1Moonlight, Mississippi

For the better part of two decades, I’ve been teaching many of my undergraduate Southern Studies classes at the University of Mississippi with the help of one specific country music recording and its accompanying music video: “Sweet Southern Comfort,” a hit for Arkansas native Buddy Jewell in 2003.¹ The song and video were first brought to my attention by a student in Southern Studies 101—a Mississippi native for whom the song perfectly summed up the sweet, friendly, natural, and musical place that this student believed his southern home to be, at least as judged from the paper he’d written. As I brooded on the song and my student’s response to it, the phrase “Pastoral South” came to mind. I discovered in Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan’s study The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature (1980) just the interpretive schema that I needed in order to use Jewell’s paean as a teachable vision of contemporary southern identity.²

MacKethan’s focus isn’t country music, but the intersection of literature and race: above all, the curious postbellum figure of Uncle Remus, the aged former slave summoned into being by Joel Chandler Harris in Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1880) who speaks fondly to attentive white children of the “laughin’ times” before the war. “[T]he plantation regime,” MacKethan argues,

was founded upon an institution which made the innocence which we associate with a pastoral way of life impossible. Close to a third of the Old South’s population were slaves, and surely it was a unique kind of Arcadia which forced human beings to labor in bondage for its support. The most amazing fact of the matter is not merely that the Negro, associated as he is with the South’s guilt and humiliation, is present in the scheme, but that he is absolutely essential to it. He is the central figure and most often chief spokesman in post–Civil War portrayals of the antebellum Arcadia.³

I assign my students the opening chapter of Dream of Arcady in which this passage is found, even though I know that few will sense its applicability to contemporary country music, a world from which Uncle Remus and his fellow slaves are notably absent. On the day we discuss “Sweet Southern Comfort,” I also smooth their way with a handout titled “Constituent Elements of the Pastoral South,” an executive summary of MacKethan’s main points, inflected in ways that center them in the interpretive task at hand. It begins with my own top-line definition:

The pastoral South is a dream-vision of the South as a sweet, warm, friendly, orderly, musical, rustic Eden, a rural place of innocence and interracial harmony that offers a pointed contrast to the world outside the South—a fallen modern world represented as harsh, cold, unfriendly, disorderly, noisy, complicated, northern, and filled with racial discord.

We would be mistaken, I tell them, to imagine the Pastoral South as an exclusively white thing—a Mayberry RFD that is off limits to the imaginative investments of Black southerners. Although my students and I will critique the Pastoral South idea with the help of Vann R. Newkirk II’s article, “The Great Land Robbery,” which explores the way that inheritance law facilitates the loss of Black-owned farmland in the Mississippi Delta, we also explore contemporary Black visions of rural peace, order, musicality, and plenitude evoked in YouTube music videos by Rissi Palmer (“Country Girl”), Sir Charles Jones (“Country Boy”), Bigg Robb and Denise LaSalle (“Blues and BBQ”), and Matt Guitar Murphy (“Way Down South”). One of the ironies of the Pastoral South mode, given its retrograde origins in white nostalgia for the “peaceful,” slave-powered, antebellum life-world, is that it has expanded the expressive palette available to Black southerners—and not just as a set of lies to be dismantled.

As shown by the final bullet point on my handout, MacKethan highlights the need for such double-consciousness. She insists that the Pastoral South, an idealized imaginative construction, is a trap that must be escaped if we are to fully appreciate the power it holds to shape our own and others’ understandings of the region. I have structured the handout’s ten-point list in a way that seduces my students into this deeper reckoning. Borrowing and adapting MacKethan’s language, it begins with straightforward evocations of the small-town Deep South lives many of them know well:

• a slow, simple, pleasurable life
• a life set in nature
• an idealization of order, both natural and social
• music as a part of this southern order, a holdover from the piping shepherds of ancient Greek pastoral
• an assertion of the superiority of rural virtues

Then it complicates the picture, forcing my students to become conscious of the idealization as an idealization, one that drags the South’s messy and uncomfortable history behind it:

• The Old South, with the plantation “big house” and the enlightened master at its center, is idealized as a golden age, a “dream of Arcady.”
• This golden age is associated with childhood innocence.
• Interracial relationships are romanticized/idealized as affectionate, familial, and friction free.
• This land of “rural peace and simplicity,” a “golden agrarian world,” is used for ideological purposes to critique the modern world.
• “Arcadia at its most glorious is an entrapment which if never abandoned can never be honestly explored.”⁴

