Waylon Jennings - The Dukes of Hazzard Theme (Good Ol' Boys)

The Savage Heart of the American South

Waylon Jennings, my favorite cocaine-addled, gunslinging balladeer, would rather eat a plate of broken glass than say “Yes, sir!” to the dead-eyed, bureaucratic greed heads who currently run American lives. Steve Earle’s John Lee Pettimore, Bo and Luke Duke, and the actual Junior Johnson didn’t run moonshine through the hills of the American South so we could become some pro-authoritarian, fuck chimps. Christ, in that regard, The Dukes of Hazzard Theme might be the only honest thing to mutate its way out of the South’s pop culture sewer in the last 45 years.

Waylon’s twang, his defiant swagger with that “fuck you” energy coiled up and barely contained for a network television program, has just enough kick to burn away the fog of American absurdity. Waylon Jennings’ Dukes Theme is one of the last gasps of genuine American anti-authoritarianism from the country music world, while that rag they call the Confederate flag? It’s the twisted banner of moral cowards begging for the jackboot. They ain't just opposites; they’re locked in a death struggle for the soul of whatever the hell this country still pretends to be.

The 9/11 attacks, for all that pure, condensed evil, also managed to fucking kill country music, a horrible ancillary byproduct of that forsaken day in September 24 years ago. 9/11 blasted away any artifice of introspective storytelling so long connected to the genre, and replaced it with redirected anger, fear, and mind-numbing, star-spangled jingoism. Our current defense secretary, a white nationalist with a penchant for philadering, would love nothing more than to sneak off to a back office in the Pentagon, fill his hand with his American flag pocket square, and dry hump his fist.

Waylon Jennings had a lifelong allergy to being told what to do. He didn’t just sing about outlaws — he was one. He was the voiceover, the narrator, the omniscient trickster god of The Dukes of Hazzard, and his theme song was a hymn for the dispossessed, the misfits, the people who run moonshine not because they want to, but because the system is engineered to grind their bones into paste for Boss Hogg’s next pork banquet.

Our heroes weren’t running shine to prop up some antebellum fever dream. They were running it because the alternative was to let the local power structure starve them out, one petty ordinance at a time. What the gibbering flag-wavers don’t understand is that they were the living, breathing middle fingers of Hazzard County, flipping off every greasy, pork-barrel politician and their badge-wearing attack dogs. They weren’t fighting for the right to own people; they were fighting for the right to exist without being crushed by the boot of authority.

And here’s where the cognitive dissonance comes in, like a punch in the throat: the Confederate flag. That ratty, blood-soaked relic of a failed slave state. The symbol of every reactionary, authoritarian, “please tread on me, Daddy” impulse that festers in the American id. You want to talk about heritage? Fine. The heritage of the Confederate flag is fucking losing. Losing a war to preserve human bondage. Losing the moral high ground for the rest of eternity. Losing so hard that your only recourse is to cosplay as a rebel while begging the state to stomp on the people you don’t like.

You want to know what waving that flag really says? It says, “I’m so desperate for someone to tell me what to do, I’ll pick the ghost of Jefferson Davis to do it.” It’s not rebellion. It’s submission with a side of cosplay. It’s for traitors who fired on their own country to preserve the right to treat human beings as livestock. It’s the ultimate act of bootlicking — wrapping yourself in the colors of authoritarian losers and pretending you’re a freedom fighter, when what you want is a master who looks like you and hates the same people you do. They’ve confused the defiant spirit of Waylon and the Duke Boys with the whining grievance of losers who peaked in 1865 and have been pissing their pants about it ever since. Just to illustrate how colossally fucking stupid they are, here’s an incomplete list of things that have lasted longer than the Confederacy:

• Gay marriage

• Tim Couch’s professional football career

• Don Johnson’s run on Miami Vice

• The Ford Pinto

• Hi-C’s Ecto-Cooler

• Michael Dorn playing Worf on Star Trek: The Next Generation

• The Walking Dead

• Heinz colored ketchup for kids

The sheer, breathtaking hypocrisy of it all would be funny if it wasn't so goddamn tragic. We have a TV show, a song, and characters (Bo and Luke Duke, both born circa 1958, men who wouldn't know Stonewall Jackson from a stonewall) embodying a scrappy, inclusive rebellion against corrupt authority. The Dukes fought the Man, not for some racist utopia, but for the simple right to be left the hell alone. They were outlaws, yes, but outlaws with a moral compass pointed towards family and freedom. Then you have these modern-day flag-wavers, these self-proclaimed "patriots," who’ve taken the aesthetic of rebellion and twisted it into a slavish devotion to the most authoritarian impulses of the modern age. They scream about "freedom" while demanding the government control women's bodies, ban books, and persecute anyone who doesn't look or think like them.

Waylon Jennings’ voice, that gloriously ragged, truth-telling instrument, cuts through the decades. It’s the sound of genuine resistance, of the individual against the machine. The Dukes of Hazzard Theme is the soundtrack to a specific, beautiful kind of American chaos – the chaos of freedom fighting back against the suffocating grip of petty, shit-for-brains authority. So here’s your prescription, straight from the gut: ditch the flag. Burn it, bury it, use it to mop up the spilled beer at your next family reunion. Stop confusing nostalgia for rebellion. Stop pretending that being a reactionary is the same as being an outlaw. If you want to honor Waylon Jennings and the Dukes, flip off the nearest authority figure, and remember that real rebellion is about punching up, not down. Anything else is just another flavor of boot polish.