Southerners have every right to be proud of the music we have produced and bequeathed to the entire globe. American popular culture would be unimaginable without the music—blues and rock ‘n’ roll, jazz and country, gospel and bluegrass, salsa and zydeco—created by the South’s disfranchised, impoverished, and forgotten peoples, Black, Brown, and white. Toe-tapping, feet-shuffling, arm-waving music. Whiskey-drinking, down-in-the-dumps, my-baby-done-me-wrong music. That’s southern music, whether it’s exuberantly body-moving or mournfully storytelling. But the music originating or popularized below the Mason-Dixon line has always meant more to southerners than an excuse to shake our booties or, bottle in hand, get downright maudlin. Scholars believe that “southern vernacular music,” to borrow a term from historian and folklorist Charles Joyner, has molded our racial and regional identities, reflected both our conservatism and our radicalism, expressed our class and racial resentments, spoke to our alienation from the prosperous and the proper, helped bridge our racial divide, and even, according to two sociologists, literally pushed us to suicide. From its inception, the region’s music thus has told us southerners about the hardships of this life and the joys to come in the next, told us who our friends and enemies were, told us about love, loneliness, and lynching, told us where we came from and who we are. And in the telling, it has also changed us.¹

Due to a whole host of factors unfolding over the past century—the migration of millions of southerners to cities in the North, technological innovations such as the radio, record player, and TV, and shrewd corporate packaging—“southern music” of virtually all flavors was long ago transmuted into America’s music and then quickly integrated into much of the world’s music. Coupled with the mainstreaming of southern culture in everything from race to religion since the 1960s, the nationalization and globalization of music first cultivated in southern soil raises interesting questions about our national tastes in music, about the audience for southern music, and about racial and regional patterns in music preferences.

To explore these questions, I turn to three nationally representative surveys of American music preferences: the 1993 General Social Survey (GSS), the Spring 1993 Southern Focus Poll (SFP), and the 2002 Survey of Public Participation in Arts (SPPA) . These surveys, unfortunately, are not strictly comparable due to differences in the populations sampled and in how questions are worded, and only the 2002 SPPA includes a large enough number of Black respondents to permit reliable regional comparisons among African Americans. Another limitation is that we do not know how respondents interpreted the meaning of the genres of music they were asked to evaluate. Is the kind of music played by Duke Ellington and Count Basie jazz or big band? What, exactly, is “New Age” music? When respondents say they like “oldies,” do they have Fats Domino, the Beach Boys, or Queen in mind? None of the surveys, moreover, tell us why folks like the music they do. Still, each survey yields valuable information not contained in the others, and the three polls, taken together, can help us better understand regional and racial tastes in music. Moreover, as we’ll see, the three surveys yield surprisingly similar conclusions.²

Table 1: American Music Preferences, 1993

% of Respondents Who “Like Very Much” Various Genres of Music

	African Americans	Whites (South)	Whites (Non-South)
Oldies	21	22	28
Country	5	36	23
Gospel	56	29	13
Classical	10	15	20
Big Band	10	16	19
Jazz	36	8	15
Mood/Easy Listening	10	16	19
Broadway Musicals	7	14	17
Blues/R&B	31	10	13
Contemporary Rock	11	11	14
Bluegrass	2	14	9
Folk	2	10	9
Reggae	13	2	5
Latin	5	4	5
Opera	4	3	5
New Age	2	2	4
Rap	8	3	2
Heavy Metal	10	3	4
Number of respondents	179	424	923

American Music Preferences

The 1993 GSS asked respondents to state how much they liked or disliked eighteen genres of music. Folks could report that they liked as many kinds of music as they pleased. Table 1 lists the styles of music according to their overall popularity in the survey (entries in all remaining tables are ordered in the same way) and reports the percentage of African American (of which there were too few in the sample to permit regional comparisons) and white respondents, differentiated by region of residency in 1993, who say they like each type of music “very much,” a more discriminating criterion than simply “liking” a certain type of music. 

