Lady Antebellum Runs Away From The Confederacy

The trio of Hillary Scott, Charles Kelley, and Dave Haywood released their first album in 2008, just a matter of months before the United States of America elected Barack Obama to be its forty-fourth president. Back then, Obama's ascension to the presidency was hailed as proof that the United States had become a "post-racial society," a notion that seems quaint in 2020, when the social rights movement Black Lives Matter reached a boiling part after simmering on the back burner during the first years of the Donald Trump administration. The civil protests of June 2020 prompted Scott, Kelley, and Haywood to change the name of their band, shortening Lady Antebellum to Lady A. 

Personal growth often contains some measure of discomfort and there was no shortage of uneasiness within Scott, Kelley, and Haywood's decision to rename their band. The trio's public letter of June 11, 2020 announced the removal of "antebellum" from the group's name, claiming the band was "regretful and embarrassed to say that we did not take into account the associations that weigh down this word." Within 24 hours, the embarrassment compounded when Rolling Stone published a report about how the Seattle-based blues singer Anita White, who has been performing under the name Lady A for over two decades, was not contacted by the country trio about their desire to use her name as their own.

All of the trio's moniker troubles inevitably raises the question of why the group named themselves Lady Antebellum in the first place. Did they gain anything from naming themselves after the period of Southern history associated with slavery? Did "Antebellum" reflect any emotional or thematic undercurrent within the trio's music? Was it simply a dog whistle to an audience who usually responds to the Stars and Bars of the Confederate battle flag? 

Lady Antebellum's official line always stated that the name carried no particular import. To hear Dave Haywood tell it to NPR's Scott Simon in 2011, the band "actually didn't mean anything" by naming themselves after the Antebellum south. "It just feels kind of country and nostalgic and we thought that it had a unique sound to it. It had a lady in the group, obviously, and threw Lady in the front of it for no reason." For a name that meant nothing, the group needed to explain what that nothing meant quite a bit. Last year, Billboard published Annie Reuter's oral history of the band's 2009 smash "Need You Now," wherein former Lady Antebellum publicist Mary Hilliard Harrington claimed "That entire first album cycle had been about explaining who Lady A was, because there wasn a little confusion. First of all, they have a really strange name...I mean, no one knew what a Lady Antebellum was." DJ Bobby Bones underscores this reasoning by claiming "I thought it was a weird name. I thought [Hillary's] name was Antebellum, and so I met them not knowing the song yet." 

Let's take all of these arguments at face value. Given contemporary textbook standards, It's possible that nobody involved with Lady Antebellum was taught the term the Antebellum South in school, although it's difficult to imagine that they never received instruction about the Civil War. As all three members of Lady A were born below the Mason Dixon line (as was Bobby Bones), it's a bit hard to believe that they hadn't heard about the Antebellum South even if they weren't taught about it in class, but let's suppose that's exactly what happened. Let's surmise that the group themselves didn't grasp the import of their name. That, in turn, means that nobody on Lady Antebellum's team and nobody at Capitol Nashville bothered to do a quick internet search on the meaning of the band's name prior to investing untold time and money in launching the band in the late 2000s, a situation that beggars belief.

A scenario that doesn't strain credulity is that everybody involved in the launch of Lady A's career decided that the name Lady Antebellum wasn't all that bad. It is more than likely that the name was even seen as a way to attract a certain portion of the country audience, one who considered Antebellum as the grand, stately flip side of the rebellious Confederacy. After all, there is a long tradition within country and rock & roll of artists flirting with the Lost Cause. Lynyrd Skynyrd's iconography was built upon the Stars and Bars, which featured prominently on their album covers, tours and T-shirts from 1974 until 2012, when the surviving members decided it was time to retire the image. Skynyrd's adoption of the Confederate Battle Flag as a banner of their own rebellion spread throughout pop culture in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in the hit comedy-adventure television series The Dukes Of Hazzard where the titular heroes drove a Dodge Charger emblazoned with the Confederate flag (as if to underscore the Dukes's lineage, their car just so happened to be called the General Lee).

