Authored by John Bare 

Rednecks, hippies, misfits – we’re all the same. – Willie Nelson

It was “hotter than nine kinds of hell” a newspaperman wrote, and it was deep in the heart of Texas, as the song says, and it was 1973 and the peaceniks and the hawks were warring, same as the rednecks and the hippies, and no one could have imagined the unshaded Hurlbut Ranch in Dripping Springs in July would be hospitable to anyone, much less everyone.

Yet there it happened, a peace better than the kind of begrudging bargains struck in Yalta or Potsdam. This was something else. “The crowd came from every direction,” Sam Kindrick wrote in the San Antonio newspaper. “There were rednecks, hippies, square Johns and freaks.” The cowboys and the longhairs – the fans of both musical Bobs, Wills and Dylan – lowered their guard long enough to soak it all in, to inhale the one thing they shared instead of spitting and cussing over the hundred things they didn’t.

It was Wille Nelson they came to see at that Fourth of July picnic. They arrived a disparate lot. They left united, all rolled up into a genuine market segment – unmovable fans of music the press would label outlaw country. “It was miserable and it was great, one of the glorious heathen stomps between the Americas of J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy and Ronald Reagan. Many had come the evening before and spent the night passing stories and hits around campfires,” Billy Porterfield wrote in the Austin paper. Willie’s drummer got married right there on stage during the show, with the Texas football coach as best man.

A half century later, war is back in style, overseas and online, on campuses and in school board meetings. The United States today is a nation divided. We are peeling away from one another. In-group vs. out-group conflict is up. Hope is draining. Despair is in ascent. We sort ourselves, voluntarily partitioning “them” from “us,” creating social tourniquets that tie off access to the flow of human connections we need to thrive. Lonely and isolated, our social identities rest on signaling what we’re against. Life expectancy is in decline. So is trust. Even worse, it turns out the miasma can be monetized. Social media platforms exploit conflict to attract and hold the eyeballs they sell to advertisers.

Maybe scariest of all, we seem to be running out of ideas to fix whatever’s broke. Maybe there is salvation in music – and if not salvation, maybe at least a taste of peace.

A half-century after the ’73 picnic, we know more about what music can do for us. We know about how music can unleash those feel-good brain boosters. We know we can lose ourselves in music, goosebumps and chills overwhelming everything else and leaving us ready to do good in the world. We know the patterns and the rhythms and the beats move us to tap our toes and dance and bob our heads, and how we synch up with others around us without even realizing it, and how all of this binds our ancient brains to the moment. The binding so strong we want to do it again and again. And how we carve out a shared identity with everyone who was along for the ride, these people we treasure because, well, they were there with us when the music spun us round and round.

We saw it happen at the 2025 Grammys, when Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs shared the stage to perform “Fast Car.” The artists “gave America a are gift: Harmony,” The New York Times wrote. And now all kinds of folks are experimenting with new ways to harness the power of music to build belonging:

• Silkroad’s “Project MUSIC (Music Uniting Strangers Into Community) brings the artists and music of Silkroad into carceral communities across the country to exchange musical and cultural traditions, creating connection through communal singing and music making.”

• At the University of North Carolina, students and faculty have created a Beat Lab and Hip Hop Ensemble to foster bridging and boding relationships. Professor Maya Shipman, who performs as Suzi Analogue, says “in this space, I just see the culture getting stronger and tighter by the premise of us writing songs together.”

• Josh Kun, a music journalist and professor at the University of Southern California, has been helping folks in New Orleans, Houston, and Lincoln, Nebraska, learn to “crossfade” – a term borrowed from the music mixing board. “What does it mean to crossfade? To crossfade is to combine without erasing, to embrace the multiple and not the singular, to understand all existence is co-existence… It’s when two become one without ever ceasing to be two.”

• The Levitt Foundation is investing $150 million to bring free outdoor concerts to communities across the country. The foundation believes shared listening experiences can be a “a key driver for positive change, building social capital and economic vitality in communities.”

• The National Endowment for the Arts is exploring ways to use arts and cultural experience to foster healing, bridging and thriving. “The arts reveal new ideas, unlock opportunities, and help us confront the many challenges before us,” the NEA says.

• At Hawai’i’s Partners in Development Foundation, Shawn Kanai’aupuni’s team integrates indigenous arts and cultural experience into programming to unlock belonging for young adults poorly served by current systems. By blending cultural identity with workforce training, community service, and leadership, the programming fosters healing and builds hope.

This experimentation is critical. For every Crossfade experience and for every Champman-Combs show, there are loads of other situations where the music and the attendance patterns harden us to our own tribes. Maybe we even poke fun at those other folks, the ones not part of our in-crowd, because they’d never be cool enough to hang with us at a music show like this.

Yet shared music moments, if we allow them, can bring harmony to our lives. These moments can wipe away some of the discord. Across the country, Aspen Institute’s Opportunity Youth Forum Collaboratives are engaging tens of thousands of young adults in the work of systems change. The youth-led Collaboratives leverage the power of arts and cultural experiences to embed Belonging, Meaning, Wellbeing, and Purpose into the systems change work.

The Collaboratives are working with local musicians and artists who function as a kind of awe-and-wonder corps. They know success depends, in part, on our willingness to let the music move us, to embrace conditions where the music makes us tingle, to create these moments so that we bounce in time alongside new friends, the folks from down the street we never get around to calling or that family from the other church or the kids from the middle school on the other side of town.

“To crossfade is to embrace the other,” Kun says. “It’s to make the foreign familiar. Or in the words of an OG crossfader, Bob Dylan, don’t fear if you hear / a foreign sound to your ear.”

Watch spoken word performances by Meta4 Houston at the OYF Fall Convening 2024