That Americans generally favor popular genres of music and forsake both “high arts” music (classical and opera) and more esoteric categories of music, such as folk or New Age, is no surprise. What may be unexpected is how music preferences seem to mirror the racial divide in this country. Black respondents report they are especially fond of gospel, blues and R&B, and jazz—music that decades ago was called “race” music—and white respondents, regardless of region, express a strong affinity for country, oldies (presumably rock ‘n’ roll of preceding decades) and, further down the preference hierarchy, classical and big band. The few regional blips in taste among white respondents—southerners are more fond of both country and gospel, northerners of classical—are dwarfed by the racial differences in music preferences. Admittedly, the data in Table 1 may mask some racial similarities in music preferences. When we look at the percentages of folks who either “like” or “like very much” each of these types of music, rather than focus on the latter category exclusively, there is somewhat greater comparability between the races. Thirty-nine percent of African Americans, for example, report at least some fondness for country music (but 60 percent of northern whites and 75 percent of southern whites do so). Moreover, large percentages of respondents of all races and regions mostly agree about genres of music they do not like: about half or more of Black and white respondents from both regions dislike to some degree New Age and opera, for instance, and more than 70 percent of all three groups express an active distaste for heavy metal. But in other ways, racial cleavages are even greater than reported in Table 1: about a quarter of African American respondents (including those in the South) say they “dislike” or “dislike very much” country, and similar percentages of southern whites feel exactly the same way about blues/R&B and jazz.

Table 2

Music Americans Like to Listen to Most, 1993

	African Americans (South)	Whites (South)	Non-Whites (South)
Country	2	34	21
Rock	5	19	27
Gospel/Devotional	36	10	6
Classical	2	12	14
Easy Listening	9	11	12
Jazz	11	3	7
Urban Contemporary/R&B	19	1	2
Rap	8	1	1
Other	4	9	9
None (volunteered)	3	1	2
Number of respondents	264	905	386

Responses from the Spring 1993 Southern Focus Poll, in which participants were asked about the one kind of music they “like to listen to most” (rather than if they liked particular kinds of music), offer even more dramatic evidence of racial cleavages in music preferences (Table 2). The plurality of southern Black respondents (36 percent) opt for gospel or devotional music as their favorite style; only 10 percent of southern and barely 6 percent of northern white respondents do so. A relatively large minority of African Americans (19 percent) in the South, additionally, say their favorite music is “urban contemporary/R&B,” which very few whites from either region claim. Conversely, roughly half of white listeners, North and South, report their top choice to be either country (southerners) or rock (northerners), genres that together attract the special allegiance of only 7 percent of southern Black listeners. (The results are essentially identical when we add the thirty or so nonsouthern African Americans to the analysis.)

To be sure, the SFP, like the 1993 GSS, suggests a modest regional difference among white listeners, with those in the South more likely to acknowledge country as their favorite music (34 percent versus 21 percent). On the whole, however, white people in the two regions generally agree about their favorite music. One crude but effective way to assess the relative weight of race versus region in structuring favorite music preferences is to calculate the overall regional difference among white listeners across the ten music categories in Table 2 (including “other” and “none”) and compare that to the overall racial difference between southern Blacks and southern whites. The two statistics are informative indeed: the average absolute difference among northern and southern white participants is four percentage points, but thirteen percentage points, on the average, separate the tastes of southern Black participants from southern whites. Again, additional data moderate this rather stark picture. Respondents in the SFP who did not respond “country” or “none” when asked about their favorite music were asked if they liked country music. There were virtually no regional or racial differences in the responses: roughly 60 percent of the four race-region groups claimed to do so. More recent polls (see Tables 3 and 4), however, indicate much less enthusiasm for country music among southern (and all) Black listeners. Simply put, white listeners from the two regions are much more similar in their tastes in music than are southerners of different races.

In data not shown here, additionally, I found essentially the same magnitude of racial differences for those who self-identified as southern, for those who spent their formative years in the South, and for lifelong southerners. Only 1 percent of African Americans who claimed a southern identity, for example, embraced country as their favorite music, and only 2 percent who either lived in the region as teenagers or were lifelong residents of the region did so. Conversely, only 2 and 11 percent of white respondents in each of these three categories liked best jazz and gospel, respectively. Overall, racial differences averaged 12 percent for self-identified southerners, for those who lived in the South as teenagers, and for lifelong southerners.

