Hayseed-Americans – formerly hicks, rubes, shit-kickers, stump-jumpers and chawbacons, all now subsets of MAGA – are in a dither over a corporate logo change. The restaurant/retail chain Cracker Barrel has been accused of “going woke” for scrubbing the seated man and his barrel (though printed in brown-outlined yellow, he codes as white), leaving just the words “Cracker Barrel.”
The right-wing outrage industry reacted like somebody slapped baby Jesus. Cries of “Remember Bud Light!” and boycott threats were immediate. The media breathlessly reported a sharp drop in the company’s stock price. (For context, the 660-outlet chain’s stock was up for the year but well off its high in 2021, which helped precipitate the change – visits from senior were way down.)
Chances are the company won’t lose significant business – most such boycotts frequently have little or no effect, with Bud Light the exception, not the rule. This isn’t even the first time Cracker Barrel has come under fire from easily-irked yokels. They threatened boycotts in 2022, when the chain committed the sin of adding a plant-based sausage option to the menu, and again in 2023 when it showed a rainbow-painted rocking chair on its Instagram account. Then, as now, the company was accused of having “gone woke.”
They’re not all that woke, tofu sausage aside. They pipe in country hits as background music, so it was inevitable that a country singer would eventually cut a song about a chain catering to the same audience. And what could be more fitting than the singer be one of the famous Dukes of Hazard – John Schneider, who played Bo (short for Beauregard) Duke, the blond one.
Schneider parlayed TV fame into a country music career early on. He released his first album in 1981, two years after the show debuted, and had a quick No. 4 country hit with a cover of “It’s Now or Never.” He scored four country No. 1’s in the mid-’80s, but stuck mostly to acting after the late ’80s.
He recorded almost nothing afterwards until 2018, when he embarked on an ambitious schedule of releasing a new song every week for a year. “Cracker Barrel” was one of those songs.
