This year, a new event will debut at the IBMA World of Bluegrass in Raleigh, North Carolina. Presented by IBMA and The Banjo Gathering, Roots Revival: Black Stringband Symposium will explore Black contributions to bluegrass and traditional music over two days of the week-long event with six especially programmed sessions.
On Thursday, September 26, conference-goers, virtual participants, and symposium attendees will engage with sessions like “Navigating Narratives: Being a Black Woman in Folk Music” and “Alive in the Archives.” On Friday, September 27 programming will include “Making Instruments” and “Journey of a Song,” featuring musicians Hubby Jenkins, Amy Alvey, and Mike Compton, as well as two special showcases: “Black Music in Appalachia” and “Beyond Bluegrass.” (See a full schedule with panel descriptions below.) Virtual passes for the symposium are available here, in person passes can be purchased here.
“First of all, I’m extremely excited to be part of this event,” said artist, scholar, and educator Brandi Waller-Pace, who will be participating in the symposium programming. “I’m happy to see something happening at IBMA that provides a platform for black people from a multitude of backgrounds and experiences to talk about all of these key things within these musical forms that we have been excluded and erased from. I really hope that this is the beginning of more widespread recognition and acknowledgment for our contributions in this field and for our own cultural reclamation.”
Other artists, creators, and experts on the symposium’s lineup include Art Bouman, Dena Ross Jennings, Kelle Jolly, Jen Larson, Valerie Díaz Leroy, Waller-Pace, Tray Wellington, Nelson Williams, and many more. Organizers Lillian Werbin, of the Banjo Gathering, Elderly Instruments, and Bluegrass Pride, and Kristina Gaddy, author of Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History, set out to spotlight the many ways in which Black musicians, builders, and researchers navigate bluegrass and traditional music spaces as they built the event from the ground up.
“We are thrilled to be collaborating with IBMA on Roots Revival,” explains Gaddy via email. “We’ve put together these panels to highlight both the important history and contributions of Black Americans in bluegrass and traditional music, and to showcase how these traditions evolved over the 20th century and continue to be innovated by Black musicians in the 21st.”
“It is a humbling experience to bring these conversations forward,” added Werbin. “I am looking forward to hearing insight and delving into the experiences each panelist brings to the space.”
Sponsors from across the roots music landscape showed up in force to make the symposium happen, with programs supported by organizations and companies like the Berkeley Old Time Music Convention, Bluegrass Pride, the DC Bluegrass Union, Folk Alliance International, Pisgah Banjos, and of course the IBMA Foundation, Elderly Instruments, IBMA, and the Banjo Gathering.
Roots Revival, the first event of its kind programmed in tandem with IBMA, will work to tell a more complete story about the origins and influences that shaped the bluegrass genre as we know it today. Make plans to attend World of Bluegrass and Roots Revival today.
Roots Revival: Black Stringband Symposium
Raleigh Convention Center (500 South Salisbury St., Raleigh, NC) Room 304
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26 1:30PM – Welcome 2:00PM – “Navigating Narratives: Being a Black Woman in Folk Music”
“Navigating Narratives: Being a Black Woman in Folk Music” builds on the “Avoiding Tokenism in Trad Music” panel from 2023, and includes panel of Black women in the traditional music industry explores how they each build upon their experiences and the expectations placed upon them to create authentic representation in the industry.
3:30PM – “Alive in the Archives”
This panel will explore how Black bluegrass and folk musicians use source and archival recordings to bridge the gap in person-to-person transmission of music between Black musicians who were recorded in the 20th century and musicians today. Musicians and scholars will play some tunes and discuss their research methods and limitations.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 11:15AM – “Making Instruments”
Within the history of American traditional music, Black instrument builders have often been overlooked, from the creators of gourd banjos in early America to contemporary makers today. They will explore how building instruments honors the history of the music while making it more accessible to broader audiences.
12:45PM – “Journey of a Song”
This panel and showcase will explore how songs from the Black tradition became bluegrass standards. Musicians Amy Alvey, and Hubby Jenkins will play some songs and they’ll also be in conversation with cultural historians Valerie Díaz Leroy and Jen Larson, discussing how we can accurately and appropriately bring music’s history into our performances and recorded work.
2:15PM – “Black Music in Appalachia” Showcase
In this showcase, Black Appalachian musicians Dena Ross Jennings, Kelle Jolly, and Tray Wellington will be performing and discussing the influences the region has had on their music.
3:45PM – “Beyond Bluegrass” Showcase
In recent years, Arnold Shultz has been acknowledged as a core figure in Bluegrass history. This showcase features musicians Darcy Ford, Art Bouman, and Nelson Williams and how they build a diversity of styles and bring in other traditional music into their repertoire.
A small, enthusiastic audience of first arrivals chat in excited, hushed tones as they listen to Hubby Jenkins soundcheck into a pair of Ear Trumpet Labs microphones in the ballroom at Fort Worth, Texas’s Southside Preservation Hall. It’s an unseasonably cool Saturday afternoon in March, with crystal blue skies and wispy clouds backgrounding the historic Fairmount-Southside district. Over the next nine hours, ten musical acts will grace the stage. Many of them are already in the room, contributing to the light buzz and chatter; this already feels like a generative space.
In its third year, the Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival (known lovingly as FWAAMFest) has a very specific vision within the Americana/folk/old-time/bluegrass festival space: to highlight the depth and breadth of contemporary African American roots music and, by doing so, underscore the seminal, vital contributions of Black folks to every single roots genre in this country. Presented by Fort Worth-based non-profit Decolonizing the Music Room (who BGS has collaborated with on multiple occasions), the event carries forward the organization’s mission, explained artfully and succinctly by DTMR founder Brandi Waller-Pace as she kicks off the day introducing Hubby Jenkins: “To center Black, brown, Indigenous, and Asian voices in music and related fields.”
