- [Narrator] Welcome to Ear To the Common Ground.

Here we celebrate the power of music and food to bring Americans together.

Filmed from the historic barn on Cash Lane in Music City, each episode of Ear to the Common Ground features one musical artist and a diverse gathering of eight of their fans.

Everyone brings a dish to the table and they talk about one of the issues of the day, face-to-face, with compassion, replacing contempt as they keep their hearts, ears, and minds attuned to the common ground.

We are Sister Sadie and these are eight of our fans.

Blake, Anette, Todd, Sam, Janelle, McKayla, Todd and Sterling.

Tonight we are focusing on the urban rural divide.

Let's celebrate America's greatest diversity, diversity of thought and shine a light on some common ground.

♪ All about you ♪ (people clapping) - Half of us are city mice and half of us are country mice.

Who's who?

I think I know.

- I'm definitely a country.

- I had you.

- Well, I'm definitely a country mouse.

- Yeah.

- I've never really lived in a large city very long, only very short stints.

And I raised my two boys and a daughter in the country and I get up every morning and go out and take care of Hereford and Angus cattle every day.

And I'm the only person.

I drive all the tractors, I do all the work I do.

So I like being with animals all the time.

- I am 50% country mouse, 50% city mouse because I also love the city.

I also love everything that the city offers.

And so for me it's a very delicate balance between having that time space in the country and then also having the things that the city brings, which is a lot.

But yeah.

so I'm 50-50.

- I live in a world class city now where I can get any kind of food in the entire world that I want and it's amazing.

I can go see any kind of music in the world I want.

I can see whatever theater production that I want to see.

And I really, I appreciate that.

- Since the pandemic's come, people are leaving the cities or California.

I've got neighbors now that's from Las Vegas, Virginia, West Virginia, all kinds of different places.

So there are a lot of people that are moving to where I live, you know?

And so I don't know, you know why?

I don't really understand why, I'd understand the part that, maybe get trying to get away from the city.

So I don't understand necessarily why, maybe, I mean, does that make any sense?

- Yeah, how does that make you feel that people are moving from the cities into your familial lands, all of that.

- Well, it don't bother me.

Only thing that what really what I guess the problem is with me is that I'm used to buying property for a thousand dollars an acre, $1,500 an acre.

- Even 3000 is reasonable.

And now they're 10,000.

- So now, when, when the property that was a house sold right beside me a couple months, well, it's been about six months ago now.

The guy put it on the market for 450.

And I told my son, we went by it.

I said, that won't last week.

And it didn't.

He sold it for 480 to some people from California.

Which raises my property values no doubt.

But if I decide to buy property, it puts me in a binds.

- Yep.

- That I'm not used to spending $30,000 for an acre of property and stuff like that.

And I don't know that it really bothers me.

It's just other than the fact of the price of the market of things.

Does that make sense?

Because there's no zoning or anything where we live, and I'm just kind of afraid that that can come with population.

I don't know all they already know about that stuff.

So that's a little scary to me that I don't understand how zoning stuff works in the cities and I've never been exposed to none of it.

And I don't know that I really want to be exposed to it.

I don't understand it.

So I just know that it happens and stuff.

So I kind of like it the way it is.

- Just in the last few weeks we've learned they've, our county doesn't limit like subdivisions and new homes going in.

10 new ones just got approved.

That's 1200 homes.

And I do have cattle and sometimes it's not a very pleasant smell to live next to a cattle farm, especially if they came and just put chicken litter all over my 90 acres and you live next door, especially if you've just moved there and built your dream home.

- Yep.

- You finally get retirement age.

You drive, you move to the country, you buy your five acres or whatever and you build your dream home and you walk out on the front porch and you go country air, oh my gosh, what is that odor?

And it's because I just put chicken manure all over my pastures and it's gonna be that way for three days, you know?

And it is atrocious smelling, but it's great for grass.

- It is really bad.

- And I've gotta be a grass farmer if I'm gonna be a cattle farmer.

And you can't be a cattle farmer without being a grass farmer.

So then you end up with people who say, oh my gosh, they shouldn't be able to do that.

We need to regulate that.

They shouldn't be able to put manure on their pastures.

Or there's a dairy farm next door or right now in my hometown, people have bought homes next to a racetrack, a dirt track out in the country.

Well, the dirt track was there.

Well now every time there's a race, they've got picket signs and they're walking down on the side of the street going, they should close the racetrack.

I understand that it causes problems, but I think sometimes, the issue is for me, like you said, property values.

I don't plan on selling my land.

- Right.

- So if my property value does go up, I'm not gonna benefit from it.

My children might, but I hope not.

I hope they hold onto the family farm.

And then the traffic that's on the roads, I don't know how often you guys drive out in the country and real estate, y'all probably run into that.

People are wanting to buy out in the country.

