Zanies, Nashville Tennessee (Pre-Covid)
It was my first semester teaching at a Baptist university in my “former” Confederate state. I’d been living in Space-Center-blue Houston and midnight jazzy-blue Harlem. With the exception of a stint in deep crimson tinted-with-the-blood-of-slaves North Carolina, I had lived in ocean-wave-blue California and Brahmin-blue Boston getting grad degrees.
In North Ca’lina, I’d plied my teaching trade at an upscale liberal arts college founded pre-Emancipation when the formerly all-white-male student body used to bring their “servants” to care for them when they left their plantation homes. Servants. Other fun times there? A gang of white frat-boy types drove around campus in a brand-new SUV shouting “Nigger, Go HOME!” at any lone African American woman. All three of us. Despite being in my thirties, this was the first time I’d been “called outta my name,” in quite this way, as we say down South.
This tiny group of three basically included me, the first black woman hired tenure-track in the school’s 150-year history, the assistant chaplain, and a recently hired history professor. The cooks and janitors, who were the only other black women on campus, knew better than to believe that a state in the United States of America held enough freedom for a black woman to walk two blocks from her office to her duplex at twilight without implied threats from white students. I was in Jesse-Helms Land for five years before I escaped to the liberated metropolitan purple of Houston.
Fast-forward twenty years with family issues necessitating a return to my childhood home in the South. I’d had a few flashbacks since returning to a state that seemed to have reverted back to the Confederacy. Soon as I got back, I’d been essentially fired from my first teaching job here for hurting a few white students’ feelings at the local state university. I’d committed the apparently unforgivable sin of asking seniors, who had never written a paper in their major discipline, to rewrite a two-page paper in order to meet my standards, standards that including such onerous first-year English Comp tribulations as double-spacing and proof-reading for spelling errors. I felt like Dorothy getting attacked on the way to Oz: Spacing, Proofreading, and Spelling, Oh My! Interestingly, the few black and Hispanic students on the formerly segregated campus — where a white male professor had once lambasted me in front of the entire 8 am class for having joined the National Organization for Women — thought my dismissal had nothing to do with formatting or footnoting.
So when I got this new job at a highly rated private Baptist college, I was a bit unnerved. I’d lost my past confidence that credentials, even Ivy League ones, matter and that another job would be available if this job didn’t work out. Bear in mind that the other students had been cheerful the whole term, in what I had forgotten was the good ole Southern passive-aggressive manner. So now, even though these Baptist college students told me at one-on-one midterm conferences that the semester was going well and even though I thought the new semester was going well, I wasn’t sure.
I wasn’t sure even though we’d casually joked about things like high-school dress codes that outlawed leggings for girls. I’d quipped that it might be a good idea since leggings didn’t work for every figure. In fact, that’s what I was thinking when my server Olivia came to take my order at Zanies, a Nashville comedy staple.
She was a pseudo California girl with long blond faux summer-streaked hair and makeup with a matte maroon lipstick common to old-school Hollywood. She also had California-style good manners. But the somewhat unwise choice of black leggings on a very un-California, nearly zaftig figure, had me thinking about my students.
Like my new class, the comedy club, despite being packed to the literal rafters, was pretty much a minority desert. I saw one young black male, surrounded by middle-aged white women and a bit later, I saw one Latina. Then me. Just like walking in to teach my class where there was one Latino and one Asian. Then me.
The micro-mini tables that comedy clubs all over the country seem to have patented, were covered in drinks, gigantic menus, and baskets of burgers. My two tablemates had to move their cell phones to make room for the drink I might or might not get in time for the show due to start in forty minutes.
I was here to see Trae Crowder, known as the “Liberal Redneck.” A few years ago, a friend of mine had mentioned him as a YouTube phenom and I’d been a fan ever since. Trae is from my home state of Tennessee. While I was an Army brat in Middle Tennessee, he was from a small-town trailer park in near East Tennessee, a town of “more liquor stores than traffic lights.” But we had each left to get the liberating education that freed our already questing minds.
Dressed in a sleeveless T-shirt and a raggedy trucker cap, he shoots three-minute YouTube videos in his backyard, formerly in Tennessee, currently in California. He’s got over fifty million views. His video on Black Lives Matter came after a bit of hiatus caused by his having “been busier than Donald Trump at a ‘Fuck Shit Up’ Conference.” Two of my fave videos are “Take a Knee, Y’all,” on the golden idol of the South, football, and “Space Forcing Families Apart” where he combines a discussion of children caged at the border, evangelicals’ support for “white, unborn, purely hypothetical” children, and the proposed “Space Force.” He takes on guns, Roy Moore’s pedophilia accusations, the Muslim bans, and of course, Trump. But my all-time favorite is “Donald Trump Hates Poor White People.”
Trae and his pals Corey Ryan Forrester and Drew Morgan produce laid-back podcasts called WellRed Comedy and have established a Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Dragging Dixie Outta the Dark. (Oddly, there’s already a Jim Goad book called Redneck Manifesto and an Irish band by the same name.)
The WellRed crew claims to be “standing proudly blue in a sea of red” trying to rescue the drowning South from “bathing in backward bathroom bills.” One of its “Ten Commandments of the New South” quips “Thou shalt not put our God above everyone else’s life and rights.”
[What does it mean that my Amazon recommendations to accompany the Liberal Redneck Manifesto are Al Franken’s Giant of the Senate and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry?]
NPR says that Trae, et al, are “Killing Southern Stereotypes with Comedy,” while Forbes posits “How Left-Wing Politics and Southern Twang Helped Trae Crowder Go Viral.” Whoopi Goldberg said about their tour:
It’s funny as hell, thoughtful and moving for reasons you would never think you’d be moved by. And go see them on stage, you will be shocked and driven to hear them, but I caution you, wear diapers …you’re gonna need em.
Although one of their catchphrases about about being poor Southern liberals is “We ain’t unicorns,” I sure felt like one at their show.
I’d come for Trae, but Corey, stout and friendly good ole boy, acted as master of ceremonies. Corey is a former head quiche chef at a family bakery in North Georgia, while Drew is an Appalachian country boy from Sunbright, TN. Quite frankly, Corey, the least well-known of the trio at that time, set the standard the others didn’t top.
One of the high points is when Corey relates an argument between a white Southern married couple at the grocery store over whether or not the woman should buy yogurt which, for their palates, qualifies as exotic. As this ridiculously escalating argument comes close to blows, Corey deadpans, “that is the sanctity of marriage we been keeping from homosexshuls.”
Drew, weedy in a rather patrician way, describes his genes as the combo platter of a “Southern Baptist preacher and a Sunday school teacher-slash-elementary school librarian. You guys know how genetics work. That makes me a heavy drinker.”
During the Covid era, Trae kept putting out his quick Liberal Redneck YouTube videos, but Corey gained attention for his rants about his congressional district — the one that “elected” MAGA maven, Marjorie Taylor Greene. But back to the show.
At the end, all three sit on stools holding their beers and riffing on each other’s quips. My jaunty steps back to my car, a block or so away, gave me time to riff on Martin Luther King, judging these three fellow Southerners not by the color of their skin, or mine, or the audience’s, but by the content of their “Southern-fried intellectual comedy.” Damned tasty comedy. I’m ready for a second helping.
The Liberal Redneck crew is now on masked and vaccinated tour.
