Rendering on Music №1

The article published on the website www.npr.org on April 9, 2013 is headlined “Brad Paisley's 'Accidental Racist' And The History Of White Southern Musical Identity”. The article reports at length that the history of 'Accidental Racist' is the history of how white Southern musicians — heatedly, implicitly, at times self-servingly and not always successfully — try to talk about who they are in answer to what others dismissively assume they are. 

It’s an open secret that Brad Paisley is a sly country singer, a slick electric guitarist and a sometimes repentant West Virginian. Moreover, Paisley is SaveFrom.net right now, having been declared a national laughingstock by virtually all commentators coming from outside mainstream country. But then, this condescending dismissal was nothing new. 

Analyzing the situation, it is necessary to note that while the Jim Crow South was Anglo supremacist politically, American culture offered a very different dynamic. Ever since white Northerners started putting out their records, Southern whites have represented a backward rural mindset in a national culture of jazzy modernity. Black Southerners, by contrast, were jazz itself: urbanely looking forward, the cradle of hot rhythm.

There is a lot of comment on the fact that if anything promised to bury the backward white South issue, it was rockabilly (i.e., hillbilly rock), that signature 1950s moment when Sun Records in Memphis offered, and combining traditionalism, regional enterprise, crossover and a rebel yell in a whole lot of shaking. For young white Southerners, this was a vision of redemption. What is more, rock 'n' roll became Woodstock rock, as the South became the bloody ground of civil rights and Alabama Gov. George Wallace's credible presidential bids in 1968 and 1972 revealed the extent of white embattlement, the cultural image of the white South returned to bottom — Okies from Muskogee standing by their man. That’s why white Southerners faced the same old choices in new times. They could embrace black music and contemporary life and cross over, like former Texan Janis Joplin.

The article draws the conclusion that Paisley is a complicated figure in country music. He's an avid traditionalist, inducted into the Grand Ole Opry very early in his career after he'd volunteered to play it 36 times, seemingly every free weekend, "because, to me, that recharges me."