Sometimes you hear a very familiar song and it strikes you in a completely new way. As a white Southerner descended from old Southern families, I had heard the unofficial anthem of the South,“Dixie,” many times, and not just as the car horn on the Dukes of Hazzard’s car, which they named the General Lee. As a child, I heard the song as a celebration of Southern identity and history, though it didn’t occur to me then that what was being celebrated was really only white Southern history. As I grew older, I came to understand that it was also defending the supposedly noble lost cause of the Confederacy.
For many years, though, it never broke through to me that the song says the quiet part out loud, right there in the chorus. Over and over, the song tells the listener to “look away.” As a child, I understood that looking away as a longing gaze at one’s distant home, somewhere beyond the horizon. But now I hear that differently, as well. Though I don’t imagine it’s what the writer intended, “look away” is exactly what the song asks us to do, to look away from the uncomfortable, unjust or painful. That looking away is now being codified in law in many Southern states, where it is literally illegal to teach the parts of history that make some people uncomfortable. In other words, it is illegal to teach accurate history.
In writing this song, I wanted to push back on the notion that there is only one way to be a white Southerner. I wrote this song in a Southern rock style, which is authentic to who I am and a part of what I listened to growing up, and still do sometimes. Though I am known as a folksinger, I’ve played live on stage with Warren Haynes of the Allman Brothers and Gov’t Mule, and have two of the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd playing on my albums. But this song is somewhat subversive, in that it speaks things that are not often heard against the backdrop of Southern rock. Hannah Garrity, one of my favorite artists, co-created a music video for the song with me, and we had the chance to marry potent images to the words and music, further troubling the waters with “good trouble” in mind.
An annotated version of that video can be found at www.LookAwayProject.com.
My grandfather’s own grandfather
Walked home from the Civil WarFrom Virginia to Columbia, SC
I don’t know what made him join up
I don’t know what he believed
But his legacy has passed right down to me
Way down south in the land of cotton
Stories here are not forgotten
Except when we’d prefer to look away
Rules were written to advantage
So the playing field was slanted
And that’s how it is still working to this day
Look away, look away
I can’t look away from history anymore
You can claim all is forgiven,
You can tie a yellow ribbon
But that old oak tree is rotten at the core
So the monuments to generals are all covered up in canvas
And some people say that’s history they’re hiding
But those statues tell a story that I cannot celebrate
Treating people like those horses they are riding
I must listen to my sisters if I want to understand
Though the story is a painful one to hear
If there’s any hope of healing, there’ll be hurting on the way
I think maybe we should start right now and here
Look away, look away
I can’t look away from history anymore
You can claim all is forgiven,
You can tie a yellow ribbon
But that old oak tree is rotten at the core