My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future

More Praise for My Black Country and Alice Randall

"Alice Randall is the perfect trailblazer to shine this light. In her book My Black Country, she hits all the notes of a great country song. She makes you smile, makes you cry, makes you realize the difficulty and beauty of these very human stories. The profound influence Black artists have had on the genre is so eloquently described, beautifully encapsulated in her own trailblazing role as the first Black woman to cowrite a number-one country hit. She’s a treasure."

—Brad Paisley, Grammy award–winning country artist

for Black Bottom Saints:

Lively, engaging, and often wise.

—The New York Times Book Review

[A] gorgeous swirl of fiction.

—NPR’s Fresh Air

"Black Bottom Saints is a tour-de-force."

—Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried and Wild Girls, Professor of History, Harvard University

for The Wind Done Gone:

[A] spirited reimagination… [Randall’s] insights are frequent and sharp.

—Publishers Weekly

[B]rilliant.

—Booklist

[A]lways fascinating.

—Library Journal

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Dedicated to my daughter Caroline and the city where she was born—Nashville.

PRELUDE

BACK TO THE STUDIO

I have eaten in studios, made love in studios, suckled my daughter in a studio, rocked somebody else’s baby who grew up to win a Grammy on my hip in a studio, saw knives pulled and guns waved in studios, cussed folks out in the studio, got cussed out in the studio. Stopped by to gossip and visit with old friends and shoot the breeze, like all I had was time and no labor. Worked so late I slept on the floor of a studio mesmerized by the lights of the high-tech mix console that was never turned off, only to awaken to the sight of mice skittering across the floor reminding me that we in the South are never far from the wild. (Which made me laugh in a studio and not for the first or last time.) I’ve done a lot of things in studios.

Cry wasn’t one of them. Until my fortieth year in Nashville, 2023.

The Bomb Shelter studio has a vibe that is part old-hippy group house or grow house, part warehouse industrial, part museum of analog recording gear. You enter through a much-used kitchen that announces the gut-bucket funk of the place.

The tight quarters are chock-full of old amps, vintage instruments, classic sound mixing boards placed for maximum performance not maximum pretty. On my first visit, tornadoes were twisting through the middle Tennessee skies. Some of the musicians had left to check on dogs, or homes, or to grab kids from school. Others were ordering or making lunch. Walking through the kitchen toward the control room, I heard voices in the live room—one singing, one encouraging.

Two folks were still working. I heard it before I saw this: Ebonie Smith, dressed in stylish sweats, her part-shaved head crowned with long faux locs, was fearlessly guiding a young Black mermaid with a voice like Dinah Washington and multiple shades of purple hair through the nuances of Get the Hell Out of Dodge, a song I wrote shortly after my first divorce in 1991.

I had never seen or heard a Country singer who styled herself as a Black mermaid, until Ebonie invited Saaneah into the studio, after years of stalking Ebonie on Instagram, to work on what was being called the Alice Randall Black Country Songbook project.

I was instantly beguiled by Saaneah’s siren song. Over the years, Get the Hell Out of Dodge, which I co-wrote with Walter Hyatt, had been recorded at least five times. Walter recorded it himself in 1993. Honky-tonk legend Hank Thompson recorded it in 1997. Then two badass babes, Toni Price, in 2003, and Eden Brent, in 2014, took a crack at the song. Finally somebody was serving up this truth with salty sweetness: you have to leave with your mind, before you can leave with your body.

Thirty years after the first recording, here was Ebonie Smith guiding Saaneah into an interpretation of the song that was retro and Afro-futuristic. Instead of luring listeners to rocks, and death, the Ebonie/Saaneah collaboration lured listeners to an understanding that liberation is first an act of the mind, then an act of the body. The fragments of the siren’s song I heard walking down the short hall were washing over me with proof of what I had long hoped: songs can be weapons. I was smiling big. Didn’t even have to say hello. I walked into the live room, looked at the two brown women working at the mike, and happy hollered, You got a mermaid singing my song!

