Now that the dust has settled, it is possible to gain a clearer understanding of the most fascinating cultural phenomenon of late summer 2023: the skyrocketing success of a completely unknown musician’s protest song. In mid-August, Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” exploded over the American landscape with unprecedented impact. As much of the country knows by now, after its release on an obscure YouTube page featuring unsigned Americana and country music artists, the song took off and has attracted, at the latest count, some 59 million views while debuting at No. 1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs.  

What is the nature of the song that attracted such massive attention and widespread approval?  The music of “Rich Men” is unremarkable: a basic folky chord progression stressing minor chords behind a simple melody. But the lyrics of the song hit with sledgehammer force. Anthony presents an anguished blue-collar anthem portraying the present plight of working-class America: minimal wages, oppressive taxes, social insecurity, rampant homelessness, widespread scamming of the welfare system, and a cadre of wealthy and powerful elites manipulating a corrupt system to their own advantage. It sketches an American Dream that has become a nightmare for many laboring people. Anthony drives home this lament in his YouTube video, where he appears like a character from a John Steinbeck novel, standing before a single microphone and playing a resonator guitar in a forest clearing near his rural home in Farmville, Virginia. Eyes closed and head tilted skyward, he sings in a powerful, anguished voice that’s almost a howl of pain. Record companies have rushed to sign this backwoods Byron to a contract, reportedly offering as much as $8 million dollars, but so far, he has turned them down. In his words: “I don’t want 6 tour buses, 15 tractor trailers and a jet. I don’t want to play stadium shows, I don’t want to be in the spotlight.” (READ MORE: The Class Divide Is Killing the American Dream)

Like everything else in American life these days, Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” was immediately politicized after its release. At the first Republican presidential debate on Aug. 23, the first question out of the chute asked the candidates their reaction to its message (unsurprisingly, they blamed the problems it referenced on the present Democratic administration). Many conservatives adopted the song as a musical enumeration of its talking points and embraced Anthony as a fellow traveler. Matt Walsh, for example, argued that the Virginian’s tune “gives a voice to the normal concerns of normal people” and thus posed a “danger to the entertainment industry and the news media,” pushing a leftist agenda. Most liberals disagreed, denouncing “Rich Men” for harboring racist overtones and encouraging contempt for the poor. National Public Radio, for instance, with its trademark combination of earnest moral superiority and snarky urban hipsterism, warned listeners that the song promoted “extremist and conspiratorial narratives” — bizarrely, it glimpsed a QAnon influence in the lyrics — and relied upon a fake authenticity because Anthony is “a straight, white, cis-gendered man in a forest with a guitar singing. And that will always code as true to people.” 

But interestingly, some critics on both sides of America’s great political divide took contrary positions. Writing in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof defended Anthony. He scolded fellow liberals who rushed to “wag their fingers and scold him for insensitivity” and urged them to “get off your high horse” and recognize the legitimate complaints of “battered, angry workers” who have been “screwed over.” In the conservative ranks, National Review’s Mark Antonio Wright criticized “Rich Men” for betraying the character ethic beloved among traditionalists. In his words, “In 2023 — if you’re a fit, able-bodied man, and you’re working ‘overtime hours for bullshit pay,’ you need to find a new job,” and if you’re drowning your sorrows away with alcohol or drugs “that’s your fault, not Washington’s.” (READ MORE: The Appeal of ‘Richmond’ Extends Beyond the Small Town)

Anthony further muddied the political waters with several statements after “Rich Men’s” meteoric ascent. He eschewed all political labels, declaring in a YouTube post, “I hate to see that song being weaponized.  I see the right trying to characterize me as one of their own, and I see the left trying to discredit me . . . . That shit’s got to stop.” He scoffed when the song was raised at the Republican Presidential Debate and pointed out, “That song is written about the people on that stage — And a lot more, too. Not just them, but definitely them.”  Then, in a Facebook post, he complained, “Corporate news (big surprise) is now trying to twist me into being a Biden supporter. That song has nothing to do with Joe Biden; it’s a lot bigger than Joe Biden . . . . Rich Men North of Richmond is about corporate owned DC politicians on both sides . . . . It’s knocking the system collectively.” Anthony, clearly, has taken pains to distance himself from both Republicans and Democrats while claiming “the problems lay much deeper than politics.” As he wrote frustratedly in a Twitter post, “I. Don’t. Support. Either. Side. Politically. Not the left, not the right. I’m about supporting people and restoring local communities.”

I. Don't. Support. Either. Side. Politically. Not the left, not the right. Im about supporting people and restoring local communities.

Now, go breath some fresh air and relax. Please? ???? I'm not worth obsessing over, I promise. Go spend time with your loved ones.

