[“I think it’s possible to acknowledge that you have benefited
from a system that’s unequal without feeling shame or even guilt
from it.”] [[link removed]]

JASON ISBELL IS TIRED OF COUNTRY’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH WHITE NOSTALGIA
 
[[link removed]]


 

Elamin Abdelmahmoud
December 16, 2021
BuzzFeed News
[[link removed]]


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[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]
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* [[link removed]]

_ “I think it’s possible to acknowledge that you have benefited
from a system that’s unequal without feeling shame or even guilt
from it.” _

Jason Isbell Live at the Cluny Newcastle. , by deargdoom57. This
image was marked with a CC BY 2.0 license.

 

WHEN YOU’RE STANDING in front of the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville,
you might feel under siege. It sits a few feet away from Nashville’s
rowdy Broadway strip, which means you have to wade through an army of
bros and bachelorettes — folks who descend upon the city for a good
time
[[link removed]],
if your idea of a good time is throngs of partyers in matching
outfits, open-top buses aggressively blasting music, and more country
cover bands per square inch than you can possibly count.

In sharp contrast to the loud nostalgia cosplay that surrounds it, the
2,300-seat auditorium, with its imposing Victorian Gothic architecture
and distinctive stained glass windows, projects dignity and history.
It’s one of music’s holiest sites, a storied hall that has been
dubbed the Mother Church [[link removed]] of
Country Music. Everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Willie Nelson has a
reverence [[link removed]] for it. Word is Harry Styles
once planned a whole tour
[[link removed]] just so he
could perform here.

In mid-October, I arrived for the second show of Jason Isbell’s
eight-night residency at the auditorium. The occasion is a perfect
marriage of artist and venue: Isbell is one of America’s most potent
songwriters, and the Ryman is a cathedral of song. For Americana fans,
the singer-songwriter’s annual residency here has become a coveted
pilgrimage. It’s for good reason that Isbell has come to be
associated with the Ryman: In 2015, he played four consecutive nights
backed by his band, the 400 Unit. He expanded this to six in 2017. In
2018, he did another six and released a live album called _Live From
the Ryman_. In 2019, Isbell and his band performed at the venue for
seven shows. This year, they’re doing eight. Every single one of
these runs has sold out.

But if the Ryman has become a kind of home for Isbell, this year’s
residency carried a different energy. It was historic. For seven of
the eight evenings, he had a different Black woman opening for him. In
an industry and genre that is consistently failing white women and is
downright hostile to Black women, the choice to feature these openers
is a small revolution.

The openers vary in age, fame, and career stages. Between them, they
cover a variety of genres under the roots music umbrella, ranging from
country to soul, blues to folk, Americana to rock ‘n’ roll. For
many of them, it was their first time playing the Ryman at all.

Perhaps the most recognizable name on the list is Mickey Guyton, a
Nashville veteran who earlier this year became the first Black woman
to be nominated for a solo country music Grammy. Guyton’s career is
the perfect representation of how country’s corporate machinery
regularly silences Black women. After weathering a decade of her
label’s attempts to slot her into an R&B box, she stood her ground.
Finally, in September, Guyton released her debut album, _Remember Her
Name_. (“Thank God that Black don’t crack,” Guyton, who is 38,
told me with a giggle. “Because I’d be screwed.”)

Isbell’s decision to feature seven Black women is notable in any
year, but in this particular moment, it feels like a necessary course
correction. Earlier this year, the country music industry was rocked
by scandal
[[link removed]] after
Ring camera footage leaked of rising star Morgan Wallen drunkenly
shouting the n-word.

Wallen was dropped
[[link removed]] by
his booking agent, and the all-powerful country radio stopped playing
him
[[link removed]].
But a few months later, he is now sort of on parole, and radio
stations are receptive
[[link removed]] to
a new single. He’s rolled out a tour schedule after months of being
MIA. The evidence suggests the appetite for forgiving Wallen is
healthy.

When I first talked to Isbell on the second night of his Ryman
residency, he seemed bothered by the relatively minor consequences
that Wallen had faced. “I think it’s hilarious that people assume
that making somebody less famous is like cutting their fucking dick
off!” Isbell said. “We’re not calling for the man’s head!
We’re just going, ‘This guy is an idiot. And he does not deserve
to be put on a pedestal. So let’s take him off the pedestal and put
him back down on the sidewalk with everybody else.’ That’s all
anybody asked for.” (A publicist told BuzzFeed News that Wallen is
unavailable to comment.)'

This directness is not a common position in country music. Most
performers have chosen to stay quiet, keep their head down. It has
mostly fallen on women — Black women, in particular — to point out
the ways the industry has overlooked racism. But then again, Isbell,
42, is far from the common figure in Nashville. Over the last decade,
he has earned a reputation for being a straight shooter, a no-bullshit
writer and performer, a mutineer with a microphone.