By the time we’ve worked our way down through this list, worrying each bullet point with the help of additional notes on the handout, my students are willing to grant me a handful of basic premises, including the idea that “nature,” in a southern context, isn’t just deer hunting in the woods, prom photos in the Grove, and lazy spring days drinking beer down by Lake Sardis. It is also Hurricane Katrina and the mass death and dislocations wreaked on New Orleans by that disaster. It is tornadoes that wipe out whole towns like Rolling Fork, Mississippi. What the Pastoral South mode does is airbrush the bad stuff out of the picture, fooling you into mistaking the simplified, sepia-toned snapshot for the truth. This is especially true, I tell them, when the Pastoral South shows up in popular music.

When Jimmy Dean sings “Moonlight Mississippi” (1964) in his gorgeously deliquescent croon, framed by the modern “Countrypolitan” sounds of the Chuck Cassey Singers, lush strings, tinkling cocktail piano, and blue-toned harmonica, he weaves together every Pastoral South cliché in the book, including moonlight and magnolias:

Moonlight, Mississippi, is a whistle-stop town
They take in the sidewalks when the sun goes down.
Life is slow as molasses that drips from a can,
But Moonlight, Mississippi, is a promised land.

With that Deep South talkin’ that’s so pleasant to hear,
Like corn on the cob, it’s mighty sweet on the ear.
There’re just seven houses, one yellow hound,
’Cause Moonlight, Mississippi, is just a whistle-stop town.

Each night on the levee where magnolias bloom,
You never seen such a sight in your life.
Why, that air gets so heavy with sweet perfume,
You can cut it up with a knife.

At night on each plantation, cotton gleams so white. . . .⁵

A molasses-slow pace of life, a small town sanctified as the South’s “promised land,” sweet southern accents, sweet perfumed air, picturesque white cotton produced on multiple plantations without apparent help from human hands—much less the combination of Black day laborers’ hands and mechanized cotton harvesters that mingled uneasily in the Mississippi cottonfields of that era. Sweet southern comfort indeed!

Yet here’s the rub: By October of 1964, when Dean’s song was released, a thousand college students from around the country had descended on Mississippi as part of Freedom Summer, determined to register Black voters and break open a state that was determined to remain baroquely white supremacist. It was in the summer of 1964 that nine white men in Philadelphia, Mississippi, at the direction of the Klan, kidnapped and assassinated civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner late one night, burying their broken, bullet-riddled bodies at the bottom of an earthen dam on a farm belonging to one of the murderers. The bodies of eight other dead Black men were discovered when Navy divers dredged the Bogue Chitto swamp and other Neshoba County rivers and wetlands.⁶ “Moonlight Mississippi” isn’t exactly a lie, I tell my students. It’s poetic truth, an idealized vision. But it’s far from the whole truth about life in the Magnolia State back then.

This revelation disturbs them. It’s a necessary disturbance—at least if they want to become students of the South, rather than dwelling unconsciously in the place they call home.

2Heroic Folk Community Under Attack

My basic argument is that Buddy Jewell’s “Sweet Southern Comfort”—the recording and video together—offers an exemplary rendering of the Pastoral South, one that MacKethan can help us hear and see more clearly. At the same time, I’m intrigued by significant slippage between the “all-natural” goodness of the Pastoral South that Jewell’s song embraces and his song’s reliance on commodities to accomplish its representational work: copyrighted song titles, a trademarked southern collegiate football cheer, a trademarked southern mansion, and, in the song’s title and refrain, an internationally distributed brand of sweet-spicy liquor originating in New Orleans. “Sweet Southern Comfort,” I propose, is actively engaged in product placement and wholly beholden to the capitalist order, even as it seeks to convince us that it is looking away from all that to sound the blessed old-time southern spirit that abides in Dixie’s uncontaminated fields and streams.

