Nashville Pussy

With the Confederate flag being shunned en masse after a murder spree at a black Southern church, what is this piece of freighted Americana still doing in any band’s portfolio?

“I don’t believe in banning things, on any level,” says Ruyter Suys, lead guitarist of Atlanta-based Nashville Pussy, whose profane, rebel-yell repertory includes a few instances of “stars and bars” branding on gig posters and tour merchandise.

Suys acknowledges that this view invites conflict. She has been debating the flag in emails with her mother, who is urging her to remove any sign of it from the band’s public presentation, and she now finds herself explaining her position to an interviewer.

“There are people who have very strong feelings about it,” she says of the issue.

Suys doesn’t muster a regional or “Southern pride” argument against mothballing the Confederate flag. For one, she’s Canadian. Suys happened to marry a Kentuckian, Blaine Cartwright, and they became Nashville Pussy.

She also says the band has a more devoted following in European countries such as France than it does anywhere in the United States.  (“We play domestically because our phones work here,” she quips.)

Suys argues that after decades of casual pop-culture usage on everything from concert tees to “The Dukes of Hazzard” toy cars, the Confederate flag is basically a relic, and to try to scrub every trace of it from public life is to give it a power it no longer has.

“It’s more kitsch by now,” she says.

But the anti-flag argument also has prominent backing in music circles. “It’s like how a swastika looks to a Jewish person,” rocker Tom Petty wrote in Rolling Stone, apologizing for having once used the Confederate flag as a tour prop.

Suys’ instinct seems to be to err on the side of free expression. “We offend people, regardless,” she says. With a song like “The South’s Too Fat to Rise Again,” from the band’s latest studio album, the offended might include every flag-waving, neo-Confederate wannabe.

Nashville Pussy with Valient Thorr, Flees and Milkspot and DJ Skidmark, Tuesday, Aug. 18 at Vintage Tap. 8pm. 21+
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~ Sean Piccoli