Omnipotent Moral Busybodies

C. S. Lewis wrote that “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.”

That was taken from his essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” (collected in God in the Dock), and the core idea is that people who believe they are acting for someone’s own good feel morally licensed to keep going, so their “kindness” never stops and never has to answer to ordinary limits of greed or fatigue. Although that sentence was not written about music, it describes the confiscation of Southern music more cleanly than any of my writing ever has.

The robber baron version of the story is easy to see and easy to resent. A label in New York hears a field recording or a Saturday night band. The singer is signed and the marketing team descends. The Southern accent is corrected. The verses are shortened. The record is sold. That is cupidity. Cupidity can be satiated. Once the check has cleared, the company often loses interest and leaves the original song where they found it. The singer will likely be poorer than the contract promised. Greed keeps the market version of the song and then walks away, leaving the source song still singable back home where it started.

But the Yankee moral busybody never loses interest. He arrives with a conscience that the label man never had and makes a worse claim on the song. He is not trying to sell Southern music. He is trying to rescue and improve the people who made it, which always requires that he take custody. Of course, he does this for our own good.

A folk song has no single owner and no single correct text. It survives because it can change a little every time it is sung. The moment an outsider decides the South cannot be trusted with its own songs, three operations follow, and they follow in Lewis’s order.

First, he freezes a version. The recording machine did this whether the collector meant it to or not. One randomly recorded Tuesday performance becomes “the song.” In the fall of 1937 Alan Lomax recorded three versions of “Rising Sun Blues” around Middlesboro, Kentucky, from Georgia Turner, Dawson Henson, and Bert Martin. All three were drawing on the same song. None of them was the official text. When Lomax published Our Singing Country four years later, he printed Turner’s performance as the version and spliced in verses from Martin. Every later singer who drops a verse or adds a refrain now looks like a deviation from that page instead of a participant in the tradition that produced it. Although the archive is a genuine gift, the gift comes with a price, and the price is where cultural custody begins.

Next, he has the nerve to explain the song to the people who already know it. The ballad that had been a family possession becomes a document. Jean Ritchie’s people in Viper, Kentucky, sang “Barbry Ellen” as a household song with a local name and a local timing. Once it is catalogued as Child Ballad 84, the family is no longer the source. They are a variant of the number. The hymn that had been something actively practiced and performed on a Saturday night or a Sunday morning becomes a specimen. The work song that had been a way to get through the day becomes an artifact. The explanation is always offered as a service, and the service is the new owner’s name on the folder.

Finally, he cleans and corrects it for the South’s own good. The singing is made neater. The slide between notes, the drawl, the bent pitch, get removed so a listener outside the South doesn’t have to suffer the indignity of hearing a Southern accent. Joan Baez’s 1971 recording of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is the clean case. Levon Helm had sung it in his Arkansas accent, as a man remembering. Baez took the accent off and some of the words with it. What reached the charts was a portable anthem fitted to the lesson she already brought. The theology is softened so the specific Christian content gets watered down. Judgment, blood, resurrection, and God get turned into vague uplift or “spirituality” so the song can be booked, anthologized, or applauded by people who do not share the faith that produced it. The local names drop out so the song stops being about a creek, a county, a dead cousin, a named church. Those details are treated as clutter. What remains is a general statement the outsider already wanted: hardship, hope, America, protest, or whatever lesson he already brought with him. Each change is justified as kindness, and none of this is admitted as interference. It is sold as help. The singer will reach more people. The song will be taken seriously. The tradition will be saved from itself. Kindness like that never sleeps, because the reformer is never finished being kind, and the music never stops needing to be rescued from the Southern infidels who created it.

This is the difference C. S. Lewis named. You’d think they could just make music of their own with their vastly superior intellect and leave everyone else’s alone, but that’s never been the Yankee way. The label man may take the profit and go home, but the omnipotent moral busybody stays. He stays in the liner notes which become the written explanation treated as the authorized meaning of the music. He stays in the seminar, because the song is now taught as a case, not sung as a song. The professor’s interpretation outranks the singer’s. He stays in the festival introduction that tells the audience what the song is allowed to mean before anyone has heard a note. He stays in the corrected lyric sheet. He stays in the claim that the people who created and performed the song did not understand what they had.

Southern music has been handled this way for more than a century. Collectors hauled machines into hollows and prison farms and front porches and performed a real rescue. Songs that would have died with the last singer who knew them are still audible because somebody showed up with a disc cutter. That debt is real. The trouble is what happened next. The performance became a text. The text became a possession. The possession became a license to instruct. Instruction, once it has the approval of conscience, does not know where to stop.

