Cracker Barrel and the Americana debate

Cracker Barrel has lost its barrel.

This week, the Tennessee-born chain, once defined by its gingham-tinted nostalgia, retired the logo of a man in overalls leaning against a wooden cask in favor of a stripped-down wordmark. The stock immediately tumbled, nearly a hundred million dollars in value gone by Thursday afternoon. Online, the uproar was swift and gleeful: conservatives decried the change as too progressive, and so, the new logo was inducted into the ever-growing catalog of “woke” consumer products — a list that already includes rainbow Oreos, Bud Light cans and Starbucks’ allegedly godless holiday cups.

For a restaurant better known for cornbread and checkerboards than market volatility, the whole thing had the air of an identity crisis unfolding in real time.

Bryon Donalds, a Republican congressman and gubernatorial hopeful from Florida, summed up the general Republican sentiment on X, formerly Twitter: “In college, I worked at @CrackerBarrel in Tallahassee. I even gave my life to Christ in their parking lot. Their logo was iconic and their unique restaurants were a fixture of American culture. No one asked for this woke rebrand. It’s time to Make Cracker Barrel Great Again.”

It’s not only conservatives who are irked. Some liberals, too, lament the rebrand, though largely for different reasons: they see it as another step in the long flattening of American restaurants, where corporate sleekness overtakes idiosyncrasy, hospitality or even basic conviviality. (Even the Democratic National Committee’s social media account joined in: “We think the Cracker Barrel rebrand sucks too.”)

But the conservative flavor of frustration is different.

It’s louder. More performative. Less about whether “Uncle Herschel’s” likeness clings to the Cracker Barrel logo and more about what the logo represents.

When you think about it, a cross-country drive without a Cracker Barrel sighting seems almost — well, unthinkable. Each location is lined with over 1,000 pieces of Southern country-themed decor. Every item is real. There are reportedly no reproductions among the 700,000 antiques in circulation, all funneled from a 26,000-square-foot warehouse in Lebanon, Tennessee. The chain presents itself as more local than it is, a feat that’s both amusing and impressive in an era of corporate sameness.

And having spent years living in and traveling through the South, I’ve also seen what these restaurants mean to people: family road trips, post-church lunches, Friday night suppers punctuated by rocking-chair visits. That combination of locality and ritual — somewhere and nowhere at once — turns Cracker Barrel into a kind of cultural lighthouse.

And Republicans, predictably, have claimed it as a beacon of Americana.

Silly? Perhaps. But under an administration that made fast food part of its politics, from Trump stumping at McDonald’s drive-thrus to RFK Jr. cozying up to Steak & Shake, it makes a strange sort of sense. (Steak & Shake weighed in on X: “This is what happens when you have a board that does not respect their historical customers or their brand.”)

The debate, though, isn’t unique to pancakes and barrels. It echoes this summer’s blue jeans dispute — Sydney Sweeney’s “good genes” campaign versus Beyoncé’s cowboy couture — and raises the bigger question: who gets to claim the aesthetics of Americana, and who decides who belongs? Cracker Barrel may be a ridiculous battlefield, its décor a curated performance of nostalgia, but the fury over its missing barrel points to something more enduring: the fight isn’t about logos; it’s about ownership and how fiercely we guard the myths we call our own.

Take denim, for instance. The fabric has long been shorthand for rugged individualism and the everyday workwear mythos of the American frontier — in other words, a different, portable performance of Americana. Controversy erupted this month when American Eagle Outfitters launched its “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign. The ads, featuring the blond-haired, blue-eyed actress reading the copy, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue,” were quickly called out by critics, including Lizzo, for their unsettling overtones of white supremacy and eugenics.

Meanwhile, some on the right hailed it as a triumph over “woke culture.” President Trump weighed in, cheering Sweeney’s political registration: “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there. It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are ‘flying off the shelves.’ Go get ‘em Sydney!”

The denim conversation became further charged when conservative commentator Megyn Kelly targeted Beyoncé’s new Levi’s campaign — a deliberative reimagining of classic Levi’s commercials, inspired by her “Cowboy Carter” album — framing it as the moral opposite of Sweeney’s. In the ads, the 35-time Grammy winner appears in denim-on-denim with blond hair. Kelly’s verdict on X was stark: “Quite clearly there is nothing natural about Beyoncé. Everything—from her image to her fame to her success to her look below—is bought and paid for. Screams artificial, fake, enhanced, trying too hard.”

It’s worth noting that some of the animosity towards Beyonce’s Levi’s ads is tied to the racism inspired by her foray into country music via “Cowboy Carter.” Her presence in the genre, her Blackness and her artistry, challenged long-standing assumptions about who belongs in the visual and sonic mythology of the American heartland.

And it’s not only about race. Country music has long been a conservative cultural touchstone, valorizing patriotism, liberty and small-town Americana. Yet, over the past decade, the genre has witnessed artists redefining what those ideals look like in practice. For instance, in 2014, Ty Herndon reissued his debut single “What Mattered Most” with pronouns adjusted to reflect his own identity, a small but symbolic act of reclamation. That same year, Kacey Musgraves won Song of the Year at the CMAs for “Follow Your Arrow,” celebrating same-sex love, while Billy Gilman and Brandi Carlile emerged as openly queer voices reshaping the emotional and aesthetic contours of the genre.

As I’ve written before, the political push-pull of country music’s modern shape continues (I think of the lyrics of songs like the conservative “Rich Men of North Richmond” and “Try That in a Small Town,” versus the work of “hick lib” Tyler Childers).

And while the pushback over LGBTQ inclusion in country music may feel distinct from diner decor, the dynamics are remarkably similar. In 2023, the Texas Family Project — an organization dedicated to “making Texas families the most powerful force in Austin” — alerted its followers that “Cracker Barrel has fallen.”

“A once family friendly establishment has caved to the mob,” they tweeted, sharing a screenshot of Cracker Barrel’s website. The target: a collage of rainbow-spindled rocking chairs under a banner reading “Cracker Barrel LGBTQ Alliance.” That year, the chain attended Nashville PRIDE, bringing a mobile Front Porch with rainbow rockers to celebrate queer employees, guests and communities.

At first glance, it reads like just another right-wing outrage over corporate diversity initiatives. But the shock stemmed from Cracker Barrel’s long-standing image as a straight, Christian, conservative-coded brand. For decades, its corporate policies mirrored the biases of its customer base. Notably, in 1991, activists protested outside after the chain fired roughly 11 employees for “failing to demonstrate normal heterosexual values.”

However, by the time of the PRIDE rocker controversy, some longtime customers had already determined Cracker Barrel had gone “woke” because of a small menu change a year prior. As the restaurant wrote on Facebook: “Discover new meat frontiers. Experience the out of this world flavor of Impossible Sausage Made From Plants next time you Build Your Own Breakfast.” The backlash was immediate from a subset of the brand’s fans, who saw the plant-based sausage as incongruous with the old-country-store experience.

“We don’t eat in an old country store for woke burgers,” one commenter wrote. Another added, “I just lost respect for a once great Tennessee company.” Some responses, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, riffed on leftist conspiracy: “This is the future us leftists want. For the domain of all right winged red necks to turn on them and force veganism upon them.”

These flashpoints — rainbow rockers, Impossible Sausage, now a stripped-down logo — reveal the delicate calculus of change for a brand whose cultural identity is intertwined with a conservative vision of Americana.

Every tweak, however small, feels like a challenge to a mythos that some customers have long believed they own.