Literary Ruralism (Part XVIII): Country Music (with a focus on forgotten rural folks)

I like this passage from Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan's book, Country Music, where they write of "Fiddlin' John" Carson playing at "the Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers' Convention in Atlanta's Municipal Auditorium in the early 1920s  

Each year several thousand people came to hear fifty or more fiddlers--and a music that reminded them of simpler times and the rural homes of their past.  "Going to a Dance was like going back home to Mama's or Grandma's for Thanksgiving,"  said music historian Bill Malone.  "Country music is full of songs about little old log cabins that people never lived in, the old country church that people have never attended.  But it spoke for a lot of people who were being forgotten, or felt they were being forgotten.  Country music's staple, above all, is nostalgia--just a harkening back to the older way of life, either real or imagined."  (emphasis added)

The nostalgia theme is very interesting of course, and I'm going to try to return with more about that in another post because I noted it is a theme unpacked in the podcast, Dolly Parton's America.

As for the "forgotten" theme, it is is even more prominent today regarding rural folks, as I have written about most recently here.   I'm pasting below an excerpt from the salient section of the article (with citations omitted; you can get them by clicking on the link at the end of the last sentence and downloading article, free of charge, from ssrn.com):

Rural people and places have been (and largely remain) awfully easy to overlook as we rush pell-mell through the second decade of a highly urban-centric 21st century. Ditto the white working class, who are sometimes referred to as the white “middle class” and who seem to draw media attention primarily during election season. The chattering classes’ widespread obliviousness to rural America is referred to in book and article titles like Hidden America and The Forgotten Fifth.

The media have increasingly recognized this neglect. The Washington Post, for example, reported in late 2016 on Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack’s “lonely fight for a ‘forgotten’ rural America,” and a January 2018 story in that paper queried what should be done for “America’s forgotten towns.” National Public Radio recently referred to rural places (in relation to the physician shortage there) as “Forgotten America.” One journalist has even referred to the rural Ohio River Valley region in Southern Illinois as “forsaken.” At least she didn’t say “God forsaken.”

Fifty years ago, the President’s National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty published The People Left Behind. In 2018, Robert Wuthnow, a Princeton sociologist published The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America. In other words, we’re still leaving them behind—and some of them are angry about it.

These uses of “forgotten” and “hidden” call to mind the occasional emails I get from law students, professors across the disciplines with students who grew up rural, or just rural residents who have come across my Legal Ruralism Blog (10 years old in 2017). Here’s a typical one, received a few years ago from a law student at the University of Missouri: 

Your work interests me so much because of your focus on rural communities—because you care. Even though you are a professor at one of the most prestigious law schools in the country, you still care about, and I hate this term, “fly over country.” Thank you so much for your passion and dedication to rural America.

Emails like this one speak to the sense many rural folks have of knowing that they are rarely seen, that their experiences are not well understood. Even when they are seen, their concerns may not be taken seriously and are rarely prioritized.

Certainly, this has been my experience as a self-proclaimed (nearly full-time) ruralist in the legal academy. In spite of my voluminous writings about rural women, no feminist legal theory text book has included an excerpt of my work. I have published three articles dedicated to the topic of rural abortion access and other works that discuss the issue more peripherally, yet neither of two recent germinal legal texts on the topic of reproductive rights says a word about rural women. Indeed, these tomes mention only in passing distance and/or travel, a defining aspect of rural women’s “undue burden” in the abortion context. I do not take these omissions personally. Two of the three authors have told me over the years that they have read and admire my work about rural women. The issue, then, must be rurality itself. Rural women just don’t make the cut in a comprehensive account of a contemporary issue that so fundamentally shapes their lives. 

This is sadly consistent with what the Fifth Circuit decided in Whole Woman’s Health v. Lakey: 900,000 Texas women—those who were situated more than 150 miles from an abortion provider after the state’s new abortion regulations shut down half of the state’s abortion providers—were constitutionally irrelevant. Thankfully, that decision was subsequently overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in an opinion that did expressly note the burden of travel on rural women, a first for a majority of the Court in an abortion case.

In a similar vein, the manuscript for the latest poverty law textbook, Poverty Law: Policy and Practice made no mention whatsoever of rural poverty until shortly before it went to press. 

* * *  

Lest I be seen as suggesting that I am above reproach on the inclusivity front, let me acknowledge at least one of my oversights. While urban America forgets rural America, my equivalent lapse as a ruralist involves American Indians. They are my “guilty footnote,” if you will. I have occasionally given “meta” talks about rural populations and law’s neglect of them only to have American Indian scholars approach me afterwards to tell (or remind) me that I was also talking about American Indian/Native American populations, although I had not explicitly acknowledged them.

I could provide more illustrations of how we overlook rural people and places in legal scholarship, as well as how I have overlooked the American Indian experience. I’m sure this extends to our teaching, too. After all, could we realistically expect those teaching poverty law, reproductive rights, feminist legal theory and/or family law—just to name a few—to cover rural difference when their textbooks do not?

I do not wish to make my career a referendum on rural America or to treat my career as the canary in the coal mine that is rural America (sometimes literally as well figuratively). Sometimes, however, it feels that way. I do not see personal failure in my anemic citation count as a ruralist, though I have often joked that I am writing my way into the very obscurity that marks rural America. I guess I can now say something slightly more optimistic: as interest in rural America goes, so goes my career. Recently, that’s resulted in a serious uptick in invitations and calls from journalists.

Speaking of forgotten, I'm reminded of this October Washington Post story out of rural Alabama headlined "I don't think they know we exist."  In that headline, Stephanie McCrummen quotes the mayor of Lisman, Alabama, population 539.  in Choctaw County, population, 13,859.  Here's an excerpt:

At a moment when American politics has become a raw and racially polarized struggle for power, Lisman is one of the most powerless places of all. It is small. It is rural. It is mostly poor and mostly African American, and it exists in Alabama, where those characteristics remain the very things that still make people forgotten.

Elsewhere in the South, political momentum has been heading in a different direction. In Georgia, an African American woman had almost been elected governor. North Carolina is a swing state. In Texas and even Mississippi, politics has been shifting toward the interests of a more racially and ideologically diverse electorate.

But that is not the case in Alabama, where the state’s Democratic Party — the traditional means to power for black voters — has become so dysfunctional that the only Democrat elected statewide, U.S. Sen. Doug Jones, recently said the party was being “destroyed from within.”