I began to wonder about Dwight Yoakam’s #1 country hit I Sang Dixie in the context of the antebellum
South I learned about in U.S. History recently. By 1861 slavery was firmly entrenched in the South, while
many Northerners had only a vague knowledge of it atrociousness first hand. Before I learned about
this in class I had simply assumed Yoakum’s songs spoke of love, guitars and Cadillacs. I have always
been a fan of his so I decided to listen to the album today after reading of songs about Dixie sung by
Southerners around the time of the Civil War. Thinking also of the famous “rebel yell” that struck fear
into the hearts of Yankee soldiers, this too caught my attention, knowing the lyrics of Yoakam’s I Sang
Dixie. My imagination led me to having remembered him singing “rebel cry,” but after listening to the
song again and again, I realized he was actually singing “rebel pride.”
This song, written by one of Bakersfield’s own, speaks of an old transplanted Southerner rotting away
“on this damned old LA street,” due to alcoholism. All he wants to do is get back home to Dixie. Robbed
of his rebel pride by the bottle, the dying man gives out his wisdom to Yoakam’s character. “Run back
home to that Southern land, don’t you see what life here has done to me?” He then closes his blue
eyes, and dies in Yoakam’s arms. With death, the man’s spirit returns to his precious Dixie. My first
reaction was to take seriously this reference of reverence held by Southerners since the Civil War for
their “Southland,” their “Dixie.” At first, to me, it seemed as if Yoakam was equating the Old South, the
slave-holding South, with heaven, or at least certainly much better than Los Angeles. Looking at that
way, it was easy to assume Yoakam an undercover racist, if one assumes the worst. Admittedly, my
imagination did run away with me as I considered that I had admired this man’s music, only to find him
so dismissive of those who disapprove of Southern pride that he put it to music. Unfortunately, I must
say that I even tried to rationalize away this notion that Yoakam might be a racist because I always
thought he was a tender-hearted man.
Then I started thinking deeper. This song came out in 1989, but written even before that. Even as a
figment of Yoakam’s imagination, this old man, dying of alcoholism in the 1980s, could have been
anywhere from fifty to a hundred years old. The dying man, real or imagined, could not have been alive
before 1889, over two decades after the Civil War ended. So he could not have been yearning for the
antebellum Dixie but rather the South of the Lost Cause, where pride of place reigned supreme; the rest
of the country be damned! Realizing the man was not alive during slave days, the song does not appear
offensive to me at all. Once I realized that this good ol’ boy from Dixieland just wanted to go home
before he died, I understood it. He simply misses the life of his younger days, as he feels his own
slipping away. This does not seem any different that someone showing reverence for “the hood,”
despite its violence and oppressiveness, or another person flying the flag of a different country. With all
this in mind, Yoakam’s other songs referencing the South, or his catchy Streets of Bakersfield, are not so
easily misunderstood. Even if he is thumping his chest with rebel pride in any of his songs, a fan can
show great reverence for Yoakam’s because his tunes are oh so right!