My Black Country
A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author presents “a celebration of all things country music” (Ken Burns) as she reflects on her search for the first family of Black country music.
Country music had brought Alice Randall and her activist mother together and even gave Randall a singular distinction in American music history: she is the first Black woman to cowrite a number one country hit, Trisha Yearwood’s “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl)”. Randall found inspiration and comfort in the sounds and history of the first family of Black country music: DeFord Bailey, Lil Hardin, Ray Charles, Charley Pride, and Herb Jeffries who, together, made up a community of Black Americans rising through hard times to create simple beauty, true joy, and sometimes profound eccentricity.
What emerges in My Black Country is “a delightful, inspirational story of persistence, resistance, and sheer love” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) of this most American of music genres and the radical joy in realizing the power of Black influence on American culture. As country music goes through a fresh renaissance today, with a new wave of Black artists enjoying success, My Black Country is the perfect gift for longtime country fans and a vibrant introduction to a new generation of listeners who previously were not invited to give the genre a chance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Randall (Black Bottom Saints) unearths the buried roots of Black country music in this intermittently insightful blend of memoir and cultural history. At eight years old, Randall moved with her mother from Detroit to Washington, D.C., where she was enrolled in a private school full of "left-wing hippy intellectuals" who were developing an interest in Black country. After graduating from Harvard in 1981, her fixation with country music brought her to Nashville, where she founded the record label Midsummer Music and worked to promote female artists before selling her shares and heading to Los Angeles to try to revive the Black western film genre and begin writing a novel. Woven through these autobiographical recollections are stories about the "First Family of Black Country"—Lil Hardin, DeFord Bailey, Ray Charles, Charley Pride, and Herb Jeffries. Randall incisively examines how these and other Black performers innovated country music starting in the late 1920s and early '30s even as their lyrics and chords were "borrowed" or stolen by white artists and they were written out of the genre's official history. The chronicle of Black country is fascinating, though its oblique telling sometimes frustrates; strewn unevenly throughout the narrative are tantalizing accounts of Randall's brushes with big-name performers and odes to her favorite artists and records. Still, readers will find plenty here that enriches and complicates the story of country music.
