that was deeply, just straight up "Oh, that was, like, hateful" or anything like that. It was never anything like serious. But it's just like little things that you notice.
Excerpt from "Cow Killers":
Southeast Georgia
Nothing but pickup trucks, them wheels is enormous
I was a young buck, I didn't have horns yet
And they was screamin' Black Livеs Matter
But it's hard to see the torment whеn your girlfriend is white and gorgeous.
And all your friends got jokes on the dark side
And they like to make fun of you because your skin is the dark type
And they throw around silly words that rhyme with "bigger"
And any time you point it out, they turn you to a villain
Chuck Reece: Casey’s first multi-song release is an EP called “Buried Out Back.” Of the eight songs on it, “Cow Killers” most vividly captures his feelings about growing up between worlds — a Black kid growing up around white kid, sometimes having friends throw around the N-word. Teenagers trying, as teenagers do, to be edgy.
Chris Casey: Just seeing Confederate flags around, just normal. It becomes, like, you're not really fazed by it after a certain point, but then you look back on it as you get older, and you're like, "Wow, that is kind of, like, crazy."
Chuck Reece: Salvation South Deluxe will be back after this short break.
MIDROLL BREAK
ACT TWO
Chuck Reece: Welcome back! So far, we’ve talked about country music breaking out of the "beer+truck+girls+dirt roads" equation and getting into more substantial territory about the South’s forward movement. And we’ve heard what happens when a young Southern musician can express him personal experiences with absolutely no regard for fitting into a particular genre or style.
Which brings me to the woman you heard at the beginning of this show — Amythyst Kiah of Johnson City, Tenn.
As I noted earlier, Kiah gained her first national recognition as part of Rhiannon Giddens’ Our Native Daughters project several years ago. Even though Kiah is well-schooled in the folk and old-time musical traditions of the South, when you listen to the music she has released since, you hear a woman in full. Somebody whose art, whose music, expresses all her personal experiences, all the learning she has absorbed in her 30-odd years of living, and a fiery determination to stake out a place in the musical landscape that only she could occupy.
Amythyst Kiah: I think I have always in my music made it a point to, um, look at the complexities of, you know, being human.
The first part of my career, I focused a lot on reinterpreting, um, y'know, old-time folk songs.
Chuck Reece: Kiah grew up in the suburbs outside of Chattanooga, absorbing all sorts of music.
Amythyst Kiah: Most of my music listening time was spent like alone in my room, just exploring different sounds and ideas and being like, "wow, that's awesome" — Whether it be like, you know, Loreena McKennitt or whether it be the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Or whether it be Tori Amos or Bjork. I would go places to go see a show and I wouldn't think about how I'm dressed compared to everyone else or whether or not I've ever like culturally fit in one way or the other. It's always been about like, "wow, this music is awesome."
Chuck Reece: Then, when she was seventeen, her mother died by suicide. And her father, laid low by grief, fell into a spiral of substance abuse.
Two years later, her father moved them both into the Appalachian mountains of northeastern Tennessee.
Amythyst Kiah: My mom had passed. We just went to Johnson City to start over, to live with my grandmother and kind of start, start our life over, put the pieces back together.
Chuck Reece: Johnson City is the home of East Tennessee State University. For four decades, ETSU has been the home of America’s first Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Roots Music Studies program.
Amythyst Kiah: I wanted to take some sort of, like some sort of class, some sort music class. I looked through the course catalog and saw Bluegrass Group Guitar. Initially I had checked into like a classical guitar class because I took classical guitar in high school, but I didn't really like the formality of it. And so when I came across this bluegrass guitar class, I was like bluegrass guitar?
I was, like, bluegrass was the The Beverly Hillbillies and Deliverance. Like, that was my extent of knowledge.
Chuck Reece (from interview): Scary.
Amythyst Kiah: Yeah, I know. I was like, "Interesting." But I'm a curious person. And I'm like, well, it's a music class and I can play guitar and, you know, why not?
Chuck Reece: At the time, Jack Tottle, the musician who founded ETSU’s bluegrass, old-time and roots program, was still teaching.
Amythyst Kiah: So I called Jack Tottle. … And I asked him if I was gonna have to like, have a footstool and learn how to sight read and all that kind of stuff because I quite literally had no idea about any of it. And he said, “No, this is an oral tradition. So, you know, we learn by ear. Bring a tape recorder. I'm going to be using guitar tablature. So if you know how to do all those things, you'll fit right in." It was really great taking that class and also meeting him because he was someone that was very well steeped in the history and knew, you know, knew about the West African influence.
