My Black Country

February 26, 2024
Novelist Randall (Black Bottom Saints) unearths the buried roots of Black country music in this intermittently insightful blend of memoir and cultural history. At eight years old, Randall moved with her mother from Detroit to Washington, D.C., where she was enrolled in a private school full of “left-wing hippy intellectuals” who were developing an interest in Black country. After graduating from Harvard in 1981, her fixation with country music brought her to Nashville, where she founded the record label Midsummer Music and worked to promote female artists before selling her shares and heading to Los Angeles to try to revive the Black western film genre and begin writing a novel. Woven through these autobiographical recollections are stories about the “First Family of Black Country”—Lil Hardin, DeFord Bailey, Ray Charles, Charley Pride, and Herb Jeffries. Randall incisively examines how these and other Black performers innovated country music starting in the late 1920s and early ’30s even as their lyrics and chords were “borrowed” or stolen by white artists and they were written out of the genre’s official history. The chronicle of Black country is fascinating, though its oblique telling sometimes frustrates; strewn unevenly throughout the narrative are tantalizing accounts of Randall’s brushes with big-name performers and odes to her favorite artists and records. Still, readers will find plenty here that enriches and complicates the story of country music.

September 1, 2024

Songwriter and fiction and cookbook author Randall (Black Bottom Saints; Soul Food Love) offers a blend of memoir and music history that considers what made it possible for contemporary Black artists like Rhiannon Giddens to rise in an industry that has never been color-blind. Narrating her own work with affection and well-placed emphases, Randall invigorates the conversation about race and country music by sharing the accomplishments of musicians Lil Hardin, DeFord Bailey, Charley Pride, Ray Charles, and Herb Jeffries, whom she calls "the First Family of Black country." Randall connects their work to other greats like Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner, whose gospel roots and ballad structures cemented their place in the country music canon. As she proclaims country music's distinctive Black identity, Randall also documents producing a new album that reimagines her previously recorded works through a Black women-centered lens, with her artistic heroes (including her daughter, Caroline Randall Williams). VERDICT A must-listen for country music fans, described here to the tune of Black history. Randall's account is destined to be a landmark contribution to understanding Black influences on country music and American culture as a whole.--Sharon Sherman

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