By James P. Gannon Special to the Rappahannock News

By James P. Gannon Special to the Rappahannock News

If Ben Jones isn’t the busiest man of Rappahannock County, there must be someone else active 24 hours every day. In between his Congressional campaign events, his weekends at “Cooter’s Place” in Sperryville, his trips to a second “Cooter’s” in Tennessee and his active schedule of charity work, he somehow finds time to make and record music.

The former television star of “Dukes of Hazzard” and current candidate for Virginia’s 7th district Congressional seat has recently released a new compact disc album of downhome Southern music on a Civil War theme, titled “The Ghosts of Dixie.”

Subtitled “Thoughts on the South, New and Old,” the album is a mix of original music by Jones and some traditional tunes including “Dixie,” along with poetry and prose spoken in his deep Southern drawl, varying from a whisper to a howitzer’s roar.

The music features some lovely violin work by Travis Wetzel, who can coax teardrops from a fiddle, and lively banjopickin’ by Lee Ann Barber, including a galloping delight called “The Great Yankee Skedaddle of 1861,” commemorating the rout of the Union army at the First Battle of Manassas. It includes a Stephen Vincent Benet poetic tribute to Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, and Jones’s own poetic tribute to the “Ghosts of Dixie.”

But perhaps the most interesting—and for a Democratic politician, the most controversial—aspect of the album is candidate Jones’s ringing defense of the Confederate battle flag, which in liberal circles has been turned into a symbol of hate and racism, and subject to boycotts and protest marches by civil rights groups.

The Virginia-born Jones, who once represented a Georgia district in Congress, uses the album to articulate his view of the Confederate flag as