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.

Starred review from February 15, 2024
A Nashville-based songwriter and music publisher recounts an unlikely success story while celebrating the contributions of Black Americans to country music. The winding stream that rolls below Clinch Mountain, where country music was supposedly born, surely lapped at the feet of one Eslie Riddle, a Black guitarist who likely taught Mother Maybelle Carter the "foundation of the Carter Family sound." Everyone's heard of Mother; no one's heard of Riddle. It's an erasure that troubles Randall, who argues with impeccable scholarship born of reading, close listening, and lived experience that country music is Black music, albeit with the "trace of Black folk whitewashed out of the rural South, the rural West, out of rural America on country radio and records." Yet it's there, and it won't be silenced or denied. Randall is a firsthand witness to the struggle, the first Black woman to write a No. 1 country song, and she portrays forgotten and half-remembered greats such as Lil Hardin, Linda Martell, O.C. Smith, and Ray Charles (who may have made his bones as an R&B singer but also released a keystone album called Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music). Randall listens to country music with open, welcoming ears. In her canon, the Supremes fit into the Black country tradition, as do the Allman Brothers and John Prine. Steve Earle is a brother-in-arms; so is Quincy Jones, about whom the author delivers an entertaining tale of home invasion that fortunately turned out well. ("Quincy," she writes, "is a whole lot more Black Country and Black Country-adjacent than most folks realize.") Occasionally tart but more often both forgiving and patiently instructive, Randall tallies the debt that all country music owes to so many Black artists over the centuries. Essential for country fans--a delightful, inspirational story of persistence, resistance, and sheer love of music.

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April 1, 2024
Randall is the best-selling author of The Wind Done Gone (2001) and Black Bottom Saints (2020), the co-writer of many songs, including the first number one country hit co-written by a Black woman, and a professor at Vanderbilt University, where her signature class is a history of Black Country. In this captivating memoir, she reconsiders the evolution of country music, correcting long-held assumptions of the genre's white roots. "So much trauma," she writes, "disrupting so much memory." She presents many irrefutable examples of Black influence, going back to the Bohees, whose banjo duets, first recorded in 1889-90, are direct precursors of "Dueling Banjos,"" which we know from The Andy Griffith Show and Deliverance. Randall finds another missing link in the work of Lesley ""Esley"" Riddle, a Black guitarist with three fingers who likely influenced the famous thumb and forefinger style of Mother Maybelle Carter. "Coincidence?" asks Randall. "Collaboration? Erasure?" Randall beautifully weaves together history and her personal story in a narrative informed by a deep love of country music, her commitment to undoing an ugly legacy of whitewashing, and her determination to change the face of Nashville to create space for herself and other Black artists.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 1, 2024

Award-winning songwriter and fiction and cookbook author Randall (Black Bottom Saints: A Novel; Soul Food Love: Healthy Recipes Inspired by One Hundred Years of Cooking in a Black Family) highlights the contributions of Black country artists and musicians while reflecting on her own life. She developed her love of country music as a young child in 1960s Detroit. When she moved to Washington, DC, with her activist mother, she found a love for listening to music from artists that she later dubbed "the First Family of Black Country": Lil Hardin, DeFord Bailey, Charley Pride, Ray Charles, and Herb Jeffries. Shortly after college, Randall set her sights on starting a music-publishing company in Nashville, where she was often the only Black person in the room at events. This memoir parallels Randall's tenacious journey as a songwriter with the history of country music and the contributions of the First Family and other Black artists. Her life story begins as the main focus but takes a backseat to the vast biographies of others after her bittersweet success in the 1990s. VERDICT Randall's knowledge and respect for the performers and musicians who came before her permeates this lyrical memoir/music history hybrid. Country music fans will relish reading it.--Anjelica Rufus-Barnes

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