Sing Me Back Home

Abstract

This paper examines the role of country music in the political life of the Young Patriots, a radical leftist group composed of white southern migrants to Chicago that allied with the Black Panther Party during the 1960s and 1970s. It begins by taking up scholarly accounts of the Republican Party's strategic embrace of country music during the era before examining the ways in which the Young Patriots used country music as a tool to organize in their local community. It argues that by grounding their analysis of country in the political economy of their neighborhood of Uptown Chicago, and institutions particular to migrant enclaves—especially the urban “hillbilly bar”—the Young Patriots offered an interpretation of country's politics that runs counter to the racialized business logic that governed Music Row and White House as well as more contemporary narratives about country music's essential political intransigence. Finally, it offers provisional thoughts on how this case study illustrates a fundamental challenge for political progressives invested in country music: how to organize the complexity of a genre whose politics were—like the politics of the working-class—often divided against itself and expressed in deeply contradictory ways with regards to central political issues like race, gender, and the nation, and what it means to put those organized politics to work.