Ebonie was so much more than the producer on this session. She was the engineer, composer, and activist who was bringing the magic and the thunder, not just her Grammys, her Barnard degree, and her ridiculously impressive résumé. She had scrolled through her Instagram and found a Nashville-born, Country-song-loving, jazz-belting mermaid. And that wasn’t even the big moment of the visit. They were just getting started. Just breaking through the top layers of what had been painted over during previous recordings, which had effectively erased me from my own co-write. They burned just enough incense to get all the femme and round and sweet they wanted in the room and all the edgy grunge out. Ebonie wanted to give Saaneah space and privacy to stretch into her interpretation. She invited Saaneah to take a break. She invited me into the control room. She wanted me to hear something nearer to finished.

Ebonie settled on a stool at the sound console. I settled into a couch. Ebonie pushed play. The guitar started, and then came a voice, a Black woman’s voice. Adia Victoria was singing the first words of Went for a Ride: He was Black as the sky on a moonless night, singing my words, from the place I had written those words, a Black and feminine place, a Black and Western place, a Black and haunted place. I wept tears of joy. It was the end of imagining. Sometimes the end of imagining is a very good thing.

I no longer had to imagine one day somebody who looked like me would sing Went for a Ride. It happened. I didn’t have to imagine someone would sing the words He was Black as the sky on a moonless night and they would be Black, too. Didn’t have to imagine an artist would sing those words and they wouldn’t be othering the hero of the song, they wouldn’t be talking about the Black cowboy as a novelty, as a curiosity. When the words He rode with the best, hell he rode with me, were sung by white PBR world champion bull rider Justin McBride, it was understood that Justin McBride was the greatest cowboy in the world and this Black cowboy in my song was good enough to be recognized by Justin but was no Justin. When Adia Victoria sang those same words, He rode with the best, hell he rode with me, it was one great Black cowboy acknowledging another great Black cowboy. That was the story I intended to write, and that my co-writer only barely understood, the day we worked together as staff writers in a writing room in a Country publishing house in the nineties. In the twentieth century I had to slip my best ideas in sideways.

In the twenty-first century, Adia Victoria put all my ideas on front street. She swaggered through the song, found the secret door I hid in the lyrics, and walked through it into my American West—past and present—that she alters by her Black and Country presence. Adia obliterated some stubborn old myths. With every syllable and sound, she raised our new myth. When I thought I would never get to that, I got to that. When it had come, I couldn’t bear to listen to most old recordings of my songs. I had been so whitewashed out of them, the racial identity of my living-in-song heroes and sheroes so often erased. Then, in rode Ebonie, and her posse of Black Country genius, galloping to the rescue. That’s good funky eclipsing all the bad funk. That’s my, Alice Randall’s, Black Country.

WHAT IS BLACK COUNTRY?

Harlan Howard said that Country Music was three chords and the truth. I’ve said Country Music is three chords and four very particular truths: life is hard, God is real, whiskey and roads and family provide worthy compensations, and the past is better than the present.

That last truth is one of the places where Country experiences a racial split. In the world of white Country, the past that is better than the present exists in a longed for and lost mythical Dixie. In Black Country, the past that is better than the present exists in a longed for and lost Africa before colonization. In my life it was the Detroit past that was better than the Washington, D.C., present.

My ancestors come from Cameroon, Nigeria, and Mali and they come from Scotland, England, and Ireland. A common way to define Country Music is that it is American folk music that has Celtic, African, and Evangelical Christian influences.

Twenty-eight percent Scottish, twenty-one percent English, sixteen percent Cameroonian, and fifteen percent Nigerian is the rough estimate I’ve been given of the ethnic identities of my ancestors based on an analysis of my DNA. I am embodied Country Music.

The earliest Black Country song I know rose from the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and dates back to sometime before 1838.

