Tag: black country music

On New Album, Dom Flemons Delves Into Different Areas of Black Country Music

Posted on by Editor

Vocalist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Dom Flemons has excelled for years at celebrating the versatility and heritage of American popular music and Black culture. But he has broken fresh ground on his exceptional new album Traveling Wildfire, released at the end of March.

“With this album I wanted to look forward for a change, do more contemporary material,” he said during a recent phone interview. “Most of these songs are recent, and I wanted to delve into the different areas of Black country music. I wanted to have some romantic material, some soulful numbers, the gospel influence, songs about the history, the entire spectrum. A lot of people have been saying they wanted to hear some real Black country music, so that was my goal along with doing newer material.”

Traveling Wildfire includes the enticing tunes “Slow Dance With You” and “If You Truly Love Me,” coupled with harder edged topical fare like “Big Money Blues” and “Tough Luck.” The engaging, storytelling side, as well as his flair with lyric exposition and expressive delivery, are also evident.

Flemons’ second album for Smithsonian Folkways, produced by Ted Hunt (Old Crow Medicine Show), continues the evolution of a solo career that for impact and importance is now rivaling the near decade he spent as part of the remarkable Black string band and old-time country ensemble, The Carolina Chocolate Drops. Its members were taught the foundations of old-time tunes by North Carolina fiddler Joe Thompson, and their Grammy-winning 2010 release Genuine Negro Jig stands as a classic of contemporary folk and country. They were together from 2005-2014, and while he looks back with fondness on that period, Flemons makes it clear he’s looking to the future rather than the past.

“Everyone has moved on and there’s been no talk about any type of reunion or revival,” he continued. “I think everyone has their own projects or interests now.”

Flemons certainly does. Traveling Wildfire is his seventh studio album, and his LPs reflect his knowledge of and comfort with country, folk and blues. Among his other outstanding solo albums, arguably the finest is Black Cowboys from 2018. It features seldom told tales and sagas of African American cowboys and Blacks who came West after the Civil War. Flemons, an Arizona native, got hooked on this material after reading a book on Black cowboys. The project was his debut for Smithsonian Folkways, and is a monumental tribute to a sorely overlooked part of not only Western, but American history.

Flemons also finds time to annotate albums for the vintage label Craft Recordings and contributes his prose as well as his music to the new compilation Birthright: A Black Roots Music Compendium. In addition, he’s earning raves as a broadcaster. Flemons hosts the monthly radio show American Songster, which airs on terrestrial radio via WSM every third Tuesday at 6 p.m. central, and is also available via podcasts.

“The radio show gives me a chance to sit down with other musicians, many of whom I have never met or crossed paths with, and have the type of discussions that you ordinarily wouldn’t have the opportunity to get. One recent example was Branford Marsalis. We had the chance to really get into some areas of performance and history that I felt were not only compelling, but things that you might not expect to hear from him. That is the type of thing I strive to get with the program.”

Flemons received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater Northern Arizona University last year, and he remains committed to championing the breadth and vast scope of American music and the African American experience. He takes a philosophical tone when asked a final question regarding his feelings about his relatively low profile on Black radio and within the African American community as a whole.

“Black music has always historically looked forward rather than backward, and the audience for contemporary Black radio is a reflection of that,” he concluded. “But my experience, both with the Chocolate Drops and as a solo performer, is that when Black audiences have a chance to hear my music and hear the context, they enjoy it. The Black experience has always been broader and more inclusive than many think, and showing that will always be a major part of my mission as a musician and artist.”

Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez

Harmonics With Beth Behrs: Amythyst Kiah

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Welcome back to Harmonics! While host Beth Behrs is planning a brief hiatus from the show (at least regarding new episodes – you can still follow along with everything Harmonics via the newsletter and social media), she is sending us off with one new episode to hold us over. For this episode, Beth sits down with longtime BGS favorite (and recent Artist of the Month alum!) Amythyst Kiah.

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Kiah tells the story of her life’s musical journey, discusses the importance of claiming her space in the roots music world as a queer Black woman, and ponders religion, philosophy, and spiritual moments experienced through music. The pair also talk about mental health and the transformative power of therapy, feeling like an outsider and the dangers of isolation, repressing feelings and toxic positivity, and wonder: Do we each truly have a specific purpose in life?

Listen and subscribe to Harmonics through all podcast platforms and follow Harmonics and Beth Behrs on Instagram for series updates!

