Tim McGraw raises his 'Southern Voice' -- to blacks and whites

As William Faulkner famously wrote in his novel "Requiem for a Nun": "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
    
Is country superstar Tim McGraw aware of that particular quote by Willie? In the raucous title track of McGraw's new album, "Southern Voice," he gives a shout-out to the Nobel Prize-winning writer.
     
"Will Faulkner wrote it," McGraw shouts as he romps through a roll-call of Southern icons -- Hank Williams, Alabama football coach Bear Bryant, the Allman Brothers Band, Scarlett O'Hara, Dale Earnhardt, Billy Graham, Charlie Daniels and others.
 
For sons of the South such as myself, Faulkner's insightful epigram is inextricably bound up with race. I'm still discombobulated when I recall that -- in my lifetime -- I saw "Colored" and "Whites only" signs hanging over two separate but supposedly equal water fountains at a car dealership in Smackover, Ark. That was in the early 1960s. I was about 5 years old.
 
I still recall the stares a date and I received when we went out on the town in Dothan, Ala., in 1986 -- she and I were fairly certain those stares were due to the different pigments of our skin.
     
I still recall hearing the "N" word dropped oh-so casually by a few folks around town when I visited Smackover in 1996.
     
Yep, Willie was right: The past isn't dead, especially in the South. It's not even past.
 
Maybe McGraw feels the same way. After all, his song "Southern Voice" also mentions Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry and other African Americans.
     
"Hank Aaron smacked it, Michael Jordan dunked it," McGraw sings. "Pocahontas tracked it, Jack Daniel drunk it, Tom Petty rocked it. Dr. King paved it, Bear Bryant won it, Billy Graham saved it."
     
So, you think McGraw isn't unleashing a rebel yell in "Southern Voice"? After all, he's not taking a stand or throwing out any U2-style social commentary. He's merely throwing out a catalog of famous Southern folks, both black and white ... right?
     
Consider this: McGraw may have mentioned more black folks in this one song than in the entire history of country music.
     
In her book "My Country Roots," Alice Randall provides list after list of various categories of country music songs, from "Honky Tonk Angels," "Hookers" and "Mama" to "Divorce," "Cheaters" and "Jails & Prisons."
     
But Randall admits she had to struggle to come up with a list for her "Black" country song category: "Unfortunately the African-American experience in the South and the Southerner's observations of that experience are far less evident" (than other subjects).
     
But maybe McGraw's song isn't such a big deal, I thought -- even if country is the most segregated music in the nation.
     
And so I poked around on the Internet, trolling for examples of country artists crossing the racial divide, and I remembered that Garth Brooks had performed at some sort of tribute concert for Martin Luther King Jr.
     
A Google search of "Garth Brooks Martin Luther King" brought up a list of sites, including mlkmemorial.org.
     
I clicked on the site ... Oops, my mouse shifted and I accidentally clicked on another site -- a page of a white supremacist site on which various, ranting posters had lambasted Brooks as a "traitor" and worse.
     
Maybe Tim McGraw thought he was crafting a simple, joyous song about Southern culture and Southern heroes. However, I don't think everyone is going to hear it that way.