We might begin by framing the song with respect to the historical moment in which it first became popular: the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001, and, more temporally proximate, the US-led invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. If “Sweet Southern Comfort,” in MacKethan’s terms, images a land of “rural peace and simplicity,” then that “golden agrarian world” of southern pastoral, she argues, is almost always summoned up for a specific ideological purpose: to “expose or rebuke, escape or confront” the perceived shortcomings of the modern world.⁷ MacKethan was writing about the way in which, and the reasons why, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and other white southern writers of the 1880s offered idealized visions of the old plantation South: “The pastoral quest,” she argues, “is always basically a search for order,” an order that the rapidly modernizing New South, overrun by Yankee entrepreneurs and a newly visible Black bourgeoisie, lacked in the eyes of these writers.⁸ Given the shock to the American nervous system inflicted by 9/11, and given the spectacle of a heartland suddenly mobilized to war, it should hardly surprise us that some country artists were moved by the desire to escape from the violence and confusion of post-millennial America into a reinvigorated dream of a southern arcadia.

Or should it surprise us? The gentled-down version of white southern masculinity offered up by Jewell in “Sweet Southern Comfort” becomes more intriguing if we recall just how loudly the drumbeat for war was being sounded at that moment by the country music establishment. Geographer Andrew Boulton argues, in fact, that the September 11th cataclysm provoked two diametrically opposed responses from country music performers. The first response was what he terms the summoning up of a “heroic folk community under attack,”⁹ a kind of southernism-become-nationalism represented at its most belligerent by Toby Keith’s 2002 hit, “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American).” Keith called out America’s Middle East antagonists as though the 9/11 attack were a gauntlet thrown down in a backcountry clearing, a personal insult to masculine honor demanding rough-and-tumble vengeance expressed as his furious promise to “put a boot in your ass.” A very different response to 9/11 was offered by Natalie Maines, the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks. On the eve of the Iraq invasion and in an implicit repudiation of Keith’s redneck bellicosity, Maines said from a concert stage in London that the group was “ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas,” a comment that immediately torpedoed the group’s popularity among country music DJs and fans and made them personae non grata on the CMA Awards.¹⁰

“Sweet Southern Comfort,” released in the fall of 2003 at a moment when operation Iraqi Freedom had “liberated” Baghdad and transitioned into an indefinite military occupation, also deserves to be read as a response to 9/11 and the Iraq war. It is a love letter to the home front, one that uses the idealizing language of southern pastoral to sound and image Boulton’s “heroic folk community under attack” without ever referring to the attack itself. Jewell’s video offers us an intensely nostalgic image of what has now, by the ravages of war, been transformed into the dream of a remembered southern past, an innocent and peaceful Eden, and it asks us to embrace that “old South” as an image of America’s best and truest self, the “what we’re fighting for” in a time of war.

The video configures Jewell not just as presiding musical spirit—a white man with guitar holding court before a gleaming white plantation house from which an American flag is conspicuously flying—but also as frame narrator. As the video begins, Jewell is speaking tenderly on the phone to an unseen loved one from what appears to be the window of a motel room: “We been touring the Northeast for the past few weeks,” he says. “I’m getting to see a lot of really cool places I’ve never seen before. But to be honest with you, I’m really looking forward to getting home soon.” This opening tableau evokes the traveling musician’s familiar road-weariness even as it frames the Pastoral South vision it is about to offer as the regional antidote to a northeastern “away.” Less evident but equally important, I suggest, is the way in which, in the fall of 2003, this particular frame enables its audience—a country music audience already being exhorted to a heightened patriotism—to identify with the perspective of the weary but resolute US serviceman stationed overseas in Iraq, one for whom an idealized memory of the home front is an incitement to hang tough and fulfill the mission.

I’ve already argued for the broader work this song and video were performing in a post-9/11, post–Saddam Hussein moment when the American nation, now an occupying force in Iraq, looked to the home front for moral and spiritual reassurance. “Sweet Southern Comfort” offers us the Pastoral South with a vengeance, you might say. The friction-free sweetness and innocence of the half-remembered, wholly idealized Dixie it bodies forth implicitly critiques the felt moral monstrosity of our Middle Eastern antagonists, but it also serves as a kind of psychic R&R, a comfort blanket tossed to our weary servicemen and the citizenry as a whole, as our supposedly righteous cause, failing to discover the promised weapons of mass destruction, began its slow and painful slide into a failed occupation. Now I’d like to set that larger frame aside and look more closely not at why but at how the song and video body forth a contemporary Pastoral South. MacKethan calls her study Dream of Arcady; by the end of the first verse, Jewell, too, has used that word “dream”:

Misty sunrise in my hometown,
Rows of cotton ’bout knee high,
Mrs. Baker down the dirt road,
Still got clothes out on the line.

