This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
A story I think about a lot is how in 2003, the band then known as the Dixie Chicks denounced then-President George W. Bush and condemned the United States’ invasion of Iraq.
Their punishment was swift and merciless. Almost overnight, the band went from pop country royalty to cautionary tale. Few American institutions police their boundaries more fiercely than country radio, and the Nashville music scene made sure to remind The Chicks of just where their bread was buttered. The band’s career never fully recovered.
Public sentiment has since come around to The Chicks’ opinion on the War on Terror, but country music itself remains a stubborn genre. The climb for anyone with a divergent political, cultural, or social viewpoint remains deliberately uphill, which is why you find folk and country artists like Crys Matthews, Shaboozey, and even Beyonce coming at it slant, preferring to carve their own paths through one of America’s most storied genres instead of going toe-to-toe with its white, conservative patriarchal gatekeepers.
And now you can add Nathan Evans Fox to the list of artists who are in the country music scene without entirely being of it. Or maybe it’s better to say Fox is operating in a purer, livelier stratosphere of country music that neither needs nor wants the approval of the Nashville ruling class. So far, he’s doing just fine. His “Hillbilly Hymn (Okra and Cigarettes)” made a viral splash; a rich tune in the tradition of old Appalachian spirituals that envisions a cop-free Heaven where “the rich get scared” and “the guns are all for shootin’ clays.”
Fox, a North Carolina native raised in an unusual fundamentalist tradition, spent a little time in what he describes as a “cult,” before heading off to Union Theological Seminary. He does not describe himself as a Christian anymore (“I’m a mutt,” he chuckles) but appreciates the language of Christian faith as a rallying cry for solidarity among the blue-collar communities he was raised around. In our interview, we talked about his unique place in the country music scene, how he’s making himself spiritually “legible” in the modern American landscape, and how to use empathy strategically.
This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tyler Huckabee, Sojourners: I find it interesting that you’ve had to shed so much of the cultural and spiritual baggage you grew up around, but music remained a constant.
Nathan Evans Fox: Music was always there but I never had the emotional or intellectual space to prioritize it. Towards the end of seminary, I remember working through my thesis and just being like, whatever this is, it’s good and I like this.
Do you think music gave you a more effective way to process everything you’d experienced with your religious upbringing?
Yeah. Music has always been autobiographical for me. It’s a little bit like journaling. Something about the creative strictures of rhyme and meter, paired with the fact that it just kind of feels good in your body to sing. I find in those kinds of limitations that I can say things to myself or to people that I'm not able to sort through without those limitations. I couldn’t have said it until I tried to rhyme. Putting yourself in a place where you can't just free write forces you to have to think about it in a deeper way than you would otherwise.
Your work is clearly touching a nerve. Does it feel weird to see stuff that is so personal to you resonate like that?
Yes and no. I put out a very personal record in 2017. I became disillusioned with the fact that I was playing these songs that were about this intergenerational mess that I was trying to sort through. I was playing the gigs I could get at the time, and it felt awful because they just want you to play covers. They just want “Wagon Wheel.”
I released another record in 2021, and it broke my heart. I learned a lot about myself. I was like, “I’m just going to say exactly what I think.” But I realized that I have to start controlling the ways that I’m — I don’t want to say perceived, but … look, it’s just capitalism. It was only going to be a matter of time until I started saying the C-word. We’re creating content for tech platforms. That’s what being an artist is right now. The moment that you create something, it immediately becomes commodified. It becomes decontextualized from the artist.
And so when I decided that I really owed my songs something and that I was really going to rededicate myself to writing bitingly personal songs, I decided that I was going to just get on TikTok and Instagram and wherever I could. I realized I had to set my own terms of legibility and try to control the ways I want to be perceived. These are the ways that I want to contextualize what I’m doing. These are the conversations that I want to have around this. And these are the people that I’ll block when they don’t do well with it.
So, I don’t feel like it’s gotten out of my control. I think I’ve had a framework for making sense of it. And the thing that has surprised me is how many people have started to connect with it. That’s what’s really shocked me. Some of that is that I figured out how to say things, but I also think that where people feel like there’s hope right now has really shifted.
Explain that shift a little more.
You’ve kicked open a big hornet’s nest here for me. Part of being a hillbilly is that I’ve been raised on a different kind of cultural diet than people in academia or coastal people, whatever. The cultural cornerstone where I grew up is church. I’m not talking like your mainline First Baptist Church. I’m talking about the gas station that has 10 people in it, and we pull up with the PA system every Sunday. It’s the flea market; it's the Walmart parking lot. I can tell you where I was when Dale Earnhardt died. It’s those kinds of cultural spaces. That’s my cultural diet.
Now, the liberal establishment has abandoned those spaces. It doesn’t have anything to say to them. They’ve left those spaces to be grifted by conservatives and far right interests. There’s this giant cultural expanse of folks who represent working class interests — and I don't mean that just in the white sense, just to be very clear. I mean blue-collar folks who live paycheck to paycheck, folks who don't read The New Yorker.
READ MORE: Raised as a Preacher’s Kid, Now She’s a Black Butch Lesbian Writing Jesus Music
I think people have realized that being liberal isn’t enough. I was born in 1989. My hometown was wrecked by the recession, was wrecked by NAFTA. These were things that Republicans and Democrats collaborated on. And so, these spaces need more than what liberals can offer. For a while, folks had a little bit of hope that maybe we can liberal our way out of this. Maybe we can pretend that American progress will save us. I think that's done. Now folks are looking for something that’s got a little more struggle in it and a little more anger and a little more rage and a little bit more grief. That reframes where your hope is and where your action is too.
