“I never wrote a song to entertain anyone. Not once,” said Alice Randall in an outtake from Episode 292 of The String. In the broadcast, she says something similar: “I wanted to create, and I think to some degree I did, necessary songs, because I believe (country music is) hard music for people going through hard times. And I believe it makes a plan. It helps us figure out how to do better.”
Randall, the first Black woman to build a career as a professional Music Row songwriter, is also a best-selling novelist, scholar and a consultant on Ken Burns’s sweeping PBS documentary Country Music. From her early stirrings of loving country music, she became aware of the African American role in building country music - of DeFord Bailey and Charley Pride and Ray Charles - but also of a country industry and music culture that treated those pioneers as Black aberrations in a White space rather than founding fathers. By the time she graduated from Harvard, she decided to head to Nashville with a dream and a mission.
“I would strike back,” she writes in her new memoir My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future. “I would spotlight unheralded Black Country artists. I would publish excluded voices; and I would write songs about the Black South and West that were not getting written, songs about Black cowboys and Black frontier women, songs about brides and lynchings, songs about brown girls in small towns.”
This book is eye-opening and extraordinary. As hard as I’ve tried to stay on top of the conversation about Black creators in country and Americana music over the past two decades, Randall’s mix of personal history and cultural criticism showed me points of view I hadn’t considered. Lil Hardin Armstrong - wife of Louis - was a powerful songwriter who played on at least one historic country recording session with Jimmie Rodgers. She’s the Mother of Black Country in Randall’s estimation. DeFord Bailey, the Nashville harmonica player who became the first superstar of the Grand Ole Opry in the 20s, is the father. Randall filled me in on Herb Jeffries, a singing Black cowboy from motion pictures in the 1930s. She elaborated on what I thought I knew about Eslie Riddle, the guitarist and song-catcher who profoundly influenced the Carter Family. And there’s more.
At the same time as the book, Oh Boy Records released a multi-artist album - also called My Black Country - featuring a dozen of the most influential and exciting Black women in Americana/country performing Randall’s favorite songs. Rhiannon Giddens is here singing “The Ballad of Sally Ann,” a devastating song - written with Harry Stinson and Mark O’Connor in the early 90s - about the wedding of the titular character to Johnny (“in his one good suit”) followed by Johnny’s lynching. It was first cut on O’Connor’s New Nashville Cats album of 1991. That sprightly arrangement sung by John Cowan doesn’t feel right now, but Giddens’s somber reading against her open back banjo brings the proper pathos.
That’s not as radical a remake though as Randall’s most successful song, the Trisha Yearwood No. 1 hit “XXX’s and OOO’s,” performed on the collection by her daughter, the poet Caroline Randall Williams. It’s now a spoken word piece, with the themes of love, money, work and self-actualization reinvestigated through remixed lyrics. Also on the album are Allison Russell, Sista Strings, Leyla McCalla, Sunny War, Rissi Palmer, and others. Randall opens and closes her book with scenes from the recording sessions, where she was overcome with emotion upon hearing Black voices sing her songs.
“It was so exciting to hear what I had intended to hear,” she tells me. “In the interim, I had heard Glen Campbell, I had heard Marie Osmond, I had heard Holly Dunn and Judy Rodman, some amazing voices, Tricia Yearwood notably, sing my songs, but I'd never heard a black woman sing one of my songs on the radio until now.”
We met for this conversation at Randall’s home in a classic old apartment building on Belle Meade Boulevard, which she noted is across the street from the mansion occupied through the 20th century by the family of Edwin Craig, founder of the WSM radio over which DeFord Bailey helped make everyone else a bit wealthier. We talk about her considered take on what makes country music country, about what Ken Burns got right that others have overlooked, about the artistry that went into producing the new My Black Country collection, and about the role of Americana in telling a new story of the African American past and future of our shared musical heritage.