“There are so many eyes and ears on culture and the arts in Fort Worth,” she continues. “And I want Fort Worth to be at the forefront of the conversation…”
Hubby Jenkins began the day’s many conversations with a couple of banjo tunes, because, he admitted, “I’m a little nervous and [banjo tunes] make me feel cozy.” It was indeed a lovely, cozy easing into the day’s marathon lineup of music and presentations. During his set Jenkins picked guitar, banjo, bottleneck slide guitar, and played bones. And, he plays the festival’s first of many gospel numbers, “Jonah in the Wilderness,” inviting the audience to sing along, grounding his performance in the history of the Southside Preservation Hall space and these rootsy genres’ origins.
Kicking off the day with a gospel-filled set in a historic former church made so much sense, calling each of us as listeners to be active participants in the day’s festivities and also in its mission: to recenter these community-based musics on the folks who gave rise to each of them, reminding us we each have a role to play in telling a fuller, more just history of these musics.
Next up on the lineup is Justin Golden, who jokes that he and Hubby run into each other on gigs constantly and have the same repertoire, but from the outset his similar-seeming act couldn’t have felt more different. Working within the same vernacular and with such broad overlap, Golden and Jenkins are each still so distinct and unique – and illustrate the wide variety intrinsic to Black and African American roots musics, even within one form. Golden’s first number is an original, “I Hate When She Calls.”
He peppers older, classic Texas blues numbers – though he admits this is his first time in Texas – throughout heartfelt, poetic, and direct originals. His music’s foundation is fingerstyle blues, but with modern crispness, timeless touches, and a crystalline, focused singing voice.
Festival-runner and founder Brandi Waller-Pace stepped back on stage, this time as performer, for the next set of the day with songwriter, composer, and banjoist Kaïa Kater as the debut performance of their duo, Sable Sisters. They swap out banjos and guitars and a bass, singing folks songs and originals with nearly familial harmonies. A double clawhammer banjo cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Happier Than the Morning Sun” is their set’s highlight, with the legendary Justin Robinson’s guest appearance to play a set of old-time tunes ranking an honorable mention. Other festivals would be wise to consider booking Sable Sisters; if duo supergroups were a thing, this is one. Superduo? You get my meaning.
Between each set of music, as the stage was changed over, representatives from partner organizations, sponsors, and community leaders spoke to the audience, which slowly grew from a couple dozen into a small-but-mighty one to two hundred attendees. Tables in the lobby featured literature, information, and calls to action for DTMR, FWAAMFest, and these partner orgs – and from the back of the ballroom wafted the tantalizing aromas of Lil Boy Blue BBQ. (If only all music festival barbeque offerings were this legit.)
After Sable Sisters’ set concluded, the next event was a live podcast taping featuring a collaboration between Rissi Palmer, of Color Me Country Radio on Apple Music, and Garrett McQueen of Trilloquy Podcast. The conversation was titled “Redefining ‘Classic’” and featured Palmer, McQueen, and their FWAAMFest lineup-mates Jake Blount, Demeanor, Hubby Jenkins, and Dr. Angela Wellman. Palmer and McQueen took turns prompting their panelists to consider ideas around canon, genre lines, what terms like “classical” really mean, and so much more.
A theme that emerged throughout the taping was how often there aren’t hard, fast, concrete answers to these big, zoomed out questions about justice, representation, art, creation, space/placemaking, and community building. The panelists and hosts encouraged and challenged each other and themselves, reminding all of us that engaging in these kinds of conversations is part of the process and having the space – like FWAAMFest – to engage, build, and hold community like this is so important.
It’s not lost on myself or perhaps anyone else in attendance just how much gratitude each of these participants have at being enabled to be in this FWAAMFest space. Each of the performers and speakers, in their own way and in their own words, effortlessly carried the event’s mission with them as they brought themselves to the space, wholly and vulnerably and powerfully.
The podcast recording gear struck, rapper and banjo player Demeanor took the stage for his first ever full-band set – and it was revolutionary. During the Trilloquy x Color Me Country conversation Demeanor (given name Justin Harrington) stated so eloquently that “Rap is folk music, because hip-hop is an indigenous Black American art form… From the porch to the stoop.”
He and his band immediately and indelibly illustrated his point with an energized, powerful set based on sometimes spitfire, other times free flowing rap lyrics with poppy, sung verses and choruses. It’s lyrical, content rich, witty and sharp. Demeanor’s writing and production style are full of forward motion, punctuated by arena rock guitar and Wooten-like bass lines. While often centered on banjo, the five-string is not the only way roots music oozes from these songs. Their lyrics and hooks are sharp and the vocals are strong – his singing isn’t an afterthought or simply in service of a hook. Several songs were from an upcoming unreleased album, including one stand-out track said to feature Rhiannon Giddens (his aunt) and Charly Lowry.
The delight of Demeanor gave way to the delight of dance and musical dialogue, as longtime friends and jaw-dropping collaborators Jake Blount and Nic Gareiss took the stage. Blount began the set solo, accompanied starkly by low, droning synth sounds gently, languidly warbling through half tones as he sang, dirge-like, above the sound bed, commanding silence. Blount brings us back to gospel, again looking backward to look forward, and in just a couple numbers the droning synth gives way to droning fiddle.
Gareiss and his singular approach to percussive dance and traditional step-dancing injects energy and joy into the crowd, who’ve been listening and engaging for almost six hours now. Audience members are on their feet, often with phones out, disbelieving the stunning musicality of Blount and Gareiss together, sixteenth notes perfectly, bafflingly in sync.
