During a recent drive through Southwest Virginia, I came to a region that is credited with giving birth to country music. The setting was the Blue Ridge Mountains. In the early 19th century, Native Americans and people of European and African descent settled along those iconic ridges, and eventually began blending cultures and traditions.
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The Scotch Irish had migrated with their fiddles. The Germans with their harmonicas. Africans, some who had escaped enslavement by using the Underground Railroad that wound through Appalachia, settled in and began hollowing out gourds to make an instrument native to their homeland. It became what we now call the banjo.
Anglo-Celtic soloists and Irish balladeers combined with African “call and response” choruses to create an entirely new music.
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From those roots would come a singer out of Winchester, Va., named Patsy Cline, who epitomized country music and helped spread the genre around the world.
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It’s a delightful bit of Virginia history, beautifully portrayed at several sites along the Shenandoah Valley: at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol, the Southwest Virginia Cultural Center and Marketplace in Abingdon and the Settlers Museum of Southwestern Virginia in Atkins.
I could see the story of those multicultural settlers being taught in Virginia public schools. And without any of the consternation or backlash that taints discussions about the subject these days.
White parents, who think that any mention of race in school is critical race theory — which they claim is a scheme to make their children feel bad about being White — would see that’s not the case.
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After learning about the birth of country music, I wanted to know more about Southwest Virginia. It’s still rural and sparsely populated compared with the rest of the state, roughly 90 percent White, working class and solidly Republican.
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An article posted in September to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics website found that for voters in the state who fit that profile, “racial resentment” was a driving force behind their candidate preferences.
“Conservative policy preferences among white working class voters on a wide range of issues were closely connected to their racial attitudes and specifically to their belief that white people have been losing ground in American society because of unfair advantages enjoyed by Blacks and other nonwhite groups,” wrote Emory University professor Alan I. Abramowitz.
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How did all of that mountain harmony turn into racial resentment? I discovered a history text that helped explain that, too.
In the 1830s, artisans and small farmers along the Blue Ridge were paying higher property taxes than the wealthy planters in the Tidewater region whose property included thousands of enslaved Africans. Before the small farmers could organize to change the tax structure, however, Gov. Henry Wise pushed for expansion of the railroad into Southwest Virginia.
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The railroad did not just disperse slavery but also the white-supremacist ideology that rationalized the system. In “Southwest Virginia’s Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis,” historian Kenneth W. Noe noted that “in a sense, both Northwest Virginia and Southwest Virginia .？.？. unloaded their ideology as well as their goods off the train. Not only did southern modernization and slavery go hand in hand, then, but the determination to defend slavery and the broader economic and social system it held on its back joined them.”
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Not only does this study of history offer clues about the origins of today’s racial resentments, it also shows that once again history repeats itself.
In the last presidential election, more than 60 percent of Southwest Virginia voted for billionaire Donald Trump, who had trafficked in racial fearmongering on the campaign trail and continued to do so while in office. Now, a Trump-endorsed multimillionaire is taking a page from that same book. Republican Glenn Youngkin, in his battle against Democrat Terry McAuliffe to govern Virginia, is riling up the White vote with claims that teaching critical race theory — which is not being taught in public schools — is an attack on White parental rights.
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So under that definition, would we not teach that when Virginia seceded from the Union to become part of the Confederate States of America before the Civil War, residents whose mind-set had not been warped by the railroad and slavery chose to break away to form what would become the state of West Virginia?
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It’s worth remembering that there was a time in Virginia history, even during slavery, when settlers from a variety of races and ethnicities managed to get along better than a lot of people seem capable of today.
Those who lived in the mountains learned quickly that survival depended on cooperation and camaraderie. They worked together, broke bread together and invented new music and dance.
From the various museums and historical sites in the Shenandoah, we learn that the Africans came with sweet potatoes, okra and black-eyed peas. The Cherokee brought the corn, squash and beans. The Irish cooked up chicken and dumplings. At some point, somebody showed up with corn liquor, and that’s when the party really started.
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There was clogging, stomping and flatfoot dancing; the Dutch and English square-dancing with the Africans and the Irish.
And from it all came not just new music and cuisine but in at least one instance, a new ethnicity — a people called the “Melungeons,” who are thought to have European, Native American and African ancestry.
Of course, in Virginia that was outlawed as “race mixing.” But an unjust law couldn’t stop people from being people, from being free. That’s a history lesson to be continued.
To read previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/milloy.
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