Oliver Anthony's viral song takes a divisive turn

By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World

Last week was the start of classes at The University of Tulsa, where I teach a course called Music as Social Action. It’s a deep-dive through histories of American protest songs, analyzing different ways political messaging has been deployed through popular music. Oklahoma’s own Woody Guthrie, as you might imagine, is our starting point.
 
Or he was — until Oliver Anthony hit No. 1 on the first day of class.
 
Anthony’s viral hit, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” is indeed a rich pedagogical example of popular music tuned with ideological intentions. Just when you might think the guys-with-guitars model of musical protest is a sepia-toned relic, here’s a profound case of a Woody-era aesthetic married to the speed and reach of digital-era distribution. As we started discussing it in class, it was easy to marvel at both another potent case of the lightning-fast path to celebrity afforded by the internet (as well as a news culture obsessively monitoring it) and especially the age-old power of the simplest musical forms to wield an affective wallop.
 
The song — posted as a YouTube video, written and performed by a Virginia man only known to a scant few as recently as July — taps into a deep well of American musical protest, opening with time-worn, working-class laments about “sellin’ my soul” and “workin' all day” for little recognition or reward, then lamenting the bite of taxes and inflation, and the struggle of the have-nots against the ever-increasing haves (specifically, per his title, those north of Virginia in the nation’s capital). His refrain sighs, “It’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to / For people like me and people like you / Wish I could just wake up and it not be true / But it is, oh, it is.”
 
Anthony knows his subject matter intimately, and I say that not only because I’ve read about him (a worker injured in a paper mill in 2013 who’s suffered personal setbacks since) but because it’s all too apparent in his voice. Powerfully sung, Anthony lists his complaints with a rawness that grows hoarse as he climbs the musical scales, as if he’s been hollering about these problems a good long while.
 
What’s less impressive, though, is the content of the song’s character. Like much of the criticism since, many of my students said Anthony almost had them … until the fat-shaming. “Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat,” Anthony sings, extending another valid concern that has echoed within folk songs for generations. But the next lines sour along with their initial metaphor: “And the obese milkin’ welfare / Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.”
 
The switch in rhetoric is jarring, not only because of the clumsy imagery but because Anthony so suddenly shifts his sights from the bosses who won’t give working people a break to other downtrodden people. Aside from the meanness of the lines, it signals the uncritical pervasiveness of right-wing talking points and a gullibility of people who are genuinely suffering simply to parrot them, no matter who else may be injured in the process. (The most poignant headline about Anthony’s song was in Christianity Today: “Oliver Anthony’s Viral Hit Doesn’t Love Its Neighbors.” That article is a long-read worth the time, a powerful narrative about the stigma of food stamps and how the last thing we need is a potent piece of pop culture adding new insults to old injuries.)
 
Billy Bragg was quick to respond. He’s a folksinger, too, a British icon who’s been singing songs in praise of laborers since the early ’80s. Bragg spent some personal time in Green Country back in 1997, getting to know the landscape a bit ahead of the release of Mermaid Avenue, his album of Woody Guthrie songs with the band Wilco. The year after that, Bragg was the headliner at Okemah’s first annual Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival. Last week, Bragg tweeted that, ever since Anthony’s song had made its splash, “the ghost of Woody Guthrie has been whispering in my ear.”
 
Within the time it took Anthony to become a household name, Bragg wrote and posted an “answer song,” now a kind of dialectic tradition in pop music, where one artist responds to the ideas of another in kind. Over Anthony’s borrowed melody, Bragg’s lyric, “Rich Men Earning North of a Million,” takes Anthony’s position to task for directing its anger at the wrong rich men: “If you’re selling your soul, working all day … Well, nothing’s gonna change if all you do / Is wish you could wake up and it not be true.” Bragg’s solution — as it’s been throughout so many of his songs — is simple: “Join a union / Fight for better pay.”
 
That’s gotta be Woody’s ghost, all right. The labor politics, sure — Woody was a staunch supporter of workers’ unions and wrote some rollicking songs about why every one of us should be card-carrying — but it’s broader than that. The spirit behind Bragg’s ready answer is not just a haunting by Woody’s particular view of social relations but of a “do something about it” energy that fueled nearly everything Woody sang and said, played and painted. One of the concepts we talk about in my class is supplementation, the idea that a communicated message encourages actual action. Woody loved people singing along with his sprightly tunes, but that was rarely an end goal. Rather than sitting there gawking at him, Woody wanted his words to pull people out of their seats — to get up, march somewhere, get things done.
 
His most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land,” was itself an answer song in that spirit — a response to the omnipresence of Irving Berlin’s (via Kate Smith) “God Bless America” in 1940.
Woody’s perspective as he scribbled out lines about all those “wheat fields waving”: God already gave us talent and the brawn. He gave us this bountiful land. He didn’t do all that so He could keep carrying us. We gotta get up and apply our God-given gifts to solving our own problems. That’s how America had been blessed.
 
Woody also might have cautioned a singer like Anthony to redirect his salvos. His lyrics tend to respect any and all people involved in whatever mess we’re singing about. One of his most frequently quoted passages declares, “I hate a song that makes you think you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. I’m out to fight those songs to my very last breath.”
 
But he also targeted rich men in any direction from Richmond. One of the lyrics in the archives at Tulsa’s Woody Guthrie Center that I’ve long wished some artist would put new music to is titled “More Than Your Share”: “You can dwell in your grandest of mansions / You can wear your jewels in your hair / Your wealth won’t get you to heaven / If you’ve got more than your share.” Social equity, real Christian values — maybe it wouldn’t be as viral a hit as Anthony’s tune but definitely a song that would resonate far and wide today.
 
The word “union,” though — that meant far more to Woody Guthrie than one factory’s labor struggles, and his larger perspective is of increasing urgency today. Woody wrote about union philosophically, historically, spiritually. In a typescript prose draft in the archives titled “War Songs and Work Songs,” he discusses his reasons for writing the kind of songs he wrote. Part of the motivation is didactic (“Songs have got to be a schoolhouse of a certain kind …”), but most of it is driven by plain ol’ fellowship: “Songs are supposed to help remind you of the simple fact that you ain’t in this old world all by your self, there’s a pretty big bunch of us walking it with you.”
 
The “war songs” part of this text — penned amid WWII — includes some (typically rambling) insights about countering Nazi propaganda, which winds up trumpeting a far more accepting ideal of how to make America great again than most have heard in the public sphere in some time:
 
“Our country here is called the Union. … The word ‘union’ means ‘all hooked together’ like a big high rolling train. … And as long as it’s all hooked up in good shape, we got a United Train, that is, a train that’s Union, I mean, a train that can skim the rails and wheel in the stuff it takes to get to Freedom where we’re all bound. And then, well … what if somebody in one of those cars was to say, ‘I’ll unhook this car because a red man, or a green man, or a black or a polka-dotted man made all of this carload, an’ I don’t like them colors of folks, so I’ll unhook their car.’ You’d be doing just perzactly what Adolph would like for you to do — hurting the work of your own American people …”
 
Anthony’s song addresses real problems, urgent woes, age-old needs. It shouldn’t be partisan. But the greatest threat to working people or rich folks today are the efforts to make it perzactly that — to divide us, to sow separation, to work against that broader idea of union. The only route out of any mess we find ourselves in is aboard the same train.
 

Thomas Conner is a former writer and editor at the Tulsa World. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The University of Tulsa.