If there’s not much Waylon Jennings country on Empire Builders, it does include a cover of Merle Haggard’s “Rainbow Stew”. Its bittersweet, partly ironic look at “Big Rock Candy Mountain” visions of down-home paradise, political and otherwise, quietly illustrates a side of country music that’s far from belligerent, nowhere near the tone of today’s war-thumper hits such as Darryl Worley’s “Have You Forgotten” or “Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American)” — or, for that matter, Haggard’s classic “The Fightin’ Side Of Me”.
Of “Rainbow Stew”, Ringenberg says, “I’d been singing that one live for four or five years, but after 9/11, that ‘there’s a big black cloud in the city’ and those kinds of things in the lyric seemed quite prophetic, and pretty frightening. But as I found other things in the song to focus on, I could see that it was a great, sarcastic, and revelatory song about American politics. It’s my favorite Merle Haggard song.”
Jason Ringenberg is an admitted, lifelong “history nerd.” His early passion for the events and personages of the American Revolution gave way to an intense Civil War fascination when he moved to Nashville. He updated “Bible And A Gun”, which he co-wrote with Steve Earle, and turned it into a Civil War song. General Lee makes an appearance in “Rebel Flag In Germany”, voicing his disapproval of that flag over there himself, in contemporary context.
“I do think that if you analyze what Robert E. Lee stood for, after the war, that that’s what he’d feel,” Ringenberg contends. “He tried to accommodate the winners of the war, tried to work with them, be a good citizen, and recommended that the soldiers do the same. One sentence from him like ‘Go out into the hills, boys, and don’t let them ever win!’ and thousands of more lives would have been lost, fighting on in the mountains. He lived up to his reputation as a great gentleman. I believe that.”
A sense of history has had its place in bringing an added perspective to Ringenberg’s nuanced viewpoint. But most central factor in how he approached his most political recording — and very possibly, in how he’s approached all his music, all along, with that special understanding he brought to the seemingly unlikely fusion of country and punk — is his background as a midwest farmboy. He comes from a place and a family with genuinely deep roots; his family contained both Democrats and Republicans who managed to get along reasonably amiably.
“I often say that where I came from is the biggest influence on me as a musician — a small family hog farm on the prairie in Illinois,” he concurs. “My grandpa had actually built the house and farm, and all of my relatives live in the area. It was just a very deeply historical, spiritual place for me to grow up. And I still go back there a lot; it’s my second home. My parents still live there, and dad still farms, at 82.”
His father is saluted in the new song “Half The Man”, which recalls the senior Ringenberg “driving that old tractor as I sat on your lap.” Which is particularly fitting given that Jason’s last release was the children’s record A Day At The Farm With Farmer Jason, complete with the ditty “The Tractor Goes Chug Chug Chug”. The two albums come from the same head; it even shows in the music.
“The Farmer Jason CD and Empire Builders both rely pretty heavily in the arrangements on riffs,” he says. “The ‘Rebel Flag In Germany’ riff is actually pretty close to the ‘Tractor Goes Chug’ riff! ‘New Fashioned Imperialist’ is not without similarities to ‘We’ve Got A Little Kitty And She Goes Me-ow’!”
More to the point, it’s in his role as a farmer’s son, and a father of growing daughters of his own, that the political concerns came to the fore for him.
“I’ve been profoundly worried, when I see some of the mistakes that we’re making in our foreign policy, and domestic policies as well, that when I look at my children, and think about my children’s children, that they’re going to have to deal with the fact that we’ve run up $400-billion deficits; that, for a generation, we’re inevitably going to have Moslems across the planet that are hating us,” he says. “Our kids will have to deal with all of that — and that’s my children we’re talking about — and I take that very personally.”
It’s in this context that Ringenberg — no less spontaneous in performance than before, but by no means reckless or unaware of the thoughts of the next family up the street or across the ocean — chooses to raise a specific question of his own for Americans and American policy at the end of the challenging “American Question”:
“Can we export dignity, respecting those who disagree?”
ND senior editor Barry Mazor lives in Nashville, where he met with Jason Ringenberg not far from the site of the Civil War battle there.