Photo credit: Sandlin Gaither

Lightning Bolt Writing: A Conversation with Yola Carter

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Yola Carter had planned to start her solo career slowly. Play some shows, work up some songs, settle in with a band. Make an EP. Take her time with an album. Build up an audience gradually and carefully.

It’s not going that way at all.

Following a brief UK tour this Summer, she made her U.S. debut at AmericanaFest in September, which was rapturously received and put her in touch with numerous labels along Music Row. Suddenly everything sped up. That EP wouldn’t wait, and Carter released Orphan Offering in November. She is set to sign with a label and launch more tours in 2017, with a full-length debut not too far off on the horizon. She is one of the grassroots success stories of 2016.

“I had planned to do a small thing and put it out on Bandcamp or TuneCore,” she says. “Just something to say, 'This is what I’m about. I’m here.' Then I got to Nashville, and it did not check out like that. So this whole slow thing I was doing — it’s over. It’s a real blessing, but it does make you hectic.”

Hers is an inevitable, but still somewhat unlikely, rise. Carter possesses a voice that is at once powerful and gentle, exuberant and melancholy, with a subtle, soulful drawl bending her vowels. She might be an even better songwriter, though, breathing new life into familiar country and gospel conventions and making them sound fresh and urgent. And yet, at a time when Beyoncé’s foray into Dixieland jazz and Nashville twang stirred up a controversy about what is and isn’t country music, this “Black chick from the UK” is intent not so much to break new ground, but to show that the ground she’s standing on is historically solid.

“All of the things that fall under the umbrella of Americana are so intrinsically linked,” she says. “I think that’s why I love it so much. I think that’s why I connect to country of the past. I love how closely connected everything was — gospel and country and soul and everything.”

Growing up as one of very few Black children in a predominantly white seaside town near Bristol, Carter gravitated toward country music — the Byrds and Dolly Parton — feeling a connection to these stories of poverty and struggle, of determination and self-definition. But the market for a Black, English country singer was nonexistent, and Carter felt her only outlets were with other genres. So she toured with Massive Attack and West London DJ collective Bugz in the Attic before forming a band called Phantom Limb, which released two solid country-rock albums.

Carter spent years building up to a solo career, but the struggle has been worthwhile, if only because it gives her perspective now that everything is speeding up. “I’m not a spring chicken,” she says with a laugh. “Maybe if I was in my late teens, I would be bricking it, as we say in the UK. If you don’t know what you want from a scenario, it’s scary for sure. But I’m not here to date. I’m a marriage kind of artist.”

Orphan Offering is, of course, an extremely important record for you. What did you want to get across to people on your first solo release?

This record was very much like the tip of the iceberg for me. At the time I came up with a collection of songs, I had a small setup — cello and fiddle and acoustic and electric. I was just calling people up to see how the songs would turn out and, when I realized they were going to turn out, I thought I should get some of them down. So these songs were the beginning of a bigger story that’s going to be told over the next two records, one of which I’ve already written and the other I’m almost finished writing. The EP is part of a greater thought. Everything I’m writing is very autobiographical.

But I also want to get across my love of country and Southern soul and the Staple Singers. I understand that country means different things to different people. Some people are more on the bro side of things, and some people think the Byrds are country. That’s the crowd I sit in. Hey, I’m just a Black chick from the UK, but Sweetheart of the Rodeo is a big record for me. I have this conversation with people all the time. They ask me, "How country are you?" And I’m like, "I’m country. Cooouuunnntrryyy." As opposed to the kind of rock music country that we have nowadays. So it’s important for me to express my love for that ‘60s country and that ‘60s gospel, Stax and Muscle Shoals and stuff like that. I think it’s country of an era more than it’s country of a particular place.

Some people in the States wouldn’t consider a lot of that music to be country, but it all definitely comes from the same place and, in some cases, from the same people.

I’ve been having this conversation with myself. Is it through the prism of my blackness that the music becomes something other than country? If I don’t sing it with exactly the same lilt as someone else would, does it then turn back into something else? Are we going to racialize music forever and ever? And, if we are, what do we say about hip-hop when white people do it? What do we call that? We don’t have another name for it. And we shouldn’t have another name for it. Music should be judged by your ears. It is what you think it is. Whatever gets you off.

Have you noticed a difference between UK and U.S. audiences? Do they respond differently to your music?

It’s still the early days with this project and, really, the only tour we did was this Summer. But my experience of that tour in the UK was really great, really well received, and really enthusiastic. I got the same thing when I was in Nashville [for AmericanaFest]. The distinction that I make is that American audiences might be more expressive in one way and British audiences might be expressive in another way. It’s more about language than enthusiasm.