Nothing from more recent and inclusive surveys suggests that any of this has changed. The 2002 Survey of Public Participation in Arts is the most recent and, with almost seventeen thousand respondents, the largest nationally representative study of Americans’ music tastes available for public use. The SPPA asked respondents both if they liked twenty-one genres of music (Table 3; again, respondents could say they liked as many genres as they chose) and which of these styles they liked best (Table 4). Data in both tables indicate, once again, pronounced racial differences, whether in the South or elsewhere in the nation, in music preference and only minor regional differences.

Racial differences in liking these styles of music averaged 11 percent for southerners and 12 percent for nonsoutherners. Relatively few Black southerners (16 percent) report liking country music in 2001–02 (Table 3), and only 2 percent say it is the music they like best (Table 4). Half or so of white southerners like it, and more than one in five of them claim it is their favorite music. Conversely, fewer than a third of southern whites even like gospel, the genre of music liked by most African Americans in the region (Table 3), and only 7 percent of white southerners in Dixie say their favorite music is either jazz or R&B/blues. Twenty-seven percent of Black southerners do so, and another third choose gospel (Table 4). Regional differences in Table 3, on the other hand, are much smaller, averaging 3 percent for African Americans and 4 percent for whites. There are only small regional differences in preferences for hymns or gospel, and no South/non-South difference at all in white respondents liking country music or in choosing it as their favorite. To the extent that any regional distinctiveness exists in attitudes toward country music in this survey, it resides in the Northeast: only 35 percent of white listeners there like country, compared to about half of the whites in the West, South, and Midwest. 

Table 3: Music Preferences of Americans, 2001–02

% of Respondents Liking Various Genres of Music

	African Americans (South)	African Americans (Non-South)	Whites (South)	Whites (Non-South)
Classic Rock/Oldies	22	29	46	55
Country and Western	16	15	49	47
Mood/Easy Listening	19	26	27	33
R&B/Blues	47	49	24	29
Hymns/Gospel	56	49	32	24
Classical/Chamber	13	18	26	30
Jazz	34	47	22	26
Big Band/Swing	12	15	22	27
Heavy Metal	10	11	19	26
Bluegrass	7	9	23	24
Latin/Salsa	14	18	18	19
Operetta/Broadway Tunes	9	10	15	19
Ethnic/National	16	17	13	17
Dance/Electronica	12	15	15	18
Rap	33	33	11	14
Reggae	22	24	12	15
Contemporary Folk	6	9	14	17
New Age	6	8	10	14
Parade/Marching Band	10	8	11	13
Opera	6	8	10	11
Choral/Glee Club	8	9	9	10
Number of respondents	638	871	3,379	11,002

Respondents’ education and age (as well as rurality) often affect music preferences and complicate simple assessments of racial or regional tastes. In analyses of the 2002 SPPA not reported in Tables 3 and 4, for example, highly educated white respondents from both regions much more frequently like jazz and blues/R&B (but not gospel) than do the least educated white respondents. But so, too, do highly educated Black respondents, North and South; thus, racial differences in expressed preference for these two genres of music are quite large even for those groups’ most appreciative audiences. Likewise, older southern whites express more fondness for gospel than younger whites in the region. But older southern Blacks do as well, thereby again preserving the racial differential. Regardless of age or education, few African American respondents in the South claim to like country music.