Nic dancing to Jake’s fiddle recalls the interconnectedness of Irish step dance and Black percussive dance traditions. Where cultures, practices, and folkways overlapped at the lowest of classes in America’s urban centers, dance flourished and Irish step dance cross pollinated with Black movement traditions and Appalachian and southern steps. Over the past century and more, movement and roots music have often been compartmentalized, privatized, and sequestered from each other. Bringing them back together in this intentional way is not just a radical act given the identities represented – in this duo and in this day of programming – but simply by existing together, with intention, Blount’s and Gareiss’s talents underline what these musics were initially created to do, say, and be.
The vibe in the Southside Preservation Hall ballroom at this point was reaching “full blown party,” and when the first of the festival’s headliners, Tray Wellington Band, took the stage the energetic momentum was raised further still. For all intents and purposes a straight-ahead bluegrass band, Tray Wellington’s four-piece group demonstrated this IBMA Award winner has found his voice. His critically-acclaimed album Black Banjo certainly feels mature and fully-realized, but this was the first this writer had caught Wellington’s band since long before that record was released. The growth they’ve sustained, musically and as a unit, in the interim is remarkable. They execute chamber music level virtuosity, but with bluegrass bones. With Katelynn Bohn (bass), Josiah Nelson (mandolin), and Nick Fallon Weitzenfeld (guitar), Tray references Dawg, Béla, New Grass Revival and many more, but with an underpinning that feels as bluegrass as Appalachia – say Johnson City, TN, where he’s from.
They play a Kid Cudi cover, which is promised to be on an upcoming release, and the audience descends into mayhem as the melodic hook is slowly recognized in ripples throughout the crowd. Whether covering hip-hop or playing an old-time tune, these pickers demonstrate amazing soloing: modern, in-the-moment musical ideas without ego or self-absorption. And with Tray’s right hand anchoring all of the above, it reminds of Earl Scruggs in his Revue days – solidly bluegrass, but intimating musical ideas that come from so far afield, way beyond what we consider bluegrass territory.
Chambergrass, or whatever you want to call it, is seen as more “high-brow” or “intellectual” given its adjacency to conservatories and storied music schools, but this style of virtuosic playing is so well placed within the musical vocabularies of people from the region that birthed string band traditions. And in this context it can be executed with equal ease, aplomb, and athleticism, and with a much more grounded approach.
A quiet, slightly exhausted euphoria tingles through the stalwarts of the crowd who remain for Jackie Venson’s no-holds-barred FWAAMFest finale. Waller-Pace returns to the stage one final time to introduce the night’s last headliner, with her daughter Sparrow (who waits patiently to get her Jackie t-shirt signed at the end of the night.)
Venson is accompanied only by drummer Rodney Hydner – and her signature DJ sampler that allows her to play along with tracks, sound beds, background vocals, and play solos over loops. Even with just a two-person act, her trademark joy immediately washes over the entire room and re-energizes the crowd. Venson’s songs are soaring, anthemic, and huge, matched only by her broad grin as she smirks and laughs at herself and her own playing like it’s an inside joke.
Perhaps the best guitarist of her generation, certainly the best rock-blues guitarist of the past thirty years, the internet is in a four to six week feedback loop of discovering and rediscovering Venson’s playing at the moment, with her Tweets and TikToks seemingly going wildly viral about once a month. She’s been retweeted and signal boosted by a who’s who of Twitter personalities and musicians, and it’s all because hers is a singular voice, perspective, and skill.
Watching her improvise over each song recalls Nic Gareiss’s dancing from earlier in the evening. When you’re watching something so visceral and in the moment, you can’t help but inhabit that moment with them. And many of us do inhabit these moments with Venson by moving, standing, dancing, reveling in the ever-present joy of her music.
Venson’s brand of modern blues is unconcerned with divorcing itself from the blues of the past (and of the present) that some feel is stoic, stuffy or dusty, and out of step with modernity. Her brand of blues, no matter how distant it has traveled from its roots, still honors the sounds of old-time and ragtime and down home blues, because it knows where it came from and to what it’s connected. Venson’s connections to Texas and Austin further reinforce this point – and help place Venson and her style of playing squarely within “guitar culture,” too.
At one point during her performance Venson marveled at how the FWAAMFest gathering was, in her words, “Pretty legendary!! You’re going to be talking about this in 10 years, telling people you saw everybody on this lineup here today.”
It was a feeling that began creeping up much earlier in the festival, that what we were present for wasn’t just a community music festival, it was so much more.
Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and Disabled folks – artists and creators and movers and musicians – continue to offer and model ways to hold the past within ourselves while looking ahead to the future, a duality that modernity and westernism struggles to acknowledge or inhabit. What’s striking about this conglomeration of creators and musicmakers on this lineup at this festival is that they make it look easy. It seems effortless to understand, uplift, and uphold a mission like FWAAMFest’s. Partly because the participants all are stakeholders in that mission to begin with! With their music, their insights, and their storytelling these musicians and thinkers demonstrate the past is the future and the future is the past. Roots music – the kinds that center the experiences, stories, and seminal contributions of Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks – can spotlight and move through this dichotomy better than so many art forms, while remaining grounded firmly in the present.
FWAAMFest’s success wasn’t simply because it’s a festival with a novel, substantive mission. It was a soaring, generative, forward-looking success because it focuses on what “the mainstream” perceives as a niche within a niche within a niche – African American roots music – and shows all of the possibilities, all of the many universes of artistic expression endemic to such a niche. The specificity here is not prohibitive or exclusive, it’s unfailingly, infinitely expansive. In sound, genre, content, tradition, and beyond.
As Jackie Venson said, we all will still be talking about 2023’s Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival for many years into the future.
Editor’s note: Follow Decolonizing the Music Room on social media to catch footage from FWAAMFest 2023 as it’s released and make sure to DONATE to support their mission and future FWAAMFests!
[Editor’s note: To mark the conclusion of Black History Month, we’ve invited BGS collaborator and contributor Brandi Waller-Pace to share her thoughts on how to take the ethos, mission, and action of BHM with us throughout the year.]
