Country-bluegrass singer and songwriter Tyler Childers brings a country boy’s perspective to the social and political matters that, well, neighbors from Lawrence County, Kentucky do not come by naturally. The county is tucked up against the West Virginia border and is 99% white.
But as a musician Childers has traveled a bit. In “Long Violent History,” he asks people from places like his rural county to look beyond “tall tales and hearsay and absolute lies” and consider the experience of people unlike them. People like the late fellow Kentuckian Breonna Taylor.
In a video explanation of what inspired the song, Childers asks white fans to do a little self-examination on race and to walk a few steps in the shoes of black neighbors, even if they have never had any:
What if we were to constantly open up our daily paper and see a headline like “East Kentucky man shot seven times on fishing trip“? And read on to find the man was shot while fishing with his son by a game warden who saw him rummaging through his tackle box for his license and thought he was reaching for a knife?
What if we read a story that began, North Carolina man rushing home from work to take his elderly mother to the ER runs a stop sign and is pulled over and beaten by police when they see a gun rack in the truck?
Or a headline like “Ashland Community and Technical College nursing student shot in her sleep“?
How would we react to that? What form of upheaval would that create?
Childers asks rural, white listeners to consider what they might do faced with that treatment:
I mean to say, if we were met with this type of daily attack on our people we would take action in a way that hasn’t been seen since the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia. And if we wouldn’t stand for it, why would we expect another group of Americans to stand for it? Why would we stand silent while it happened, or worse, get in the way of it being rectified?
Perhaps we could find more productive ways to preserve our heritage, he suggests, than “lazily defending a flag with history steeped in racism and treason.” Maybe take up hewing logs or canning food, tanning hides or quilting.
Let’s hope the video gets the play and consideration it deserves.
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