HE SINGS AND HE YODELS, he plays half a dozen instruments and he whistles, he’s about to tour Australia with Margo Cilker and he makes modern records with the feel, sometimes source material too, of early decades of the 20th century. But most of all, he speaks up.
From Fayateville, Arkansas, with family roots in Arkansas and the Missouri side of the Ozarks, Nick Shoulders is a musician and a Southern man who is not going to go quietly. That’s whether you’re talking worker’s rights, the multi-ethnic history of the region, or the environment, as in the song Bound And Determined, from 2019’s Okay, Crawdad album, where he sings “You think you’re country/You lay a claim unto the soil/If you were country/You’d save your land from being spoiled/Do you drink water? Do you breathe air?/I think if you were really country you would fucking care.”
Along with people like comedian/commentator Trae Crowder – the self-described “liberal redneck” from Tennessee whose aim, and the subtitle of one of his books, is “draggin Dixie outta the dark” – Shoulders is a rebuttal of so many assumptions about the South, and especially its men. Assumptions made by its supposed defenders (from the right wing political/media universe) as much as its detractors (from urban know-it-alls elsewhere in the country, and the world), right down to those who decide whose music is approved.
With last year’s boisterous, band-led album, All Bad, not in favour in the halls of Nashville, it’s useful to know Shoulders’ definition of himself as a footsoldier in "southern vernacular music with hard syncopation and the influences of historical inequity".
Yeah, I still don’t know why the Grammys haven’t got that as a category yet either.
“I think ‘country music’ is a lot easier to stomach even if it is not particularly accurate,” Shoulders says from his home, dressed for the heat of summer’s last burst.
And it’s a lot easier to fit on the base one of those Grammy or CMA trophies.
“That’s true. I’ve never seen one of those but I’m sure there’s not a lot of room on them,” he says, adding with a wry chuckle, “I don’t think anyone should be shocked we haven’t seen one of those.”
What he does have, as can be seen over his shoulder sitting on a mantlepiece, is a portable record player, one of those small suitcase-like boxes that trade fidelity for portability. It’s real and it works.
“I collect 45s, I’ve got tons of them here, so whenever I get a new set of 45s I test them first and that’s my test rig I take when I go record hunting,” Shoulders says. “And this one’s funny because it plays 33, 45 and 78 – you just flip a little dial and if you’ve found this nice George Jones 12”inch you can play that, and if you then find a Fred van Epps 78 from 1919 you can throw that one on there.”
And don’t we all need somewhere to play our circa-1919 78s?
Now, usually the 78 is the province of the complete basement-dweller collector who never lets anyone even thinking about breathing on his records, or someone for whom this music has always been part of their life, as it was for their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. Living history in other words. Which one is Shoulders?
“I like to say, just based on my family’s singing traditions and how I’ve experienced music, that it’s in my bones. Maybe country and traditional music is much more an anthropology project than anything and I just happen to be the partial subject of the anthropology project,” he says.
So when I get to really find these old, almost fossils, of music that are from the 1910s and 1920s I really must say that the world I’m hearing about all day – endless wars and bank failures and dust bowls – sounds a lot more like this world than the one I hear on most modern Americana and country records.
“Even if they do feel archival and archaic and perhaps dated in that sense, the content and the struggles of working class people, and the cultural context in which it is created, I still live there. I’m still in Arkansas, I still live next to a creek that was the site of a Civil War battle. This history is not dead for me; it’s alive in me, and I feel like I’m living within the arc of that.
(As an anthropological aside, all this could also explain the Shoulders haircut – what one might term a historical mullet, sometimes bleached up the sides. He cackles at this. “Can you tell I got struck by lightning? I think when you look someone like Webb Pierce in the 1940s, wearing a bedazzled suit and looking like just a total crazy person, people thought that looked nuts then too.
"It’s only now, with the benefit of hindsight that we are like, oh cool the Nudie suit is a historical part of country music. That was freaky stuff back in the day, it was wacko to look like that. So all I’d say is I feel like I’m also living in that tradition.”)