Table 4: Music Americans Like Best, 2001–02

	African Americans (South)	African Americans (Non-South)	Whites (South)	Whites (Non-South)
Country and Western	2	1	21	19
Classic Rock/Oldies	3	5	15	18
Hymns/Gospel	33	23	11	5
Classical/Chamber	2	2	6	7
Jazz	11	16	5	4
Heavy Metal	1	1	6	8
Mood/Easy Listening	2	2	4	5
Latin/Salsa	1	3	5	4
R&B/Blues	16	16	2	2
Rap	12	12	2	2
Do not like one style best	12	15	12	14
Number of respondents	582	820	3,177	10,439

Ethnicity, as well as race, divides southerners in the 2002 SPPA. Self-identified white Latinos/Latinas in the region, for example, are barely more appreciative of country music than are southern Black respondents (23 percent of the former like it, and 5 percent say it is their favorite music) and are even less enamored of “Black” styles of music than are non-Hispanic southern whites. (These data are not shown on the table.) More than half of this group say their favorite music is either Latin/salsa or ethnic/national, a taste shared by 1 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 3 percent of African Americans in the South. As late as 2002, then, the region’s Hispanic, Black, and white respondents seem largely to prefer different kinds of music.

Charles Joyner is undoubtedly correct when he argues that “southern folk culture” grew out of the convergence of African and European traditions and that southern vernacular music, as the articles in this issue of Southern Cultures demonstrate, has always been multicultural, with genre-bending musicians crossing racial and ethnic borders in search of musical inspiration. This, indeed, is likely key to the music’s remarkable innovativeness and popularity. But it does not follow (nor does Joyner claim) that distinct kinds of southern music—no matter how musically indebted they are to each other—equally attract southerners of different races or ethnicities, or that a preference for southern vernacular music distinguishes southerners from other Americans. Overall, there is little evidence in any of these surveys to suggest either the existence of distinct regional tastes in music or that southern music unites the races in the region. Whites in the North and the South express very similar music preferences; so, too, do African Americans in the two regions. Even the few regional differences evident in the data—in white listeners’ preferences for country music and gospel, for example, or in southern Black listeners’ particular attraction to devotional music—are small or not always consistently observed. Similarities in the music preferences of Blacks, whites, and Latinos, moreover, are both few and relatively muted, and their dissimilarities are more numerous and often very sharply etched. If the South’s music does shape who we southerners are and understand ourselves to be, these polls imply that it might just make us different kinds of southerners.³

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Larry J. Griffin is professor emeritus of sociology and history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a former coeditor of Southern Cultures.

NOTES

This essay, originally published in 2006, has been updated for style.

1. Charles Joyner, “The Sounds of Southern Culture: Blues, Country, Jazz, and Rock,” in Joyner, Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture (University of Illinois Press, 1999), 194; Frye Galliard, Race, Rock and Religion: Profiles from a Southern Journalist (East Woods Press, 1982); James C. Cobb, “From Muskogee to Luckenbach: Country Music and the ‘Southernization’ of America,” Journal of Popular Culture 16 (Winter 1982): 81–91; James C. Cobb, “The Blues is a Lowdown Shakin’ Chill,” in Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South (University of Georgia Press, 1999), 92–124; Vincent J. Roscigno and William F. Danaher, The Voice of Southern Labor: Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes, 1929–1934 (University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Brian Ward and Jenny Walker, “‘Bringing the Races Closer”: Black-Oriented Radio in the South and the Civil Rights Movement,” in Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Culture, ed. Richard H. King and Helen Taylor (New York University Press, 1996), 130–49; Steven Stack and Jim Gundlach, “The Effect of Country Music on Suicide,” Social Forces 71 (September 1992).
2. The General Social Survey is fielded by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago (see http://www.cpanda.org/data/a00006/a00006.html). The Southern Focus Poll is jointly sponsored by the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) and fielded by the UNC-CH Odum Institute for Research in Social Science (see ftp://ftp.irss.unc.edu/pub/irss/southern/focus/spring93/freqs.pdf). The Survey of Public Participation in Arts is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and was fielded by the U.S. Census in late 2001 and early 2002 (see http://www.cpanda.org/data/profiles/sppa.html). All websites were accessed 13 June 2006. Some of the problems of music categorization schemes typically used in social surveys are discussed in Bethany Bryson, “‘Anything But Heavy Metal’: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes,” American Sociological Review 61 (October 1996): 895–96.
3. Joyner, “The Sounds of Southern Culture: Blues, Country, Jazz, and Rock.”