Chuck Reece: Now, if you, dear listener, have never heard the phrases “bluegrass music” and “West African influence” put together, that’s because you have never learned that the banjo — which strikes most people as an awfully white instrument — actually originated in West Africa. Like so much of the best parts of Southern culture, the banjo came here with enslaved people.
Amythyst Kiah: And I learned to play clawhammer banjo. Also, I learned about the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
Chuck Reece: Many of you will remember the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the Black musical group that was led by the aforementioned Rhiannon Giddens. In the early teens, the Chocolate Drops won Grammy awards by reclaiming Appalachia’s Black string band traditions from a century before.
Amythyst Kiah: So there was kind of this perfect storm of me like slowly coming into the music and, and realizing, you know, OK, well, even though I don't think I should have to have a birthright in order to play this music, there is a history here that, that I am culturally connected to.
That's when I first realized that I was Appalachian. I didn't even think of myself as Appalachian, per se, or that Chattanooga was part of Appalachia. Like, I just was so cut off from all of that stuff. And so it was interesting learning about it through, you know, through school.
I think that was such an important part of my development as not just as a musician, an artist, but also just as person, like for the first time, I was like, oh, so I am part of a story. You know, I have a music history, there's a cultural history here that, that, that I'm able to, you know, get back in touch with.
Chuck Reece: By the end of the teens, Rhiannon Giddens had invited Amythyst Kiah into the Our Native Daughters Project. And while she was working with Giddens, Kiah wrote “Black Myself,” that album’s brash opening salvo, which you heard a bit of at the beginning of this show.
Amythyst Kiah: And then when I really got into songwriting, I — it was a cathartic project to like, work through my emotions about grief and loss and, um, feeling, you know, wary and strange, if you will.
Chuck Reece: Her 2021 full-length album bore that as its title: Wary and Strange.
Here’s a bit of “Firewater,” one of my favorite songs on that album.
Excerpt from "Firewater" by Amythyst Kiah:
Melancholy always seemed to work for me
Wistful and uncertain are my dreams
Stardust forms into shapes that never leave
Strange and wary they all seem
I’m a ghost in the hall, a haint in the room
Everywhere I go impending doom
How many spirits doesn it take to lift a spirit
I don't know
I don't know
Chuck Reece: Surely you noticed Kiah using a musical palette on that song that had far more colors than the sepia tones of old-time Southern music.
And it was amazing for a listener like me, who first fell in love with Kiah’s writing via the acoustic “Black Myself” from 2018, to hear how she recast that song as a strident rock anthem in 2021.
Excerpt from "Black Myself" by Amythyst Kiah:
I washed away my blood and tears
I've been born brand new
There's no more work horses
But there's still work to do
'Cause I'm black myself (Black myself)
Chuck Reece: Amythyst Kiah’s sonic world grew even wider on her 2024 album, Still and Bright.
Amythyst Kiah: It's really been on this last album Still And Bright that I've actively, you know … had the capacity to … be able to really talk about the things that are directly challenging societal expectations. Looking at how, you know, the Bible belt and particularly fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity really in a lot of ways, damages the psyche of lots of kids. And even people that, like me, that didn't even grow up in the tradition, I grew up in a place where I wasn't part of it. And so I was made to feel other about it.
Chuck Reece: The South Amythyst Kiah envisions today is one that rises above prejudices and threats of damnation. What she’s searching for instead, to borrow the title of one of her new songs, is an empire of love.
Excerpt from "Empire of Love" by Amythyst Kiah:
Johnson City, Tennessee
My home in Appalachia is still calling me
Give me a mountain, something divine
A river that can carve its way through stone and time
'Cause I don't want a theocracy
Or some idol ideology
We're all made from stars from above
Amythyst Kiah: There's like a broad brush painted on what it means to be Appalachian, who Appalachians are, and I think the same thing extends, you know, to the wider South as well.
Each individual has a, you know, a very individualized experience. There's overall ... cultural, societal expectations, and really each person, you know, has their own, y'know, neurology — the way their brain works — personality, the way they respond to whatever the societal norms are.
Chuck Reece: Which, I think, gets at the crux of what I’ve been trying to put my finger on during this ramble through the Southern music of the current century.