There really is a massive appetite for American music over here, and the entire infrastructure has expanded to compensate for it. You’ve got to understand: We didn’t have an Americana chart or an awards show or radio shows dedicated to playing roots or country or whatever you want to call it. But over the past five years or so, it’s just grown and grown. It’s changed our perception of what we’ve been able to do with the genre in this country, which is encouraging to me because I’ve been trying to peddle it for such a long time. So it’s a really wonderful thing that’s happening over here right now. It’s exciting.

Do you think you could have gotten such an enthusiastic response at an earlier moment?

It’s definitely good timing. The environment has changed for the genre. The infrastructure has changed. That whole process of spending your radio time explaining to people what your genre is, what your connection to it is as a Black woman … that conversation is getting shorter. The upside is that you can move along to actually promoting your record instead of leading a class in American Music 101. People don’t want to feel like they’re going to school when they’re just trying to enjoy themselves and connect with something.

But we still have people with a selective memory, when it comes to the origins of rock 'n' roll or the influence it had on the genesis of country music as it transformed out of mountain music. We’re still having a conversation about Beyoncé and how appropriate that is for the CMAs. That’s not surprising over here, but it does seem like we’re having a lot less of them. So that’s great. And it’s good that we’re talking about it and people are writing about it. It’s important to have that conversation about American music, because it’s a rich, amazing history.

I read that you play fiddle. Are you playing on the EP?

No, I’m not playing on the EP, but I used to play fiddle. My bow hand is still alright. It hasn’t got all heavy and clunky and confused. It’s still good. I can hold a melody. That was me growing up. I got attached to things in bluegrass because of the fiddle. I love double-stop fiddles and I think that was one of my gateway drugs into Americana music — CSN to start with and Neil Young. I was very much on the alt side of things when I came in, and then I slowly centered on Dolly and the Byrds. It was all very piecemeal, which is what you got in this country. It’s like you’re just bumping into things over and over and, every time you bump into something, you get a greater understanding of what it speaks to in you.

As a kid, it was Dolly and the fact that she was a woman writing about her life. That really got me because of my own environment. I wanted to write like her and sing like her. Then I bumped into other people. I had a lot of Gene Clark for a while, just for song structure, and I had my time with Joni [Mitchell] — maybe less than I should have. I started getting into the Dillards and just all the way across American music. The Staple Singers landed about that time, and Mavis is still one of my greatest heroes, musically. Soul Folk in Action changed me. We all know Ray Charles did what he did with that amazing country record, but I needed to hear someone with a similar vocal timbre doing things that I was reaching for. As female singer/songwriters, we need matriarchs sometimes.

Before she passed, my mum told me that she had a Staples' record that she used to play in the house when I was really small. It was the only one of that kind of music she had, so she wouldn’t let me touch it. So I never touched it and never knew it was there until she told she’d had the thing the whole time. Are you kidding me? I‘d been trying to reach for something, but didn’t know what it was. My mum was really into music and had a sizable record collection that was pretty diverse. She used to be a hospital DJ. She was a psychiatric nurse, and she’d play mostly disco, but sometimes soul music for the mentally infirm. That was her job.

Orphan Offering seems to be addressing some aspects of your youth.

“Orphan Country” is very much about me growing up in that seaside town. There’s a show in the UK called Keeping Up Appearances, and the title says everything. It’s about the working class in the UK trying to deny where they’re at and trying to be socially mobile. Where I grew up was very much like that. It was people buying just outside of what they could afford and either keeping their shit together or going into debt. I grew up in that kind of insular environment. There was nothing there. It was a very conservative and pretty racist environment, so music was a real escape and a way to express myself without acting out. “Orphan Country” is about growing up in that place, being from a broken home, being from a place that doesn’t accept you one bit. All the things that are going on now are things that I grew up with.

People are talking about how surprised they are that this is still happening, but it’s not surprising if you grew up with it and lived with it. "Oh surprise, I was really racist." Yeah, we got the memo about 20 years ago. You can pretend you’re not racist, but we’ve got good Spidey sense for that institutional stuff and we know it’s just a matter of time before it rears its ugly head again. It goes in cycles, like ‘70s fashion. "Oh, flares are back? Great!" We won’t talk about these issues for a while, but then people will feel like they can punch a Black person again.

You mentioned that your next two albums will continue the narrative you started on Orphan Offering. It sounds like you’re writing with some very specific themes and stories in mind.

