In 1980, I moved from the Midwest to Dallas to go to graduate school. It was the first time I had lived more than 100 miles from where I was born.
I was 22 years old, and a lot of the time that wasn’t tied up with going to school and doing my side gigs to finance going to school was spent drinking in dives in Oak Cliff.
Those evenings almost always concluded with the lot of us standing on top of picnic tables with buckets of Lone Star long necks at our feet bellowing out “Dixie.”
I gather this behavior would be frowned on in 2024, and this is the divide we face in this country.
Half of us think this song is a touching tribute to a historical past that has gone by, that represents the unfortunate people left behind when industrialization overtook the cotton South and laid waste to a culture that was flawed but had its own customs, its own pride, and its own story.
Half of us think this song is about literal Nazis.