“Dr. Carter G. Woodson, Black American writer and historian, is known as the Father of Black History Month. One of the first scholars of African American history, he founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in 1915 and established Negro History Week in February of 1926. He chose the week of February that contained the birthdays of both Frederick Douglas (February 14th) and Abraham Lincoln (February 12th) as both birthdays were already being celebrated in Black communities. In 1970 The Black United Students organization at Kent State University began a celebration of Black History Month, and in 1976 President Ford declared Black History Month nationwide.”
– Brandi Waller-Pace, Decolonizing the Music Room, 2001
Dr. Woodson’s selection of Douglass and Lincoln’s birthday indicates how significant they were, especially since the 1920s being just one generation removed from the Civil War – with many formerly enslaved Black people still alive. Even today, we are not nearly as removed from that time period as we think we are. In 1976, the year of the United States’ bicentennial and fifty years after the first Negro History Week, President Ford expanded the commemoration to last an entire month and Black History Month was born.
Some folks ask, “If Black history is important all the time, why is it just a month?” But the literal history of the month itself, the fact that it exists at all, is part of Black history. It was a push to validate and celebrate the experiences, culture, study, and background of Black people in the land that came to be known as the United States, people who were viewed legally and societally as less than fully human, alongside the denial of their contributions to this country’s foundation and culture. Negro History Week was created to shine light on everything Blackness has created in the U.S. – and that week of recognition itself was created by a Black scholar. We know that Blackness and Black history is broader than just the U.S., and I find it important to look at that expanse in the context of Black History Month.
When we talk about heritage months in general, we have to think about how we use terms: “Black,” “African American,” and so on. These ideas and terms didn’t all begin at the same point, they didn’t come out of the same movements, and they aren’t all used interchangeably or even in the same fashion. They also are not universally claimed by people we would place under their umbrella.
This is exactly what this month is for, to have these conversations and to open up these spaces, not to relegate Blackness to one month. Celebrating Blackness isn’t geared toward denying other groups their history – framing the month in terms of what it means for the recognition of other groups perpetuates false binaries, as if the only options available are honoring BHM at others’ expense, or ignoring BHM altogether. Celebrating Blackness is just that– acknowledging the history and the continuing traditions, culture, and advances of Black folks, who continue to make history. That sort of celebration is huge, especially considering the erasure and exclusion of so much of Black history in curriculum, media, and literature.
It’s interesting to consider our ideas around Black History Month as they relate to our changing perceptions of time. As the world became more industrialized, mass communication advanced, and now we’re in the age of the internet where things seem to move lightning-fast and we are inundated with content, with emphasis on trends. This contributes to the impression of even meatier information simply being trends and waves in popular culture or only being flashes in the pan. This helps reinforce the idea that our celebrations of heritage months are just a moment, something for short attention spans, to be consumed in a second before scrolling on. You’ll see memes or posts like, “Now everybody is doing such-and-such a thing!” When that “thing” – almost always mocked as “woke” or “politically correct” – has possibly been around for hundreds of years.
It’s a function and arm of the myth of white supremacy to present the “other” as invalid, unless there is something about it upon which one can capitalize. Time and time again, Black folks’ creations – our foodways and folkways, our cultural creations, our music, our ways of dress – have been erased, ignored, or derided unless there’s a point at which some kind of value can be extracted from it. It is then taken up by the mainstream, gates are built around it, and Black folks are purposefully distanced from it while others profit from it.
It’s like so many of the linguistic trends that have pervaded TikTok and internet culture, which are referred to as “Gen Z language,” but they are really rooted in African American Vernacular English and Black language that have been adopted by the internet writ large, but without understanding of or general reference to their origins. Because of how quickly the world moves and how information is passed along in the age of the internet, these pieces of culture are picked up, stripped down, and decontextualized so quickly.
Or consider the banjo – which is still represented in the mainstream specifically as a “white Appalachian instrument.” In the past, this representation was even upheld broadly among many trad communities in a factual way. In recent decades – thanks to the labor and diligence of some great humans – the banjo’s true origins have become more and more widely known, along with the story of how it was taken up into mainstream popular culture and how many Black people were distanced from their connection to the instrument while many white people continued to profit materially and/or reputationally from playing it.
In this time, Black cultural appropriation is so often perpetuated that it’s easy to have no awareness of these phenomena as they happen. Part of the work here is understanding that intention – or lack of intention – doesn’t mitigate impact. It’s important for all of us to understand how we perpetuate what we perpetuate and how we co-opt what we co-opt, whether mistruths about the banjo, slang and language trends, or Black History Month.
When we talk about privilege and perpetuation of this sort of appropriation, we tend to individualize, because in our society and culture we are conditioned to think individually. This manifests itself in a lot of ways; for instance, many speak against funding community care for people who need it, against investing in and giving people what they need – income, shelter, nutrition, access, resources. This comes from being taught that each gets their own – if you do, it’s because you are sufficient as a person, if you don’t it’s because you are deficient. While our society individualizes, it’s important to remember these are systemic, holistic, endemic issues that must be solved collectively. We must collaborate to repair the legacy of antiblackness, erasure, and exclusion that Black folks have experienced on this land for centuries.
This doesn’t mean there isn’t individual responsibility. Each of us can and should make individual efforts – as well as collective – to reckon with our privilege and our roles in perpetuating this status quo. And I would caution against positioning the individual against the collective; it’s collective and individual work. People interact with one another individually and interact with collective systems and groups. It’s such a balance; not taking away the need for individual focus and responsibility, but understanding that that same individual is part of the collective and should also drive the collective. Something like voting– when you’re in that booth, you’re by yourself, but your vote is collective action.
