They skipped the era of country music that was “I love my dog more than my wife, but don’t ask me to choose between my dog and my truck”
What is a sundown town?
Oh, you poor soul.
Here’s the wikipedia, if you wanna read.
And here’s a video about the history of slavery and its after-effects that is kind of relevant.
The tl;dr is that there were laws, like vagrancy (i.e. not having a job), that were vague and applied to “everybody” but realistically only applied to black people through legal jiu jitsu and selective blindness on the part of police. Sundown towns are known as such for that behavior. They were (are) very unwelcoming if you’re not white.
Oh wow, that’s some nice and cozy sounding name for such an atrocity.
The name refers to “move on before sundown” - as in, if you’re a minority and caught there after sundown, you’d be beaten or killed or both.
Black people who are passing through have to leave by sundown. There’s still some small towns in the US with this expectation, although it’s no longer written on signs.
And he shot a man in Reno
But why?!
Just to watch him die
It’s not just today, even his contemporaries kinda sucked and mostly didn’t like him.
Yeah, just as an example -
Marty “Big Iron” Robbins released a song in 1966 called “Ain’t I Right” that said people who came down to southern towns last summer to show people a new way of life were actually a bunch of secret Communists who didn’t care about America and just wanted to sow discord.
Some context: in the summer of 1964, a bunch of civil rights activists went down to southern states to register people to vote for an event called “Freedom Summer,” which led to them being harassed by local police and eventually at least 3 of them being murdered by the KKK. This was a huge headline dominating story that made the American mainstream actually start paying attention to the civil rights movement and start looking at how bad racism in the south had gotten, so Robbins was totally reacting to and trying to push against that change in popular opinion when he released that song.
He toured with Rockabilly artists more than other country singers.
He’s the only person in both the Country and Rock & Roll Halls of Fame. He was a Rock musician, not just a country one.
Well aktually, Johnny Cash issued a statement to the KKK telling them his first wife wasn’t black and appeared to have some racist attitudes in his youth, though he did come around later on and I wouldn’t say he was racist. Her heritage is described:
“In the image, Vivian, whose father was of Sicilian heritage and whose mother was said to be of German and Irish descent, appeared to be Black.”
Though in other images in the same article she doesn’t appear black at all, so I’m not sure. There seemed to be different attitudes about what was considered “black” in that time.
“The stress was almost unbearable. I wanted to die,” she [Vivian] wrote in her memoir. “And it didn’t help that Johnny issued a statement to the KKK informing them I wasn’t Black.” She did not think the campaign should have been dignified with a response.
So she may have been more upset that he responded at all, not necessarily being upset that he said she wasn’t black.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/05/16/johnny-cash-first-wife-vivian-black/
The view from the lighthouse excited even the most seasoned traveler.
Yes, but I was responding the original posts claim that Johnny Cash came out and said his wife was black, which was the exact opposite of what happened. His wife being 1/16 African helps the claim that she had maybe a darker complexion I guess, it’s hard to tell with most photos of her being in black & white or potentially colorized. I’m also 1/16 Native American and I really wouldn’t claim that I’m actually Native American based off of that (though maybe some scholarships exist that say otherwise).
Her being 1/2 Sicilian may have had a bigger impact on skin-tone, but maybe the African great-great-grandmother was a well-known secret in her family and they tried to hide it as much as possible, I don’t know. It’s probably more important to ask, “Did she consider herself to be black?” Everyone has their own definition of it, but I’ve not seen anything that says that she actually considered herself as black, but it’s also possible she tried to hide it early on given the racial climate at the time. Is the “One-Drop Rule” still valid here?
They were excited to see their first sloth.