Isbell has long been waging war against the way nostalgia has been
weaponized. He has grown intolerant of the levels of racism and sexism
entrenched in the industry. A white Southern man from Alabama, he is
resentful of the ways a fictitious version of the past has been
deployed to keep people like him — “white Southern rural men,“
in his words — from seeing how things really are.

But this story is only a little bit about Jason Isbell. If Isbell does
his job right, it’s not about him at all. It’s about what happens
when white men attempt to unhook themselves from the tentacles of
nostalgia and engage with the world as it is, not as they’ve been
told it is. For the next week at the Ryman, it’s about cultivating a
different vision of roots music in all its iterations. The only thing
you have to kill is something that never existed in the first place.

JASON ISBELL MADE THREE ALBUMS with the Southern rock band the
Drive-By Truckers, then he made three albums after that, then he got
noticed about a decade ago. Actually, that’s not quite true: First
he got sober, _then_ he got noticed. His fourth solo album,
2013’s _Southeastern_, is his breakthrough album — certainly
commercially, but definitely critically. Isbell set a new standard for
vivid songwriting on _Southeastern_, from the lonely anthem
“Traveling Alone” to the weeper “Elephant.” In 2020, when
Rolling Stone revised its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
list, _Southeastern_ entered the list at No. 458. The album’s
opener, “Cover Me Up,” has morphed into Isbell’s crowning
achievement and his most famous song. Isbell wrote it in a very
specific context — his own painful journey to sobriety — but it
has become a timeless song about redemption.

From there, things took off. Over the next three albums — two of
them with the 400 Unit — Isbell won four Grammys. He became a
mainstay at the Americana Music Honors & Awards, with more than a
dozen nominations in half a decade. He became renowned for his
songwriting prowess, and his ability to crystallize a feeling, a
tension, a scene. Perhaps that’s why Bradley Cooper tapped him to
create one of the songs for his adaptation of _A Star Is Born_ —
Isbell wrote “Maybe It’s Time
[[link removed]].”

Like the best of Isbell’s work, “Maybe It’s Time” is a
mournful, layered song that’s subversive and playful, too: The music
sounds nostalgic and wistful, but the lyrics implore you to “let the
old ways die.” The gentleness of the song disguises its ask, but at
its core, it’s an invitation to do away with your rigid
perspectives.

It’s not a surprise, then, that Isbell doesn’t do elephants in the
room. (He has been outspoken about vaccine requirements
[[link removed]] at his
concerts, earning some fans’ ire. Some declared they’ll never see
an Isbell show again. “Sounds great!
[[link removed]]”
he responded.) At least that’s the sense I got when he first walked
into the small dressing room a few steps from the Ryman stage during
our interview. This is someone who has little tolerance for vague
small talk, preferring to get to the heart of the matter. So when I
asked how he decided to have seven different Black women opening this
Ryman run, there was a hint of exasperation in his voice. “First of
all, I just love the music these women make,” he said. The choice of
openers was neither some performative move nor an after-school
special. “None of these people should be available to open for
me,” he added. “They should all be too big for that.”

The breadth of talent opening for Isbell in this run is extraordinary.
As is tradition, the first night of every Isbell Ryman residency is
reserved for his wife, Amanda Shires, an award-winning
singer-songwriter with piercing specificity
[[link removed]], who also founded the
country supergroup the Highwomen and plays fiddle in Isbell’s band.
In addition to Guyton, there’s also Brittney Spencer, the breakout
country singer who burst onto the scene about a year ago with her
transcendent voice and skillful songcraft
[[link removed]]; Allison Russell, whose solo
debut _Outside Child_ was released in May and is one of the
year’s best
[[link removed]]albums;
Amythyst Kiah, who should be a household name
[[link removed]] by
now; Adia Victoria, who deftly subverts a listener’s idea
[[link removed]] of
what modern blues should sound like while breaking their heart;
Shemekia Copeland is blues royalty
[[link removed]],
with seven Blues Music Awards to her name; and Joy Oladokun, whose
career has finally been accelerating at a pace
[[link removed]] that reflects
her talent [[link removed]].

“Hopefully they won’t be opening for people like me for too much
longer,” Isbell said. But he’s aware of what the slot can do for
musicians who need a boost. “Maybe this is a way that some people
will be introduced to their music.” It’s not without precedent:
“Chris Stapleton opened one of my Ryman shows back in the day,”
Isbell pointed out. Stapleton is now one of country music’s most
bankable stars, with more than a dozen Grammy nominations and five
wins. “Sturgill Simpson has opened one of these too,” he added,
referring to the critically acclaimed country singer with a Best
Country Album Grammy to his name. “So it is a platform for a lot of
folks.” He frowned and paused. “I'm not saying that's _why_ they
got huge, just that, before they got huge, this was something they
did.”

