A country song from a previously unknown singer that touches on class struggle in America and has been seized on by politicians has debuted at the top of the US charts, Billboard said Monday.
Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” has overtaken megastars Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen and Olivia Rodrigo to the number spot on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.
Billboard said Anthony, who has identified himself as a farmer in rural Virginia, becomes the first artist ever to launch atop the list “with no prior chart history in any form.”
The song has been streamed 17.5 million times and downloaded 147,000 times in less than a week, Billboard added.
The song was released on YouTube on August 11 and quickly soared to the top of Apple’s country chart as it hit a nerve on social media and garnered millions of views.
In his lyrics Anthony leans into issues of long hours for little pay with high taxes.
He also picks up talking points that have persisted since the business-friendly, pro-austerity Ronald Reagan years, namely against the welfare state.
“Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothing to eat / And the obese milking welfare,” sings Anthony.
“Well God, if you’re 5 foot 3 and you’re 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.”
In a clip Anthony belts out the twangy tune sitting in front of a wooded area complete with a camo-deer blind, which is used for hunting.
The song’s title invokes a common argument that Americans in the south, and more broadly rural areas outside the country’s coastal cities, have been left behind by those in power. Richmond is the capital of the state of Virginia and is a couple hours’ drive south of Washington.
Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, a US representative from Georgia with a history of aligning herself with far-right conspiracy theories, said on X, the platform formally known as Twitter, that Anthony’s track is one “that Washington DC needs to hear.”
Conversely, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democrat, said on the same social media platform that “progressives should listen to this.”
In a video posted to his YouTube channel Anthony insists his political views are “pretty dead center.”
At a concert in North Carolina on Saturday, he told Fox News: “I don’t see our country lasting another generation the way we are headed. We got to go back to the roots of what made this country great in the first place.”