I’m dealing with a lot of personal issues that have been going on in my life, and I’m never going to get all of that onto just one record. These are the things that have been happening in my life and that are happening politically at the moment, which have to do with the perception of race. If you’re a Black woman, people automatically assume that the prefix “strong” can be applied to you, regardless of how you’re feeling at the time. I’m dealing with that. In this solo environment, I have new opportunities to express myself in less general ways than I have in the past. I don’t have to write about everyone. I can be personal. Freedom isn’t something that I’m used to, because I’ve never gone solo before. But I’ve got a lot to stay about these issues and about life, in general, especially coming out of a really awful, awful relationship.

It’s obviously cathartic, but I think it’s essential that I don’t just write in a woe-is-me way all the time. I’m writing to make people aware of situations or to be a mouthpiece for something that happens to my particular demographic or to us in the West on a grander scale. So this little EP — bless it — is the tip of a slightly angry iceberg. I do a little venting, but there’s a lot of hope and love and kindness. And a lot of "What the fuck?!" People always ask me, "What are your themes? What are you working with?" I’m working with "What the fuck?!" A lot of people are working with that sentiment right now. I think it’s appropriate.

I know I’m not going to save the world with a song, but I am going to be able to process things. And that’s enough. People are starting to feel a need for a little bit of protest. Not too much. We need to have fun, too. It can’t all be serious all the time, but I’m going to try to keep the tradition alive that’s been going on since the ‘50s and ‘60s: uptempo music with a happy melody and sad subject matter. There’s a song that will be on the album, I hope, when I find the producer I want. It’s called “Free to Roam,” and you listen to it and you swear it’s the greatest party you’ve ever been to. But then you read the words — it’s not exactly joyful. You have to put a little sugar with the medicine.

It’s the Woody Guthrie approach. You add a little humor and humanity to the anger and the outrage.

That’s the balance I’m after. I wrote about 50 songs. They just appeared out of nowhere in a very short space of time. I had been backed up, creatively, so I had a big old purge. And it hasn’t stopped. My writing process involves a lot of waking up with an idea. I call it lightning bolt writing. It just arrives. I’m just waiting. I’m dousing for it. I’m always trying to get myself into the right headspace for a song to turn up, and I’ve started getting very good at creating a good environment for that process. So I’m hoping that some of the songs are quite immediate, that they really get you. I go to shows and I see people mouthing the words. The band just learned the song, and people are already singing along!

 

For more on the intersection of race and country music, read our Squared Roots interview with Rhiannon Giddens about Dolly Parton.

Photos courtesy of the artist.

LOOSE ENDS with Jewly Hight (Part II)

Posted on by Editor

Here’s Part II of Jewly Hight's interview with Diane Pecknold, who edited and contributed to Hidden In the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music and previously authored The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry. (If you missed Part I, be sure to check it out here…)

Besides Ray Charles, you mention a number of other examples of southern soul singers recording country songs. And in Charles Hughes’s chapter, he talks about that exchange between the Muscle Shoals, Memphis and Nashville scenes and highlights African-American songwriters who could get country cuts in Nashville but couldn’t get anywhere as performers there, like Arthur Alexander.

What we’re talking about is the difference between having an existing industry infrastructure and not having one. Besides the example of Burke knowing who to get to produce his album Nashville and what material to put on it to attract a certain audience, there are other performers who are more closely identified with contemporary blues, like Shemekia Copeland and Bobby Rush, who’ve done similar things. Copeland has very deliberately drawn on Americana singer-songwriter material. And Rush consciously tweaked the sound of his new album to appeal to Americana notions of rawness and teamed up with Thirty Tigers to distribute it. I wonder if you would look at both of those as cases of African-American performers making smart, savvy use of a framework already in place.

Yeah, I think there’s a reason why Americana is a different thing from alt-country. Americana has defined itself as occupying that sort of middle ground that got lost in the genre distinctions between race and hillbilly and all of the things that followed from that. So yeah, I think, in addition to changing attitudes, there is a potential institutional home in a way that maybe there wasn’t. Although if you think about Dave Sanjek’s article on King Records, or even a place like Atlantic, people were producing both kinds of music. So to some degree, there has been some limited continuity among independent labels that have had that same mid-market niche that Americana aims at. Americana, to the degree that it’s a radio format and a genre, does provide that kind of institutional underpinning that people can take advantage of.

I like to see talented performers, who are also African-American, taking advantage of those opportunities. Not that it could even begin to make a dent in all of the lost opportunities over the years. But there is a way for performers to get themselves in front of an audience playing that music, though it is, from what I’ve seen, mostly a white audience.

