Alice Randall, award-winning songwriter, New York Times best-selling novelist and professor of African American and diaspora studies, delivered a talk about her new book, titled “My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present and Future,” on Nov. 20. The event was jointly hosted by Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries, Vanderbilt’s Live. Learn. Lead. Academy and the Writing Studio.
Randall began her talk by addressing Beyoncé’s snub from the Country Music Association Awards. Despite her album “Cowboy Carter” debuting at number one in several countries, becoming Beyoncé’s eighth consecutive number-one album on the Billboard 200 and topping the “Top Country Albums” chart — the first by a Black woman to do so, — Beyoncé was not nominated for any CMA awards this year.
“She didn’t need to win, but I did feel she absolutely deserved to be nominated. I was a little bit heartbroken,” Randall said. “I was the first Black woman in history to be a voting member of the CMA. I’ve been a voting member since the 1980s. So this was a hard moment, and I chose not to go to the awards tonight.”
Origins of country music
“My Black Country,” Randall’s sixth solo book, weaves together the history of country music, the country music business and her own life. She focused her talk on the history of country music itself, beginning with the initial settlement of Nashville, then Fort Nashborough.
“Africa is in the cultural DNA of country music,” Randall said. “The very first settlers of Nashville included free and enslaved Black people. [They] comprised 20% of Nashville’s 1799 population. We know that Africans arriving in America brought with them musical [knowledge, skills, melodies, rhythms and instruments].”
She said the banjo was inspired by many different African regions and cultural groups due to their forced displacement and explained that the instrument united enslaved Africans at a time when they did not share language, religions, spiritual traditions or painting techniques. She referenced the American folk art watercolor painting “The Old Plantation” as displaying the Black origins of country music.
“In the center-right of the work is a Black man wearing a dark hat with a white rim, playing the banjo. His feet are firmly planted, his fingers precisely placed. His beauty and power [are] evident. He is the artist, leading with his instrument. This, for me, is a birth of country music,” Randall said.
“First family” of Black country music
Through her new book, Randall said she aims to “complicate the story” of country music, revealing its roots in Black culture and music.
“‘My Black Country’ is an act of restoration focused on what I’m calling the first family of Black country,” Randall said. “It puts a spotlight on cultural redlining.”
Randall began by spotlighting Lil Hardin, a Fisk University graduate, jazz pianist, composer and singer who was also the second wife of trumpeter Louis Armstrong. The original shellac disc of “Blue Yodel No. 9” lists the artist as renowned country singer-songwriter Jimmie Rodgers and “orchestra.”
“It isn’t stated that, for decades, fans, music biz executives and scholars assumed that Jimmie Rodgers’ orchestra was a group of white western swing musicians. Only it wasn’t,” Randall said. “Jimmie Rodgers’ orchestra was Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin. Lil is the invisible Black woman at the beginning of the history of recorded country music, changing everything that came after.”
Randall was present the night singer Roy Acuff, known as the “King of Country Music,” proclaimed Jimmie Rodgers the “Father of Country Music” in front of a crowd at DAR Constitution Hall that included then-President Ronald Reagan, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush and Ted Kennedy.
“My first family of Black country was conceived in that moment. It was nurtured in the silence of missing names,” Randall said. “Acuff found the space to mention Will Rogers the comedian but no space to mention Lil Hardin and, shamefully, no space to mention DeFord Bailey — the man who helped launch Acuff’s own career.”
Randall said it was then that she had the realization of a first family of Black country, comprising Hardin, Bailey, Ray Charles, Charley Pride and Herb Jeffries, the “stepchild” not present that night.
“[It’s] always a stepchild not invited somewhere they have every right to be,” Randall said. “In country, that’s too often the whole Black audience.”
Multicultural pasts and futures
Randall added that she hopes to rewrite the Blackness of country music into its history.
“I stand here as living proof that country music and Music Row are Blacker than most folks realize. Music Row itself was a Black neighborhood. It was DeFord’s neighborhood before the first studio was put there,” Randall said. “Country was diverse before diversity was cool, and country will be diverse now that diversity ain’t cool anymore.”
Lauding Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter,” Randall said that the album has vastly expanded and educated the global country audience.
“[Cowboy Carter] does it by creating an album that’s a whole lot like a family reunion in which all the family is invited — a family reunion where the whole family is acknowledged,” Randall said. “There’s so many complicated ways in which allies have risen up to create this Black country renaissance that is female-driven. It’s time we acknowledge this.”
Randall further referenced often overlooked individuals of other cultural groups that are part of country music’s narrative, including the Chinese men who worked on the Central Pacific Railroad and the Indigenous cowboys part of singing cowboy culture.
“Country music is an unexpected example of the power of inclusion. Country music is by definition, in my opinion, counting English, Irish, Scottish ballad forms and narrative structures and extended metaphysical conceits, plus African influences [and] evangelical Christianity,” Randall said. “‘Blue Yodel No. 9 sounds proof: diverse groups are an essential structure for the achieving and maintenance of excellence.”
Inspiring the community
On Juneteenth this year, Vanderbilt unveiled a mural at 625 Chestnut Street titled “First Family of Black Country,” created by local artist Elisheba Israel Mrozik, who took inspiration from Randall’s book. In addition to encouraging community members to visit the mural, Randall offered words of advice from her time as an undergraduate.
“The closest class I ever took to country music at Harvard was one of the only English classes I didn’t do well in. I didn’t let myself be dissuaded,” Randall said. “You don’t need our applause to know your worth. What’s best is when they come together: when you know your own worth and the community also validates it — those are the days we dream for.”
During the audience Q&A, a Live. Learn. Lead Academy intern asked Randall how she defines leadership, to which she responded with “integrity and interiority.”
“[Being a leader] means making the case for the generation coming up after me — to put other people ahead of me and push and pull from behind,” Randall said. “Those women on my album — I advocated for them. I spoke their names in rooms where they were not present.”
Aimee Salakhov, a first-year master’s student, called the opportunity to learn from Randall “a privilege.”
“There were so many moments during Randall’s book talk in which I was struck by her connections within the country music community — from being crammed into the same tiny room as Ray Charles playing ‘Seven Spanish Angels’ to delving into music archives on a mission to prove that Black musicians have always been a part of country,” Salakhov said.
