Culture Thursday: Black country music
Well howdy thar, Barflies!
The Toby Keith crowd must be crying in their grits. Queen Beyoncé has the number one hit on the country charts, "Texas Hold 'Em", and from the viral videos of good Southern white folk line dancing to it, it does seem as if she's broken a few brains in a good way.
However, the roots of country music, as with all American music, lie in Black music.
But one of the series’ central tenets is that country music has always been home to African-American artists. Burns shows that, just like in rock, jazz and pop, every facet of country — from its instrumentation to repertoire to vocal and instrumental techniques — is indebted to African and African-American traditions, but commercial decisions by white industry executives led to their exclusion from the genre for decades.
The black influence on country music starts with the banjo, which often conjures the hazy image of a white pastoral South. But the instrument is a descendant of West African lutes, made from gourds, that were brought to America by slaves and which became a central part of slave music and culture in the South. Soon, the instrument was standardized, appropriated and spread to white audiences through minstrel and blackface shows — which deeply informed the rise of hillbilly music, a term that would later be rebranded as “country music.” (The blackface performer Emmett Miller’s “Lovesick Blues,” for example, inspired Hank Williams’ own rendition of the song, which is still one of the most beloved songs in country history.) White banjo innovators like Earl Scruggs and David Akeman later made the instrument integral to the genre’s DNA, and black musicians mostly abandoned the instrument.
It's simply a truism that without the contributions of Black America, American popular music would be unrecognizable. This is no less true in a "white" music like country than a musical form like jazz. Most country music fans don't know this history, and a strong minority would be appalled, as if they had discovered a Black ancestor in their family tree.
Light it up, Bey, and Lil' Nas X, and Charley Pride. It's time to remind folks that without Black America, there would be no "America".
Share your own selections in the comments.
As always, a life without the arts and culture is not a life worth living.
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