We raise de wheat,

Dey gib us de corn;

We bake de bread,

Dey gib us de crust;

We sif de meal,

Dey gib us de huss;

We peel de meat,

Dey gib us de skin;

And dat’s de way

Dey take us in;

We skim de pot,

Dey gib us the liquor,

And say dat’s good enough for nigger…

We is the Black folk, Dey are the white folk. And the specific we is enslaved Africans and the specific dey are Scots. Frederick Douglass was owned by people, the Auld family, whose lineage traces back to Scotland. They were likely Ulster Scots who made up a lion’s share of the migration to the eastern shore of Maryland starting in 1649.

The lyric to this early Country song was included in My Bondage and My Freedom, the second of Frederick Douglass’s three autobiographies. Published in 1855, it details Frederick’s escape to freedom in 1838. So, we know the song was being sung by enslaved Africans in these Americas sometime before that in the days between Christmas and New Year’s, when it was heard and remembered by young Frederick.

The song caught by Douglass is seminal. It evolves over time. It transforms. It becomes hard to recognize. But I believe I hear an echo of it in the Bob Wills classic, Take Me Back to Tulsa:

Little bee sucks the blossom, big bee gets the honey.

Darkie raise the cotton, white man gets the money.

Is that a sweetened-up twentieth-century riff on the nineteenth-century song? Another line in the iconic Country and Western dance hall tune:

Let me off at Archer and I’ll walk down to Greenwood.

Archer and Greenwood are streets in the Black neighborhood of Tulsa. The neighborhood that was destroyed in the Tulsa Massacre. Take Me Back to Tulsa is not a blues song. It’s a labor protest. It’s African and Celtic and it tells a story. We Raise the Wheat is a Black Country song that gave rise to other Country songs. How many others are there?

It’s hard to know. So much trauma disrupting so much memory. So much never documented. So much was never recorded. And so much yet to be recovered. Let me give you but one concrete example found on a federal website:

Despite the best efforts of the Library of Congress and other sound repositories around the world, innumerable items from the world’s recorded sound history are believed to be lost. For example, it is estimated that only 2% of the 3000-plus cylinder recordings produced by the North American Phonograph Company (NAPCo) between 1889 and 1894 have been accounted for…

There is always, however, the possibility that one or more of these may turn up in attics, basements or elsewhere. The Recorded Sound Section of the Library of Congress is currently searching for the following titles. Have you seen—or heard—any of these? (They may exist as test pressings or commercial releases, and on cylinder, disc, or other media.)

If you have, please contact: [email protected].

A difference between Black Country and blues? Black Country, because of its embrace of Evangelical Christianity, embraces hope. It makes a plan. Because it is Black, it deals with the real. Looking for lost treasure is real.

If you know of a boarded-up house in your community that you can safely and legally make arrangements to poke into, look in those attics and basements. You’re looking for Edison Wax Cylinder boxes. They look something like a biscuit can. They may be about 4 1⁄2 inches tall and have about a 2 3⁄4 inch diameter. They will say Edison Records some kind of way on the outside of the can. They could be in a wood box that looks something like a big doctor’s bag—that would be an Edison phonograph player. If you find one of those, you are more likely to find some cylinders.

On the list of artifacts the Smithsonian is hoping to find are twelve tunes recorded by the Bohees. One may have been recorded as early as 1890. Yep, three decades before the recordings of the Bristol sessions that have been called the big bang that created Country Music, the Black Bohees recorded Banjo Duets.

In 1973, Dueling Banjos peaked at number five on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart. The way I see it, that Country hit, and all recorded banjo wars, are descended from the Bohee Brothers.

Watching Deliverance—the film set in Appalachia that featured Dueling Banjos and starred only white people—I had never heard of the Bohee Brothers, let alone known they were early Black banjo recording artists. Didn’t know James and George were born in Canada in 1844 and 1857, before the end of slavery in the United States. That they would move with their parents to New England before crossing the Atlantic to make a home and musical life in England, where they became banjo stars and banjo teachers to the aristocracy.

Dueling Banjos started off as Feudin’ Banjos and was written in 1954. I first heard it in 1963 when it was performed on The Andy Griffith Show.