Actually, I would guess that probably there is a larger African-American audience for mainstream country than there is an African-American audience for Americana.

That’s entirely possible.

And that may have something to do with the fact that artists in Americana tend to be older, tend to be performing styles that are perceived as antiquated or revivalist. You know what I mean?

Mmhmm. That brings to mind the Tony Russell chapter of your book, where he discusses why African-American musicians stopped playing the banjo. I think he does a really effective job of saying it wasn’t blackface minstrelsy that did it, but that black musicians and audiences moved on from old-time music, brought the banjo into jazz, then left it behind when they moved on to blues, since it didn’t fit the cadence, tempo or dancing style of blues. He makes the argument that black musicians were forward-looking and weren’t driven by nostalgia. Whereas nostalgia definitely seems to be something that funds revivals of old-time music. I hadn’t really considered whether the very idea of roots music or Americana, the very idea of wanting to reach back and revive something, would be unattractive and wouldn’t offer a lot of creative possibilities that they would be interested in.

Yeah. Tony’s piece to me is a really interesting one. There aren’t very many African-Americans who write about country music, but when white people write about country music, the assumption tends to be that whether it’s repulsion or exclusion, that the underrepresentation of African-Americans in country music, among artists and the audience, must be some sort of response to whiteness, or must be some sort of response to racism. And the beauty of what Tony is doing is saying, “Hey, no. This is a community of people who have their own lives and who are just interested in other things. You go on about your business. We’re doing what we’re doing. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.” [laughs] In fact, I think he would vociferously argue that he is not writing about country music even, and that he doesn’t really have any interest in it, that what he’s writing about is something else entirely, when he’s writing about old-time music. I think that’s one of the really great things about this piece is his interest in stuff that’s just, you know, separate laws of motion.

Several years ago I had a hard time finding African-American singer-songwriters to include in my book about women songwriters in Americana music. I certainly didn’t want to write only about white performers, but I needed to select artists whom it made sense to identify with Americana, taking into account how they saw what they were doing. That model of the singer-songwriter wasn’t identified with a lot of African-American performers; people have had a hard time getting away from the idea of Bob Dylan as the archetype.

So I’ve been eagerly watching what’s going on with a new generation of performers, who are songwriters and are doing stuff that I think can be seen as having a relationship to roots music, and who in many cases are African-American or multiracial, like Chastity Brown, Valerie June, or Cassie Taylor, the daughter of Otis Taylor. Do you have any thoughts on whether a new generation of performers, or even a band like the Alabama Shakes, are finding something more creatively promising, open or moldable for them in roots music, and why that would be?

Well, you know, I think it’s hard to overemphasize the importance of the idea that there really has been a significant shift in which the crossing of those racialized lines is no longer really perceived, I don’t think, to some degree, as the same sort of scandal that it once was. I think that’s part of what Adam Gussow is saying: Cowboy Troy has to highlight his crossing of that boundary in order to even make it register as a significant crossing. And I think it’s generational change over time.

And to some degree, I’m hoping that that’s what this book does also, is take away the notion that it’s somehow automatically a transgression, that it’s already always scandalous in some way. Not in the sense of racist outrage, but just sort of like, “Ooh! That’s kooky.” As we get further and further distanced from a world in which Jim Crow made every crossing of any kind of cultural or social or spatial racial line problematic, I’m sure that younger people are feeling themselves more able to do whatever they want, without having to think about the racial implications. And I think Americana and roots music, again, by emphasizing the fact that those boundaries have always been crossed, provides a space for them to do that.  So you know, maybe in 10 years or whatever, the issue of whether or not there are African-Americans playing country music or African-Americans playing country-informed roots music or old-time music or whatever will just be sort of a moot point. You’d hope to get to a point where having a book like this would be sort of redundant and perplexing — like a book about left-handed people playing country music: “Who cares?” Over time I think that will happen. As you say, I think roots music is one place that makes that kind of thing possible.

Singer-songwriters are one of the most celebrated models for a performer in Americana music, especially those who write really complex lyrics or maybe have a literary bent to their songwriting. The storytelling aspect of what they do has often been celebrated more than the musical aspect of it, the singing or how it’s framed musically, what the music actually feels like. That’s certainly not what a band like the Alabama Shakes is doing. It seems to me like a lot more physical style of performance and expression. What’s your interpretation of what they’re up to?