This kind of pause for self-reflection seems to be second nature to
Isbell. Over our conversation, he regularly checked himself to leave
less room for ambiguous interpretations. Perhaps this is why he is
bothered by imprecision, and he wants to politely put some distance
between himself and country music. “I don’t consider myself a
country musician,” he told me. “I grew up in the country. I
appreciate certain aspects of country music as a songwriter. But I'm
in a rock’n’ roll band, and that's how I look at it.” I pointed
out that until recently, he was a member of the Country Music
Association. “They _sent_ _me_ the membership. I did not request
the membership,” Isbell told me. “It was like: _Congratulations,
you’re in our club_. Well, I never asked to be in your fucking
club.”

Still, he acknowledged the areas of overlap between himself and
country music. As he conceded, “I sing about a lot of the same
things.” The caveat is that the context is often deeper and more
challenging. Take “Speed Trap Town,” from his 2015
album _Something More Than Free_. “Sometimes I’ll introduce it as
‘here’s my country song about trucks and football,’” Isbell
said with a smirk. He’s being cheeky: The first verse may mention
trucks and football, but this is merely the backdrop; the song is
actually about a state trooper known for pulling women over and
sexually assaulting them, now dying in the ICU while his family
struggles over whether they should go see him, and the shame that
comes with that. It’s not exactly tailgate party material, but
it’s the kind of complex songwriting that has earned Isbell his
reputation as a formidable storyteller.

But is it country music? “When people call me a country musician, I
don’t mind it necessarily, depending on the point they’re trying
to make,” he told me. “But there never should have been ‘country
music’ to begin with.”

This may seem tangential, but it’s actually the whole ball game. At
the turn of the 20th century, Black and white musicians in the South
were recording the same songs with the same instruments. The music was
borderless and loose. But about 100 years ago, record executives found
that by segregating the musicians and positioning “hillbilly
music” for white audiences and “race records” for Black
audiences, they could make more money.

This is not ancient history. The consequences of that decision come
pouring out of your speakers every time you turn on the radio. It
didn’t take long before “hillbilly music,” which got repackaged
as “country,” was dubbed “the white man’s blues.” The notion
of genre is first and foremost a sales pitch, a byproduct of combining
capitalism and racism. Outside the music sales infrastructure, the
porous borders between genres have long existed, even if it took
until this year
[[link removed]] for
the Grammys to finally rename categories like “Urban.”

Still, it’s not a given that Isbell would have come to challenge
these beliefs about genre and about music. After all, these rules were
set up to benefit him and people who look like him. He could jump on
the nostalgia train and make a lot of money: He’s a tall, big man
with tattoos and Southern rural credentials. It wouldn’t be hard to
position him as a vehicle of empty nostalgia.

Yet the idea seems like a nonstarter. I asked Isbell about an old
quote of his — in 2016, he told GQ
[[link removed]], “I
don't believe all music is okay. ... I believe some music is bad for
people to listen to. I think it makes their taste worse, I think it
makes their lives worse, I think it makes them worse people.” I was
intrigued by the concept. He explained that he was referring to
“anything that panders, anything that serves to reinforce a story
that you already believe.” So that’s about half of country radio.
“I think anything that tries to use nostalgia against you, anything
that tries to reinforce your fears, that’s bad for you,” he added.

Nostalgia is a beast of fiction: It’s an act of selective editing,
of carving out just the bits you want, in order to tell the story you
want to tell. It’s the kind of forgetting rampant in country music.
Seeking nostalgia is seeking a mirage, for its beauty, yes, but also
for its safety. Isbell is not in the business of safety. His music
paints the image of a man who’d sooner shout a thousand
uncomfortable truths than take refuge in one lie.

MICKEY GUYTON WAS STANDING beside a row of pews on the floor of the
auditorium, waiting for a staff member of the Ryman to take the cover
off a display case. Behind it, there’s a dress she wore earlier this
year on that very stage, and she wanted to be reunited with it,
perhaps as a grounding force.

While she waited, she smiled and kept an eye on her band who were
onstage for soundcheck, working through “Lay It on Me,” an
emotional number with a big soaring chorus. She held her hand to her
chest as the band repeated the backing vocal refrain: “I’m right
here.” In the empty Ryman, it sounded like a reassuring prayer.

It must be a comfort to Guyton to have people who are right here —
people who have your back, in a town that mostly hasn’t. By now,
she’s become the most visible case of country music’s neglect of
Black women.

Guyton spent much of the last decade in recording industry purgatory:
She never wanted to be anything other than a country singer, but she
kept running into walls everywhere she went. She was put in silos by
gatekeepers who tried to position her as an R&B artist
[[link removed]].
Collaborators suggested songs about blue-eyed love interests
[[link removed]].
The message, loud and clear, was that country music doesn’t quite
know what to do with a Black woman.