So, what is needed for others to make progress toward Black people and their creations being treated equitably? Start by building human relationships, first of all. Representation within ranks shouldn’t just be for “diversity’s sake.” Diversify spaces not just for the sake of diversifying spaces, but so these spaces aren’t just white-dominated and white-led, talking about these issues and what to do about these issues. Having actual human connection, being in relationship with one another, is vital. Have a willingness to invest in real, human relationships with the Black folks that you’re inviting in. There’s a huge difference in how one cares for and handles people they’re in real relationships with – not as just a representative identity, but as a human, a community member. It’s easier to listen to folks and really hear them, if you care about them.
Make sure not to employ a “color avoidant” (AKA “colorblind”) approach. If you care about me as a Black person and my full humanity, don’t erase my Blackness, because it is an important part of my identity, of which I am proud. But it also is something society has painted as negative and caring for me means acknowledging that that affects me. The status quo, white supremacist norms, are intertwined with our particularly fierce brand of capitalism, and it all seeks to completely individualize us and strip away our sense of collective care. So, one must be intentional in building relationships. But don’t stop connecting at those of us who are the easiest to access, who have the most resources and the privilege to already be in exclusive spaces you regularly encounter. That has us tokenized and other Black folks still erased, outside of the gates.
Then, based on these real, personal relationships with Black folks, you can step in when necessary to check your peers who are perpetuating the erasure, marginalization, tokenization we regularly experience among organizations and groups. In bluegrass, old-time, and roots music the number of Black folks present is never equal to the true cultural contributions of Black folks, which can result in heavy tokenization. We can feel actions are being taken just to check a box, versus work being done to make structural change over time.
There is a great deal of societal resistance against taking deliberate, intentional actions to address antiblackness. It is important to view this work through the lens of reparation, in a real material and financial sense and to direct resources to Black communities, giving Black folks the discretion to use those resources as they see fit, rather than insisting on providing your oversight. At the same time, those who hold this industry and community power should understand that people aren’t always going to want to be hired in or brought on to diversify or as a solution to a diversity problem.
You can do both at the same time. I had a conversation recently with someone about the festival I founded, the Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival, about pushes to diversify spaces, versus creating new ones. Both of these strategies are completely valid – if you run a festival, by all means bring on more Black artists next year. But at the same time, donate money to spaces specifically aimed at building a more involved Black community within roots music – ones in which we don’t often get to participate.
It’s also important to address the concept of inclusion. The word “inclusion” can be frustrating, because the baseline for inclusion is, “We made something in which you weren’t included upfront, and now we have to figure out how to put you in it.” The focus can’t always be on bringing Black presence into those spaces; there is also a responsibility to support what Black people are already building, letting us do our thing. If your support is given upon the condition that we stick within your established frameworks, is it really support?
I often remind people that it takes time and energy to process all this information, put it into a historical context, and really understand disparities caused by antiblackness – especially because, for instance, not all white folks are rich, not all privilege is financial privilege, and so on. On the grand scale, huge financial disparities exist between white and Black people in the U.S. Confronting this may cause discomfort; sitting in discomfort is hard. But I see it the way I see physical exercise – when you’re working out, if you aren’t pushing your muscles to failure you can’t grow. This work is building muscle. This is why understanding that you, even as individuals, are part of the collective is so important. Because, at this point, the individual gets fed up. The individual tires when it gets tough. It can feel so insurmountable, but this is when people can remind themselves that they are part of a collective and have others to help with the load.
When discomfort creeps up, one may go to, for lack of a better idiom, black-and-white thinking. So many people who aren’t Black want to ignore that antiblackness is so deeply rooted in the history of our country, in our economy, in this industry, in our perceptions of the world around us – whose full humanity is or isn’t acknowledged; what defines beauty; what defines intelligence; and much more. When we’re talking about these issues more broadly, going back to the original question of “Why Black History Month?” Why is this distinction, this specificity important? If you’re striving for justice, working to dismantle white supremacy, working toward creating pathways to success for Black folks in this industry and within capitalism, but aren’t talking at all about Blackness specifically, you’re missing something major. There’s something distinct about Black people’s position in this society – just as there’s something distinct about the position of Indigenous, Asian, Latine and other non-white folks in this society.
These white supremacist narratives that erase Blackness’ contributions on this land, that heritage months like Black History Month work to interrupt, became what they are today over centuries of very dedicated legal, cultural, and personal efforts to entrench them. That process took hundreds of years, so why do we expect one workshop, one presentation, one article to be all it takes?
While the entire industry surrounding roots music ratchets up its awareness around social justice issues and attempts to create a more representative and inclusive community, it’s apparent that, now more than ever, we need industry leaders of diverse cultural, ethnic, gender, and identity backgrounds. As we cap off this year’s Black History Month, BGS wants to spotlight not only the Black artists, songwriters, musicians, and instrumentalists who make these genres and this industry great, but also the writers, thinkers, leaders, and stakeholders working behind the scenes to craft a better, more just reality for all folks in roots music. Here are just a few of the Black industry insiders and community builders who inspire us and are leading the way.
Charleston, South Carolina’s first poet laureate, Marcus Amaker, is also a musician, author, performer, and designer. Oh, and he’s also composed an opera! A true multi-hyphenate, Amaker’s visual art has anchored No Depression’s print journal since 2017, just after its rebirth. He has released an impressive thirty-five albums of electronic music and his latest book, Black Music Is, is a “poetic love letter to Black music and history” through the eyes and ears of Bebop the cat, who spins vinyl records and listens to all sorts of genres – from bluegrass to hip-hop.
Songwriter, recording artist, and community builder Kyshona is well known in Nashville and in the folk and Americana scenes for her grounded, embodied songs that explore themes of agency, justice, mental health, healing, connection, and growth. Her career began in music therapy and she brings sensibilities from that expertise with her into every avenue of her professional life. She founded and runs Your Song, a non-profit, collaborative songwriting program that connects performing arts centers, musicians, and artists with vulnerable communities to promote healing and community connectedness. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, she also began holding events and meet-ups for music professionals seeking to move through this extractive, punishing industry more healthfully and mindfully and joyfully.
