The song gets its title from a popular movie produced by Disney in 1946 based on the Uncle Remus stories told by a freed slave on a plantation in the Reconstruction era. (The movie contains some racist tropes, which is why Disney pulled it from its collection online, but most white people weren't bothered by that in the 1980s when this song was written.) The importance of the movie is only that it dates the song to the Depression and WWII era.
The songwriter's father is a World War I veteran. Southern Democrats aka Dixiecrats are characterized as racists today for supporting the Jim Crow laws, but most of their supporters voted for them because they had to, for their economic policies favoring poor farmers. The songwriter is basically characterizing his father as salt-of-the-earth.
Southerners characterized economic times with agricultural metaphors as during this time most of the South was rural. High cotton meant a boom time, short cotton meant a recession. Weeds being tall meant a lot of people were begging for very few jobs and trying to get handouts. This was the middle of the Depression.
Many Southerners can trace their family line back to sharecroppers who leased land and gave the landlords a cut of the profits. (My great grandparents were all sharecroppers.) Hence "we all picked the cotton, but we never got rich". The songwriter's father lost the family farm because he had to care for his wife who was sick. The county got it and auctioned it off to someone else.
Roosevelt was seen as an economic savior. He created the various New Deal agencies including the socialized utility project TVA which electrified Appalachia and put millions of Americans to work. TVA still supplies millions of rural Tenesseeans and Alabamians with power. The songwriter's dad got hired by the TVA and afterward they got to buy the conveniences of modern life.
It's a historical song, basically the "American Pie" of country music. It portrays the changes that created the New South in a positive light. The line about buying a Chevrolet and a washing machine ends with a musical flourish. There's nothing negative about Northerners in this, at all. The reference to Gone With The Wind is just another movie to date the song to the Depression and War era.
After all, "ain't nobody lookin' back again". Nobody, even in the very rural South, wants to go back to a time before washing machines, when our economic destiny depended on cotton prices (and Jim Crow, Dixiecrats' racism). The "Dixie" melody is probably the song most associated with the South and its problematic history, hence its incorporation in the song. Today at best that would be considered tone deaf, but there was no ill or racist intent originally.
The song gets its title from a popular movie produced by Disney in 1946 based on the Uncle Remus stories told by a freed slave on a plantation in the Reconstruction era. (The movie contains some racist tropes, which is why Disney pulled it from its collection online, but most white people weren't bothered by that in the 1980s when this song was written.) The importance of the movie is only that it dates the song to the Depression and WWII era.
The songwriter's father is a World War I veteran. Southern Democrats aka Dixiecrats are characterized as racists today for supporting the Jim Crow laws, but most of their supporters voted for them because they had to, for their economic policies favoring poor farmers. The songwriter is basically characterizing his father as salt-of-the-earth.
Southerners characterized economic times with agricultural metaphors as during this time most of the South was rural. High cotton meant a boom time, short cotton meant a recession. Weeds being tall meant a lot of people were begging for very few jobs and trying to get handouts. This was the middle of the Depression.
Many Southerners can trace their family line back to sharecroppers who leased land and gave the landlords a cut of the profits. (My great grandparents were all sharecroppers.) Hence "we all picked the cotton, but we never got rich". The songwriter's father lost the family farm because he had to care for his wife who was sick. The county got it and auctioned it off to someone else.
Roosevelt was seen as an economic savior. He created the various New Deal agencies including the socialized utility project TVA which electrified Appalachia and put millions of Americans to work. TVA still supplies millions of rural Tenesseeans and Alabamians with power. The songwriter's dad got hired by the TVA and afterward they got to buy the conveniences of modern life.
It's a historical song, basically the "American Pie" of country music. It portrays the changes that created the New South in a positive light. The line about buying a Chevrolet and a washing machine ends with a musical flourish. There's nothing negative about Northerners in this, at all. The reference to Gone With The Wind is just another movie to date the song to the Depression and War era.
After all, "ain't nobody lookin' back again". Nobody, even in the very rural South, wants to go back to a time before washing machines, when our economic destiny depended on cotton prices (and Jim Crow, Dixiecrats' racism). The "Dixie" melody is probably the song most associated with the South and its problematic history, hence its incorporation in the song. Today at best that would be considered tone deaf, but there was no ill or racist intent originally.