South Gotta Change: We’re Gonna Find a Way

It’s been six years since Adia Victoria released her debut single, “Stuck in the South,” a searing, moody track that reveals the inherent struggles of a Black woman born and raised in a land that has given her life but continually denies her liberty. “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout Southern belles,” she sings, “but I can tell you something ’bout Southern hell / When your skin give ’em cause / to take and take.”

The American South is a constant source of inspiration for the South Carolina-born Victoria, a modern blueswoman with a spirit that harkens — and pays homage — to the ancestors. And on Aug. 28, with her Black brothers and sisters still marching in the streets, still asking, begging, for acknowledgement of rampant injustice, Victoria released “South Gotta Change.” It is, perhaps, the younger, more fearless, spawn of 2014’s “Stuck in the South.” This time around, Victoria is not lamenting centuries of pain. This time, she is demanding recourse.

The lyrics to “South Gotta Change” came easy for Victoria. Later, for the song’s musical foundation, she turned to legendary producer and 13-time Grammy winner T Bone Burnett. Burnett was born in St. Louis but raised in Texas, so he knows well the ways of the South. Still, before coming back to Nashville, 50 years in Los Angeles had created a misguided belief that the modern South — what he refers to, unironically, as the Confederacy — had somehow come to terms with its wretched legacy. 

“Just going to the grocery store and the dry cleaners in L.A., you deal with 15 different ethnicities, and everybody’s peaceful, everybody’s respectful,” Burnett says. “I thought that’s the way the world was, but moving back to the Confederacy showed me that it’s not.”

Ultimately, Burnett’s decision to produce “South Gotta Change” — to orchestrate the gothic guitar wails that underscore Victoria's vocal yearning — is reflective of the song’s powerful message: “ ’Cause I love you, I won’t leave you / Won’t let you slip away / Come what may / We’re gonna find a way / The South gotta change.”

“My thesis is, essentially, that the Civil War never ended,” Burnett explains. “There was a ceasefire, but it was never resolved. And I believe we’re in the moment, right now, to finally resolve the Civil War in favor of equal rights for all people.”

It is wholly appropriate that, in a city where music is the source of both immense pride and blistering prejudice, Victoria (who is Black) and Burnett (who is white) have partnered to leverage it as a healing force. 

 “I think about what equity and justice would look like, especially in the South and in a town like Nashville,” Victoria says. “Whose story is being told? Who gets to tell the story? Who is the subject? Who is the seer? And from those stories, what are the truths and myths that are built?”

 Burnett calls these myths the “delusion of white supremacy,” and while the delusion may have changed shape over time, it remains deeply entrenched nonetheless. If the delusion of 1820 was the belief that Black people could and should be bought and sold like cattle, that they were to be perpetually denied access to the wealth generated by their physical labor, the delusion of 2020 is the belief that Black ideas are now currency. It is the idea that Black people should now be locked out of the industries built by their creative and intellectual labor. And nowhere is this delusion more prevalent than in Nashville.

 In an essay written for Amazon’s audiobook platform Audible, slated for a Sept. 24 release, and called, aptly, “The Confederacy,” Burnett speaks to this truth: “While [African Americans] and their descendants have been overcoming indignity for over four centuries, they have in return given the world literature, art, music, knowledge and wisdom, and shown the world grace, courage, faith, perseverance and forgiveness, and for that, the world owes them the deepest respect and gratitude.”

 This idea of an unpaid debt strikes directly to the core of “allyship” — a term that has been used frequently in our post-George Floyd world but that still remains rather nebulous. How do American whites, and Southern whites in particular, repay what has been stolen?

 Put simply, allyship is action. It isn’t hashtags or black squares on Instagram or even regular Zoom conferences that call attention to inequities without ever doing the work to solve them.

It is, in Burnett’s case, making time to produce Victoria's song, and using his platform to spread it widely. It is telling his friends about the truth of white supremacy and how it always hovers close, suspended in the air, as potent and dangerous as any virus.

 “In the South,” Victoria says, “I think one of the reasons we are so hard-pressed to get past the Confederacy is because the myth will not die. You think of what James Baldwin said: The reason why white people hang onto their hate is they don’t know what to do without it. They’d be flailing in the wind.”

 While Burnett believes that many of these white people are ultimately “good,” he also knows that  it is the “good” people who present the most danger to humanity. In Nashville, few people are the direct ideological offspring of Nathan Bedford Forrest — the Ku Klux Klan leader, Confederate general and general genocidist. Instead, they descend from people who may have never raped or killed or looted, but who stood silently by as Forrest and others enacted their own reign of terror on the Black community.

 Getting “good” white people to act on behalf of the oppressed has always been this country’s most strident challenge; indeed, we wouldn’t be here, in a nation still fraught with racial inequity and violence, if more of them were willing to do so. But alas, it seems that the best way for white folk to connect the dots of white supremacy and see how it continues to draw harsh lines through society is to marry a Black person, to have a Black child, or to otherwise be in such an intimate relationship with a Black person that the struggles once rendered black-and-white in a news report now stand before them in three-dimensional Technicolor.

 “Black people have to constantly negotiate with whiteness,” Victoria says. “I think it’s time that white people have to negotiate with us.”

 And this is where the storytelling comes in — where songs like “South Gotta Change” have the potential to do the work that legislation and marches have failed to. Will it work? Burnett, who has dedicated his remaining years to the fight for equality for all people, seems to think so: “If you look at Memphis in the ’50s, you had Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash,” he says. “None of them probably had a high school education, but they changed the whole world, those four guys.”

 Victoria is a master storyteller who knows and feels, deep in her marrow, how white supremacy has stripped everyone, Black and white, of their humanity. Thankfully, she is as ready as anyone to help the South be the change the world needs to see. “Black people,” she reminds us, “have never wanted to do back, in kind, what has been done to us.

 “I’m looking at this from a spirit of grace,” Victoria continues. “It’s grace that allows people the space and the opportunity to grow. The most important things we learn in life are often the things that we mess up, the lessons that come from having someone else guiding us.”