Southern exceptionalism and music

When I was at Ole Miss getting my masters the last class I took was Faulkner from Jay Watson. In that class he once made some point that involved talking about a series of changing perspectives in Southern history that went something like, first we have C. Vann Woodward and he argued something we call “southern exceptionalism” where the South is different from the North because we’ve had different historical experiences, and then we had a school of thought perhaps exemplified by Howard Zinn who argued that the South is actually the epitome of the American experience and all of the South’s problems are the same problems the rest of the nation has, just writ larger. And now we have globalism, where we now look at the South as maybe a bridge between South/Central America and the U.S. North and Canada and the experiences of those two sides. A kind of hybrid. Er. Other people have explained this way better than me.

Anyway. A thought occurred to me one day. Which is that, if you wanted to, you could set this argument up by looking at a couple of songs about the South. Usually “Sweet Home Alabama” is set up in contrast to “Southern Man” and “Alabama,” but here, all three songs are really about Southern exceptionalism. Neil Young thinks the South is exceptional in a bad way (damn those lynchings!), and Skynyrd thinks we’re exceptional in a good way (family! Blues skies! Muscle Shoals!). And then on Zinn’s side I might point to Randy Newman’s “Rednecks,” which I think is a really interesting song, maybe more interesting than any of Young or Skynyrd’s, though out of all of them Skynyrd’s music is by far my favorite. Still haven’t come up with a proper song to demonstrate globalism. Maybe the place to start looking would be at Afrissippi or someone like that, trying to bridge African music and Mississippi blues. Not really the kind of stuff I find myself listening to much, so I could be wrong.