They want that home.

We don't have expressways.

I got here to Nashville and it's like, white knuckles on the elbow, on the steering wheel.

It's like, oh my gosh, 'cause I'm not used to driving in this kind of traffic.

I'm driving a tractor down a gravel road.

And in the rural areas, they don't maintain our roads like they do here in your city or wherever you live.

In larger cities and closest cities, they've got nice paved roads.

We have potholes in the paved roads everywhere.

- Sounds like Nashville.

- We get 'em in the nice highways so.

- Come to Chicago.

- The further you get from the city though, the less money they put into the road structures.

That's just the way it is.

There's less people living there.

They're further apart.

They're not gonna spend as much.

So you end up with that as being an issue.

And then here I am driving my tractor down the road and you're used to driving across town, brum, brum, brum, on the expressway.

And you come up behind me and I'm doing 25 and you think.

- And that's all you can do though.

- Yeah.

Because that's all I can do on the tractor, but okay.

And then I live in a windy area, so you're like, okay, is it a double yellow line?

Is it a white line?

Can I pass them?

And it's dangerous to the people on the tractors and people don't have a lot of, people visiting our areas or moving into our areas, don't know how to drive behind a tractor, a truck pulling a trailer.

If I've got six hay bales on there and you're riding on my bumper of my trailer, I'm terrified.

What if something comes loose that, I've got it all strapped down.

But there are a lot of issues that need to be discussed and people need to hear those issues and say, oh my gosh, I never thought about that before.

It's not just our country, but also our communities.

- I know nobody wants to dive into the politics of it, but something you said I think's really important.

When you were talking about the zoning, for example, you said it kind of worries you 'cause you don't know that much about it.

And I think that there are a lot of, certain politicians and others, lobbyists and others that really, really take advantage of that exact thing of fear mongering and making people worry about things that they're not familiar with.

Making people worry about things that they're, just haven't been exposed to or haven't been around, that are much bigger issues and much bigger subjects and much more all-encompassing than zoning.

But I just think that was super important what you said.

I just think it goes so far because there are so many people, powerful people in this country that are, that I think use that to their advantage and to certain people's advantage if they can find anything that makes people worry or scares them about the unknown, whether that's, whether that's people that look different than them, believe differently than them or change, like all those things, and I mean, again, I say it from growing up in a small town in the middle of nowhere and then living in the city and you know, having experience and lived through both sides of that.

And yeah, I look back all the time and think about my friends, my family in my hometown and you know, lots of 'em that I still talk to and keep connected with.

And it's so much different, if I try to have a conversation with 'em about something.

It's so much different for my friends that have never left a small town.

And because I don't ever want to come across, I don't want them to think for a second, like, I think I'm better or condescending or anything like that, or that I know more or anything like that.

But when you've been out.

And you've experienced better, you want better for everyone else around you.

- Yeah, like, that's it.

When I left my little town years ago, as crazy as it sounds now that I've lived outside of it, legitimately, I had never had, I had never even had a close relationship with somebody that looked differently than me.

But at the same time, my parents raised me to love everyone and like treat everybody with respect.

They didn't ever raise me to like be hateful or anything like that or be mean to anyone.

But there was just like this, it was almost, it was like this understood separation in small rural town, of you be nice to everybody, but there was still, it was still so segregated, you know?

- Yeah.

- And a large part, Everything changed when I got outside of that and now have black friends and brown friends and Muslim friends that are literally like family to me now that.

We're at their house, they're at our house.

Our kids have birthday parties together.

We spend time with one another.

Call one another, check on one another.

It's just so much different than where I grew up.

- We are still segregated very much so, even in the very inner cities.

Stratford high School is still 95% black and Franklin Academy is still 95% white.

- That's true.

And it is 2022, right?

- Yep.

- So what was the number again?

I missed it.

- Of what?

- The numbers you did.

- Oh so like Stratford high school is 95% Black, Franklin Academy, which is what four miles across town is 95% white.

And that happens not only in rural, but everywhere.

- I have run and I don't wanna say it, but I'm going to say it, I've run into more racist episodes and racist issues in the country than I have in the cities.

- Really?

- Because in the cities, it's just accepted.

- You may have an opinion about somebody, but typically they keep it to themselves.

- Okay.

- In the country, I'm a cyclist, I ride a lot.

I rode Seven Centuries last year, I did 3,500 miles.

So you do a lot of training and I ride, I live in the country, so for me, I'll just go near my driveway and make a left and I'll ride out in the country and I'm out in, these little back roads where, I can get up at seven o'clock on a Saturday morning, right?

60 miles, I'll pass five cars all day.

- Right.

- But the problem is, is that the only time in 20 years of riding of cycling that I've ever had racial problems, it's been in the country I was riding my bike one time and this white dodge pickup pulls up next me post a window down and he goes, wow.