By February 2020, running into walls was losing its charm for Guyton.
It had been a decade of being touted as a future star, only for little
to happen. “I was just ready to give up by that point,” she told
me. “I was just like, _This ain’t it. I deserve better than
this_.” You can roughly see the moment she thought her career was
over. It was, out of all places, on the Ryman stage. It came during an
industry showcase that same month, where she was debuting a new song,
“What Are You Gonna Tell Her?” It’s a moving account of
suffocating under sexism and racism and having to explain it to a
young child. (“She thinks love is love / And if you work hard,
that's enough / Skin's just skin and it doesn't matter,” she sings.)
You can see Guyton’s face collapse
[[link removed]] for a moment as she received a
standing ovation from the crowd. Maybe she treated it as a last
outing. “I thought, _That’s it. This is over_,” she told me.

Then two days after George Floyd’s murder, amid massive protests
across America, Guyton posted to Instagram
[[link removed]] a snippet of a song
she’d written a year prior. The video is just a 38-second
screen-recording of a file she has on her phone. Her voice full of
emotion, she sings, “If you think we live / In the land of the free
/ You should try to be / Black like me.” It’s a pointed and
forceful reversal of the jingoism that pervades country music.

Guyton revealed that she didn’t consult the label or have a
particular plan when she posted the snippet. She just hoped it would
comfort people [[link removed]] who
heard it. It did a lot more than that. Within minutes, dozens of
commenters were eager for a full-length version. Then Spotify asked
for a finished song to place in country playlists.

Immediately, “Black Like Me” was acclaimed by critics
[[link removed]] and
fans alike. It’s hard to say which came first: the profound interest
in Guyton, or the scurrying to fix the optics of having too many white
faces in country music. But either way, she could no longer be ignored
by the country establishment. “Black Like Me” earned her a Grammy
nomination for Best Country Solo Performance, a first for a Black
woman in the category — and she did it without even having an album
out.

The Mickey Guyton moment was now in full swing. She was invited to
cohost the Academy of Country Music Awards with Keith Urban in April
2021, becoming the first Black woman to host the ceremony. The dress
Guyton wore at that awards show, a floor-length blue gown, is now
inside that prominent display case at the Ryman. It stands next to a
guitar that country legend Emmylou Harris
[[link removed]] once
played on the same stage. In other words, Guyton’s dress is now a
part of country music history.

At the end of soundcheck, Guyton shared a tender moment with Isbell
onstage. “Thank you for everything, and thank you for what you’re
doing for Black women especially,” she told him. “It’s about
walking the walk and not being afraid of walking the walk.” She
sounded like someone who has embraced the role of ambassador of Black
country artists.

That night, when Guyton took the stage to open for Isbell, it was her
first concert at the Ryman since she thought it was all over. In a
full-circle moment, she opened her set with “What Are You Gonna Tell
Her?”, the song she sang just before she thought it was all coming
to an end. Before long, the crowd erupted into a standing ovation. By
the end of her set, she got another three, or perhaps thirty — I
couldn’t keep track, because this audience was rooting for Guyton
with every note. At one point, she called out for the Black people in
the audience. Hearing a few loud whoops and a “We love you,
Mickey,” she pointed at the crowd. “I see you!” she exclaimed.

The next morning after the show, when I met up with Guyton at her
management’s office in Nashville, she couldn’t quite wrap her mind
around the rapturous reception at the Ryman.

“I just never know what to expect,” Guyton said. “I’ve gotten
some pretty awful responses online.” The racist abuse directed at
Guyton on social media
[[link removed]] has
exacted a heavy toll on her, particularly after the video of Wallen
saying the n-word emerged. “The hate runs deep,” she tweeted
[[link removed]] in
response to the news. A day later, she expanded
[[link removed]]: “This
is exactly who country music is. I’ve witnessed it for 10 gd
years.” And the heartbreaker
[[link removed]]:
“I question on a daily basis as to why I continue to fight to be in
an industry that seems to hate me so much.”

The sentiment is only a little bit about Wallen, Guyton told me. “I
don’t think he’s a horrible person. I think he’s a sick person
who said something that he really, really regrets. And he deserves
grace for that.” But it was her experiences with Wallen’s fans
that left her shaken. “I mean, I was called a ‘fucking
nigger,’” Guyton said. “Just pages and pages and pages [of
abuse] in my DMs.”

So you can understand why Guyton might seem uncertain of whom she was
singing in front of. “I’m a little traumatized. So I walk onstage
fearful that that’s what I’m about to get.” What she got at the
Ryman was thunderous adoration and standing ovations. “This is what
I wanted for so long,” Guyton told me. “This was my vision, but it
didn’t happen for so long. So I’m still just retraining my brain
to be like, _Oh, we’re here_.”

Guyton is indeed _here_. The same week we were speaking, she was
named CMT’s Breakout Artist of the Year
[[link removed]].
In her acceptance speech, she told an audience of her peers that she
“made it [her] life’s purpose to show that country music really is
everyone’s music.” Her voice broke as she dedicated the speech to
those who have felt left out of country: “I am here for you. I am my
sister’s keeper.”