— Oliver Anthony (@AintGottaDollar) August 26, 2023

Anthony’s Song Is About Populism

The political muddle surrounding “Rich Men North of Richmond” actually provides a key to unlocking its real meaning and significance. The fact that the song’s message does not fit neatly into liberal Democrat or conservative Republican categories indicates that its origin lay in another tradition in American public life that cuts across the usual political lines: populism. From its origins in growing rural hostility to urban social and financial power in Jacksonian America, the populist movement burst full-blown on the political scene in the 1890s. Pushed forward by figures such as William Jennings Bryan and Ignatius Donnelly, populist farmers and small-town residents railed against the economic and political elites who kept their knees on the throats of “little guys” who struggled to make a living in an industrializing economy. And those same elites, most populists believed, dominated both political parties. The populist insurgency denounced economic and political concentrations of power in American society and championed the notion of dignified, productive labor by hard-working citizens as the lifeblood of a market society of genuine opportunity. It upheld an ideal of individual independence where the citizen prospers by his own efforts without becoming either a ward of the state or a client of the wealthy. It defended the virtue of an American “folk” defined by self-reliance, hard work, property ownership, moral conservatism, and community loyalty and attacked corrupt elites who have robbed them of the chance for abundance and advancement. 

As populism took shape in succeeding decades, it appeared in several strains that influenced American public life. A left-wing egalitarian populism directed its animus at economic magnates, large corporations, and financial institutions wielding undue influence in American society. The seat of this power lay in New York. A right-wing libertarian populism identified government as the locus of tyrannical power, particularly the federal bureaucracy, and focused its rhetorical fire on Washington, D.C. In the cultural realm, a sentimental populism idealized ordinary Americans and their salt-of-the-earth values while decrying the intellectual elitism and social snobbery of coastal media centers, particularly Hollywood. Over the last two centuries of American history, at various times and places, various expressions, combinations, and permutations of these three populist strains have surged forward intermittently to defend ordinary, hard-working Americans from the oppression of plutocratic elites. (READ MORE: Music Elites and the Oliver Anthony Conundrum)

From the late 1800s up to the present day, political figures as diverse as Huey Long and George Wallace, C. Wright Mills and Pat Buchanan, Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump have articulated populist themes. Cultural figures such as Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath), composer Aaron Copland (Fanfare for the Common Man), poet Carl Sandburg (The People, Yes), and filmmaker Frank Capra (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) have explored the plight and possibilities attending lives of ordinary people battling elite domination. The populist excoriation of the powerful and veneration of the common person frequently also found expression in popular music. Artists such as Woodie Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Merle Haggard earned hordes of listeners and fans from their songs, decrying American elites who manipulated “the system” to their advantage and the detriment of ordinary folks.

Anthony, even if he doesn’t quite realize it, has walked into the public spotlight as a product of the American populist tradition. He has tried to avoid political pigeonholing and co-optation and downplayed the social significance of his music, claiming that the song emerged from his own struggles with depression and alcohol abuse and describing himself as “just some idiot with a guitar.” But artists, of course, often do more than they know or intend. Dylan, for instance, sought only to become his generation’s leading folksinger in the 1960s, accidentally emerging as a spokesman for the dissent of American youth when he was caught up in that era’s larger, roiling social and cultural revolution. Now Anthony seems to be doing likewise, ironically, as a modern populist representation of one of the left’s favorite political tropes, “the personal is the political.” Some ordinary observers have seen the connection. “I’m a 42 year old truck driver and have been working 70 hours a week plus side work for over 7 years straight. And this hit home,” wrote one respondent to his YouTube performance.  “I feel buried and no matter how much I grind and stay positive, I see no light at the end of the tunnel. Politicians are so out of touch with who they ‘represent’  It’s gotten so much harder just to stay afloat these past few years. I do not need or want any hand outs. But stop making it so damn hard for hard working Americans to get ahead or climb out of struggles no matter how we got there.”

Food for Thought

So does Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” provide food for the thoughtful as we enter fully into the 2024 political contest? Yes, indeed. The song’s populist sensibility and the nerve in American public life that it obviously has touched reveals a powerful undercurrent of despair among ordinary people out in the provinces who feel politically ignored, economically abandoned, and socially dismissed as “deplorables.” Many working-class citizens see both big government and big business as bastions of “Rich Men North of Richmond,” twin manifestations of an elitist system that unfairly impedes their pursuit of happiness — the former intruding into family life, squandering tax revenue, and imposing radical social values; the latter outsourcing good jobs to foreign countries, constantly raising prices, and paying executives obscenely high salaries while squeezing workers’ wages.  

In recent years, this insurgent discontent has helped fuel the Trumpian movement that, too often, has underscored the most unattractive aspects of populism: bitterness, resentment, revenge, demonization of opponents, and contempt for institutional restraints. But Anthony, who has urged people to avoid political hatred and opened his most recent performance by reading a Bible passage, represents a more attractive side of what American populism has always been — an appeal from those who believe in the American dream of hard work, opportunity, respectability, and family but desperately want the system to work fairly.  This obscure musician’s populist plaint is a cry of pain about problems that our politicians, especially conservatives — now that the left has redefined “the people” as a grab bag of racial and gender groups— should heed, address, and try to rectify if they hope to regain the trust of ordinary, hard-working citizens who have always been the backbone of America.  The nation’s future may depend on it.

Steven Watts is a historian, writer, and musician living in Columbia, Missouri.  His biographies of Henry Ford, Walt Disney, and Will Rogers (forthcoming) have explored American populism, while his Americana band, Flyover Country does likewise in its initial album release, Too Thick to Drink, Too Thin to Plow.