Writer, thinker, fashion icon, and Tennessean columnist Marcus Dowling has been publishing writings on dance music, food, hip-hop, Nashville, and country music for more than fifteen years. In 2021, he was awarded the Rolling Stone Chet Flippo Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism. Just about everyone who has ever been anyone in the modern country scene has spoken with and been written about by Dowling, who brings vibrant, artful descriptions as well as thoughtful perspective and context to his interviews and features. But, it’s not just the Shania Twains, Kelsea Ballerinis, and Tyler Hubbards of the world that he covers, he connects the dots between past generations and the future, highlighting new artists, forgotten or underappreciated legends, and creators too often relegated to the shadows, as well.
Holly G and Tanner D are the co-founders and co-orchestrators of Black Opry, a touring collective, showcase, revue, and community that re-centers Black musicians, songwriters, and instrumentalists in country music. Black Opry rose to notoriety rapidly in the wake of the social unrests surrounding race, police brutality, and state-facilitated murder of Black folks in 2020, but the groundwork for this trailblazing group had been laid long before that pivotal year. Both Holly and Tanner began their work as fans of the music, giving them a particular perspective on how to create spaces in country music that truly feel inviting, receptive, and open to all, while still focusing their mission on the historic and current factors that continue to channel Black fans out of country and toward other genres.
Benjamin Hunter is a speaker, musician, educator, and organizer perhaps best known in roots music circles from his duo with Joe Seamons, but his work extends far beyond his expertise in the primordial musical ooze that became blues, bluegrass, old-time, and country. He’s founded and co-founded multiple organizations with artistic purviews: Community Arts Create (with a mission to break down social barriers through cross-generational and multi-cultural arts programming, especially folk art), Hillman City Collaboratory (a social change incubator), Black & Tan Hall (a venue, restaurant, and gathering space), and many more. Based in the Pacific northwest, Hunter was Seattle’s Music Commissioner from 2014 to 2020. And his resume continues, these being merely the tip of the iceberg of his experience.
Brandi Waller-Pace is an educator, academic, and musician who founded Decolonizing the Music Room, a non-profit with a mission of re-centering Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian voices in music education, complicating and subverting endemic colonialism and classism in Western European classical music, its history, and its instruction. She’s also a board member for Folk Alliance International and with DTMR founded the Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival, which will be held this year on March 18. BGS first met and collaborated with Waller-Pace in 2020, when she and DTMR curated our virtual Shout & Shine Online showcase as part of IBMA’s annual business conference. Her approach to the work of anti-racism and decolonization is grounded and realistic, while offering models for how to move into the future with justice and representation as keystones in our musical spaces.
Lillian Werbin
Elderly Instruments in Lansing, MI has been a beacon of roots music for now more than fifty years. It’s a true community center, not just a purveyor of fine instruments, and Lillian Werbin recently took the reigns of this folk-, old-time-, and bluegrass-hallowed ground from her father, Stan Werbin. Lillian is not only CEO at Elderly, but also chairs the board of Bluegrass Pride, a non-profit with a mission of uplifting LGBTQ+ folks in bluegrass, and also serves on the board of the IBMA Foundation and advises its Arnold Schultz Fund, which strives to increase participation of people of color in bluegrass music. In Lillian’s free time, you’ll often find this musical workaholic running music camps, facilitating online events, and saying yes to just about every mission-minded project that comes across their desk.
Pat Mitchell Worley is the president and CEO of Stax Soulsville Foundation in Memphis, which oversees the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, Stax Music Academy, and The Soulsville Charter School, all with a mission to perpetuate the soul of Stax Records. Worley was just awarded the Spirit of Folk Award by Folk Alliance International earlier this month. She’s also a veteran radio host in Memphis, where she’s hosted the Beale Street Caravan, a weekly show that has run for more than twenty years and is the most widely distributed blues radio program in the world. She began her career as writer in her late teens, then went on to work at the Blues Foundation before starting on the radio in the early 2000s. While as a child she may have dreamed of becoming an astronaut someday, her work in music has always reached for the stars.
At BGS, we firmly believe that Black history is American roots music history. Full stop.
Last year, following the extrajudicial murder of George Floyd and the civil unrest, protests, and rebellions against racial injustice and systemic inequality in this country, we realized that that belief wasn’t present enough in our daily content and editorial. We knew that it needed to be overt, expressed within every aspect of what we do.
Which is why this month, we’ve invited you to celebrate Black History Month as we always do, by denoting that celebrating Black contributions in bluegrass, country, and old-time — and roots music as a whole — requires centering Black creators, artists, musicians, and perspectives in our community daily, not just in February. (Though, for the entire month we’ve been sharing music, stories, and songs featuring Black artists every day, too!)
In the past year we’ve recommitted ourselves to fully incorporating Black Voices into everything we do and we hope that our readers and listeners, our followers and fans, and our family of artists constantly celebrate, acknowledge, and pay credit to Blackness and Black folks, who we have to thank for everything we love about American roots music. To bid adieu to Black History Month 2021, we’re spotlighting Black artists who have graced our pages in the last year in a two-part roundup.
Fresh off of an appearance at President Biden’s inauguration, Grammy nominees Black Pumas are our current Artist of the Month honorees, but they aren’t the only ones to hold down our most prestigious monthly series and editorial spotlight. Drawing on folk songwriting as much as soul groove, both men agree that the term “American Roots” fits their sound well. The Americana Music Association seconds that notion, as the duo picked up that organization’s Emerging Act of the Year award in late 2020.