I asked Guyton if she’s tired of playing the role of class
valedictorian, of the burden of explaining being Black in country
instead of just celebrating the songs she’s written. “It does get
tiring,” she conceded, “but if I don’t talk about it, who
will?” She’s aware that people are listening to her, and she feels
the responsibility to use that power.

In the era of Charley Pride, country music’s biggest Black
superstar, there was a pervading ethos that country music only has
room for one Black star. Guyton contended that remnants of this
attitude are still lingering. “After Charley and Linda [Martell],
there was nothing for 25 years. Then there’s Darius [Rucker], then
there’s nothing. Now we have Kane [Brown] and Jimmie [Allen],”
Guyton said, “but I'll be damned if I let another 25 years go by and
there's not a Black female country superstar.”

So she spent the rest of our interview talking up some Black
up-and-comers who needed attention. She seemed anxious to make sure
anyone interviewing her will leave with a list of names to go
investigate. She was bursting to tell me about Madeline Edwards (“I
think she's like the Amy Winehouse of country music”). A month after
our conversation, when Guyton performed her ode to Black hair
[[link removed]], “Love My Hair,” at
the Country Music Association Awards, she invited Edwards and Brittney
Spencer on stage with her.

If Guyton has anything to say about it, there will never again be room
for just one. “My theory is that the only way for it to work is if
there is not one, not two, not three, but several Black artists
busting down that door,” Guyton said. “If we’re lifting each
other up, then each of us individually are going to do the same thing
for other artists. That’s the only way to keep it going.”

IN 1991, GEORGE H.W. BUSH declared October “Country Music Month.”
In his proclamation
[[link removed]],
he stated that “to listen to a country and western song is to hear
the story of America set to music.” He told the nation that country
music is “honest, good-natured music played with style and spirit.
Like a favorite pair of faded blue jeans, it fits the way we live.”
Eighteen years before Bush, Nixon made a similar proclamation
[[link removed]],
saying, “No matter where men and women happen to live, country music
may be one of the truest voices speaking to and for them.”

That kind of romanticization of country music as America’s song is
not limited to presidents from a distant past. Toby Keith performed at
Donald Trump’s inauguration celebrations, as did Lee Greenwood,
whose song “God Bless the USA” became regular rally entrance music
for the former president. The entwinement of country music and
nationalism is not even limited to Republicans; Garth
Brooks performed [[link removed]] at
Joe Biden’s inauguration earlier this year.

Still, while plenty of country songs touch on the theme of quiet pride
in the place you’re from, the overly jingoistic part of the genre
lends itself to aligning with conservatism. And those close
associations with right-wing politics are not accidental. It’s just
a smart political strategy. When Nixon visited the Grand Ole Opry and
connected country music with conservative values, these were, as
Jacobin writes [[link removed]],
“calculated attempts at inventing a ‘white working class’ and
pitting it against the radical movements that had emerged in the
1960s.” Country became embroiled in the explicit project of stoking
the resentments of white people, particularly rural white people.

A week before Isbell’s Ryman residency began, the conservative
website the Daily Wire held a live event on that very stage in front
of a sold-out audience. Ben Shapiro, the website’s founder, showed
up wearing a bolo tie. Just a year prior, Shapiro moved to Nashville
and brought
[[link removed]] the
rest of the Daily Wire with him.

Shapiro didn’t build his following as a conservative commentator by
being a mild-mannered fellow who likes the free market. He got there
through torqued rhetoric, saying things like “Arabs like to bomb
crap and live in open sewage
[[link removed]].” He’s
been called out for anti-LGBTQ comments
[[link removed]].
And he once tweeted on the anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s birthday
that the teenager would be alive “if he hadn’t taken a man’s
head and beaten it on the pavement before being shot.”

All of this makes the Ryman stage hit different this time for Jason
Isbell. “If I was the venue, I’d probably not book that,” he
said with a grimace. He was clearly wrestling with this. He wouldn’t
go as far as suggesting banning Shapiro and company from the stage, he
said, because “I don’t want the Ryman telling me I can’t say my
fuckin’ liberal, progressive shit from the stage.” He added, “So
that is where the First Amendment comes into play.” But still, he
can’t help but feel differently about his beloved Ryman. “It
changes my opinion of the venue a little bit. I’m not quite as proud
to play the place after that happened as I was before.”

Isbell and Shapiro don’t know each other, but they’ve had a minor
internet spat over gun control once. Isbell tweeted that people who
are fighting over the definition of an assault weapon are being
deliberately misleading. “You know what an assault weapon is, and
you know you don’t need one,” he tweeted. In response, one of his
followers gave an earnest rebuttal: “Legit question for rural
Americans,” a man named Willie McNabb tweeted
[[link removed]]. “How
do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins
while my small kids play?” The response was an immediate meme
sensation
[[link removed]].

The attention that Isbell’s original tweet got didn’t seem to sit
well with Shapiro, who shot back
[[link removed]],
“Actually, no, I don’t ‘know what an assault weapon is.’ And
neither do you.” Big mistake. Isbell responded
[[link removed]] that he
has “owned and fired those guns. … You pretend to be confused in
order to con people who actually are.”

