The song has an undeniable power. It starts with the unadorned performance, the low-key and plaintive way Oliver Anthony presents us with the story of an American worker toiling during late-stage capitalism. Just Anthony, a big, bearded man who looks the part of southern worker, and his acoustic guitar. A performance that feels genuine, lived.
This is why the song — a self-produced recording and video — has touched a nerve, and run to the top of the country music charts, has sat there for two weeks and likely will hang around a bit longer.
“Rich Men North of Richmond” is a difficult song to make sense of, a working-class anthem, a paean to red-state reaction, a heart-felt ode to Trumpian conspiracy. It was front and center during the first Republican debate, and it has captured the imagination of the political right, even as its writer and singer dismisses political intentions.
Anthony’s response to the public debated over his song, the Saving Country Music blog writes, “has pretty much everyone who initially supported him or steadfastly rebuked him twisted up and second guessing themselves as he refuses to fit nice and neatly into their political binary.”
And yet, there is the song, which is far less a matter of interpretation than Anthony seems to think. Yes, the “English language is interpretive,” as he says, but the song exists in a specific time and was written and is being heard in this moment — a time when a right-wing populism has intersected with conspiracy and backlash.
It’s no accident that the song has become a sort of right-wing anthem and that it was, as Save Country Music writes, “right-wing influencers, politicians, and media types who believed Oliver Anthony was their conservative savior in popular music, singing (Anthony’s) praises to the rafters.” The song encourages this — despite his rhetoric — by pointing to several well-worn tropes — in particular, about government control and welfare.
Still, “Rich Men North of Richmond” is a listenable piece, a song that echoes so much from the folk/country/blues past. Call it an imperfect anthem for working Americans — a song on the same plane as American Graveyard’s “Common Ones,”
which offered an angry populist defense of the “common ones” and a call to “take our country back.” That song, released in 2010, almost predicted Trump.
In “Rich Men North of Richmond” (lyrics from Billboard), Anthony offers a similar defense, one that cannot be separated from Trump and the anger he helped to coalesce and unleashed.
His working-man narrator opens by explaining that he’s “sellin’ (his) soul,” putting in “overtime hours for bullshit pay,” wasting his life and “drag(ging) back home” to “drown my troubles away.” Life happens to him. Victimizes him. Victimizes all who work. Evil forces are at play. The world, this country, are changing, and for his brethren “Livin’ in the new world / With an old soul,” it’s clear why:
These rich men north of Richmond
Lord knows they all just wanna have total control
Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do
And they don’t think you know, but I know that you do
‘Cause your dollar ain’t sh– and it’s taxed to no end
‘Cause of rich men north of Richmond
It’s a sad story and it resonates, though we get a glimpse here that his complaints are more in line with Reagan than Bernie Sanders. The American economy, American capitalism, uses and abuses most of its workers. It chews us up and spits us out. And the lawmakers — mostly, but not all, Republicans — aid in the process, crafting laws that make it more difficult on workers who want to fight back. The “working man,” a class that has to include more than those who toil with their hands, is under siege. But not just from the “Rich Men North of Richmond,” i.e. the politicians in D.C.
Corporate profits are at record levels, which is helping to drive inflation, but Anthony sees the problem in different terms:
I wish politicians would look out for miners
And not just minors on an island somewhere
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfareGod, if you’re 5 foot 3 and you’re 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds
Note the juxtapositions — minors on islands and miners digging coal (some say this is an allusion to Jeffrey Epstein. But it doesn’t have to be); the hungry on the street and the obese eating fudge rounds on the public dime.
The song carries echoes of past anthems. I’m thinking of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, of the Carter Family singing “No Depression in Heaven.” Anthony’s song is in that tradition — as Ted Olson told The Washington Post.
Protest anthems — anti-establishment missives on behalf of a forgotten, rural working class — have a long history in folk music and country music, noted Ted Olson, a professor at East Tennessee State University who studies country music and Appalachia.
He described the song as “just general enough in its message that many listeners are able to project their lives and experiences onto it,” and that
fans may skip over the song’s contradictions — with its lyrics that advocate for the working man while mocking “the obese milking welfare.”
“Unpacking a song involves a lot of these layers of analysis, which maybe a lot of listeners are not wanting to do,” Olson said.
The most obvious parallel is Merle Haggard’s “Working Man’s Blues,” a classic which glorifies what liberals sometimes derisively call “Joe jobs,” while also offering a sly critique of the same culture — the nine kids, the dream of leaving that is unrequited. Even the gratuitous snipe at welfare seems not quite sincere.
Haggard had a hit with “Okie from Muskogee,” which numerous sources say was written not as a reactionary anthem but as a joke (while high), a satire on the southern backlash of the Sixties, and I think we have to understand this song through that lens.
Just as we have to understand Anthony’s song through the lens of the Trumpian zeitgeist and its conspiratorial mindset and White resentment. Like J.D. Vance, Anthony is concerned with the “working class,” but avoids defining what the phrase means. It is shorthand, a kind of rhetorical macro that allows the speaker to avoid the question of race, allowing it to hang in the air. But in the context of Trump’s election, when Vance’s book suddenly became the go-to explainer, “working class” was just a synonym for white workers who felt under siege by taxes, immigrants and demographic change.
Basically, “Rich Men North of Richmond” picks up on the very real sense of disaffection among workers but misdirects his ire. The real culprits are the corporations and big financial firms, as Ry Cooder reminded us on “No Banker Left Behind”
or
Woody Guthrie and
later Billy Bragg and Wilco on “The Jolly Banker.”
We are closing out a a summer of labor unrest, during which workers at UPS, in academia, the auto plants, Starbucks, Amazon and elsewhere have turned up the heat on management. Anthony, rather than going after the real power holders, targets welfare recipients and ill-defined government failures — “the inefficiencies of the government because of the politicians within it that are engulfed in bribes and extortion.”
Anthony’s song is no. 1 on Labor Day, but it fails as a Labor Day anthem.
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Some better choices:
Bob Dylan, “Workingman’s Blues #2:
Bluesman Sleepy John Estes also recorded a song called “Working Man Blues”:
Al Rogers recorded his own version, as well: