Why an ex-factory worker’s YouTube hit is being hailed as an anthem for ignored Americans… and has even beaten Taylor Swift to the top of the charts

Last month a troubled and unknown country musician got to his knees and tearfully made a pledge that would change his life.

Although not a religious man, the singer – who calls himself Oliver Anthony on stage – says he promised God he would get sober if he helped him ‘follow his dream’. The former Virginian factory worker’s unlikely ambition was to have a hit song.

Whether thanks to divine intervention or not, his dream has come true. His song, titled Rich Men North Of Richmond, is a three-minute, ten-second burst of rage and frustration about the hopelessness felt by many working-class Americans and their resentment of the autocratic and selfish elite.

Ironically, while the heartfelt lyrics describe the death of the American Dream, Anthony, in his early 30s, is proof that it can still hold true.

The musician says he’d been about 30 days sober when – picking up on the popularity of songs he’d already released on social media – the West Virginia music channel asked him to record the song for its YouTube channel.

Oliver Anthony performs at the Oliver Anthony concert at the Eagle Creek Golf Club on August 19, 2023 in Moyock, North Carolina 

The Rich Men video has since attracted more than 40 million views and entered the Billboard charts at No 1, overtaking pop superstar Taylor Swift and bumping country singer Morgan Wallen off the top spot – an unprecedented feat for an artist with no prior recording history.

Yet unlike so many other Americans who have followed the rags-to-riches path that is supposedly their country’s birthright, Anthony has announced that he’s turned down an $8 million (£ 6.3million) recording contract. He claims that he’s had ‘blank stares’ from music-industry executives when he’s shunned their approaches.

‘I don’t want six tour buses, 15 tractor trailers and a jet,’ he explained on social media. ‘I don’t want to play stadium shows. I don’t want to be in the spotlight. I wrote the music because I was struggling with mental health and depression.’

This is no Bono or Bruce Springsteen venting against capitalism from a state-of-the-art recording studio in one of their mansions, but a high-school dropout with a history of alcohol abuse and depression who lives in a camper van and describes himself as ‘just some idiot and his guitar’.

But he’s an ‘idiot’ whose passionate views about the fractured state of his nation and the hypocrisies of those in charge are clearly in tune with the feelings of millions of other Americans.

The music video has no frills. It’s just Anthony, sporting a bushy red beard and a T-shirt, standing in the backwoods where he lives, strumming his guitar and singing into a microphone as two dogs sit at his feet.

It’s been a sensational success story of the digital era – the radio stations that once determined chart hits and misses hadn’t even heard of the song, let alone played it on air, before it went viral, attracting more than two million views in its first two days. During its first week of release it was streamed 17.5 million times on the likes of Spotify and Apple Music.

An Oliver Anthony fan at the Oliver Anthony concert at the Eagle Creek Golf Club on August 19, 2023

In the song – with a title referring to Richmond, Virginia’s state capital – he delivers a litany of misery about ‘sellin’ my soul working all day overtime hours for bulls**t pay… It’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to / For people like me and people like you’.

And in a country that prides itself on its egalitarian values, but which in recent years has had to face up to staggering inequality, he knows who to blame: the super-rich, privileged class on America’s East and West coasts.

He also appears to single out the prying, private data-stealing billionaires of Silicon Valley: ‘They all just wanna have total control / Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do.’

The virtue-signalling Washington elite, who seem to care more about needy cases abroad than struggling Americans, also bear the brunt of the attack. He darkly references the late-paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes with the lyrics: ‘I wish politicians would look out for miners / And not just minors on an island somewhere.’

He’s since been lionised by commentators across the Right and compared to conservative writer J D Vance, whose acclaimed 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy movingly related the struggles of his extended white, working-class Appalachian family. Vance’s story ended in hope – he managed to win a place at Yale Law School and is now a US Senator.

Although some estimates claim Anthony is currently earning $40,000 (£31,000) a day from his music, he knows it could easily be a flash in the pan.

Right-wing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called the song ‘the anthem of the forgotten Americans’, while Trump-backed Republican Kari Lake hailed it as ‘the anthem of this moment in American history’. But even some Democrats have acknowledged its significance, with Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy saying that ‘progressives should listen to this’.