That was the end of it. Isbell told me, “I didn't hear much back
from Ben after that. I think that was a difficult one for him to logic
his way out of, because he just didn't look like the kind of man who
has owned those kinds of guns.” But he conceded gleefully, “Maybe
he is. I could be wrong.”

Too often, living in certain parts of the South, or owning certain
guns, is used as shorthand for conservatism. Isbell complicates this
story. He stands as an inconvenient challenge to what he calls a
“con,” the trick of using nostalgia and white resentment to keep
rural white Americans believing that they are victims, that something
has been taken away from them. You know the coded rhetoric. It’s the
one that says America has to be made great again. It’s the kind of
narrative that explicitly tries to use nostalgia against you, in
Isbell’s parlance.

It’s also a narrative that has many champions. “They got their
[_Hillbilly Elegy_ author and Ohio Senate seat candidate] J.D.
Vances, people who can cover a large group of people, for example in
Appalachia, and convince them to fall for the grift,” Isbell said.
He knows it’s a grift because he’s had the opportunity to see the
truth.

“I didn't realize until I got in my 20s and started touring around
the country what poor in America really _was_,” Isbell said. “We
got out into some of the Indigenous territories, and I was shocked
that this existed in America because that looked like a country that I
had read about and not the one that I had lived in.” It didn’t
cohere with the story he had been told about his own poverty. “When
I was a little kid, we were all the same. So I didn’t think we were
poor. And then I got a little older and I thought, _Oh, I grew up
poor_, and then I got out there and I thought, _No, I was just
fine_.”

The reason this message works best coming from him is his credibility.
“I grew up in rural Alabama with a lot of people who had a lot of
backwards beliefs, people who hunted and fished and got in fights and
drank too much and loved football.” It’s not as though he’s been
taught about systemic racism from the first grade. “I’m not coming
at these opinions because somebody has force-fed them to me from the
time when I was a child,” Isbell said. “I figured this shit out on
my own, with the help of a lot of good friends that I met once I
started touring and traveling.”

I asked why he finds himself so opposed to the narrative of white
victimhood. “Because there’s no way it’s true. I would be happy
to consider it because it would serve me well to be able to say
‘I’m a victim,’” he replied. “I would love that. I don’t
have too much pride. I’ll use whatever. But it’s just not true,
and it’s so untrue that I couldn’t sell it with a straight
face.”

Isbell has imbued some of his songs with these themes. Take “White
Man’s World” from his 2017 album _The Nashville Sound_. It’s a
song explicitly about coming to terms with the ways he has benefited
from being a white man. There’s the line about becoming a father and
believing that the world will belong to his daughter, “but her mama
knew better.” There’s the line about his complicity in
“pretending not to hear another white man’s joke” in front of a
Black man. “When people try to attack the statements that I made in
that song, they use phrases like ‘shame’ or ‘white guilt,’”
Isbell said. “But I think it’s possible to acknowledge that you
have benefited from a system that’s unequal without feeling shame or
even guilt from it.”

In fact, Isbell wants to go further than just acknowledging. “I
think it’s possible to change your ways without feeling guilty or
ashamed,” he said. “I think that’s what I was looking for with
that song: to try to remind people that their story is not the only
one.”

WHEN I WALKED INTO BRITTNEY Spencer’s greenroom above the Ryman
stage, she was asking if anyone in the room had any lotion or shea
butter. The only Black member of her band, drummer Desmond Davis, did.
She got the lotion, and then we were off to find somewhere quiet to
talk. On the way, she was bouncing off the walls, descending the
stairs three steps at a time, and swinging from the railing.

“Today is a good day,” she said, beaming. “I’m opening up for
Jason Isbell, one of the best people I’ve ever met in my life.”
Spencer and Isbell have an easy rapport. At soundcheck, he suggested a
collaboration on the last encore of the night: “Gimme Shelter” by
the Rolling Stones. “You up for it?” he asked. “Hell yeah,
that’s my shit,” she responded. Most people would not just be up
for the task on a whim.

But then again, Spencer is not most people. She may have had her
breakout moment only a year ago, but she’s been honing her craft for
some time. “People get shocked when I tell them I’ve been here for
so long,” Spencer told me. “But I’ve just been writing songs in
my bedroom for eight years.” So she’s been putting in the time to
develop a powerful voice she knows how to deploy.

It’s that voice that caught the attention of Amanda Shires,
Isbell’s wife, in October 2020. Spencer tweeted a video
[[link removed]] of herself
alone with her acoustic guitar, singing “Crowded Table,” a cover
of the signature song of Shires’ supergroup, the Highwomen. Shires
reposted it with a simple message: “This is beautiful, Highwoman.
Some day we will play again—and when we do, we’d be honored if
you’d come sing this with us.”