You know, I think I heard their name first in maybe an Ann Powers review or something, and it wasn’t clear at all in the review just exactly what they were gonna sound like. So I rushed out and went and listened to a bunch of their stuff. They’re really doing something that is not country enough for me to lump it in with all of these other things that I see, but clearly also overlapping with it enough that that’s how they’re being received and perceived. To me, I feel like they are an example of a band that probably would not get a very solid hearing were it not for the category of Americana. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

They really do fit so much in the middle of a variety of different styles, and with the admixture of a non-revivalist attitude, I guess. … If alt-country were still a format, clearly it would never get played on alt-country. There’s too much rock in it, really, to appeal to blues revivalist types alone. I guess I just feel like they are truly such a hybrid that they would, I think, have a hard time finding a home anywhere other than through an Americana audience that had already been primed to hear all of those things and not expect or demand the dominance of any one of them.

The other thing about many of these young bands is that their take on rootsy rock has a lot higher R&B or soul quotient to it. I think it’s exciting to see them expressing themselves in a physical way, drawing on that kind of musical intelligence, bringing that into play alongside the acts that excel at writing intelligent lyrics.

I totally agree. Because of the most heavily racialized categories and the paradigm that was set up, it’s easy to always be thinking of the dichotomy between old-time/hillbilly/country and race/R&B/soul/urban as the only options, and I think that the Alabama Shakes, their performance style and their physicality, remind us there are other things out there too. And I think you can’t underestimate the impact of just plain old rock ‘n’ roll in what they do.

You said early on in our conversation that this is a book that you’re excited about putting out there. Is there anything in particular that excites you about it, or the kinds of conversations you hope it’ll contribute to?

Well, you know, one of the things I hope it sparks is this conversation that has taken place, partly around “Accidental Racist,” about whiteness and country music and how it functions. Although it’s a book about African-American engagements with country music, I assume it’s going to also [contribute to] those other conversations, in a way that maybe will create less defensiveness than the conversation that starts, “Hey, country music is only played by white people and listened to by white people.” That’s a conversation that’s really probably not gonna go anywhere, whereas I think this one has the possibility. I would like people to have the freedom to play and listen to whatever they want to play, regardless of who they are. I’d like to get to the point where Darius Rucker doesn’t have to have the conversation when he starts playing country music about “Hey, you’re a black guy. Why do you like country music?”

“Yeah, why don’t you do a show with Charley Pride?”

Exactly! Wouldn’t it be nice if he could just put out his album and people would say, “Hey, that one song is a really great song. Tell me a little about how you wrote that.” I guess I’m just hoping to have conversations about what has been possible, what hasn’t been possible, what has taken place that seemed like it might have been impossible and just further the conversation.

I think that would be a very constructive thing.

And the other thing is, I’m really looking forward to having people say, basically, “Wow, even within the constraints, there were all these people who were doing this fabulous stuff and who had an impact on this type of music that people have generally not acknowledged.

[Carolina Chocolate Drops singer] Rhiannon Giddens, somebody was again asking her, “Is it okay for a black person to play this kind of music?” She said, “You know, the music is blameless. The lyrics might be problematic, but the music itself is blameless.” And there’s a lot of great music out there, and I am really hoping that conversations develop, maybe not even a conversation that I am necessarily participating in, but that people will feel that new possibilities are open to them to enjoy things that they might otherwise not have, to recognize how awesome much of this previously unemphasized music is and to feel free to listen to whatever they want — including this music.

Click here for Part III of LOOSE ENDS.

LOOSE ENDS with Jewly Hight (Part I)

Posted on by Editor

In her four-part series Sitch columnist, JEWLY HIGHT, explores the the ties between rhythm & blues and the roots, Americana and bluegrass music world.

Perhaps you’ve heard the blogosphere buzzing over the fact that one of the biggest acts in electronic dance music, the French duo Daft Punk, felt the need to build their latest album upon the performances of real, live musicians — as opposed to mechanized programming — in pursuit of “the soul that a musician can bring.” Something else that recently got my attention was a quote from Bradford Cox, the white lead singer of Deerhunter. In an interview about his band’s new album, he diagnosed indie rock as lacking “Bo Diddley and blackness,” as well as the “struggle” of “hillbilly music from a certain era.”  Then, too, one of the more striking R&B music videos I’ve seen of late is a dystopian sci-fi fantasy from the ever-imaginative Janelle Monae. While these bits of pop culture might not seem all that significant on their own, I’ve come to interpret them as outside confirmation that something big is going on in that bastion of realness — or “realness,” if you like — that we know as roots music.

