Beyoncé and the History of Black Country Music
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the On The Media Midweek Podcast. I'm Michael Loewinger. Some of you already know this, but Beyonce's new country-influenced album, Cowboy Carter, drops this Friday.

And because most of our producers are huge Beyonce fans, we spent our Monday editorial meeting brainstorming and debating how and if we could find a way to talk about the release on the show. And then we learned that our friends at Today Explained, the daily news podcast from Vox Media, beat us to it. They just released an excellent overview of the history of black musicians making country music. And it was so good, we thought, we'll just...

Share it with you as our podcast this week. So here's co-host Noelle King. So last week, I went to the Nashville home of songwriter Alice Randall to talk about Cowboy Carter.

Alice has been writing and teaching for a long time about country music's very Black roots. If her life was a country song, it would go something like this. A sensitive Black girl with a barfly dad and a distant mom finds solace in Ray Charles and Charlie Pride, writes her first country song before she's even old enough to read, and at 24, hits the road to Nashville with a folder full of handwritten songs, one of which will go to number one on the country charts. Phone rings, baby cries, TV

Good morning, honey. Try to keep the balance up between love and money. X's and O's sung by Trisha Yearwood. Alice then spends 40 years in Nashville waiting for another Black woman to make it in country, an art form that she defines this way. The simplest definition, it requires three things. It has to have Celtic, English, Irish, Scottish ballot forms, news reporting elements, storytelling elements.

It has to have Black influences, African influences that could be in instrumentation, say a banjo, can be in other aspects. And it has to have evangelical Christianity. Those things come together and you have country music. Does the story that the song is telling have to be a certain type of story to be country? There are patterns of country narrative and a sort of secular theology of country that I have observed. And this is how that would go.

God is real, life is hard, road, whiskey, and family are significant compensations, and the past is better than the present. When I see those four things,

I know I may be looking at a country song. And here, Alice's life diverges from a country song because for her, the present just got pretty damn good. In 18 Days, her memoir, My Black Country, comes out, right as Beyonce has all the universe interested in country music and asking where Black people fit into it. As it happens, Alice has spent a lot of time trying to find an answer to that. She's a black woman.

She identifies the birth of both recorded country and Black country as a moment in 1927 when Dee Ford Bailey takes the stage in Nashville. Dee Ford Bailey is to me

the first superstar of the Grand Ole Opry. And the Grand Ole Opry, for those who don't know it, is the oldest country radio show in America, and it's the most powerful. It's the most significant. So D. Ford Bailey is one of the people who founds the Opry. One day, they were playing the show, and the announcer said, we've just been listening to Grand Opera, now we're going to have some Grand Opry.

meaning they're coming down home. And the next sound that was heard was Dee Ford Bailey playing Pan American blues on his harmonica.

Now, Dee Ford plays harmonica. Some of his songs are called blues, but he describes himself actively as a hillbilly performer. And although he's known for the harmonica playing, he also does sing, plays guitar and banjo. He was a multi-instrumentalist, and I think that's very important. And I think that Fox Chase is one of his first very important songs. Dee Ford Bailey, and it'll be his famous Fox Chase. All right, Dee Ford. ♪

Fox Chase is about the difficulty of being pursued and scrutinized. I assure you that was a big problem in Black life in America at that time. In 1927, racism is still rampant in America. It's alive and well.

How does Dee Ford Bailey pull this off? Like, why is he allowed in? What's wild about music, we have to always remember, about commercial recorded music, it's the business. He was making them money. And then remember, at first, it's the radio. And so they're not seeing it.

then it is a Black person. And they're not necessarily announcing it. And that may be part of the reason in many of those early recordings he's not speaking or singing because it might have been more evident to people he was a Black person if he was speaking or singing. Dee Ford was able to defy

evade the structural obstacles created to keep his voice off the radio and to keep him out of the public. But he never did have the same opportunities that his white contemporaries had. Okay, so that's 1927. This is 97 years ago now. And then...

