Since I live in Richmond, VA, and write about music, I feel obliged to weigh in on “Rich Men North of Richmond,” the song whose YouTube video quickly went viral (45 million views, as of this posting) and now tops the charts.
Composed and sung by the Virginia-based Oliver Anthony (stage name of Christopher Anthony Lunsford), “Rich Men” is a new example of an old tradition in American music: topical or protest songs, cries for recognition and justice by marginalized people – here, people living in hollowed-out communities and employed in dead-end jobs, “working all day, overtime hours for bullshit pay.”
On the video, Anthony sings and plays his guitar in a forest clearing, with dogs lying at his feet and a hunter’s blind in the background. Visually, the production pushes as many cultural buttons as the song’s lyrics do:
Promoted by a number of influential right-wing online and cable-TV commentators, the song was the opening topic in last week’s Republican presidential primary debate. Most of that chatter was not about Anthony’s lament over long hours and low pay, but about his nods toward rightist and conspiratorial fixations: welfare queens, sexual predators, economic and cultural elites seeking “total control.”
Blowback from the left soon followed. “Since I saw that clip of Oliver Anthony singing his song ‘Rich Men North of Richmond,’ the ghost of Woody Guthrie has been whispering in my ear. ‘Help that guy out,’ Woody keeps telling me. ‘Let him know there’s a way to deal with those problems he’s singing about,’ ” Billy Bragg, a British singer-songwriter known for working-class protest songs, wrote in a preface to his video “Rich Men Earning North of a Million.”
Anthony, who mostly has avoided interviewers, opting instead to communicate in social-media posts and video talks, distances himself from ideologues: “It’s aggravating seeing people on conservative news try to identify with me like I’m one of them . . . like we’re fighting the same struggle here, like that we’re trying to present the same message.”
As for the presidential hopefuls, “that song is written about the people on that stage. And a lot more, too, not just them. But definitely them.”
Anthony also has kept his distance from another “them,” music-industry agents dangling management, recording and touring deals. His live performances to date have been gigs in small towns in Virginia and North Carolina. Becoming a rich man south of Richmond doesn’t seem to be a priority so far.
Rather than diving into the ideological dog-pile, I’ll focus on Anthony as a singer and his song as a song.
It’s frequently described as an anthem. It isn’t. Anthems aspire to happy outcomes – “crown thy good with brotherhood,” “we shall overcome some day,” “was blind but now I see.” Their tunes stick readily in the memory, and their refrains are easily sung by a congregation or a crowd at a rally. “Rich Men” doesn’t parse neatly, anthem-style, into verses and chorus or refrain. The song is plaintive, voicing a personal view of what is, not what ought to be. It’s as much blues as country.
It reminds me of the songs (aside from the yodeling) of Jimmie Rodgers, the country/blues singer of the 1920s and ’30s. This one, for example:
Rodgers, a railroad brakeman turned popular entertainer, cast himself as a working-stiff Everyman, not the promoter of a movement. Any political views he might have had were inferred by others. He absorbed the outlook of the people and places around him, and filtered it through his own experiences and sensibilities.
That’s how I hear Anthony’s song and the way he sings it, and how I see the performing persona he has adopted.
The real message of “Rich Men North of Richmond,” I think, comes not from the song’s lyrics but from one of Anthony’s talks: “I don’t know what this country is going to look like in 10 or 20 years if things don’t change. I don’t know what this world’s going to look like.”
That’s a sentiment – an uneasy, unanswered question – that strikes a chord with most of us, whatever our worldview or musical preferences.
Letter V 