Modern blues legend Shemekia Copeland was our Artist of the Month in November, when we celebrated her latest release, Uncivil War from Alligator Records. The song sequence offers quite a few topical numbers ranging from gun rights (“Apple Pie and a .45”) to LGBT affirmation (“She Don’t Wear Pink”). But a standout is certainly the title track, Copeland’s most bluegrassy foray yet, which features Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas
Song-interpreter extraordinaire Bettye LaVette held down the AOTM post in August, reminding us of the value of persistence, perseverance, and perspective – especially by Black women. Her interpretation of the ubiquitous “Blackbird” recalls the fact that Paul McCartney wrote the song about a Black woman (as British slang refers to a girl as a “bird”). In LaVette’s rendition, though, she is the one who’s been waiting… and waiting… and waiting for this moment to arrive. And, in a specific allusion to this moment in history, to be free.
On the Cover
Both country & western crooner Charley Crockett and old-time banjoist, fiddler, and ethnomusicologist Jake Blount graced our digital covers in the past year, demonstrating the width, depth, and breadth of Black contributions to American roots music across the country and drawing from various regions and traditions.
In our interview and on his most recent release, Crockett doesn’t just reckon with the current historical moment. With Welcome to Hard Times, which is comprised of 13 tracks of searing anguish set to slick, ’60s-style, country-western production, he’s also examining his own place in this moment, and how his music has a different impact with different audiences. Even as he — a man living somewhere between Black and white, privileged and not — feels that his message is obvious.
Queer old-time musician and scholar Jake Blount is intimately familiar with the history of Black artists in the twentieth century who spoke out against white supremacy and often paid for it with their lives. He sees his music — and his most recent album, Spider Tales — within that subversive, radical lineage, and rightly so. A critically acclaimed project that landed on seemingly dozens of year-end lists in 2020, Blount’s carefully curated tunes convey that racial inequality in this country is a long, self-feeding cycle and this current iteration of the civil rights movement was neither surprising nor unpredictable. In a year defined by music created in response to current events or simply passively shaped by them, Blount’s Spider Tales stands out, an example of action rather than reaction.
Last week, we celebrated the grand opening of the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville with a feature that explores the ways Music City has always been a major player in the African American music world — from the days of the Fisk Jubilee Singers to radio station WLAC breaking R&B, soul, and blues hits, and the Jefferson Street nightclub scene providing both valuable training for emerging artists and a vital showcase for established ones. The 56,000-square-foot museum, something of a musical equivalent to the the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. (definitely with the same level of visual splendor and attractiveness) is a testament to the Black, African American, and Afro contributions that have touched, impacted, and influenced every sphere of American pop culture and art.The striking marquee of the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville, TN
The BGS Podcast Network
Over the course of the past year, the BGS Podcast Network has been proud to feature many Black artists over our shows about bluegrass, Americana, touring, wellness, and of course, music. On Harmonics season one, three Black women joined host Beth Behrs to talk about living through so much stress and tumult and how self-care, wellness, and music are all woven so tightly together.
Country singer and 2020 breakout star Mickey Guyton (who, for the record, has been a recording artist for more than a decade despite her recent meteoric rise) appeared on Episode 3, talking about writing “Black Like Me” — a song about her pain and struggles growing up as a Black woman in America — amidst the protests against police brutality across the nation. They also discuss country artists speaking out against racism and injustice, the power and importance of “three chords and the truth” in the midst of Music Row fluff, lifting other women up as a form of therapy, and, of course, Dolly Parton.
Two of Behrs’ closest friends, sisters Tichina & Zenay Arnold also appeared on the show. Tichina, Behr’s co-star on CBS’s The Neighborhood, and her sister are something like spiritual coaches for Beth. The three discuss the spirituality of music and the musicality of comedy, the timeliness of The Neighborhood as well as the pure spirit on the set, the absolutely necessity of open conversation in active anti-racism, balancing professional and familial relationships, and much more.
Finally, Birds of Chicago frontwoman and multi-instrumentalist Allison Russell decided to dig deep into her childhood traumas, the healing power of music and artistic community, the history of the banjo, and the intersectionality of the honest conversations in our culture on her episode of Harmonics. In addition to her career with Birds of Chicago, Russell is one quarter of the supergroup Our Native Daughters, with Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, and Leyla McCalla, and is preparing to release her first solo album.
On The Show On The Road, host Z. Lupetin curated a special episode last summer featuring clips and snippets from past editions of the show featuring Sunny War, Bobby Rush, Dom Flemons, and more. As he put it, “I’ve been lucky to talk with truly amazing Black artists, songwriters, and performers in the two years I’ve been creating The Show on the Road. I ask you to go back into our archives and listen to these voices.”
Later in the season, SOTR episodes featured Leyla McCalla — a talented, multilingual cellist, banjoist, and singer-songwriter and member of Our Native Daughters — and a special podcast swap with Under The Radar featuring truly fantastic Oakland-based artist, Fantastic Negrito. And just a couple of weeks ago, the show dropped an episode honoring Black History Month, featuring an interview with Jimmy Carter and Ricky McKinnie of the legendary Blind Boys of Alabama.
Plus, on the String, Craig Havighurst interviewed new lead singer for the Time Jumpers, Wendy Moten, and southern Gothic poet, songwriter, and Americana-blues wizard Adia Victoria.
And, not to be left out, the BGS Radio Hour always includes music, premieres, and features of Black artists every week, as we round-up the best stories from our pages to include on the airwaves. Like this week, Allison Russell’s Sade cover and Valerie June’s cosmic new single, “Call Me a Fool” — which features Stax soul legend Carla Thomas — both appear on the show. And, on Episode 194, Chris Pierce, our Whiskey Sour Happy Hour friend Ben Harper, and Charley Crockett all make the playlist as well.
