Bring Our Country Back : Country Music, the Southern Strategy and the 1968 Presidential Election
On the campaign trail for the 1968 Presidential election, American Independent Party candidate and former Alabama governor George Wallace appeared on a local country music television programme in Oklahoma City. In the world of American politics, this seemed to be something new. Gene Roberts, writing in the New York Times, reported that Wallace smiled broadly when he heard a hillbilly band picking and singing [&] country music standards. Wallace praised the music and performers in effusive terms, making clear what had been implicit for the duration of his campaign: People that listen to the kind of music you are playing tonight are the people that are going to save this country. The studio audience, Roberts described, whistled, applauded and cheered. In the year of international revolutions, country had apparently clarified its role as the music of choice for the American counter-revolution a cultural shift that has ramifications down to the present day.This paper will explore the various roles played by country music in the Presidential election of 1968. In particular, it will examine its profound relationship to both Wallace's campaign and Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy. The use of country music in Southern political rallies was, in and of itself, nothing new. But the 1968 election ushered in a new, intimate relationship between the country music industry and the new conservative ascendancy. George Wallace's campaign was crucial to this development. As Paul Hemphill, in Nashville at the time, phrased it, Music Row was practically a battlefield command post for George Wallace. But what Wallace started, Nixon and his campaign team progressed in the formation of their Southern Strategy. As well as commissioning a country influenced campaign song Bring Our Country Back they recruited their own country performers to reach out to what Mississippian Republican Fred LaRue termed a special kind of audience. This established a relationship which lasted throughout Nixon's presidency, and still has significant resonance today. But in examining the conservative appropriation of country music, it is important not to obscure the contradictory role that country music played in America at this point. For in 1968, in search of the Nashville sound, the hippies were also on their way to Music Row, and country music was set to become one of America's most contentious cultural battlegrounds.
Thomas Ruys Smith, University of East Anglia