“Tennessee Whiskey” and the Politics of Harmony

Abstract

In 2015, country singer Chris Stapleton, lauded for his allegiance to hard country music, stepped on stage at the Country Music Association annual awards show in Nashville, Tennessee, and knocked out a stunning performance of “Tennessee Whiskey.” The moment was heralded by critics and fans alike as a celebrated return to roots-oriented, traditional, hard country music. But Stapleton's cover version rewrote the song over a historically significant soul groove. In so doing, he presented a musical-political statement about the past and present of country music that challenged its acknowledged racial politics. The analyses presented here, centered on Stapleton and Sturgill Simpson, weave these threads together into a sonic explanation of country music's contradictory senses of genre identity, musical style, and racial politics. They propose a new historical perspective on the confluence of country and soul in the early 1960s, most memorably realized in the two Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music albums that Ray Charles released in 1962. What emerges in conclusion is a subversive narrative that reinvents modern hard country music through a lineage of R&B and soul.