First of the Month : A website of the radical imagination. The subject of the Truckers' Opera is the "duality" - their word - of life in the land where blues began.
Their country and Southern Rock musics have celebrated that difference and registered the Great Shame of the South as well. All those cheating songs hint that white Southerners knew they were guilty a generation before the Civil Rights Movement. Though they weren't trying to hear that unless they'd had a drink and even then their favorite singers had to slip around the truth. Which was never the whole truth.
White southerners were mocked and demonized as arch-bigots by the rest of country at a time when their racial attitudes weren't much worse than those of most other white Americans. And the society's moral condemnation of them was often polluted by culture vulures' less-than-righteous contempt for "backward" populations below the Mason Dixon line. In the mid's, Okie country rocker Buck Owens sang right back at all the icy people looking down at him from El Norte.
You don't know me But you don't like me Say you care less how I feel How many you that sit and judge me Ever walked the streets of Bakersfield. I walked a thousand miles upon it I've worn blisters on my heels Trying to find me something better Out on the streets of Bakersfield. I once heard Dwight Yoakam sing a cover version of "The Streets of Bakersfield" live a couple years ago. I was sitting behind a white country boy with a crew-cut who'd been up dancing - shaking a leg like a little Elvis - through most of the show.
When Dwight sang "Streets," the kid turned around and wailed the chorus back at all the so-phisticated New Yorkers sitting in the balcony.
