Traveling Together: Alice Randall's My Black Country
Charles's thoughts on a wonderful new book
We love Alice Randall’s new book, and the album that it accompanies. So we’re going to devote a couple of posts to them. First off is Charles’ thoughts on the book, and then David will join him for a special “Turn It Up” spotlighting their favorites from the My Black Country album.
Early in Alice Randall’s My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future, she recalls something her father told her about the myths and realities of American music. Noting the presence of Black musicians on early country records, Randall’s father also noted an absence. “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?’” This wisdom – recalled by Randall at several key points later – is a fitting microcosm for this larger accomplishment of this astonishing book. Drawing equally on Randall’s gifts as songwriter, novelist, and teacher, My Black Country is a transformative joy.
The book weaves together three narratives. First is Randall’s story, the journey that took her from Detroit to Nashville and through many tumults and triumphs along the way. Black country music is with her at every stage: an early encounter with the Supremes and their version of country hit “Queen of the House,” for example, is a foundational early memory. Her creative process and personal life are inextricable: an extended discussion of a cross-country train journey following her mother’s death is both an evocative travelogue (akin to a concept album) and a meditation on the art of creating oneself. At the end, Randall finds herself literally and figuratively teaching Black country traditions, both through a position at Vanderbilt and in her renewed focus on celebrating Black country legacies in which she participated.
The second thread is that larger Black country history. Randall includes deft discussions of many of its artists and recordings, as well as of Black music from outside the genre which nonetheless falls within Randall’s understanding of the traditions. She gracefully honors forebears both expected (like DeFord Bailey) and less predictable (Lil Hardin Armstrong), naming a “First Family of Black Country” whose impact Randall traces all the way down to recent figures – Rissi Palmer, Lil Nas X, Rhiannon Giddens – who animate the book’s final section. But she also makes space for Bill Withers, Quincy Jones, Roberta Flack, Arizona Dranes, and others at Black country’s table, as well as expanding its geographies to Detroit and Los Angeles.
Indeed, the third thread is a larger rethinking of how we think and, more importantly, how we listen. Her early discussion of the multiple definitions of Black country – outlined with the clarity and detail of the master teacher she is – is one of the best that I’ve seen. It includes country music recorded by Black people, honors country’s African-diasporic foundations, and acknowledges audiences, instrumentation, and thematic resonance as potential criteria. (Just one striking example is her claiming of Quincy Jones production “We Are The World” in the Black country tradition, and not just because it was co-written by country-inclusive hitmaker Lionel Richie.) There is room for debate in the specifics, I suppose, but Randall’s point is to demand a definition that’s broad enough to encompass the variety of Black musical experiences and country’s changing identity. It’s already changed and improved how I listen.
My Black Country’s remarkable ideas are matched by its beautiful language. This isn’t a surprise to anyone familiar with Randall’s writing, but it’s still a noteworthy complement to the book’s rich insights. Stories, images, and figures jump out in vivid detail, and many of them reappear throughout. (Lil Hardin Armstrong serves not only as root figure for Black country history but also as touchstone for Randall as she finds and re-makes herself.) My Black Country is defined as much as anything by the craft of storytelling. In that way, it’s very much like Randall’s songs.
Speaking of which, the book is tied to the release of an album, also called My Black Country, which features recordings of Randall’s songs, produced by Ebonie Smith and performed by an all-star group of young Black country women. Randall uses the stories of these sessions as links between her life’s chapters – like Valerie June’s “Big Dream” or the reworking of her biggest hit, “XXXs and OOOs,” by poet Caroline Randall Williams, her daughter, who the song was written about. Randall takes it even deeper. The recording of “Girls Ride Horses, Too” by SistaStrings or “Get the Hell out of Dodge” by Saaneah is not just about Randall celebrating her work or the vibrance of contemporary Black country women. The new versions illustrate Randall’s demand that we reconsider who makes country music and who it is assumed to be about. As she notes, part of country’s whiteness problem is that Black people are not considered to be the subjects of country songs, unless those songs are by Black artists or fall into limited stereotypes. So when Adia Victoria tackles the cowboy song “Went For A Ride,” for example, she makes the song an unmistakably Black-centered conversation. As Randall writes, Victoria’s performance “raised our new myth” by re-establishing the song’s roots in Randall’s “Black and feminine place,” “Black and Western place,” and – most profoundly, perhaps – “Black and haunted place.” Or, as Victoria sings in her startling version of Randall’s lyric: “They got it all wrong in that book of history.”
My Black Country is a work of history, memory, and myth, raising spirits of Black country’s past and bringing them into conversation with its wondrous present. Randall is the book’s center, but she calls together a community that extends beyond time, space, and even the most flexible definitions of genre. Of Allison Russell’s version of “Many Mansions,” with which she closes the book, Randall writes that the change of phrase from “my father’s house” to “my mother’s” in the song’s central image captures this larger goal. “We have inhabited so many of them,” she writes, “and built more spaces to inhabit where we are seen and heard, in our power and beauty, in warmth and movement.” My Black Country finds Randall living and building those mansions, making a home for ancestors like DeFord Bailey and Lil Hardin Armstrong and the many musical descendants – like Randall, or the Black women who appear on the My Black Country album – who have followed their example. “In Black Country,” Randall notes, “we are fortunate when we travel together. And we are often fortunate.” It is we, too, who are fortunate to have this wonderful book.
PS - Here are three miscellaneous thoughts that I couldn’t fit into this piece but didn’t want to exclude:
-Her comparison of Lil Nas X to Aquamayne is genius.
-I was happy to see that we share favorite Rissi Palmer and Allison Russell songs.
-I’m sure I’m not the only person to immediately do a YouTube search for the Wooten Brothers’ version of “Country Boy” from Busch Gardens in 1986 after reading Randall’s description of it. And, yep, it’s everything she says it is. Go read about it, and then go find it.
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