It wasn’t lost on me that a young neo-soul-influenced singer-songwriter named Chastity Brown showed up to play a showcase at last year’s (2012) Americana Music Festival in Nashville. Or that the weekly live and radio stage show Music City Roots has been playing host to more and more twenty-something bands with horn sections and a penchant for boogieing down. Or that this year’s (2013) Grammy Awards featured an all-star tribute to Americana hero Levon Helm and a host of other recently departed music makers, in which the Alabama Shakes singer Brittany Howard held her own next to flamboyant elders Mavis Staples and Elton John.

With mainstream R&B now deep into its futuristic phase, much of current rock, indie and otherwise, devoid of roll and dance music’s pace-setters searching for a flesh-and-blood pulse, performers of a new generation are gravitating toward roots music and bringing with them more physically robust forms of expression and a revival of rhythm and blues ingenuity.

Before and after Bonnaroo, I’ll be exploring this trend in a multi-part series, looking at how acoustic music has helped open the door for this, as well as how young performers are expanding on tried-and-true Americana models for singer-songwriters and roots rock bands and toying with new ways of embodying their identities.

First, though, it’d be helpful to unpack the history of our thinking about who plays what music and why. The tangle of racial, stylistic, social and commercial factors is far too complex to tackle in a six-minute song, though Brad Paisley (maybe?) deserves credit for making the attempt. But from Tony Russell’s Blacks Whites & Blues to Karl Hagstrom Miller’s Segregating Sound and a very important new book edited by Diane Pecknold, Hidden In the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music, there’s illuminating scholarship on the subject. Here’s part one of a phone interview I recently conducted with Pecknold.

You couldn’t possibly have anticipated, when Duke U Press settled on the release date for the book, that something else would happen to stir up conversation about race and country anew.

Diane Pecknold: Are you talking about “Accidental Racist?"

I am! Even outlets that don’t usually pay any attention to country music covered it, and so much of the coverage had little or no sense of context. I wondered if you might take that as an indication of how important this book is at this moment.

I was really interested to see the difference between the way people who don’t normally pay attention to country music or like country music wrote about it versus those who I think would identify themselves with country music wrote about it — even though they would not identify themselves with some of the problems the song raises. I think having some more, as you say, nuanced way of talking about the effort to deal with race in country music is, you know, I hope the book will advance that at least. I don’t know whether it will or not, but I do hope it will. I was really struck by the way people who do not apparently think about country music a lot assumed a lot about who [Brad] Paisley was prior to releasing the song, and assumed that Paisley was speaking for himself in the voice of the song’s character.

I kept hearing people talk about it as an autobiographical song, but I wonder if his personal perspective isn’t more sophisticated than that.

Yeah, exactly. I saw it as him in the time-honored tradition of country songs taking on a character and speaking from that character in very mundane ways, from that character’s point-of-view.

I think it’s significant that he made the attempt, and was trying to speak to the country audience in a certain way, even though the execution is … [laughs] And I’m hoping it’ll make for a receptive audience for the book.

I hope so too. As the introduction says, it’s kind of a paradox that on the one hand, country music is white. I’m not trying to argue that it’s not coded as white music or that it doesn’t function as white music in our culture. But there is also, undeniably, a longstanding tradition of African-Americans either just flat-out playing country music or engaging with it and using it in other genres. How do you resolve that? What does it mean that it manages to stay white even while it’s being used and engaged with by African-American artists and entrepreneurs? I don’t know.

Patrick Huber’s chapter emphasizes the artificial nature of commercial categories like “race” and “hillbilly,” and talks a lot about how those designations didn’t seem natural or self-evident at the beginning and were developed through on-the-fly marketing decisions by record companies, sometimes based on narrow assumptions about who the audiences were for this music. Why do you feel like that kind of contextualizing is important? What kind of difference do you think it could and should make to the interpretation of what’s going on in the contemporary landscape?

I think one of the things [Patrick Huber] does so very well is to outline this pretty robust habit of totally disconnected African-American old-time records and interracial old-time records, so you can’t argue that it’s one scene or one locale producing these recordings. This is clearly a really widespread set of traditions that are bubbling up in these recordings, but that are hard for the A&R guys to figure out just quite what to do with. And I think the other thing that’s really interesting is the degree to which it didn’t always hinge on race. I mean, [the] received wisdom [is] that, “Oh, categories like hillbilly and race, and the racialized categories that followed from those, those were conceived of. It was impossible for people to imagine anything outside of that dualism.” But clearly, the people that he is looking at did imagine things outside of that dualism. They did experiment around and apply other logics.