The Dukes of Hazzard debuted in 1979 and stayed on the air until 1985, the same year that Tom Petty plastered the Stars and Bars on his stage as he supported his Southern Accents album. Decades later, Petty apologized for flying the flag, saying "The Confederate flag was the wallpaper of the South when I was a kid growing up in Gainesville, Florida. I always knew it had to do with the Civil War, but the South had adopted it as its log. I was pretty ignorant of what it actually meant...I wish I had given it more thought. It was a downright stupid thing to do." Petty performed in front of the flag because it connotes rebellion, the kind of ornery spirit driving the characters on Southern Accents, particularly the narrator of "Rebels." Petty may have recanted his flirtation with the Confederacy but scores of other musicians embraced it in his stead. Georgian country-rockers Confederate Railroad formed in 1987 and kept on rolling without too much controversy until recently when their very name caused an uproar. Confederate Railroad leader Danny Shirley stuck to his guns, refusing to change their name but unlike Lady A, they're an oldies act in 2020; the gigs they lost were at county fairs. Then again, county fairs are also one of the last places where Kid Rock could be heard attempting to get the crowd riled up over Colin Kaepernick's protests, and there is no other musician in the 21st Century who has made it a point to drape himself in the Stars and Bars than Bob Ritchie. 

Unlike Lady A, Kid Rock had no roots in the south. He's a rich kid from the Detroit suburbs who embraced the Confederate flag as a sign of rebellion then wrapped it tighter when it became clear that his listeners were dyed-in-the-wool old rockers and right wingers, not Gen-Xers raised on hip-hop. It's an audience that has some superficial crossover with the contemporary country fans who form the core of Lady A's base but throughout their career they've purposely played it safe, opting for anodyne, soothing melodies that would sound at home on adult contemporary as country radio. "Need You Now" gave them that coveted crossover success in 2009 and once they racked up the sales and Grammys, they didn't change their formula, they only accentuated it with some fresh flair. Risk and rebellion never factored into either their art or business; they aimed for the middle of the road and once they got there, they flipped on the cruise control. 

Lady A's inherent musical caution makes the recklessness of the Lady Antebellum name all the stranger. Throughout modern pop, rock and country history, any association with the Antebellum South arrived mainly through codifying the Confederacy as rebellion. Indeed, until Lady Antebellum's debut in the late 2000s, the word "Antebellum" was vanishingly rare in popular music, almost never used in album or song titles and never surfacing in a band name. By dubbing themselves Lady Antebellum, the trio was staking a claim, not precisely for the Confederate States of America but an imagined version of the American South, one conjured through romanticized movies, old tunes, plantation tours, and traditions repeated so often their roots become hazy. It's a fantasy of the South, one that is common throughout American culture, one that doesn't take into the account such unpleasantness as slavery, rebellion and secession.

Over the first decade and a half of their career, Lady A acted as if "Antebellum" was just a picturesque word, one that evoked the grand traditions of the South and nothing else. To the group's credit, the scales finally fell from their eyes this past month; perhaps they handled it clumsily, but their public statement seemed sincere and they were working to reach an accord with the blues singer Lady A, hoping to create an agreement that allowed both to perform under that moniker. Nevertheless, it's hard to shake the notion that somebody in the band or within their orbit should've realized long ago the name Lady Antebellum was inappropriate. The very rarity of "Antebellum" within modern pop discourse should've sparked some soul-searching within their organization and label if not the group themselves but that discussion would've led their entire enterprise to some uncomfortable conclusions. And it's also not like the group's name escaped criticism at the time. Music journalist and critic Rob Tannenbaum remembered how he Tweeted jabs at the band's name during the 2011 Grammys, a move which brought him an email from Lady Antebellum's record label publicist claiming she was "sorely disappointed" in the Tweets—an action that confirms at least one person within the band's team was keenly aware that their name was objectionable.

When reckoning with Lady A's evolution, these incidents of massaging the message and their repeated rehearsed ignorance hang in the air. Each occurrence suggests that somewhere within the trio's organization there was somebody who understood that choosing to name the trio Lady Antebellum was wrong and that they should offer a tacit apology. This past week, they've made the right steps forward but it will take much longer to fully repent for playing footsie with the Confederacy.