Shout & Shine
Our annual IBMA showcase celebrating representation and diversity in 2020 focused entirely on Black performers, building upon our collaboration with PineCone, who co-presents the event each year. Brandi Pace of Decolonizing the Music Room curated the lineup, showing our audience how seamlessly our missions intersect and build off of each other. The showcase lineup included Rissi Palmer, Tray Wellington, Stephanie Anne Johnson, Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton, and more, drawing a direct line between Black musicians and bluegrass while highlighting the important role Black folks played in the genre’s creation as well as influencing all of its contemporary forms.
To build on this intention, we retooled our monthly column version of Shout & Shine as well, turning the interview series into a regular livestream event. Sponsored by Preston Thompson Guitars, each episode includes thirty-plus minutes of exclusive performances by Lizzie No, Sunny War, Julian Taylor, and Jackie Venson with more to come. Each set of music — and each interview as well — reinforces just how vibrant and varied roots music created by Black musicians and songwriters can be and just how valuable the perspectives and lived experiences of all kinds of people are to our communities.
Photo credit (L to R): Shemekia Copeland by Mike White; Rissi Palmer courtesy of the artist; Bettye LaVette by Joseph A. Rosen; and Mickey Guyton by Chelsea Thompson.
For five years now BGS and our partners at PineCone Piedmont Council of Traditional Music have used our voices, resources, and positivity to lift up and celebrate diversity in bluegrass and roots music through the Shout & Shine showcase. These live performances have given a platform to those artists who have been overlooked, while illuminating the paths of those starting out on uphill journeys in our music community. This year, the event’s 5th annual iteration will follow a format more suitable for a worldwide pandemic — with an all-online showcase as part of IBMA’s Virtual World of Bluegrass.
Shout & Shine Online will feature these artists from across the genre map of roots music: Rissi Palmer, host of Apple Music Country’s brand new radio show, ‘Color Me Country‘; IBMA Momentum Award winning banjoist Tray Wellington; punk-influenced fingerstyle guitarist and songwriter Sunny War; down-home blues and old-time musician Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton; The Voice alumnus and guitar picker Stephanie Anne Johnson; and returning favorites Kaia Kater and Amythyst Kiah, who make their first appearance at Shout & Shine since playing on its debut lineup in 2016.
Shout & Shine Online’s roster is curated by performing musician and Decolonizing the Music Room founder and Executive Director, Brandi Waller-Pace. Shout & Shine Online will take place at 2 pm ET Saturday, October 3. Viewers will be able to tune in right here on BGS, or on our Facebook page orYouTube channel, via PineCone’s channels, and via IBMA’s conference platform, Swapcard (registration available here).
(L to R) Marcy Marxer, Alice Gerrard, Cathy Fink, and Tatiana Hargreaves perform at 2017 Shout & Shine showcase.
While Shout & Shine has continually championed underrepresented and marginalized folks in roots music, this year’s event comes at a time of reckoning in this country’s ongoing battle against institutionalized racism. “This year, Shout & Shine’s mission is as clear and galvanized as ever,” says BGS editor and Shout & Shine producer, Justin Hiltner. “Our lineup is a direct response to this current iteration of the Black Lives Matter movement and the righteous rebellion against police brutality and systemic racial injustice in this country. The greater bluegrass community needs to be having these conversations and needs to be centering the voices and perspectives of Black folks — especially Black queer folks. We saw that as our role this year.”
BGS joined hands with Decolonizing the Music Room’s founder Brandi Waller-Pace to curate 2020’s lineup. “The mission of Decolonizing the Music Room is to center Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian voices, knowledge, and experiences within the field of music education,” says Waller-Pace. “In addition to that, it is part of DTMR’s core values that we are an openly LGBTQ+ affirming non-profit organization. I am honored to have served as curator for this year’s Shout & Shine and to have had this opportunity to partner with BGS and PineCone on work that highlights a convergence of our values.”
“In addition to Shout & Shine’s continued work centering the music and stories of underrepresented artists in the bluegrass community, we also continue to work toward making these programs as accessible and inclusive as possible. We’re providing American Sign Language interpretation for the entire Shout & Shine program, modeling what can be done and what we continue to work toward in making accessibility central to our work,” said Jamie Katz Court, Communications & Programs Manager for PineCone, the Raleigh-based roots music organization that has partnered with us on Shout & Shine since 2017. PineCone also produces the festival, IBMA Bluegrass Live! powered by PNC.
The showcase was first conceived in 2016 to celebrate diversity and inclusion at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s business conference and festival in Raleigh, North Carolina. Originally organized in response to the North Carolina General Assembly’s homophobic bathroom bill, HB2, the scope of the event immediately widened to include and celebrate not only the LGBTQ+ community, but any and all marginalized folks in roots music. Shout & Shine stages have included the most exciting emerging talent alongside bluegrass legends and stalwarts, with lineups that have boasted the Ebony Hillbillies, Alice Gerrard, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands, Missy Raines, Amythyst Kiah, Kaia Kater, Che Apalache, and many, many more.
Shout & Shine is also a monthly editorial feature, which debuted with world-renowned drag queen Trixie Mattel’s first-ever interview by a roots music publication. In 2020 the column grew into a monthly livestream series that has already featured harpist and songwriter Lizzie No and fingerstyle guitarist Sunny War, part of a six-month series focused on Black artists and creators in roots music. The next episode will follow Shout & Shine Online in November. Whether on stage, in print, or online, Shout & Shine’s mission has always been celebrating the marginalized and underrepresented folks of all identities, backgrounds, faith traditions, and abilities who make and love bluegrass music.
Tune in Saturday, October 3 at 2pm ET for Shout & Shine Online!
Lede photo (L to R): Kaia Kater (by Todd Cooper); Stephanie Anne Johnson (courtesy of the artist); Amythyst Kiah (Anna Hedges). Poster art by Grant Prettyman, Belhum
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