From there, things took off for Spencer. Soon, she was writing songs
with Shires and Isbell and others. Her profile grew. By July 2021, she
quit her job at Warby Parker, the glasses retailer. Last month, the
33-year-old announced her own headlining tour. Nashville’s MusicRow
magazine just named her a 2022 Next Big Thing
[[link removed]].
But how does it feel when your stardom begins with people like Isbell
and Shires championing you? “It feels like you’re surrounded and
protected. It feels like you’re not alone,” she said. Spencer
understands that her kind of story doesn’t come along often. She
explained that she met with Guyton long before her video went viral,
and she’d seen how Guyton was willing to fight for the next
generation. Spencer recalled, “Mickey said to me, ‘I don’t think
success is going to happen for me. I don’t see a future for me, but
there could be a future for the younger generation, for other people
that are coming up behind me.’”

'Things are happening fast for Spencer. It’s hard to believe that
she is still green, that she doesn’t yet have an album out.
She’s _so_ green, in fact, that she has never seen her name on a
drumhead. Until tonight, when Desmond, her drummer, surprised her with
one for the big Ryman show. Spencer squealed with excitement at the
sight. When Shires passed by, Spencer yelled after her: “You know
I’m only here because of you, right?” Shires was having none of
it. “No, baby, you’re here because of you.”

Amythyst Kiah can’t wrap her mind around the journey she’s taken
either. “When I was a teenager, I was one of two Black people I knew
who played guitar,” she said. “And I was the only girl I knew who
played guitar.” And now? “Now I’m the face that I needed to see
when I was younger,” she said. “Now people younger than me are
looking to me and seeing that, _yes, this is possible.
You_ can _express yourself in this way_.”

The 35-year-old covers a range of roots genres, marrying country blues
with elements of folk and rock. She writes powerful, defiant songs
about growing up Black and gay in the South.

Speaking by phone a couple of days after she opened for Isbell, Kiah
extolled the virtues of therapy. “It was a huge day to play the
Ryman and have a chance to talk with Jason after the show — about
songwriting but also therapy — and come away from this amazing
experience to realize I need to not be so hard on myself,” she said.

What role has therapy played in her life? Kiah explained that even
though she writes songs about what she needs to process, “that
wasn’t enough, because I didn’t have the vocabulary or the
perspective to actively engage with what was going on with me.”

Having a therapist has been helpful as she navigates the questions of
performing in a genre whose stars don't often look like her. “Within
the space, we’ve had to mentally deal with a lot,” she said.
“We’ve had to deal with rejection, we’ve had to deal with ‘Am
I good enough?’, but we’ve also had to deal with ‘Do I feel safe
doing this?’”

In addition to her solo work, Kiah is a part of Our Native Daughters,
an Americana supergroup that also features Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla
McCalla, and Allison Russell. The four Black women, all wielding
banjos, released _Songs of Our Native Daughters_ in 2019, an album
that explores the forces that have shaped the lives of Black women,
from misogyny to slavery.

The album’s opener, “Black Myself
[[link removed]],” is written by Kiah.
It’s a song that starts defiant in the face of racism before turning
into an ode to being rooted in your community. In 2020, she earned a
Grammy nomination for Best American Roots Song for the song.
She rerecorded it [[link removed]] for
her most recent album.

Kiah has been blown away by the messages she gets. “I get messages
from Black women saying, ‘Hey, I started learning the banjo and
getting into folk music because I saw Our Native Daughters,’” she
said. “White people message me and say, ‘your work really helped
change my perspective on how I saw the history of this country.’”

THE BARS OF BROADWAY seem to be bursting with a desire to return
Wallen to his perch. Within a two-block radius, I heard five different
Wallen covers. Three of them were of “Whiskey Glasses,” his
breakout hit. Each time, hundreds of people inside the bar were
screaming every line of the lyrics. Clearly, it’s a crowd-pleaser.

In general, the numbers Wallen puts up suggest he is one of the most
popular country stars of his generation. Even in a year where he was
briefly taken off the radio, he still managed to get five songs
[[link removed]] in the
top 50 of Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart.
Wallen _alone_ constitutes 10% of the top 50.

Even the moratorium on being played on the radio had a positive effect
on Wallen’s album sales. After all promotion for his record ceased
in the wake of the racial slur scandal, _Dangerous: The Double
Album_ went on an impressive streak at the top of the charts
[[link removed]].
Wallen will end the year as the top-selling artist
[[link removed]] in
America _across all genres_, one spot ahead of Olivia Rodrigo, and
four spots above Drake.

Remember “Cover Me Up,” Isbell’s signature song? According to
Spotify, it’s far and away his most popular song, streamed more than
48 million times. But there is another version of it with more spins
on the streamer: Morgan Wallen’s cover, which is on _Dangerous_,
has racked up 190 million listens. It’s fucking preposterous.