Unlike so many other Americans who have followed the rags-to-riches path that is supposedly their country’s birthright, Anthony has announced that he’s turned down an $8 million (£ 6.3million) recording contract

Anthony, who has so far declined to give interviews, has insisted that he’s standing outside the ferocious battle between Left and Right.

‘I sit pretty dead-centre down the aisle on politics and always have,’ he claimed in an introductory video uploaded on to YouTube earlier this month. ‘It seems like both sides serve the same master, and that master is not any good to the people of this country.’

On Friday he mocked the playing of his song at last week’s debate between eight Republicans vying to become the party’s next presidential candidate. He said: ‘I wrote that song about those people, you know, so for them to have to sit there and listen to that, that cracks me up.’

But Left-wingers can also see he’s hardly one of them, even if they agree with his populist diatribe about the sufferings of the poor and venality of the rich.

Liberal critics have complained about lyrics attacking wages that are ‘taxed to no end’ and, worse of all, fat people claiming government support. Or, as Anthony puts it, the ‘obese milkin’ welfare’, adding: ‘Well, God, if you’re 5ft 3 and you’re 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.’

Anthony has even sparked a response from ageing British firebrand Billy Bragg, a troubadour of Left-wing musical breast-beating, who has composed his own, Guardian-friendly version, entitled Rich Men Earning North Of A Million.

The music video has no frills. It’s just Anthony, sporting a bushy red beard and a T-shirt, standing in the backwoods where he lives, strumming his guitar and singing into a microphone as two dogs sit at his feet

‘Join a union / Fight for better pay / You better join a union, brother / Organise today,’ runs the chorus.

And to Anthony’s jab at overweight spongers, Bragg piously lectures: ‘So we ain’t gonna punch down on those who need / A bit of understanding and some solidarity / That ain’t right, friend.’

However, what Bragg and the rest fail to see, say Anthony’s supporters, is that his song hasn’t become wildly popular because it’s a worthy political polemic but because it’s ‘authentic’ – a cry against being told (by people like Bragg) what they should think all the time.

Anthony is telling it as he sees it and not as he’s told he ought to see it. ‘People are just angry over the way that… the woke universe has taken over so much of content,’ Clay Travis, talk-radio host and author of American Playbook: A Guide To Winning Back The Country From The Democrats, told the New York Times.

He and others on the Right see the song’s success as part of the ongoing backlash against establishment wokery, such as the major boycott of Bud Light after it hired transgender ‘influencer’ Dylan Mulvaney to promote the all-American beer.

The same conservative ‘rebellion’ has recently seen a low-budget feature film about child-trafficking, Sound Of Freedom – championed by Right-wing politicians – become a box-office smash hit.

Another, rather more controversial country song, Try That In A Small Town, also soared to No 1 in the Billboard chart after being accused of promoting racist vigilantism with lyrics such as: ‘Cuss out a cop, spit in his face… Well, try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road / Around here, we take care of our own…’

As for Anthony’s ‘authenticity’, the only thing he’s made up is his performing name – his real one is Christopher Anthony Lunsford. He says Oliver Anthony was his grandfather, whose life in the South’s poor Appalachian region during the 1930s Depression was ‘dirt floors, seven kids, hard times’.

Singer-songwriter Anthony was brought up in North Carolina and dropped out of school aged 17. He worked in a succession of factories, his last being at a paper mill which he described as a ‘living hell’. In 2013 he suffered a bad fall at work and fractured his skull, prompting him to move to Virginia to be near family.

After he recovered, he worked in sales for industrial manufacturing companies, a job that he says involved him ‘getting to know tens of thousands of other blue collar workers’. And he’s heard the ‘same story’ for the past ten years. He said: ‘People are so damn tired of being neglected and manipulated.’

Pictured here is his poverty-stricken family during the Depression, including his grandfather Oliver Anthony (far left), from whom he takes his stage name

After falling heavily in debt when buying a home, he is now living in a 27ft camper van with a tarpaulin on the roof that he bought online for $750. The latter may have played a huge part in his success but he calls the internet a ‘parasite’ that infects our minds, wastes our time and ‘has divided all of us’.

He goes on: ‘I’m not a good musician, I’m not a very good person. I’ve spent the last five years struggling with mental health and using alcohol to drown it out.’

Such startling honesty is hardly the norm in the cynical and artificial world of the music industry, but Oliver Anthony can at least reassure himself that, as a songwriter, he has reason for optimism.

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