There are some people – and we could name them but they and their cat lady-fearing views are getting enough attention at the moment – who claim to know what it means to be southern or Appalachian or Midwestern, and they tell us it means a certain type of person, a certain type of thinking, a certain look or colour or religion. Does that irritate or spur this Arkansas boy?
“Something I have learned – having grown up entirely in the post-Confederate experience of Arkansas, a place that’s defined entirely by enslavement, the Trail Of Tears, and the Civil War – that leaving Arkansas I suddenly became so aware of how not only misrepresented but deeply misunderstood the South in general was by people in this country. So I can’t imagine outside of it,” says Shoulders.
“It’s worth pointing out that the South, the former confederate states, this is the least white region of the country. It’s also the poorest region of the country. And the fact that the states that practised the most brutal form of labour exploitation in the 19th century are now also the poorest and most repressed states in the 21st-century, that is no accident. There is a clearly defined line of cause and effect there.”
But, but, but … this is carefully cultivated, carefully airbrushed history he’s undermining here. Country music history at that.
Shoulders isn’t having any of that, arguing that “America in general is redefining its history, reconciling with its dark past and trying to fix the problems of the present by saying, wait we never solved the problems of the past”, so why shouldn’t country music play its part because “country music as a vehicle for that experience of the disaffected, of rural and working people, if we trace it back to its origins you immediately and always find yourself in the former confederate states”, and that means people like him.
“The idea of addressing the problems that never got solved around enslavement and the Trail Of Tears and the Civil War, that lives in these songs, and that lives in the dialect that people are affecting, if we are to have any chance of solving those problems, the soundtrack to that history has to have an honest face on it.”
Which brings us back to that not-so-honest scion of the Midwest and South, the Silicon Valley-financed provocateur fanning hatred.
“All that is to say that that [cat lady-fearing, racist-adjacent political] person is full of it. That person doesn’t live where I live and didn’t experience what I’ve experienced,” Shoulders says simultaneously polite but with bite. “Even if I am a white male of entirely European heritage who came from a Southern Baptist singing family, I’m not the start and end of the genre and where it comes from and what it’s meant to represent and whose problems it’s meant to represent.
“So to represent the hybrid culture, the racially and culturally diverse reality that is the American south, that is a burden and responsibility that I happily take on because the misrepresentation of it has horrible consequences, and America’s political reality is a representation of those consequences.”
And those consequences are not just on the demonised “other”, one day the Hmong fishers, the next Haitian factory workers, but blow back to those supposedly being championed, who are categorised and dismissed as a single bloc or a single mind.
“I think if I didn’t truly deeply care about the fate of not only these traditional music forms but the working class and diverse origins of those traditions, I wouldn’t write these songs,” argues Shoulders. “It’s not from a place of ‘oh I hate it so I’m going to disparage it’; no, it’s I care about it so profoundly that deceit abused and weaponised for systems of oppression is intolerable.”
In which case saying nothing, or worse still acquiescing, is anathema to Shoulders.
“It feels second nature to me, it feels almost like a reflex, to write songs like that, to push back against the assertion that country music is supposed to represent only one experience,” he says. “And I also feel that the tradition is not just sonic; the tradition is pushing back against systems of power. I think that when you listen to Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, and early blues and stuff, you are listening to people who are pushing back.
“That one of the first commercial hits in country music history [Single Girl, Married Girl] was a feminist anthem that Sara Carter sang in the 1920s, that should tell us everything about how far we have drifted from where this music comes from.”
TOMORROW: In part two of this interview, Nick Shoulders gets really radical by bringing joy, and dancing, to the fore. In music and politics. “It’s not an act how gleeful I can come across, but there is a seriousness to this because they both are so important. They are coequal in their value to me: maintaining joy and asking the hard questions … If we lose our joy, if we are allowed to be crushed and subjugated, they win.”
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Nick Shoulders and Margo Cilker play The Factory Floor, Sydney, October 9.
Out On The Weekend: Ballarat October 11; Williamstown, October 12; Korumburra, October 13
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