The commercial machine did its own damage, and Robert Lewis Dabney would have recognized the pattern. When the industry established itself outside the South, Southern musicians faced a concrete choice. They could make the music they came from, or they could make the music the labels wanted. This is the exact dilemma Donald Davidson wrote about in his only novel. The labels wanted something that fit the commercial conventions of wherever they were headquartered. The bent note, the slurred rhythm, the call-and-response that assumed a crowd rather than a solitary listener were seen as complications. Executives wanted them smoothed, and that is the robber baron. He is certainly greedy, but he is finished when the market is finished.

The omnipotent moral busybody is a different animal entirely. He may despise the label man, and he often does. In the end, the moral busybody still ends up with the same song, only now the justification is virtue rather than sales. He will tell you he is protecting the music from commerce, from ignorance, from the South itself. He will tell you the original singers need a translator. He will tell you the tradition will be safer in a catalog than in a kitchen, or a porch, or a choir loft. He will tell you all this while gutting the song.

Watch what “for our own good” has meant in practice. It has meant that a ballad is more respectable once a scholar has assigned it a number. It has meant that a hymn is more useful once its doctrine has been treated as folklore. It has meant that a country song is more acceptable once the voice has been trained out of the land that produced it. It has meant that the people who sang the song are welcomed onto the stage as cute, quaint color and then dismissed as interpreters of their own work. The confiscation is not always a theft of copyright, but it is always a theft of authority, and authority is the right to say what the song is.

Lewis’s last turn especially belongs because the busybodies never apply it to themselves. The robber baron may go to Hell and still leave you a fiddle tune for your trouble. The busybody may go to Heaven and leave you a corrected text, a moral, and a song that no longer belongs to the people who sang it. He sleeps well. He always does. It is the satisfying sleep of the righteous.

The South does not and never has needed that kind of rescue. Oral tradition is not invincible, and some of it has admittedly died for lack of a memory or a machine. But preservation is not the enemy here. Custody is. A recording that helps the singers remember a song they already know is a useful tool. A recording that makes the collector the source of the song steals the song away from the culture. For our own good.

“For our own good” is always the tell. The busybody seizes the music by his concern. He is wounded on behalf of the tradition. He is patient with the singer. He is shocked that the lyric was left so plain, or so local, or so devout, or so uninterested in the lesson he came to deliver. His shock is the warrant. Once he is shocked, he is authorized. Once he is authorized, the work of improvement has no natural end. If Yankees want to be in charge of American music so badly, they should go make some. Southerners should be in charge of Southern music. Period. That is not a complaint against legitimate collectors, scholars, or record men as such, but it is a limit. The limit is that a song made by particular people in a particular place does not become public property the moment it is admired. Admiration is not ownership. Annotation is not ownership. A good conscience is not ownership. Yankees didn’t “discover” Southern music any more than they “discovered” Plymouth.

C.S. Lewis understood the type. The omnipotent moral busybody will never rest while any unimproved thing remains in reach, and Southern music has been within reach for a long time. The robber barons took what they could sell and, in many cases, moved on. The omnipotent moral busybodies stayed to finish the job, and they are still finishing it. They will finish it for our own good, and they will not stop until they have changed Southern music to match what they believe. They can finish that task, but our music still does not belong to them.

Southern music is still played and sung, as Southern music, in the places that made it. Shape-note and Sacred Harp conventions still meet in Alabama, Georgia, Texas, and Mississippi. They sing from the book on Saturday and Sunday. That is living worship and practice, not a display for tourists. Independent Southern gospel still uses Christian doctrine in plain terms. Red dirt and Texas dancehall country still play on local circuits without an announcer telling the crowd what the songs mean. In Southern Appalachia, from southwest Virginia through the mountain counties, bands still name the towns they come from and do not accept Americana as the official category. Southern rock is still made by people from those same towns who know how to bite.

That is not a revival or a retrospective. Those people never handed the songs over in the first place. They refused to be reconstructed.

Southerners are rebels, and rebels keep their culture and keep using it. Independent ownership of Southern music works the same way. We don’t need to wait for an outsider to save us and explain it. The omnipotent moral busybody can keep the corrected lyrics, the lecture, and his good conscience. And we can go right on singing and playing the way we always did before he showed up.

The most important part, which is deliciously overlooked by the omnipotent moral busybodies, is that we never actually ever let go of our ownership.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.

Tom Daniel

Tom Daniel holds a Ph.D in Music Education from Auburn University. He is a husband, father of four cats and a dog, and a college band director who lives back in the woods of Alabama with a cotton field right outside his bedroom window. His grandfather once told him he was "Scotch-Irish," and Tom has been trying to live up to those lofty Southern standards ever since.

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