So I think on the one hand, it does tell the story of why race played such a critical role in defining country music as a genre, but on the other hand, it also points to all of the opportunities or the little fissures in that racialized genre ideology that I think people can still see today. I think it kind of strikes a nice balance between recognizing the way that whiteness and country music came to be associated with one another and the possibilities for other outcomes, that still remain open.

In the chapter after that, you explain that at the time when Ray Charles released Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music, it was championed as a sign that the country audience was sophisticated and upwardly mobile, but the race piece of it wasn’t engaged nearly as much. You draw a contrast between the fact that people concluded there was an audience for the blended, hybrid thing Elvis was doing early on and the fact that they didn’t draw the same conclusion from Charles’s album. Could you talk about why this countrypolitan album by a black soul singer was interpreted so differently from those early rhythm & blues and rockabilly sides by a southern, white kid?

I wish I had a really good answer for the why of that. I think part of it certainly had to do with racial privilege, that it’s always been easier, historically, in the music industry for white people to borrow stuff from black folk and become popular with it than has been the reverse.

Maybe one of the things was that by the time Elvis became who he was and sort of represented this crossover/fusion of white and black music, he was not the only person doing it, right? There was an infrastructure essentially of people who were already interested in that particular form of crossover, so that to see him as part of an emerging genre was realistic, because there were others doing the same thing. That territory had already begun to be defined in some way.

Ray Charles was not the only person doing what he was doing. Solomon Burke had also started to do the same kind of thing. But there were far fewer people doing it. And after Ray Charles did it, then I think, to some degree, a lot of what happens as country soul in the later 1960s is informed by the popularity of that record. But I think given that country radio didn’t play it and it wasn’t really embraced by R&B radio either at the time, until it became really popular, there was not an infrastructure, a circuit of stations and labels and those kinds of things that would make him the figurehead of a particular [movement]. In Elvis’s case, he was making something that was already there, far more visible, whereas Ray Charles was not the figurehead for a movement.

So I guess to some degree what I’m saying is the industry was kind of right in thinking that it did not constitute the same thing, because there wasn’t as much underneath him as there was underneath Elvis. But I also think that part of the reason there wasn’t as much underneath him was because of the racial imbalance in the music industry.

I was going to bring up Solomon Burke. You talk in that chapter about him recording country songs during that era. Of course, much later in his career he came down to Nashville and made an album literally titled Nashville with Buddy Miller. On it, there’s material from Tom T. Hall, Buddy and Julie Miller, Gillian Welch, Dolly Parton.

That’s a great record. I love that record.

I remember when he performed at the Americana Music Festival and was the subject of long features in No Depression magazine. He was, on some level, getting recognition and respect from an Americana audience. What would you say is the difference between how he went about it and was received then and what had come of him recording country songs like “Just Out of Reach” and “Detroit City” decades earlier?

Maybe this is the elephant in the room, but the truth is that for all of the totally accurate emphasis on collaboration across racial and genre lines in the music scene in Nashville, I think it is also the case that racial attitudes just had shifted between those two periods … Solomon Burke tells a hilarious story in that Peter Guralnick book Sweet Soul Music about getting booked to what turned out to be a Klan rally, because nobody realized that he was black … Part of it also is a change in the way that artists are presented and marketed. An artist in 1958 could be just a song on the radio, and on that basis could be booked into a venue, whereas now, all of that supporting material, in terms of music criticism and media coverage and all that kind of stuff, you’re never gonna end up in the Solomon Burke situation where you show up and they didn’t realize your race before you walked in the door. I think that is one thing. The actual shift in racial attitudes is another thing.

That makes me think of the famous story of Charley Pride’s first country single being released without a photo.

Exactly. I also feel like things have changed a little bit in the sense that there is an emphasis on hybridity and combination now that there kind of wasn’t then. So if you just take what people said about Solomon Burke’s first single, as they were with Ray Charles, the labels and the A&R guys were really worried: “How are people even gonna respond to some black guy singing a country music song? The R&B people aren’t gonna like it because they’re not gonna get it. The white people aren’t gonna like it because,” A&R label guys assumed, “they’re racist. So who the heck are we gonna market it to?” I think now there’s much more of a premium placed on hybridity, crossing genre lines, putting things together in new ways, just because that’s kind of the cultural atmosphere now in a way that I think maybe it wasn’t then.

Click here for Part II of Loose Ends.