An inward who doesn't look like he stole that bike and takes off white diesel.

I was riding past some guy's house.

Dog starts barking and the guy was like, get the in, get the in, get the inn as the dog's barking.

And this is out in the middle of nowhere.

And here I am, I'm a mammal, which for you, if you don't know what a mammal is, it's middle-aged men in Lycra.

So I look like an Easter egg.

Yellow and red and green and pink and I'm carbon fiber bike and I'm just peddling through the countryside, minding my own business.

But I run into this kinda stuff in the country and I don't run into that in the city.

I've lived in Chicago and I used to, I used to ride into the city and back and they just looked at me like I from crazy bike messenger.

It's like you're riding in Chicago, what is wrong with you?

As they drive past.

But I never had any racial issues.

But yet out in the country, that's where I always run into the problems.

And so it's, one of the things that we were asked to talk about was the divide between urban and rural.

And one of the reasons I asked the country mouse, city mouse question was because I was trying to sort of highlight the fact.

I wanted to highlight the fact that a lot of us have toes in both worlds.

A lot of us, we live in the country or we're from the country, we've been to the city.

We live in the city.

And so we know both worlds.

And so we've been able to see city life, we've been able to see country life.

We know what's good about each.

I love going outside and looking at stars.

- You can appreciate it, - You appreciate it.

I love being able to go outside and just look at the stars.

I walk outside and look up and it's like, oh wow.

And I've got an app that tells me what all the stars are, but at the same time, it's being on the country.

It's kind of disheartening when that kind of stuff happens.

- Yeah.

- Well I'm gonna start off on the food, and I hate to say this, but I made sweet potato pie and somebody stirred it and put it in a different bowl and changed it completely.

I don't know how it's going to taste.

- No sweet potato hash.

- Yeah, it looks that way.

- I bet it'll be wonderful.

- It should have been.

Sweet Potato is on the bottom with a beautiful brown sweet potato, a brown sugar crust with pecans on the top.

That's not what it looks like.

There's a seedy person around here.

- I guess we're having the springtime Thanksgiving, 'cause you made sweet potato casserole and I made cranberry Chutney.

- Oh, wonderful.

- Amazing.

- The racial divide.

We were founded on a racial divide.

This country was founded on a racial divide.

And so A, I'm so grateful that we're able to even all be here and we have so much work to do, but it does feel as though it's just right.

It's this repetitive, it keeps coming back around and we keep dividing and all of us sitting here have felt, I think, I should speak for me, 2020 And it was just like.

Puff.

people just took their corners like two boxers.

- Yeah.

- Something I had thought of, oh, a little bit earlier as we've been talking about this, is that in rural areas where people tend to be more right leaning and then versus urban areas where people are left leaning.

In rural areas, there's a general distrust of government interference.

And that can cause a lot of skepticism about.

- Which I've never understood because the government is for you technically in rural areas.

- Well, I've got to say something about that then.

As old as I am, I have lived through Watergate, lived through the Iran Contra, I have lived through, help me here Todd.

All the different times the US government has lied to the American people and that has not helped this communication thing that's going, that we've had to go through the last few years.

Todd named some of the things, Vietnam, all the things, the OPEC, the gas shortages of the seventies.

When you get our age, I think I've lived through like 11 presidents.

Can you imagine that?

- The crazy thing though is the things that some of those people do trust from the government.

It's like whoa, whoa, whoa.

You believe that, but you, you don't believe.

- Then I would have to call 'em on that if I heard it.

- Then it's like, what?

You know.

- But what were you gonna say?

were you gonna follow, say it?

- I was just gonna say like, 'cause for most of your conservative white people, the government falls in line for you.

Whether it's just like, you're being lied to, but I mean, it's like, oh, well, like you're gonna say, oh, I don't know what you're gonna say, can you say that sorry.

- I was gonna say 'cause if anybody has a reason to distrust the government, it would be somebody who hasn't had more than one president that looks like them.

- Exactly.

- Right, and as a woman, I've never had one president that looks like me.

- Right.

- So we all have.

- But I'm white.

- Neither have, but I keep hoping when we get one that she will be honest and truth, and deserve the job and do all the things that make all them men look terrible.

- But we have had white presidents, right?

And so I was, I wanted to tag on with that and say like, the distrust in government, it's always interesting to me when people say that rural people distrust the government because I always think that like urban people distrust the government.

I don't know.

That's interesting to me.

- Well, from.

I was in Appalachian studies in college and while I'm not originally from Appalachia, a lot of the things that we had to study were the types of things that we're talking about.

Because lots of people in Appalachia are very poor and they're very isolated from the outside world and they have a really bad habit of having stigmas and stereotypes put on them that they're stupid, because they don't go to college or they don't do things the same way other people do.

