Jason Isbell, Camo Hats, and the DNC: The Democrats Finally Embrace Country Music
In 2016, at what became an ill-fated celebration to hopefully usher in the first female president, there was not one country music 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 or Americana worlds. This was a mistake, clearly: The attitude was that country music and Southern/rural stuff was for Trumpers, and to be avoided at all costs, and 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.” There are blue voters in those red states, if you get them to the polls, but you have to speak — or sing — their language to get them there.
The first night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, wherein we’ll once again make a go for a female president, looked and sounded a whole lot different from eight years ago. There weren’t big pop-star performances (though surely they are coming), 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. These signifiers have been generally reserved for Trump rallies when it comes to the Venn diagram of music and recent politics, with country music’s conservative core latching on to the jingoist beat in earnest since 9/11, though the alliance between the two dates back far longer.
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By opening their convention with Isbell and Guyton, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz seem to want to change that, with the cherry on top appearing in the form of a Harris-Walz camouflage baseball hat released a few weeks ago — it sold out instantly. But it’s country artists like Jason Aldean, who appeared at the Republican National Convention and engages in the workingman’s sport of country club golf with former president Trump, who like to own this sort of symbolism. His 2019 album, 9, even contained a song called “Camouflage Hat.” That’s the genius work of this one small bit of Harris-Walz merch. The hat reclaims the rural and Southern identity that mainstream Democrats have long ignored, all in with the power of one nifty little cap. Ella Emhoff proudly wore hers last night, while Walz displayed his own — also camouflage — Jason Isbell hat backstage.
Meanwhile, it’s the Trump supporters who are the ones getting country music wrong, soundtracking their TikTok videos in support of the ex-president with none other than the Chicks’ “Not Ready to Make Nice,” which was written after their expulsion from Nashville in the wake of anti-Iraq War comments and their refusal to apologize. This baffling phenomenon by the right seems to come from either an inability to Google, or an assumption that everything country music must be conservative, and it’s hard to decide which is worse.
Somehow, it’s the Democrats who are the ones pushing beyond stereotype and finally getting it. It’s hard not to feel like this is a new understanding from the DNC, that liberals aren’t just listening to streaming pop hits and that Southern folks, Appalachian residents, and small-town people in general who listen to country and roots music often believe in things like basic human rights too. The author Sarah Smarsh wrote about this all in the context of Walz, the governor of Minnesota, being chosen as Harris’ VP running mate: “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.” In other words, there are more who subscribe to Isbell’s “Thank God for the work” message that he sang in “Something More Than Free” onstage at the DNC than in Aldean’s fear-mongering “Try That in a Small Town,” and actually always have been.
It seems like the Democrats are intent on further filling that messaging gap when it came to the 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 all to make sure she and other Black artists do not disrupt the tidy white 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 writes and speaks forcefully for a different version of the South and the Southern person than what our stereotypes gleefully peddle.
The song Guyton performed, “All American,” is like an audible version of the Harris-Walz camo hat: It’s the kind of anthem that white country artists have been singing for decades about the American experience, and about patriotism, but no longer only centers white experience as the 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 American?
This is a furious reframing of not just who the Democrats can reach, but who a Democrat actually is. And they’re country.
This article was adapted and expanded from the country-music newsletter Don’t Rock the Inbox.
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