Where does Black Country go from that moment on? 1930, we're going to get another extraordinary performance. We're going to get Lil Harden Armstrong performing on Blue Yodel No. 9. Jimmy Rogers is going to be the singer, the frontman. But there are three people on that record. One is a Black woman born in Memphis, Lil Harden.

And the other is Louis Armstrong. When you listen to Blue Yodel No. 9, many people think it's a very white song. It is considered the most iconic country song. And Lil Hardin, her piano is driving the session. Louis is playing on it. And it sounds what people think. It sounds so white.

but actually two out of the three geniuses on the record were black. And so this becomes this aesthetic redlining that that was black music. Now, whoever labeled it white and it was marketed as white, but actually the people behind the session and their names were not put on the record. This was repressed, erased information for years. What was the sound that would have led people to be like, ah, we can call this one a white song and nobody will notice? Often they took the exact same recording.

and market it one to a white audience and one to a black audience, sometimes changing the name of the group. So a lot of it is literally marketing and bifurcating the audience, thinking they would make more money that way. There's a lot of cultural redlining that is actually separating things that are not intrinsically separate.

So fast forward, we're at 1930. We can't get through the 30s and 40s without one of my other great influences on country, Herb Jeffries, the bronze buckaroo. These are black singing cowboy movies. They're financed out of the white world, but they

But this is his concept, and he is starring in them. And so that's going to be a whole other influence on country and Black country. In the 1890s...

20 to 30 percent of all cowboys are going to be black and brown in America. Cowboys have cowboy songs and cowboy camps. And in these cowboy camps, singing was an extremely important part of the culture. So we get in Herb Jeffries in the 30s and 40s. Some of this wisdom, this collective wisdom from the black cowboy camps.

So after the Browns-Buckaroo in the 1940s, I want to jump forward until the late 60s and the early 70s and hit Charlie Pryde. Charlie Pryde is going to come out of the Negro Leagues baseball. He's going to rise. By 1971, he's going to be Entertainer of the Year country. Whenever I chance to meet some old friends on the street

He is going to come out as black in the 60s in Detroit City. Wait, what do you mean come out as black? When they released the early Charlie Pryde records. Oh, people didn't know. My oldest sister used to say to me, why are you singing their music?

Okay. Their music. Their music, okay. I said, well, it's my music too. Now, that's me growing up in a segregated southern state. They actively made sure that no one knew he was black. He, quote unquote, I am not saying this, sounds white. That's what it was said at the time, that he sounds white. What people thought was white,

They did not put his face on the original. They did not share any photographs of him. They wanted people to fall in love with the voice and the records first. And then he came out as black in Detroit, Michigan when I was a little girl. I still remember people talking about it in the background of the city. And he will end up going to the top of the charts so many times.

And so we get this line from D. Ford Bailey to Charlie Pryde. Both of them will belong to the Opry. Charlie will be given superstar status. He will become Entertainer of the Year. I believe that was in 1971. But at that same time, we get Linda Martel trying to step into that space, and she is shut down.

She will be the first Black woman to sing at the Opry. She will release an album on Plantation Records, which is actually quite extraordinary. ♪ I think I'll color you ♪ ♪ I think I'll color you ♪

She's a beautiful voice. She's quite beautiful physically. She can rock these miniskirts. She has very much the sort of style of a Bobby Gentry and people who are superstars of the moment. The album, I believe, is called Color Me Country. One of the great singles on it is called Color Him Father, which is actually about a stepfather. I love this man, I don't know why.

It's an extraordinary album, but she's on Hee Haw, she's on the Opry, but she never goes incognito. The very first time she comes out as a Black woman, there just isn't the traction. She experiences myriad micro and macro aggressions navigating Nashville. She is not allowed in this space.

