If you haven’t heard, the world loves Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond.”
The song raced up the charts in one day thanks to a social media tidal wave of support for the red-bearded farmer from Farmville, VA.
Before August 9, not many people had heard of Oliver Anthony. He mostly played to the trees and his dogs on about 90 acres of woods.
Every now and then he would get 20 people to show up and listen to him pick and sing.
A little recording studio liked his sound and set up some microphones and a camera on his farm. He sang his soul into the microphone, and that tune has now become the anthem of Jeffersonian America.
The day before it was released, Anthony recorded a little video introducing himself to America, not knowing that it would be viewed nearly a million times a few days later.
He also had no idea his song would be played tens of millions of times in the span of a week.
Amazing really, and it was all thanks to one listener of The Brion McClanahan Show.
Here is the Tweet that got it started:
Some larger accounts shared it and the rest is history. Oliver Anthony was a shooting star.
He performed in front of thousands just a few days later, including country music star Jamey Johnson from Alabama.
Some have called it a “right wing anthem” and the left began piling on. When the right people hate it, you know you are over the target.
Faux conservatives at National Review hate it, too. I’ve warned you that these people are branches of the same Lincolnian tree.
They are all just versions of 1860s New England Republicans.
They don’t get it. Just like they wouldn’t get Hank Williams or Lynyrd Skynyrd, let alone a former factory worker turned farmer from a place they just fly over.
But this kind of American defiance to the establishment has been around for a couple of centuries. Jefferson tapped into it in 1800 and Jackson in the 1820s and 1830s.
Southerners didn’t want to be in a Union with “those people”, while populists in the West and South took aim at the New England mafia in the late nineteenth century.
You can trace that direct line through the Nashville Agrarians, the Southern literary renaissance, and the general Southern renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s with Jimmy Carter, Southern rock, the Dukes of Hazzard, and Smokey and the Bandit.
People loved the South. They admired Confederate heroes, and they thought it was cool to say y’all.
There were Southern artists who knew the score, which is why Hank Williams, Jr. sang “The American Way,” “Dinosaur“, and “I’m Tired of Being Johnny B. Goode.” You can add dozens of other Southern songs to list list of American populist defiance.
“Rich Men North of Richmond” isn’t a tune about rich men causing inflation and taxes, though that is in the song. It’s a tune from the heart and soul of a people who feel left behind and abused by a culture they don’t recognize. That’s why Anthony is an “old soul” in a “new world.”
The progressives fear songs like this because they can’t control the narrative if people are on to their cultural genocide.
But what they really don’t like is someone telling them to shove it.
And for that, Anthony must be canceled.
Good luck.
I discuss his tune on Episode 864 of The Brion McClanahan Show.