Erwin Nichols there with Judge Lee,
Playin’ checkers at the gin,
When I dream about the southland,
This is where it all begins.

What sort of arcadian southern dreamscape does Jewell sound and image?

After the introductory framing scene and before Jewell begins to sing, the video counterposes the sounds of banjo and harmonica, played at a premodern, clippety-clop mule-wagon tempo, with sepia-toned images of cornfields, daffodils, and, strikingly, a dew-covered spider web.¹¹ This is not the spider-web of southern gothic, betokening spiritual damage and death, but the reverse: a talisman of organic order and communal health, one that sets the scene for what is to come. What strikes any student of the agricultural South is what is not present in this opening montage—or, indeed, with one passing exception, anywhere in the video: field labor. Jewell sings in his opening refrain about “rows of cotton ’bout knee high,” but no human hands—and certainly no Black hands—play any role in the clearing, planting, hoeing, or harvesting of this cotton, corn, or hay. Jewell’s South is a well-ordered field of dreams, a space of play rather than work.

Yet that isn’t quite true. “Mrs. Baker down the dirt road / Still got clothes out on the line.” Here is labor, sort of. Here is poverty, sort of. Were Jewell not so intent on bodying forth a pastoral vision, Mrs. Baker—still living on a dirt road, still apparently forced to live outside the circle of rural electrification and too poor to afford an electric clothes dryer—might be invoked as an embarrassment, a poster child for southern backwardness. But “Sweet Southern Comfort” is pastoral, and Mrs. Baker, a serene gray-haired white elder, thus embodies the pastoral motif that MacKethan terms “the urge to idealize a golden age almost always associated with childhood.” One of the fascinations of Jewell’s video is how many children and young adults it contains, and how thoroughly the South it offers us is pervaded by the theme of childhood innocence. Mrs. Baker isn’t poor, or backward, or to be pitied, at least as represented. She’s beautiful, invaluable, because she’s still there: a moral exemplar and imaginative anchor remembered from childhood. The Pastoral South emerges through precisely these sorts of regressive idealizations.

What about race? According to MacKethan, the most curious thing about the Pastoral South mode as it emerged in the 1880s was the way it didn’t just airbrush away the burdens of slavery but had the audacity to make the aged former slave the spokesperson for the vanished antebellum world, so that he testified not to the horrors of compelled servitude but to the virtues of “old times” before the war. “Sweet Southern Comfort” takes a somewhat different tack toward race matters. Although the first full minute of the video offers us the South as Whitelandia, devoid of Black people—it’s all about white kids, old white men playing checkers, and, when the chorus rings out with understated orchestral grandeur, Jewell in front of the plantation house—the race-theme is eventually introduced, and delicately, in the form of one Black boy playing touch football with the white boys on the plantation lawn and a pair of Black girls braiding each other’s hair on the front steps of what appears to be a much smaller house. To the extent that they apply to southern race relations, the words “sweet” and “comfort” in the title of Jewell’s song are earned only at the cost of a wholesale disavowal of southern history and its burdens. There are no African American adults in the video, laboring or otherwise. The realm of politics, of political struggle, has been erased. Unsurprisingly, the song and video betray no traces of the 1955 school desegregation suit brought by the Black residents of Osceola, Jewell’s hometown, nor the continuing post–Adams v. Rankin County (Miss.) Board of Education intransigence of the Osceola School District that forced the Department of Justice to investigate in 1971, when Jewell (b. 1961) would have been ten.¹² Race relations in this remembered Old South—an Old South defined relationally as one man’s childhood memories of a time before the War—are a friction-free frolic on the front lawn of the big house.

The presiding spirit of the video is of course Jewell himself, guitar in hand, framed by the tall white columns of that iconic plantation home. “This is where it all begins,” he sings, referring not just to his beloved southland but to his own station at the center of it all. As the chorus swells, broadening the soundscape’s premodern clippety-clop with rock’s anthemic grandeur, he stands tall, conjuring a world:

From Carolina down to Georgia,
Smell the jasmine and magnolia,
Sleepy sweet home Alabama,
Roll tide roll.
Muddy water, Mississippi,
Blessed Graceland whispers to me,
Carry on, carry on,
Sweet southern comfort, carry on.

