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It depicts a bare lightbulb on a garish red ceiling, with white cables forming an X across it, like a subliminal Confederate flag. Eggleston’s best known image may be 1973’s Greenwood, Mississippi, itself used as a cover for Big Star’s 1974 album Radio City.
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The cover was actually a photograph by William Eggleston, celebrated chronicler of the southern American landscape whose work often incorporates Confederate flags, overtly or covertly. Primal Scream put the flag on the cover of their 1994 album Give Out But Don’t Give Up, but this was intended to signal their new southern-tinged sound, the album having been recorded in Memphis.
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The cover of Primal Scream’s album Give Out But Don’t Give Up – a cropped 1980 photograph by William Eggleston. Petty would unfurl the flag on stage during the song Rebels, whose chorus begins: “I was born a rebel down in Dixie.” They all later renounced its use, though not Johnny Cash, who sang in front of it on The Muppet Show in 1980. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 1974 pro-southern anthem Sweet Home Alabama famously featured the flag on its cover, and the band used it liberally in their graphics, merch and stage act, as did such other southern rock acts as Tom Petty and the Allman Brothers Band. But, rather than military and political rebellion against the north in defence of a racist ideology, the flag came to represent more nebulous forms of rebellion. “It became an icon for an attitude,” says Coski.Īnd that attitude was “rebel”. In the early 1950s, the US developed a “flag fad” and suddenly it was everywhere: on T-shirts, licence plates and mugs. It entered postwar politics via the pro-segregation Dixiecrats.
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It was adopted by southern fraternities and soldiers from the south used it during the second world war. It began to seep into popular culture in the 1940s, says John Coski, historian at the American Civil War Museum and author of The Confederate Battle Flag. After the civil war, it became the prevailing way to represent the Confederacy, initially in the context of military history and memorials. The Confederate flag as we know it – 13 white stars on a blue cross with a red background – was designed in 1861 by William Porcher Miles, an avowed pro-slavery secessionist politician. Sure, their car had a Confederate flag, but the Dukes were just “good ol’ boys, never meanin’ no harm”, as the theme tune had it. It barely ever broached matters of race, slavery or the civil war, although the erasure of non-white characters from the landscape made that easier. On the face of it, The Dukes of Hazzard was simple, good-natured fun. The responses to Schneider’s question were an overwhelming “No”, even from commenters claiming to be black and Latino fans. Popular culture has been central to that process. Having once stood for one, unambiguous thing – the Confederate army during the American civil war – the flag has now accumulated a multitude of meanings, many far removed from the original Confederate cause. Spike Lee, on the other hand, said the flag made him feel “the same way my Jewish brothers and sisters feel about the swastika”. With his limitless desire to open another front in the culture wars, President Trump recently asserted it represents “freedom of speech”, and criticised Nascar. Dispute rages over what the Confederate flag really signifies. Photograph: Rob Carr/APĪnd it’s not over yet. Severing ties … a Nascar race at Talladega, Alabama.