Outlaws of the American Dream

About a year ago, Oliver Anthony released his song “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Although establishment critics dismissed it as a one-hit wonder peddling an “incoherent form of populism,” the lyrics participate in country music’s long tradition of protesting the status quo and centering the perspectives of marginalized rural and working-class Americans. 

Livin' in the new world With an old soul
These rich men north of Richmond
Lord knows they all just wanna have total control
Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do
And they don't think you know, but I know that you do
‘Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end
‘Cause of rich men north of Richmond.

With 174 million views and counting on YouTube, the song is much more than a flash in the pan. It’s an anthem for “people like me and people like you.”

Anthony’s success is part of a larger boom in country music. According to The Economist, in 2023, 36 percent of Spotify’s top fifty songs streamed in America were country, up from 2 percent in 2016. At the center of the boom is a rediscovery of “outlaw country” in the mold of Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard. Stars like Chris Stapleton, Colter Wall, Charley Crockett, and Zach Bryan (and even Post Malone, who’s best known for rap and hip hop) are returning to the heart and soul of the genre.

This is a positive development and may even portend a renewal of the affection for our national home that suffuses the music of Haggard and Jennings. In light of this recovery of outlaw country, it’s worth reflecting on the legacy of the men whose lives and songwriting most defined the genre’s sound and thematic concerns.

Influenced by the dominance of rock and roll, record label executives in the 1950s and sixties pushed the “Nashville Sound,” a polished, pop-oriented country sub-genre designed to replace the gritty honkytonk style and appeal to a broader audience. The labels went so far as to restrict artists from writing their own songs. Waylon Jennings, in his autobiography, laments this: “We loved the energy of rock and roll, but rock had self-destructed. Country had gone syrupy, dripping honey all over its sentimentality.”

A small but determined group of musicians tired of this control over their art broke with the Nashville establishment. These “outlaws”—which included Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson in addition to Haggard and Jennings—wrote songs that were raw, authentic, and remained true to the core themes of the country music tradition. Those themes had been most clearly expressed in the work of Jimmie Rodgers: the freedom of the traveling man; the struggles of the working class; love and heartache; death’s inevitability; and the life of the outlaw. 

This pursuit of creative autonomy coincided with the social upheaval of the 1960s and seventies, and outlaw country acquired a decidedly political tenor. Dissatisfaction with the Vietnam War fueled songs like “Galveston” by Glen Campbell (1969), “Saigon” by John Prine (1979), and “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” by Kenny Rogers (1969). Merle Haggard, for his part, pushed back against anti-war protesters with “Okie from Muskogee” (1969), where he indicts the “hippies out in San Francisco” and claims that where he is from, they “still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse.” And in “The Fightin’ Side of Me” (1970), he says to those critical of America: “If you don’t love it, leave it, / Let this song I’m singin’ be a warnin’.” 

Merle Haggard was born in 1937 in Oildale, California, a town founded by Dust Bowl migrants. His parents, James and Flossie Haggard, raised him in a “boxcar home.” A devout Church of Christ member, Flossie had prayed during her pregnancy that her son would inherit his parents’ love of music. James played guitar in a band, and she played the organ at local gospel gatherings. Her prayers were answered: Even as a baby, Haggard would bounce his feet to the sounds of country music.

Haggard grew up listening to country classics on the family radio. He was especially taken with Jimmie Rodgers and would go on to record an album of Rodgers covers, Same Train, a Different Time. Rodgers’s themes became embedded in young Merle’s soul, shaping not only his songwriting, but the way he lived his life.

Haggard’s early life was marked by illness and loss. In 1946, he contracted Valley fever and spent two months bedridden, his mother praying by his side. Months after he recovered, his father died of a brain hemorrhage. The loss cast a long shadow over Haggard’s life, perhaps contributing to the rebellious behavior that would follow. 

In “Daddy Frank (The Guitar Man),” Haggard describes his father as a hardworking man, singing that he didn’t “once remember goin’ hungry.” His parents “counted on each other.” Haggard’s life, however, was a constant push and pull between sin and salvation, in spite of his mother’s prayers that he would follow a righteous path. His song “Mama Tried” (1968) is a poignant reflection of this struggle: 

No one could steer me right, but Mama tried, Mama tried 
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading I denied 
That leaves only me to blame, ‘cause Mama tried.

As a teenager, Haggard was frequently in and out of jail, mostly for theft. He even acquired a knack for breaking out of juvenile detention centers. Then in 1957, at the age of twenty, he was arrested for attempted robbery of a roadhouse in Bakersfield, California, and incarcerated for three years at San Quentin State Prison. Despite a rough start—he launched a gambling and brewing racket—his encounters with death-row inmates ultimately convinced him to change his life. In 1972, Gov. Ronald Reagan pardoned Haggard, now a successful country music star, of all his past crimes.

