Issue # 66: When Country Music Comes to the DNC

Jason Isbell, Mickey Guyton, camo hats: I think democrats are finally...getting it?

Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images

By Marissa

In 2016, at what became an ill-fated celebration to hopefully usher in the first female president, there was not one country performer at the Democratic National Convention. There were pop stars like Demi Lovato, Lenny Kravitz and Lady Gaga, but there wasn’t a single performance that drew from the country and/or Americana worlds. I’m no political analyst, but this seemed like a mistake them and now: the attitude was that country music and southern/rural stuff was for Trumpers, and to be avoided at all costs. That doesn’t end well when you’re trying to win an election, or understand the American public at large on a level deeper than “red state bad.”

Last night, the first night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention wherein we’ll once again make a go for a female president, Vice President Kamala Harris, looked and sounded a whole lot different. There weren’t big popstar performances (though I am sure they are coming, and I hope they are coming! Who isn’t throwing pennies into the fountain to wish for a Beyoncé appearance?) but there was country: a country artist, Mickey Guyton, and a country person, Jason Isbell, singing “Something More than Free” with his unmistakable Alabama drawl in front of an image of a barn (!!!) with an American flag on it. There was even Ella Emhoff in a camo hat, the genius bit of merch the campaign is making that speaks 1000+ words on reclaiming rural and southern identity in one nifty cap. I would have one now if they weren’t sold out.

This feels like a new level of understanding from the DNC that liberals aren’t just listening to streaming pop hits (and these days, you’ll find country there too!), and that southern folks, Appalachian folks and small town people who listen to country and roots music often believe in things like basic human rights for all people and other things we consider to be democratic principles. The author Sarah Smarsh has done some great writing digging into to this in the context of selecting Governor Tim Walz as Harris’ VP running mate: “That people in small towns are often hopeful, cooperative folks who find creative solutions to local problems and are ruled by a sense of responsibility to community rather than by a fear of those outside it,” she writes in the New York Times. “In conveying the dignity and reality of what is casually derided on the coasts as ‘flyover country,’ Mr. Walz speaks plainly yet eloquently in the parlance of my place and thereby fills a decades-long geographic messaging gap for Democrats.”

It seems like the democrats are intent on further filling that messaging gap when it came to last night’s musical choices of Guyton and Isbell. There is a significance to picking these two - Guyton, who, as a Black woman in a genre that gives its entire all to make sure she does not disrupt the tidy male status quo, represents a country music fan who seldom has had a chance to see themselves on stage, at festivals and certainly not on the radio. And Isbell, who writes and speaks forcefully for a different version of the south and the southern person then what our stereotypes gleefully peddle. Not unlike what was happening with #HeAintFromHere, there is a furious reframing of not just who the democrats can reach, but who a democrat actually is. Meanwhile, it’s the Trump supporters who are actually getting country music wrong, something I spoke to NPR about last week.

I thought of the time I went to see Jason Isbell play the Ryman in October of 2021, with Mickey opening: she played the same song she did last night, “All American.” The experience struck me so much it became a pivotal point of my book: there are country fans everywhere, and country voters. Anyway, it is a brilliant song because of how it does this work of reframing on almost every level - it is the kind of song that white country artists have been singing for decades about the American experience, and about patriotism, but not centered only in the white experience as the only norm. She mentions back roads and dookie braids, asking a question that democrats (and those who have continually dismissed country music) seem to finally be answering in a different way than before: ain’t we all all American?

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