Alice Randall spotlights Country Music's Black roots

[Tanuki]

https://www.thecut.com/article/alice-randall-black-country-music-book-interview.html?utm_campaign=thecut&utm_medium=s1&utm_source=tw

"Alice Randall is Nashville royalty. Although she was born in Detroit and raised between the Midwest and Washington, D.C., she moved to the Music City in 1983 with an investor’s seed money to start a music-publishing company and a singular goal: to make the inherent Blackness of country music more visible to the masses.

In the four decades since, Randall has become the first Black woman to write a number-one-charting country song (“XXXs and OOOs” sung by Trisha Yearwood) and continued to nurture a successful country songwriting career. She has written six novels — including the best-selling Gone With the Wind parody The Wind Done Gone — and co-written a cookbook with her daughter, written and produced a film, and become a professor and writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University.

Of all the songs she’s written or co-written over the years, even the ones with explicitly Black narratives, every single track has been recorded by a white artist — until now. In April, Randall will release two projects with a shared title. My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future is a memoir weaving together her personal journey to Nashville and all she went through in the country-music industry with a deep knowledge of Black country history. Come for the fantastically juicy anecdotes, from dressing up chickens on the set of a Johnny Cash music video to being snuck into Quincy Jones’s home in Los Angeles, and stay for the treasure chest of references that track Black country’s roots from Lil Harden and DeFord Bailey to contemporary talents Allison Russell and Rissi Palmer.

Along with the book, Randall will release My Black Country - The Songs of Alice Randall — 11 of her songs, all sung for the first time by Black women. “This is Black women coming together and healing an old hurt,” she says. “These women came together, not for any particular interest of their own, but to give me a magical moment. That was a long time coming. It was a personal Juneteenth. It was good news at long last.”...(more)