He never shied away from singing about his criminal escapades, his hard upbringing, his bad decisions, and his love for his nation. Many working-class Americans resonated with Haggard’s story. His lyrics were heartfelt and authentic, speaking to the struggles and hopes of ordinary people. In “Workin’ Man Blues” (1969), Haggard sings:

But I keep my nose on the grindstone, I work hard every day
Get tired on the weekend, after I draw my pay
But I'll go back workin', come Monday morning I'm right back with the crew.

Haggard was, in every sense, the poet of the common man.

Waylon Jennings, like Haggard, grew up in poverty. He called his family “dirt-poor” because they “had the floor to prove it.” As a kid he longed to escape his small town of Littlefield, Texas, which was “so flat your dog could run off and you could watch him go for three days.” As he kneeled in the cotton fields outside of town, the whistle of the freight train would “sound like death” because he “wasn’t on it.”

Like Haggard, Jennings was influenced by his parents' musical inclinations and Christian faith. Both Flossie Haggard and Jennings’s mother Lorene were active in their local Church of Christ, and Lorene even wanted one of her sons to become a preacher. Jennings gave it a shot to satisfy her, but ultimately came to resent this part of his upbringing. “Of all the religions I’ve run into,” he said, “the Church of Christ has probably got it wronger than anybody. They’re self-righteous, narrow-minded, and truly believe they’re the only ones going to Heaven.”

Jennings was troubled by the distant, punitive God he heard preached in the Church of Christ, and he questioned how a loving God could allow so much suffering in the world and yet blame humanity for original sin. He eventually abandoned his Christian faith in favor of a personal conception of God unbounded by doctrine—a conception sociologist Christian Smith has named “moralistic therapeutic deism.” In “I Do Believe,” a song Jennings considered his best, he lays out his position:

I do believe in a higher power One that loves us one and all Not someone to solve our problems Or to catch me when I fall He gave us all a mind to think with And to know what's right or wrong He is that inner spirit That keeps us strong.

Jennings’s view of religion paralleled his fight for musical freedom. He understood himself and other outlaws to be fighting against not only the music industry, but the Bible Belt as well. He said:

We were walking contradictions, and we didn’t mind. We were rebels, but we didn’t want to dismantle the system. We just wanted our own patch. In the South, especially, they try to live by the rules; it’s the legacy of the Bible Belt. Anybody that breaks the rules is a sinner. When you come into a working system, and start trying to change it, you are regarded as the Devil. . . . We accepted the way people were and hoped they’d accept who we were. What we talked about was real, the truth. You could depend on it. Outlaw music.

Jennings rebelled against the Bible Belt when Christianity was culturally ascendent, setting the norms for most of American society. But the resurgence of outlaw country has come at a time when Christianity is viewed as déclassé and morally suspect. Today, genuine cultural outlaws are those who embrace the faith and the churches that nourish it. 

Oliver Anthony and other outlaw revivalists are carrying the torch lit by Haggard and Jennings. Their music grasps the importance of place, time, and people, and favors raw emotion over commercial polish. And it takes seriously the struggle of working-class Americans to make ends meet.

In stressful, uncertain times, songwriting does us a service by interrogating the status quo and its defenders. For Jennings and Haggard, that meant targeting the Nashville music machine and Bible Belt fundamentalism. But for the new generation of outlaw musicians, the targets have changed. Not only has Christianity been vilified, but long-standing moral norms have been inverted. Love of country is now fascist. Treating people as equals created in the image of God is “colorblind racism.” Simple facts of human nature are anathematized. Our ability to apprehend reality is degrading. As exemplified by Anthony’s song, truly rebellious music takes aim at those who have turned the world upside-down.

But the best music will not settle for mere protest or interrogation. The songs of Haggard and Jennings are full of honesty and hard truths, but they rarely if ever answer the existential questions they raise. We find a better model in the original outlaw musician, King David. Take Psalm 61:

From the ends of the earth I call to you
When my heart is faint.
Lead me to the rock that is higher than I, 
For you have been my refuge,
A strong tower against the enemy.

However wrenchingly David pours out the contents of his heart, he always returns to that rock.

The resurgence of outlaw musicians speaks to younger generations’ yearning for the stability that only comes from loving one’s home and people and, most of all, the God who has given both as gifts. Outlaws of the American dream help us see our need for the biblical story and for the gospel that can transform not only the human heart but whole nations—indeed, the whole of creation.

Eddie LaRow is a PhD candidate at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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Image courtesy pixabay. Image cropped.