Or, there's lots of stereotypes about them being incest and having babies with their sisters and you know, making moonshine and they're stupid and they don't have any teeth and all kinds of things that make them not want to associate with people from the outside because that's what they're gonna think of them no matter what.

Because if you have a really heavy accent and you talk slow, somebody thinks that you're stupid.

But a lot of this comes from, lots of people specifically in Appalachia, and I can't speak for other rural areas, feel abandoned by the government because when promises are made about, like from from the side, from the left side, when they're saying we want to make, we want to make changes and stop global warming and we want to lessen the fuel emissions and we want to make all the cars electric and we want to, you need to do your part and you need to bike and you know, carpool to work and you need to lessen the emissions that are hurting the environment.

Lots of people in rural areas are so isolated that they can't bike to work because they have a 30 or 40 minute drive.

They can't bike to the grocery store.

The closest grocery store is a Dollar General and it's an hour and a half away from you and you cannot get by without having some sort of vehicle.

And usually those vehicles are older and they're gas guzzlers because that's all you can afford.

So when you have people talking at you saying, oh, well you're just stupid and you need to do this, this and this.

It kind of makes them feel or taking coal mining away, because lots of people depend on that as they're, as they're living, as their main source of income.

And when somebody comes in and says, oh, well it's not good for the environment or it's not good for this, we're just gonna take it away.

And lots of people are suddenly afraid that they're gonna lose their jobs and their livelihood and they don't know what else to do and they're not given a solution for that.

A lot of people in rural areas, specifically in Appalachia from what I know of feel like they've been abandoned by the government.

So they don't trust things that people tell them or when they're told from somebody in the city, oh, you should do this and you should do this, and here's a big list of things that you should be doing.

They feel like it doesn't apply to them because where's the proof that it applies to them?

- There's no doubt that there's a lot of things that can be changed.

And there needs to be a leader in that, to lead change.

But if you cannot get the other 99% of the world to commit to any of it, I mean, you're speeding your wheels a lot.

You know what I mean?

In a lot of ways.

- But you have a lot of this country that'll really cut their nose off to spite their face.

- Oh yeah.

- Just because like, they don't want to see someone that is not the same as them, receive the same benefits as them.

So they'll throw away their benefits.

- Absolutely.

- Just because they're like, oh, well they get that too.

No.

- Which is a story as old.

- Well, I'm talking about emissions now.

- But I'm saying it's like even with emissions, whenever you're looking in inner cities, right?

So you have a good, you have a part of a city that can't afford to keep their car up to date.

How much of that city can fix a check in?

check engine light?

It might be a $32 fix, but like, hey, sometimes that $32 is a big stretch.

- I've been to the point where $32 either is a light bill for the month or gas to work.

- Yeah.

- There's no doubt about that.

- And that's probably 90% of America.

- That's right.

I'll go a hundred percent on that.

- So like no matter what we look like or whatever, that's 90% of America.

- That's right.

(people clapping and cheering) - Thank you for the pudding.

- Look what we have.

Yeah.

Dig in.

- All right.

- But who made it?

I made the pudding.

I have a great story about this pudding.

So this older lady that is not in very good health, her name is Tissi and she's says she's ready to go home to be with the Lord.

And I said Tissi, but before you go, she asked me to play at her funeral.

So she told me what song she wants me to play.

She wants me to play Bridge Over a Troubled Water.

- Excellent.

- That's a good one.

- Nice.

And so I said before you go Tissi, I need you to gimme your banana pudding recipe.

So this is it.

- Aww.

- And I've only made it twice.

- SO this is the second time.

- This the second time.

- Nice.

- It didn't kill anyone the first time.

- That was the next question.

- I mean, how many people got sick or died?

- None so far.

- So anyway.

- I'm sure it's good.

- I hope you enjoy it.

We're glad to be here with you guys.

I was watching some of you, your dinner and your conversation and it was just beautiful, very moving.

♪ Make the world ♪ ♪ go away ♪ ♪ Can't get it off my shoulders ♪ ♪ Say the things you use to say ♪ ♪ And make the world go away ♪ ♪ Do you remember when you loved me ♪ ♪ Before the world took you astray ♪ ♪ To say you love me, like you used to ♪ ♪ And make the world go away ♪ ♪ Make the world go away ♪ ♪ Can't get it off my shoulders ♪ ♪ Say the things you used to say ♪ ♪ And make the world go away ♪ ♪ Oh, I'm sorry if I hurt you ♪ ♪ I'll make it up day by day ♪ ♪ To save you love me like you used to ♪ ♪ And make the world go away ♪ ♪ Make the world go away ♪ ♪ Can't get it off my shoulders ♪ ♪ Say the things you used to say ♪ ♪ And make the world go away ♪ ♪ Say the things you used to say ♪ ♪ And make the world ♪ ♪ go away ♪ (people clapping) (soft music)