Okay. Charlie Pryde had done it. He had like broken the barrier. What happened with Linda Martell? Like what was the resistance? He'd proved you could be popular and make money and be black. So... One of my favorite songs I've written is a song called Small Towns Are Smaller For Girls. And that was recorded by Holly Dunn. Small towns are smaller for girls. Small towns are even smaller for black girls. And that's what Linda Martell was up against.

and Music City was a small town. Linda Martel, when she left Nashville, continued to make music. She just wasn't making it in country spaces. Now, in that time, in the early '60s, we're going to get the arguably most important album of country music, and certainly the most important album of Black country, perhaps to this current moment, is "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music" by the great Ray Charles.

In my way of looking at it, D4 Bailey is the papa. Lil Hardin is the mama.

And Charlie Pryde is their genius child. This is the first family of Black country and the founding family of all country music. Because when Ray Charles releases Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, it's going to deconstruct and reconstruct the industry and the audience's understanding of what country music is. And it's going to claim...

the first huge white and black Asian and indigenous audience for country. Because everybody listened to Ray Charles. He may not have been on the country charts, but everybody was listening to this. It was on the radios. It was in jukeboxes. It was everywhere.

And it was constructing and deconstructing country music. Ray Charles is the foundation for everything, this genius child that's coming into this current moment. And this Beyonce moment, and we now know that the album is called Cowboy Carter, is the biggest revelation since modern sounds and country and western. And it's that same kind of moment. I say that Beyonce is Ray Charles' genius child.

She is deconstructing and reconstructing country in her own aesthetic image, but reflecting the Black geniuses come before and larger country cultural genius and creating new opportunities for genius to come back. Coming up after the break, Beyoncé country.

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That's zbiotics.com slash OTM and use the code OTM at checkout for 15% off. This episode is brought to you by Progressive. Most of you aren't just listening right now. You're driving, cleaning, and even exercising. But what if you could be saving money by switching to Progressive?

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Kamala Harris's presidential campaign has centered on her record as a tough prosecutor with an eye toward justice. But what does her time as California's so-called top cop reveal about her stance on policies that would prevent deaths like Sonia Massey's at the hands of police? I'm Kai Wright. Join me to talk about Harris, the prosecutor, and Harris, the presidential hopeful, on the next Notes from America. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

This is the On The Media Midweek podcast. I'm Michael Onger, and this is the second part of Noelle King's conversation with author and songwriter Alice Randall.

21st century country has gotten really interesting. It includes your Darius Ruckers and your Lil Nas Xs and other Black artists. But Alice, who is a songwriter and sort of country music historian, says the 21st century hasn't been much kinder to Black women than the 20th was. Now, she does list some bright spots. Reese Palmer, Miko Marks, Macy's.

Mickey Guyton. And then along comes... The other great genius of Black country, equal to Dolly Parton in country, is Rhiannon Giddens. We're going to see her appear first in the Carolina Chocolate Drops. She will discover the banjo. She will release extremely important country singles and albums. She is, by all standard measures, a beautiful woman.

She has an extraordinary voice. She's an extraordinary instrumentalist, world-class. And she's a fine songwriter. Rihanna should have been a country star. She had everything. To me, she is the evidence. The system did not work at that point to allow a Black woman to rise to those heights. Beyoncé has her playing on Texas Hold'em. Did you know Beyoncé was working on a country album?

I had heard rumor, but more importantly, I knew Beyonce had already done country music. ♪ Came into this world, daddy's little girl ♪ ♪ Daddy made a soldier out of her ♪

I knew that Daddy's Lessons was actually, I think, one of the great country songs of all time, that it was emphatically a country song. I had written an article about that in American Songwriter magazine, and it received some very harsh criticism for that article. And I also knew that when she performed with the Dixie Chucks on air, that it was actually an extraordinary country performance. I

I'd seen how that song had been received, which was negatively. It's the highest rated 15 minutes in CMA history. And then they start getting, you know, racist assholes bombarding their website with comments and emails and whatever. And so they take her down. They took our performance down.