My father loved Andy Griffith. He appreciated the humiliation of Barney Fife and the weekly reveal of the incompetent, weak, puny soul hiding behind the powerful structure of white supremacy. Years later, at the millennial gathering of Southern writers in Nashville, which included precious few Black writers—Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey, and I may have been the only Black folk invited—Shelby Foote moderated a closing ceremony and somehow the discussion turned to the whiteness of The Andy Griffith Show, and I pointed out Blackness was hidden in plain sight in the banjo.

I didn’t even begin to get to the point about jug band music. White Briscoe Darling courting Aunt Bee plays the jug originating as a Black tradition with strong roots to Louisville. Jimmie Rodgers recorded with the Louisville Jug Band.

When you are up in your attics or down in your basements looking for Bohee Brothers tunes, see if you don’t find some early lost Black jug band recordings. I suspect Black jug band music didn’t start with the amazing Louisville Jug Band. I suspect that’s just where erasure begins to end.

So much erased it is hard to say when and where Black Country and Country began.

PORTRAIT OF A BLACK MAN PLAYING AN EARLY AMERICAN BANJO

I have imagined Black Country and Country to be born as an art form, as an aesthetic, in the year 1624 near Jamestown, Virginia. William Tucker, the first Black infant born in the British colonies that would become America, was born that year near that place. I have imagined his mother weaving English ballads she heard with African melodies she knew and singing to her son.

The inaugural catalog of the National Museum of African American Music was published in 2021. After failing to persuade museum leadership that they needed a gallery devoted to Black Country, I succeeded in convincing them to include a chapter in the catalog that reflected the phantom gallery that I wished existed. At the center of the imagined exhibit is a painting that hangs in fact, I believe, in a museum in Williamsburg. In lectures and in that catalog, this is how I have described the painting:

The Old Plantation is an eighteenth-century watercolor painting that chronicles a group of enslaved Africans in community dancing and singing as part of a religious experience or part of an entertainment—we do not know. What is clear is that they are engaged in an activity of their own creation under their own direction; some are in couples, some are solo, some are part of a larger group. Their purpose seems serious given their unsmiling faces, their reflective miens. In the center right of the work is a Black man wearing a dark hat with a white rim playing the banjo. His gaze is direct, confident. His feet are firmly planted. His fingers precisely placed. His beauty and power evident. He is the artist, leading with his instrument. Far in the background, small, less than the size of the head of the tallest man depicted, is a white house. Can this be the birth of Country Music?

Here is loss. Here is home. Here is family. Here are the rural acres. Here is the love in a couple’s gaze. Here is music. Here is all that is compensation for that loss. For me the blues is about a somehow sweet engagement with a bitter world. Country Music at its heart is elegiac and mournful, even when it dances; it is a sad engagement with a world promising sweet, a place where profound loss coexists with profound hope.

I won’t call the founding of recorded Country Music something no one living has heard. So, it’s not the Bohees. And I will acknowledge when we speak of Country Music and Black Country in the twenty-first century we are speaking of commercially available recorded music, so I cannot place the founding of the genre in seventeenth-century Virginia, though that is where I find the root and seeds of the aesthetic.

THE BIRTH OF BLACK COUNTRY

According to me, Black Country was born December 10, 1927, when DeFord Bailey played Pan American Blues on Barn Dance, a Nashville radio show blasted out on the WSM airwaves. Listeners couldn’t see this, but DeFord was a short, handsome, dark-skinned man who wore a three-piece suit and brightly shined shoes to every recording session, performance, and when just sitting, waiting for death. In his last days his family would tease DeFord that they could just put him in his casket when he passed. He dressed that clean and sharp.

Bailey, who would become acknowledged as the first superstar of the Grand Ole Opry, entered the world in 1899. His daddy, John Henry Bailey, was a farmer. John Henry’s father, Lewis Bailey, was a noted musician in Smith County, Tennessee, who performed what DeFord would later call Black Hillbilly Music in an all-Black family band.

