Hootie — yes, Hootie — made the most fascinating video on race this year
This piece ran on Digital First Media sites on July 9, 2013.
Country music star Brad Paisley drew criticism when he took on the tricky subject of race in the music video for “Accidental Racist” earlier this year.
But, meantime, a much more subtle and interesting video on the subject slipped under the radar: Darius Rucker’s cover version of “Wagon Wheel.”
The former frontman of Hootie and the Blowfish, now enjoying a second career as a country crooner, has made a video that in its own corny way is a fascinating meditation on the role of race and myth in the South.
On his most recent album, Rucker, who is black, covered a 2004 song about traveling home to Raleigh, N.C., by the Old Crow Medicine Show that is a staple of Southern bar bands and karaoke venues. The chorus of the song comes from an unfinished sketch by Bob Dylan.
That’s already extraordinary, in a typically American way.
Imagine explaining it to a foreign visitor who knew nothing of American pop culture: A Jewish singer from Minnesota, performing under a stage name derived from a Welsh Catholic poet who died in New York City, wrote a sketch about the joys of heading on a “southbound train” that was then completed by a white bluegrass band from Nashville and covered by an African-American pop/country singer from South Carolina, selling more than a million copies.
On the radio, this uniquely American blend can pass unnoticed. But music videos raise the stakes.
In their original, low-budget music video, played more than 19 million times on YouTube, members of the Old Crow Medicine Show appear dressed in old-timey clothes at a roadside carnival with a group of go-go dancers. It’s a typical slice of Southern Americana, except for the one thing you would be guaranteed to find in the South: Black people.
Raleigh, the hometown the song pines for, was 29 percent African-American in 2010 Census estimates, but not a single black person appears in the original video. That’s an all-too-common occurrence in this kind of modern Southern mythologizing — an airbrushing that allows artists to elide any uncomfortable racial history.
As a black man, Rucker has no such privilege. If he wants to be in his own music video, it’s going to be multiracial.
Each option he had for making the video would present its own difficulties. Setting it in modern times would lose a lot of the nostalgic feel of “Wagon Wheel.” But setting it in the past would mean either ignoring racial differences in the old South or confronting them in a way that would undercut the song’s easygoing charm.
Instead, Rucker opts for a compromise. The video, played about 12 million times on YouTube, begins with him falling asleep on the tour bus, then switches to a dreamlike Southern past, full of cheap laundromats, old Chevy trucks driven by men with full beards and railroad crossings. It’s like an Instagram of a Cracker Barrel waiting area come to life.
Members of the popular country band Lady Antebellum and the reality TV show “Duck Dynasty” make appearances. Interestingly, the video has exactly one more black person than Old Crow Medicine Show’s version: Rucker himself. But no one seems to notice. Even the old white man who picks him up doesn’t bat an eye when Rucker shows a photo of his white girlfriend. Suffice it to say that if you should find yourself hitchhiking as a black man in the pre-Civil Rights South, this would not be advisable.
One brief moment alludes to racial strife. When Rucker arrives at the bar to play, a white bouncer stops him at the door and manhandles him briefly until Rucker’s bartender girlfriend steps in. Even the bouncer comes around, though, and ends up nodding along to the music.
When the song ends, Rucker awakens on his tour bus in present day, and all the people from the dream are there in real life. You half expect him to channel Dorothy back in Kansas and say, “and you were there, and you were there.” It’s a cheesy moment in a cheesy video, but it has a serious undertone.
Rucker’s version of “Wagon Wheel” admits that the mythic South was not perfect — it was a dream after all, and there was that bouncer — but it doesn’t dwell on the past either. When Rucker wakes up, he’s surrounded by white people who work with him and respect him. The modern South, the video argues, may still have work to do, but it has moved ahead, and Rucker himself is the living proof.
After all, back in the days of the mythic South, who would have believed that a black man could one day unironically sing this line written by a white bluegrass band: “If I die in Raleigh, at least I will die free.”
Ryan Teague Beckwith lived in Raleigh for five years while working as a reporter for The News & Observer.