I asked Isbell to take me back to the call when Wallen asked to cover
“Cover Me Up.” Isbell clarified dryly, “Oh, that’s not the
call. The call is ‘Wallen has covered ‘Cover Me Up.’” Other
artists do not need your permission to cover your song, they simply
need to pay you. Still, even if Isbell’s permission wasn’t
required, Wallen initially had his blessing
[[link removed]]anyway.
Isbell thought the cover might introduce “Cover Me Up” to a new
audience.

Did the success of Wallen’s version change his relationship to the
song? “No, that’s _my_song,” Isbell said assuredly. “It is my
baby that I have had to carry through a rainstorm.” Besides, the
context is so very specific to Isbell and his sobriety. “I wrote it
for myself and for my wife years ago,” he said. “I’m
disappointed in the type of person that he became — or maybe was,
and didn’t reveal until it was too late — but that has nothing to
do with that song.”

After news of Wallen’s racial slur, Isbell announced that he’d be
donating his royalties
[[link removed]]from
the song to the Nashville chapter of the NAACP. “The mistakes that
he made,” Isbell told me, “were enough to warrant giving somebody
else that spot.” By “that spot,” he means the full lobbying
support of the country industry: radio, TV, magazine covers, a push
for a musical guest spot on _Saturday Night Live_, you name it.
It’s the machinery that made Wallen the top-selling artist of the
year. “The problem was they had already invested so much money in
Morgan that when he made those mistakes, they didn’t want to lose
that investment.”

But is it so simple to give the support to somebody else? “I know a
lot of people think it’s not that easy,” Isbell said, “but it
is. It’s manufactured. Promotional budgets determine who is going to
be the darling of the industry at any given time.” The frustration
is in seeing all the people who could be given that opportunity.
“That spot was available for someone like Mickey. Why not? That
would be a great story,” Isbell said.

Is this tantamount to “canceling” Wallen? “I hear a lot of
people say, ‘How dare you do this to this young man in the prime of
his life?’” Isbell said impatiently. “This man is going to
be _fine_. There’s a lot of people who are fucking doing awesome
who are not singing country songs on _Saturday Night Live_.”

But fine. Let us grant that there might be a path for Wallen to redeem
himself. What could that look like? Perhaps he might “go through
some steps and try to craft some kind of way where he can show us that
he has learned from this experience,” Isbell said. “But not even
that happened.”

Instead, what has happened is…nothing. Wallen pledged $500,000 to
Black-led organizations. As of this fall, he has yet to donate much
of his pledge
[[link removed]].
In many ways, it seems the appearance of redemption is more important
than actually doing the work of proving you’ve changed. “Listen to
how they talk about George Jones,” Isbell said of the country
legend. “There’s a lot of shit that George did that was not cool,
shit that you really should not be able to be completely redeemed
from.” Jones has a well-documented history of violence, misogyny
[[link removed]],
and, racism
[[link removed]]. “But
everything ended well, according to the country music's narrative.”

Isbell paused. “I don’t mean to pick on George Jones. I think
he’s the greatest country singer that ever lived,” he clarified.
“But he did a lot of really, really terrible, terrible shit.” This
is the magic trick: to be able to hold both truths in hand at the same
time, instead of rushing to the redemption.

“Excuses have been made over and over to try to craft that same
white male narrative. It’s just part of the story. It’s like,
‘Yes, sometimes, as white men who’ve been put upon, we slip and we
make mistakes, but we can rise again! And that’s country music,
folks,’” Isbell said. “For people who already believe it’s
true in their life, it gets reinforced when they hear it on the radio.
And they don’t have to question it, they can just enjoy the
nostalgia of it.”

I asked Isbell: What do those audiences get out of this nostalgia?
What makes it so appealing? “They want to hear how heroes are just
like us. But I think we can ask for a little more,” he said.
“Let’s look for real heroes. People who devote their whole life to
a battle they know they’re not going to win. Those are the real
fucking heroes.”

IN BETWEEN SONGS ON THE THIRD NIGHT of Isbell’s residency, I struck
up a conversation with an audience member I’d seen the day before.
Sarah Shea told me she and her husband, Matthew, come every year from
Alabama for Isbell’s Ryman residency. This year, they’re attending
three nights. Last time, they went to four. She’s excited that their
children will soon be old enough to join for a few shows too, maybe
starting next year.

I asked Sarah what she thought of the openers so far. She had rave
reviews of both Guyton and Spencer. “They blew me away. I’m just
so mad I’ve never heard their music before,” she told me. “I
can’t believe I haven’t even heard their names.”

I started to ask her another question when Isbell launched into
“Stockholm,” a favorite of hers, and she disappeared back into the
music she came here for. But after the show, Sarah was excited to
share the new artists she just discovered. About Spencer, she tweeted
[[link removed]],
“buy all her merch, attend all her shows, and add her to every
playlist.” And like that, a new fan was born. 

_Elamin Abdelmahmoud is a curation editor for BuzzFeed News and is
based in Toronto Contact Elamin Abdelmahmoud
[[link removed]] at [email protected]._

'

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