The Patriot Post® · Ode to the Ignored Americans

Like a good story, a well-crafted song has the power of touching the souls and minds of an audience. One such song has become an overnight sensation. Oliver Anthony released his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” and it immediately resonated. (Warning: Some language.)

Anthony is from Farmville, Virginia, just outside what is considered “Appalachia.” He is singing in the great tradition of “high lonesome,” which in music terms is most often associated with bluegrass but can also describe folk, hillbilly, and country. Though there are several technical definitions for this term, the most common identifier is audible understanding. The singer and the music are raw and piercing, much like Anthony and his resonator guitar.

The raw, heartachy quality of the storytelling is primal. He sings about the lament of the ordinary hardworking American: those hardest hit by the decisions made in Washington, DC. “These rich men north of Richmond / Lord knows they all just wanna have total control.” It is a cry for a country that has so much turmoil that people are committing suicide in record numbers.

We hear clearly the deep frustration he articulates in his lyrics.

It’s our kids who have to endure the government’s terrible public education system. It’s our sons and daughters who are the subjects of social experiments. It’s us, the lower- and middle-class Americans, who struggle to find affordable insurance and homes and food while grinding it out in jobs that barely cover the bills. Yet the government, the elites, and their cronies keep taking.

Our tax money goes to Ukraine while President Joe Biden has “no comment” on Maui’s devastating wildfires. Our tax money goes to failing green energy boondoggles while taking away jobs from coalminers and destroying the affordability of gas. Bidenomics is working so well that people can barely afford groceries or to fill up their cars, though our tax money somehow pays for “bags of fudge rounds” for “the obese milkin’ welfare.” Most galling of all, the elites in the swamp of DC never seem to have to actually endure the consequences of their own policies.

Podcaster Andrew Klavan often talks about how the artist channels the muse and that oftentimes, the less aware the artist, the more prophetic the art. It seems that Anthony’s song is along these lines.

In interviews, Anthony clarified that this song is apolitical: “It seems like both sides serve the same master. And that master is not someone of any good to the people of this country.”

This is absolutely true. The common people both on the Left and on the Right are disenfranchised, shamed, bilked of their hard-earned money, and then used as shields by one side or the other. The answer, however, isn’t tearing down and destroying the America that was. The answer is a restoration and a renaissance.

These words — “It’s a d*mn shame / What this world’s gotten to / For people like me, and people like you / Wish I could just wake up, and it not be true / But it is, oh, it is” — struck a specific chord because they speak particularly to parents. This is not the world in which many of us wanted to raise our kids. But it is the world we have, and for now, it seems like there’s little we can do about it.

Anthony’s “high lonesome” protest song and the fact that it rightly went so viral show just how much of the zeitgeist he captured in the lyrics and presentation.