Reimagined Old-Time Music Cultures in the Trainhopping Punk Rock South

This chapter presents the first consideration of a little known network of radical musicians which has coalesced in the last decade into a vibrant new subculture within the broader (but still obscure) “old time music” scene. Since the late 1990s, old time music has been adopted and repurposed via the language of liberation and autonomy with great seriousness and complete novelty by a fluid group of alternative minded DIY anarcho-punks, many of whom are originally from outside of the region. These young musicians have relocated from around the country to the contemporary South in search of deeply authentic old time forms of music, life, and economy standing in opposition to dominant capitalist consumer culture. These “trainhoppers” search for community and authenticity among alternative-minded people and construct a unique old time musical ecology embedded within related pursuits like radical environmental politics, squatting, off-the-grid homesteading, alternative fuel production, and other aspects of the radical quest for hand-crafted experience conceived of as oppositional to dominant, contemporary American consumer culture.