Johnny Rebel, American country singer, Died at 77

  Music

Clifford Joseph “Pee Wee” Trahan was born on October 3, 1938, and died on September 3, 2016.

He best known as Johnny Rebel and Pee Wee Trahan,

He was an American country musician.

He used the Johnny Rebel name for a series of recordings for J. D. “Jay” Miller’s Reb Rebel label in the 1960s

Johnny Rebel’s songs frequently use the word nigger and often voiced sympathy for Jim Crow-era segregation and the Ku Klux Klan.

His first recorded under the Johnny Rebel name in the mid-1960s.

Johnny Rebel employed J. D. “Jay” Miller’s recording studio in Crowley, Louisiana. Miller, in fact, produced the sessions and issued the recordings on his own Reb Rebel label.

His first release—the fifth for the Reb Rebel label—was a 45 RPM single of “Lookin’ for a Handout” and “Kajun Ku Klux Klan”.

Johnny Rebel would record many more singles for the label, “Nigger, Nigger”, “Coon Town”, “Who Likes a Nigger?”, “Nigger Hatin’ Me”, “Still Looking for a Handout”, “Some Niggers Never Die (They Just Smell That Way)”, “Stay Away from Dixie”, and “Move Them Niggers North.”

However, two of Trahan’s songs are not strictly about race: “Keep a-Workin’ Big Jim” is the efforts of Louisiana district attorney Jim Garrison to solve the Kennedy assassination, while “(Federal Aid Hell!) The Money Belongs to Us” is a song critical of U.S. federal aid programs.

And two of these songs were eventually issued in album format by Reb Rebel Records under the title “For Segregationists Only”.

During 1976, his song “Lâche pas la patate” (also known as “The Potato Song”), sung by Jimmy C. Newman earned gold record status in Canada.

Johnny Rebel passed away at 77 years old.