And caved to that bullshit. And then they, I guess, got so much bad press for doing that. Within 24 hours, they put it back up again. Just cowards. It's just crazy. She just gave you your greatest ratings that you've ever gotten. How dare you take her song off?

I've seen how much the establishment pushed away at it, that I had myself a lot of pushback when I thought it was speaking the obvious truth that it was a country song. So the rejection of that and the rejection of her performance, the CMA Awards, to me, again, it was a Rachel's moment. Beyoncé is a superstar.

She can also be a country superstar. This has happened before. Elvis Presley started off thinking he was a country singer. He, at some point, became a rock star. And then maybe at some other point, he became a country singer again. And ultimately, genre is just a construct, too.

But Beyonce can be in both of these spaces. But what is interesting here to me and what I love, I have seen literally white, black, and Asian people dancing to Texas Hold'em on my Instagram. I've seen all kinds of people from all walks of life doing all kinds of complicated dances. They're embracing this. Beyonce is amazing.

Her beauty is acknowledged widely now in this country space. This is the first time that a Black woman's ability, beauty, and musicality has been acknowledged widely as a pinnacle. This moment means that finally the history of Black people in country is being acknowledged.

It's far beyond the success of Beyonce. It is a moment that reveals she did not come out of nowhere. She's not claiming to come out of nowhere. And when I listen to 16 Carriages, for example. 16 carriages driving away one...

Watch them ride with my dreams away. Which is elegiac. That is a song that is in conversation with May the Circle Be Unbroken. Can the circle be unbroken? By and by, Lord, by and by. It's a song in conversation with 16 Tons, a work song about coal mining. You load 16 tons, what do you get? Another day older and stronger.

It's a song in conversation with strawberry wine, I think, about loss of innocence. I was caught somewhere between a woman and a child. One restless summer without love growing.

It's also, I believe, a song, consciously or unconsciously, in conversation with my song, X's and O's, about the balance between love and money. That song is a black country song. Fix the sink, mow the yard, me and myself. Underpaid and overwhelmed, I might cut clean but still won't fall. Still working on my life, you know. Only God knows, only God knows, only God knows. 16, yeah.

It seems that what Beyonce has the ability to do is like illuminate what from the past was lost or ignored, but then also fundamentally to change what the future looks like, right? Absolutely. What is also most important here is she is creating new sounds, new methods of narration. In country, there's always a balance between preserving and evolving. She is doing more evolving than preserving, but she's significantly preserving and spotlighting past geniuses.

while manifesting her own present genius and creating a path forward for further innovation. What do you think that means for Black artists? What could that mean for Black artists and country? I think the difference between zero and one is immense. When something has never been done, people can think it is impossible to do. And they don't try, and they don't support it.

When something has once been done, they think it can again be done. Now that she has done it, she has proven it's possible. No one again can say a black woman can't chart. No one again can say, which is a thing that was unfortunately said around town.

Bring me the right Black woman. Bring me the one that's pretty enough, who sings well enough, and has some songs, and we'll make her a star. But I think because it's been done...

People know it can be done, and so I think it gives them a lot of fortitude. She had to be extraordinary. She is the pathbreaker. She had to evade layers and layers of cultural redlining, strategically, intellectually, artistically. But she's also proven that there's a giant country audience that's new in this moment, as well as an old audience. And that includes white people who thought they were too cool for country but were following Beyoncé and have followed Beyoncé into country.

It includes Black people who didn't want to publicly acknowledge they like country, but are willing to publicly announce they like Beyonce's country. It includes white people who thought they really did not like Black country, but they just love this. It includes lots of people. People have fallen in love. It's a magical moment when people who don't get music get it because some music is being served up.

that is just irresistible. Noelle King is the co-host of Today Explained. She spoke to songwriter Alice Randall, whose new book, My Black Country, comes out next month.

Thanks for listening to the Midweek Podcast, and don't forget to tune into The Big Show this Friday. See you then. I'm Michael Onger.

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