Jewell is the master and orchestrator of this world—surely that was sweet comfort indeed to some white southerners in 2003—and he is, in his open-hearted paternalism toward the children who surround him, as much of a moral anchor as Mrs. Baker and her dirt-road clothesline. In dramatizing what MacKethan calls “the superiority of rural virtues” in this way, “Sweet Southern Comfort” urges us among other things to forget how urban and how interconnected with the rest of the global order the South has become.¹³ Yet even as I make this last claim, I want to qualify it.

What’s striking about “Sweet Southern Comfort” is how heavily its idealizations are indebted to the larger corporate world—indeed, the world of the fallen World Trade Center—that it seeks to evade. The song’s lyrics, in this respect, are in tension with themselves. On one hand, they seek to situate this remembered southern dreamland somewhere back beyond the hurly-burly, the hustle and flow, of contemporary commerce, labor, and commodity relations, including the culture industry. That’s why the lyrics elide field labor, foreground clotheslines and checkers, invoke “catfish on the river” and “fireflies by the creek,” and make beauty out of “rusty cars and weeping willows.” Jewell’s childhood dreamscape is uncontaminated by television and MoonPies, not to mention Kentucky Fried Chicken, Waffle House, the usual ephemera of New South identity formation. All this being the case, why does the song’s title incorporate what is arguably the South’s best-known brand of liquor, Southern Comfort, and why do the two variant choruses lean so heavily on trademarked and copyrighted icons of southern cultural identity?

We’re not talking about a trivial passing reference or two, but about a representational strategy that distinguishes “Sweet Southern Comfort” from a host of earlier southern songs in the pastoral vein, including the Allman Brothers’s “Blue Sky” (1972), which begins “Walk along the river, sweet lullaby,” and ends “Good old Sunday morning, bells are ringing everywhere. / Goin’ to Carolina, it won’t be long and I’ll be there.” Southern rockers like the Allmans, according to environmental historian Bartow J. Elmore, “expressed concern about the degradation of the country’s natural environment and sought to reconnect to an American past far removed from the repressive sterility of the modern commercial world.”¹⁴ If the Allmans leave commodity relations out of “Blue Sky,” why do Buddy Jewell and his songwriters sneak them back in? Why do they offer us three copyrighted song titles (“Sweet Home Alabama,” “Old Man River,” and—in “yellow rose of San Antone”—a blend of “Yellow Rose of Texas” and “San Antonio Rose”),¹⁵ a trademarked SEC football cheer (“Roll, Tide”), and a brand of sweet-but-spicy alcoholic beverage distributed internationally by the Brown-Forman Corporation of Louisville as part of an integrated product lineup that includes Jack Daniel’s, Old Forester, and Tequila Herradura?¹⁶ Why telegraph southern spirituality not by invoking Sunday morning and ringing bells, as the Allmans do, but by invoking Graceland, the iconic Memphis homestead of the South’s most famous and profitable musical brand?

I view this representational strategy as a postmodern attempt to update the Pastoral South: a kind of “Pastoral South 2.0” in which the New South’s commercialism, rather than being rejected, is shrewdly recuperated, so that copyrighted and trademarked things come to seem like comforting tokens of enduring southern realities. The shock of the World Trade Center’s destruction, a material and symbolic attack on the idea of American corporate preeminence, is registering here, I suggest, as a kind of epic reassembly, in Keith Cartwright’s terms: a felt need to knit the shattered world back together by interweaving a rosary bracelet of Deep South states—Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas—with an equally iconic set of southern brands, copyrighted music, trademarked sounds: Southern Comfort, Sweet Home Alabama, Roll Tide, Old Man River, Graceland. Those things, this song seems to say, is who we really are. They’re our best and most enduring South and, as that, our best America. You can knock down our tallest building, but you can’t kill our spirit—or diminish the worldwide reach of our most popular cultural brands. “Sweet Southern Comfort” pretends, in other words, to be an inward-turning love letter to the home front, but it’s also a celebration of the corporatized US South’s global reach and an assertion of continuing American preeminence.