We bounced from working-class to middle-class neighborhoods as we moved to a new house each year. I attended a thoroughly racially integrated school at the peak of Southern desegregation in the 1970s. And my time in youth orchestra and accelerated classes meant mixing with proper wealthy kids. In fact, Winston-Salem had an actual Old Money™ set, the kind that only really exists in select places in the South and cities in the northeast like New York or Boston, the rest of the country being too new for that. Winston-Salem was home to R. J. Reynolds Tobacco, purveyors of all things nicotine. That’s where Winston cigarettes, Salem cigarettes, and Camels come from. Hanes underwear, Krispy Kreme, and more industry than you could shake a hauserstick at started in Winston-Salem. Back in the 1920s, Winston-Salem was even chosen as the site for the prototype of the Empire State Building, the more diminutive Reynolds Building. All this industry meant that Winston-Salem was also home to a lot of factory workers. “Millionaires and mill rats” living “side by side,” as my song “Jackson Cannery” goes (from Ben Folds Five, 1995).
Darting around all these social classes, I did a lot of observing. I now think of myself as a social-class tourist—learning a little about each, but never quite at home in any of them. One day I was the nervous poor kid who didn’t know which was the salad fork, the next I was worried I’d get beat up for talking too fancy around the country kids. Little habits and words from one class rubbed off on me, giving it away that I didn’t belong to the other. I came to see being a part of any class, like any club, as being trapped. And I liked to roam. My family never traveled geographically outside of North Carolina, but I felt like a world traveler. Laugh all you want at their Hawaiian shirts and high black socks, but a tourist gets to appreciate and enjoy all the things the locals take for granted. And it can be a little lonely, but such is the perspective of a songwriter, and this kind of upbringing was excellent training ground.
Yes, my family lived in some redneck neighborhoods, and yes, it’s true that there was a gun in every corner of our house. There were houses with yards stacked with old tires and neighbors who threatened to shoot each other because a dog knocked over their trash. Once, a redneck neighbor put a tiny pocket pistol against another redneck neighbor’s forehead and actually pulled the trigger. But it didn’t penetrate the skull. It just left the poor fellow’s face black and blue for six months. I even went to a country dentist whose office was in a cinder-block house on the edge of a pasture. The sounds of mooing cows could be heard outside the window as I looked up at a stained foam-tile ceiling, with country music blasting out of a transistor radio. This old farmer of a dentist filled fourteen cavities in one week after I got my braces off, one after the other with no novocaine or painkillers. I sensed he thought I looked too soft and classy—not quite football player enough.
“Son, you wanna learn how to be a real man?”
“I guess so,” I answered.
“You think you can be a real man?” he drawled as he picked up his drill.
“Yes, sir.” I shifted in the dentist’s chair nervously, sensing I’d just accepted a challenge I wished I hadn’t.
I squirmed, and tears streamed down my face, as he kept drilling into what felt like a bare-naked nerve. It was excruciating, and the sound of the drill matched the sensation a little too perfectly.
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But I can’t claim Springsteen-worthy working-class cred no matter how many anecdotes I might offer. Because unlike the legit working-class types I grew up with, I got to peek at the whole class menu. After my parents finished building a nicer house, we’d leave the working-class neighborhood behind and move to a middle-class development across town, where we’d live for a year until selling and starting the cycle all over again. It was hedgerows and foreign cars one year, and stacks of tires and American pickup trucks the next. I never quite got comfortable with the kids in one neighborhood before it was time to move on. And my parents often didn’t get around to learning the names of the neighbors on either side. Papa would give them his own names, like “the Doorslammers” or “that prick across the street.”
It turns out the nice neighborhoods had dog and trash-can disputes just like the redneck ones, but with their own middle-class twist, and minus the guns. A Wake Forest professor neighbor once pulled my father aside to show him a Polaroid. It revealed a blurry shadow of a dog in the night with Satan-like red-eye from the flash and two trash cans on their sides, garbage strewn about. It was definitely our German shepherd, insisted the professor, and he would have no choice but to use his black-belt karate skills on our dog next time this happened. My father laughed aloud at the man, and so Chuck and I joined in. These were the kinds of surreal middle-class suburban scenes that informed so much of my songwriting, and not just on the album entitled Rockin’ the Suburbs.
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For me, public schools and desegregation were a great gift. But there are many who grew up in my era in the South, black and white alike, who didn’t have such a positive experience. I recently heard a radio interview with an African American woman around my age who felt the benefit was to the white kids, who got their little taste of diversity at the expense of the black students. For her it wasn’t tourism. She was subject to what she described as a nightmare and felt like a guinea pig. I had never considered that angle, I admit, and it was an eye-opener to hear her speak about it. Just because you’ve blown through like a tourist, who can always go home when it’s no fun anymore, doesn’t mean you’ve experienced the people or the place.
I recall waiting for Papa in a “gun and coin shop” on the outskirts of town, looking at Indian Head pennies, and overhearing actual Klan dudes squinting down barrels and talking about who they’d like to shoot, dropping the N word left and right. But then they’d come over and tell me the history behind the “wheat penny,” give me a piece of candy and even a pat on the head. I was only eight years old—I had no idea how to process this stuff. But at school, while showing my black friend Daryl the rare coin I got at such a shop, I certainly knew better than to tell him where I bought it and what had been said.
I didn’t love every group I encountered. In fact, I’ll be quite happy to never see gun-and-coin dude again. But I learned to stand in other people’s shoes, as much as a child can. It’s hard to view certain people as anything but monsters, yet there’s value in giving it the old college try. By dignifying even the most despicable character as a human being, by offering them what empathy we can manage, we also hold them accountable for their choices. You can’t really convincingly condemn a monster for being a monster. He’s just being the best monster he can be. Sure, it’s easier to make a caricature of someone you don’t want to relate to, but the more lines you can step over, the closer you can get to a subject, the better off you’ll be—and the more complex and effective your songwriting will be. From the filthy rich to the filthy minded, I learned to meet people one at a time. And for that I’m grateful.