That’s been told by DeFord in his own words in an audio interview in the 1970s: In the slaving time, my grandaddy and my great-grandad, they all were musicians back there. They say he was a good harp player. I would like to have heard him, see what he sound like.

That Black Hillbilly Music DeFord’s granddaddy was playing in the nineteenth century in a family band didn’t get recorded or acknowledged in the white or Black press, didn’t make it into the historical record, doesn’t leave a date that I can claim and document as the day Black Country was born. It just gets told in the whispers of the community and handed down as lore in the housing projects where DeFord spent his last years.

My daddy was the person who hipped me to the fact it was a Black woman, Lil Hardin, playing on that big, old Country record, and that there were probably a lot more Black folks passing for white on other Country records. He was the one who would look at some sheet music, or some hymn in a hymnal, then over at me and ask, "What you bet Traditional was a colored girl?" And he was the first to tell me the banjo was an African instrument, after all.

Other folks with other fathers tell a different story. It’s often said that Country Music was born with a big bang. When the story is told this way, typically Jimmie Rodgers is the papa, Mother Maybelle Carter is the mother, and there is a magical and immaculate conception that culminates in Ralph Peer—a traveling representative of the Victor Talking Machine Company turned producer—playing the role of the stork that brings the baby, Country Music. And all this happens in 1927, in Bristol, a town that strides the Virginia and Tennessee border where commercially recorded Country Music sprang, not from a cabbage patch, but from the Taylor-Christian Hat and Glove Company. In the last days of a hot July and a hotter August, Peer produced a series of recording sessions, some starring Jimmie Rodgers, some starring the Carters. That’s the way some folks tell it.

What if my daddy was right? What if that white stork, Ralph Peer, didn’t bring the baby? What if a one-legged, eight-fingered Black man, Eslie Riddle, was the stork? What if DeFord Bailey is the papa, Lil Hardin Armstrong is the mama, Ray Charles is their genius child, Charley Pride is DeFord’s side child, and Herb Jeffries is Lil’s stepson? You get a whole new way of looking at Country.

Bristol, Tennessee, calls itself the place Where Country Music Began. The city holds a variety of tourist attractions from the Birthplace of Country Music Museum to the Carter Family Fold run by descendants of the Carter Family that offer proof of the claim. Another tourist attraction, the Burger Bar, infamous as the place Hank Williams, Sr., was last seen alive, establishes Bristol’s ongoing connection to the genre. The two-day Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion Festival, established in 2001, includes a nod to Black influences on Country—but something is missing in Bristol. Where is the huge statue of Eslie Riddle?

Some called him Wesley Riddle, some call him Leslie. There’s evidence his name was Eslie Riddle and he is the Black man who may have been the true founder of the Bristol musical festival.

How’s that? Eslie Riddle taught the Carter Family a whole lot of songs. That’s an established and acknowledged-by-the-Carters fact. What isn’t acknowledged or even alluded to? While still in his teens, before he met the Carters, Riddle blew off two of his own fingers in a shotgun accident that might have been a suicide attempt. Recuperating from both the shotgun incident and a prior accident at a cement factory that ended with a leg amputation, one-legged, eight-fingered Eslie Riddle began playing the guitar using only his pointer, his baby finger, and the thumb of his right hand.

When Riddle played songs for the Carters, he picked the guitar with three brown fingers. He had innovated an adaptation to his physical circumstances that resulted in a new and appealing sound created by his new technique.

Mother Maybelle Carter is famed for her guitar playing that is a foundation of the Carter Family sound. Her technique has been named the Carter Family Scratch. It sounds and works a whole lot like how Eslie Riddle played the guitar, relying on his thumb and pointer finger. Coincidence? Collaboration? Erasure?

