Turn It Up: "My Black Country" Edition

Charles and David with favorites from a wonderful new album

We love the new album of songs written by Alice Randall, performed by an all-star group of Black women country artists and produced by Ebonie Smith. We also love Randall’s book of the same name, which Charles talked about here. The book and album are best experienced together, so we hope you’ll check them both out. Here are a few of our favorite tracks from this great record (including one, “Went for a Ride,” that we wrote about before), plus our regular reading recommendations at the end.

Adia Victoria – “Went for a Ride”

Adia Victoria, whose reckonings with the Southern and American past and present have marked her as one of this moment’s most vital voices, offers a smoldering version of Randall’s “Went for a Ride,” which she co-wrote with Radney Foster. Foster’s version – stately, declarative, major-key – is just fine. But Adia Victoria unsurprisingly explores a vast new territory. Her eerie testimony, offered over a hazy-horizon arrangement, adds extra weight and mystery to the song’s recounting of a freedman who found work with both the “Buffalo Soldier” frontier regiments of the U.S. Army and as a performer in “Wild West” shows. Engaging both reality and mythology of Western expansion, Victoria sings of the caging of the prairie and the “blood on the leather” with the vivid lyricism of the linked traditions of which Randall and Victoria are such crucial parts. With her final, repeated “I swore at the devil, and went for a ride,” Victoria nods back to the crossroads while committing to ride ‘til she can’t no more. What a track. What a project. - CH (originally published here on 2/8/24)

Allison Russell – “Many Mansions”

Revising both The Bible and Moe Bandy, Allison Russell’s beautiful version of “Many Mansions” switches the spiritual home from “my father’s house” to “my mother’s.” As Randall notes in her book, this subtle but clear shift both reframes the song’s discussion of urban poverty and affirms the song as testament to the woman-centered communities of music that Randall lives in and builds anew. This is a key part of the larger My Black Country project, and it is done so effectively here. But that thematic reimagining is only part of the transformation here. Russell and the other musicians open the arms of the song into a lush embrace of the listener – a stately rhythmic sway carries Russell’s clarion voice and the harmonies that support her, building to a cathartic final chorus that feels like the close of a prayer. As with the rest of Russell’s work, it’s both heartbreaking and heart-filling. As with the rest of the album, it’s the new definitive version of this song. – CH

Rissi Palmer – “Who’s Minding The Garden?”

Randall’s call for environmental protection soars in the hands and voice of Rissi Palmer. Building from finger-picked guitar and quiet lamentation into the chorus’ roiling sea, Palmer’s “Who’s Minding The Garden?” forces the listener to confront the losses in the lyric while not allowing for disconnection or defeat. In the era of climate change, Randall’s message has only grown more urgent, and Palmer delivers it with an appropriate mix of desperation and persistence. There’s additional symbolism: very few have minded the garden of Black country music with the care and expertise of Rissi Palmer, an artist and advocate who Randall celebrates in her book as a great steward of the legacies and contributor to the future. Because, as “Who’s Minding The Garden?” also reminds us, Palmer is a uniquely talented artist. Another new definitive version. – CH

Leyla McCalla – “Small Towns (Are Smaller for Girls)”  

Holly Dunn’s 1987 recording of this song “gives no indication,” as Randall writes, “that any black girl ever lived in a small town.” Honestly, Dunn’s sunny reading of the song doesn’t even make small towns sound smaller for white girls. Randall’s lyrics, though, make the gender differences plain, and Leyla McCalla’s version both feels circumscribed and evokes blackness because of her banjo, brooding but biding its time. When I first heard McCalla sings about a black girl feeling trapped while dreaming of New York, it reminded me of Roberta Lea’s song last year, “Small Town Boy,” about a girl who fleas her small town, and her small-minded beau there, to travel the world. Randall’s song, and McCalla’s take, is about feeling trapped but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hopeful. – DC

Miko Marks – “I’ll Cry for Yours”

Randall writes in her memoir that “I’ll Cry for Yours” is a song she “cowrote with Robert Jetton while walking through a Confederate graveyard, a Union graveyard, and a graveyard of the enslaved…” That origin story traces the song’s “legacy of hate and fear” back to the Civil War and makes unmistakably specific its “wrought iron gates and cold stone walls.” Randall observes as well that the My Black Country version of the song by Miko Marks has “a raw urgency that makes it the theme song of so many global conflicts and this project.” I love that way of reading the song for several reasons. First, it underlines why Marks, my favorite “new” singer this decade, and this Randall song are perfectly matched: Marks’ own project has been to expand the reach and depth of familiar American roots traditions. I also love that Randall identifies the number as “the theme song for… this project,” meaning her own My Black Country of course but also the larger project of understanding country as having been an integrated music all along. Think, “I’ll cry for your songs, will you cry for mine.” And that ties as well into a still larger political project of changing the world, together, via what the scholar Craig Werner terms the African American-born “Gospel Impulse.” Charles and I have noted here before how country music typically lacks such a collective impulse, but our thousands of words fail to capture all the losses and possibilities that Miko Marks packs into a single Alice Randall line: “When they choose up sides, will you cross that line?” – DC

Reading recommendations:

-Ann Powers on Taylor Swift, for NPR.com

-Carl Wilson on Taylor Swift, for NPR.com

-Ron Wynn on Brei Carter, for Good Country

-Rachel Cholst on “cottagecore country,” for Good Country

-Justin Hiltner on Secret Sisters, for Good Country

-Josh Kitchen talks with Joe Kwaczala about his Rock Hall-themed podcast, at Setlist Kitchen

-Elizabeth Blair on Redbone and the significance of “Come and Get Your Love,” for NPR.com

-Oh, and take note: our friends at Rainbow Rodeo continue to raise money to make sure that their great publication can keep producing crucial queer-country content. Check out the link here!

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