Festival of Faith and Music - Workshop: Ethan McCarthy

"The Duality of the Southern Thing": The Drive-By Truckers and Cultural Memory in the American South

Over their twenty-year history, the Drive-By Truckers have dealt with the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of Southern culture and history. Far from the idealized portraits of the South popularized by the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the contemporary country music industry, the Truckers reckon more honestly with the heavy cultural freight of the South’s racial history, as well as with the complex dynamics of its rural white population. In this workshop, Ethan McCarthy will find parallels between the Truckers’ music and the efforts of Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative to erect memorials across the South to honor the victims of lynching. Music like the Drive-By Truckers’, which deals substantively with the checkered cultural history of its place, is another kind of monument, one that forces us to face our history, to avoid false binaries and to live with the uncomfortable duality of our cultural history

Ethan McCarthy is a staff writer for Christ and Pop Culture and assistant editor at InterVarsity Press. He earned an M.Div at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and lives in the Chicago area with his wife and three children.

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