The finest Southern music so far in the 2000s, to my ears at least, is made by people who don’t care what a song is "supposed" to sound like, according to any old norms. Who feel no need to use common music or lyrical denominators. Musicians who are completely unafraid to express their own points of view about this place, who incorporate our musical traditions if they help them get a point across — or ignore them if they don’t.
Chuck Reece: Earlier, you heard me invoke the memory of the late great John Prine. Back in April, we were pleased to present John’s son, Tommy, on the Salvation South stage at the Word of South Festival in Tallahassee. And we heard him play a brand new song called “Oh What a Dream,” which was inspired by a documentary he’d seen about the health care crisis in Appalachia and across the rural South.
Tommy Prine: There's plenty of small communities all over West Virginia and eastern Kentucky and parts of eastern Tennessee, where they're losing their hospitals left and right. And they're really like the only hospital for the communities that live there for to go to and the surrounding communities that are even smaller.
That hospital was still around, a lot of the folks that live near that hospital don't qualify for health care.
There is this one couple that they interviewed that really, really deeply struck a chord with me. It was this, this older couple, and the husband was a coal miner, and his wife, she ended up getting a debilitating disease that rendered her unable to work.
Some years go on, and his wife gets so sick that she can't even leave the bed anymore for the rest of her life. She's in permanent bed rest. And there was this one question that the interviewer asked this man. And it's still — it's hard for me not to choke up talking about it, but he said, "Do you ever dream about your wife being able to stand up out of that bed one day so you guys can start making memories?" And he sat there, and the only thing he said was, "Oh, what a dream. I've had that dream." And that just, yeah, really touched me, man.
And I wrote a song called "Oh What a Dream" to share their story.
Excerpt of "Oh What A Dream" by Tommy Prine
The doctors couldn't help her, nor could Charlie's wage.
And Sarah couldn't stand it when he'd look at her that way.
The burdens were bound to get heavy, she grew quiet on the call
The kettles boiled over. forgot how the stars did fall….
Chuck Reece (from Word of South stage): Tommy, that's a great song.
Tommy Prine: Thank you very much.
Chuck (from WOS): And I hope people will take the lesson that's inside it, and I see people wiping tears away. So I think it's working.
Chuck Reece: After Tommy came off the stage that day in April, we asked him what he thought it means to be a Southerner.
Tommy Prine: I think to be a Southerner means that you have a responsibility to open your heart to everyone you meet.
Chuck Reece: I sure do like that definition. All of these artists whose music we’ve presented to you here, live up to that responsibility. And regardless of the fact their music might sound and speak to us now in ways that are different from how Southern music sounded and spoke to us years back, I think it is our responsibility, as listeners, to hear it with open hearts.
CLOSING
Chuck Reece: We have many people to thank for their help and cooperation in producing this episode. Amythyst Kiah and her team. BJ Barham and all his bandmates in American Aquarium, Chris Casey, and Tommy Prine. Mark Mustian and Sara Marchessault and their crew at Tallahassee’s Word of South Festival, who moved heaven and earth to make it possible for us to document what happened on the Salvation South Stage.
I should also thank our producer and theme music composer, Jake Cook, whose insights and ideas and hard work were absolutely crucial to the form this episode ultimately took.
You’ve been listening to Salvation South Deluxe, proudly produced in cooperation with Georgia Public Broadcasting and its network of 20 stations around our state. Every Friday, we add a new 3-minute commentary about Southern stuff to our podcast feed, and every month or so, we add longer, "dee-luxe" stories, such as the one we’ve just told you.
I’m Chuck Reece, your host and the editor-in-chief of Salvation South Magazine, which you can find 24/7 at SalvationSouth.com.
GPB’s director of podcasts is Jeremy Powell, and none of this could have happened without the help and cooperation of wonderful people at GPB including Sandy Malcolm, Adam Woodlief, and Bert Wesley Huffman.
We’ll be back next month with another full-length, dee-luxe episode of the Salvation South Podcast.
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Salvation South editor Chuck Reece comments on Southern culture and values in a weekly segment that airs Wednesdays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on GPB Radio. Salvation South Deluxe is a series of longer Salvation South episodes which tell deeper stories of the Southern experience through the unique voices that live it. You can also find them here at GPB.org/Salvation-South and wherever you get your podcasts.
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