I grew up in rural Nebraska, and the town where I was raised has been decimated by the same forces you’re describing. For a while, especially post 9/11, you saw country music — which historically has a history of working-class solidarity — get subsumed by this larger Bush administration project into just psyching kids up to go off to the Middle East and bomb Muslim people.
Now there has been, over the last 10 years or so, a bit of a reclamation of folk music as something more solidaristic, community-rooted, and skeptical of nationalism.
For sure. I think of it as country music going through periods of expansion and contraction. Post-9/11 was one of the biggest periods of contraction. Everything had to be jingoistic, it had to be chauvinistic, it had to be patriotic. And then you also had this shift in masculinity where you weren't singing about your sweetheart, you were singing about being a man, which is just preparing people to be soldiers.
Now, that shift is real. But some people have this idea that before 9/11, country music was just the Garden of Eden.
To hear some progressives talk, you’d think Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton were communists.
Right. Country music has always had white flight dog whistles. But country music is a contested genre. And then after 9/11, the chance of singing about class just went away and it all became about a racialized, militarized America.
The little bit of reclamation that we’ve had in the last couple of years was really around queerness and gender. I don’t think it’s done enough to challenge whiteness in the industry. That’s not to say there aren’t Black artists who are doing good work and making great music.
Country music’s history is also deeply intertwined with Christian music. On the one hand, you’re part of that tradition, because you do sing about faith. On the other hand, you sing about it in a unique way within the legacy of the genre. Does it feel lonely?
Sort of. I haven’t fact-checked this or focus grouped it, but I think that I’m culturally legible. I don’t know that I’m legible in terms of the genres that we have available to us right now, but I don’t think singing about the Lord has to be any different than saying, “Lord have mercy.” It’s this thing that’s baked in, and it has this emotional appeal. It’s not an individualistic, nice, liberal language. It is the language of community and tradition. That’s something that people understand.
READ MORE: How One Theologian Is Composing a Soundtrack for His Faith and Activism
This is the inheritance I have of the imperial religion and the ways that it’s been sifted through generations and generations of cultural trickle down. I think that’s very culturally legible.
The ways people think about religious faith in general and Christian faith in particular has changed a lot. The vocabulary we’re all using has shifted in ways that pollsters and census takers haven’t necessarily caught up with. But as an artist, your music can speak to that ambiguity.
My responsibility as an artist is to bring in the right people and push away the wrong stuff. The thing that’s been really weird about this song going viral is that for some people, I’m their favorite leftist worship leader now. And I’m like, I gave that up years ago! But other people like the new atheists are so mad.
And the thing is, I’m trying to operate in the cultural backwash of what we’ve got. We live in a kind of Anthropocene, but it’s like a Christian-o-scene or whatever. We can’t undo the ways that Christianity has made our culture here and I’m just trying to live in that. If we can all connect around that, that’s great, because that’s the job of the artist. If people feel like that is their religion, great. And if they don’t, but they like the song, great. Like I’m not trying to organize people around religion. I’m trying to organize people around vibes.
I’ve heard some artists describe it as the difference between protest music, which is very didactic, and modern singer/songwriter music, which is confessional.
I’m in a genre that is just propaganda. Propaganda is not a dirty word for me. I prefer propaganda over protest music any day.
But yeah, people will lose the poetics the moment that they want to talk about politics. And I think that says something about American culture and the ways that we privatize everything.
When I make political music, I want it to feel like it sits right here [in the guts]. Like I want it to feel like it’s affecting your desires, and it hits on the same level that a hymn would or that a love song or a breakup song would — that deep emotional plane.
Last question I have for you: Almost everybody is at least a little bit creative, has some sort of creative pursuit in their life. That is power, and that power is responsibility. What do you see as being the responsibility of people who are doing any sort of creative work right now?
I think it was Steve Earle — if not, we’ll just attribute the quote to him — I think he said that all songs are an expression of empathy. I find that the politics of empathy is pretty washed out. Not because empathy doesn’t matter, but because that's just not enough. We only have so much empathy to give. We only have so much imagination to give people. I think that the job of the artist is not just to extend empathy, but to be very thoughtful about where we invest that empathy and how we invest it and where we're helping people grow their empathy, because that’s what solidarity is: Being thoughtful about where you put your empathy.
So, I think the job of the artist is to provide a framework for people to empathize with. Prioritize the poor in your empathy, prioritize being disloyal to patriotism with your empathy, and honor the parts of yourself that got you here. The thing that makes us thrive is the history of working-class folks who sacrificed so that there would be eight-hour workdays and so that the rivers wouldn’t be polluted. That’s the kind of care and sacrifice that got us here. Invest your empathy in those stories and in those traditions so that you can begin to also invest that empathy and that solidarity elsewhere in your community.
"For a while, folks had a little bit of hope that maybe we can liberal our way out of this. Maybe we can pretend that American progress will save us. I think that's done. Now folks are looking for something that's got a little more struggle in it and a little more anger and a little more rage and a little bit more grief. That reframes where your hope is and where your action is too."
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!