I found Eslie Riddle in the 1910 census. It wasn’t hard to do. He was three years old and in there with his brother, Grady, who was two. They were living in Burnsville with their grandparents, Sullen Griffith and Sindy Griffith, their mother, Hattie Griffith, and four uncles. Maybe the story of the Carter Family children naming him Eslie because they couldn’t say Leslie is a lie. How many other maybe-lies are in the story?

Eslie and Grady and their mama were being raised in the shelter of grandparents who had been born enslaved in North Carolina—but Sindy could read and write, create and nurture life, and face death. At the age of fifty-two, she reported having birthed fourteen children and buried four.

Who would I like to ask about Eslie Riddle’s involvement with the Carter Family, about Eslie Riddle’s name? His brother, Grady Riddle.

Grady Riddle pastored AME Zion churches in western North Carolina for fifty-four years. He died March 8, 2003, in Burnsville at the age of ninety-five. If people had wanted to know more about Eslie Riddle, he was the person to ask. Scholars late into the twentieth century lamented not knowing more about Eslie. But no one interviewed Grady.

How different it would have been to know Eslie through the lens of the person who grew up hearing the same music and who rose to be a successful minister of God? A man with a seventh-grade education to Eslie’s four. But nobody asked Grady.

They asked the Carters. They asked Eslie, when he depended on the Carters for work and depended on white gatekeepers who revered the Carters for bookings. Eslie Riddle died in 1980. When he was safe in the ground, no longer seeking jobs or needing to curry good favor, it would have been very interesting to ask Grady Riddle to characterize the collaboration. How does lack of access to markets impact willingness to collaborate? What is creative consent? And how does lack of access to markets affect our ability to give it? How often were Black artists faced with a choice (after working with a white collaborator) between no public credit for what they brought to the collaboration or credit for a fraction of what they brought?

If Eslie had said he was the originator of Carter Family Scratch in the thirties, would anyone have believed him? Did Eslie Riddle teach Mother Maybelle how to play what came to be called the Carter Family Scratch? We will never know.

So, let’s get back to the big bang, the Bristol sessions, starring the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. Even if you don’t buy into the idea that Riddle played a seminal role in the development of the Carter Family Scratch, there’s no denying Lil Hardin’s impact on Jimmie Rodgers.

On July 16, 1930, in Los Angeles, Lil made Country Music history as the first Black woman to play on a hillbilly record that sold a million copies, Blue Yodel #9, also known as Standin’ on the Corner. Three geniuses played on Blue Yodel #9—Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Rodgers, and Lil Hardin. Only Lil plays on every bar of the piece.

Lil’s performance on the piano proves that Country is not as Bill C. Malone long posited: a genre with Black influence but without Black presence. Blue Yodel #9 refutes that twentieth-century lie.

If Blue Yodel #9 represents the birth of Country Music, as many have argued, including Johnny Cash, then I argue the woman driving that session with her innovative approach to the keyboard and her intimate knowledge of the lyrics is Country Music’s midwife, and that’s Lil Hardin. And if it’s true, as I suspect, that she brought the song to the session, that she shaped the lyrics, then she’s not just the midwife, she’s the mama.

Black women have been present in Country since the earliest days of Country’s existence as a recorded and commercially marketed music form.

So, this is another lie: isolated Black men had some presence and influence in Country at its very beginning—DeFord Bailey, Eslie Riddle, and Louis Armstrong—but Black women are a new addition to the Country scene in the twenty-first century. Lil’s presence on Blue Yodel #9 and the decades-long denial of that presence pose very interesting questions.

What if Country Music wasn’t Mother Maybelle’s white-as-the-Appalachian-snow child, wasn’t Jimmie Rodgers’s white-as-the-Appalachian-snow child, it was their Black as Nuttallburg coal grandchild? And that’s Black.

In the 1930s in the infancy of Country Music, there were fifty-five thousand Black men working in coal mines and living with their families in coal camps. Some of the forgotten mine and town names: Nuttallburg, Hawk’s Nest, and Stone Cliff. How do we forget this?

Don’t forget what I’ve told you. Jimmie Rodgers and the Carters learned songs and