On Thursday, August 8, Alice Randall presented excerpts from her new book, My Black Country, and engaged the audience in conversation at the Featherstone Center for the Arts. Those in attendance also heard several songs from her new album of the same title, My Black Country, released on the late John Prine’s Oh Boy Records. The album was produced by Ebonie Smith, who wrote Hamilton and Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer, among others, and is an excellent complement to Randall’s novel.
All of the songs on My Black Country are performed by black female artists, including Leyla McCalla, SistaStrings, Adla Victoria, Rhiannon Giddens, Sunny War, Miko Marks, Allison Russell, Saaneah Jamison, Rissi Palmer, Valerie June and Randall’s daughter Caroline Randall Williams, who delivers a stunning rendition of XXXs and OOOs.
On Randall’s website, Simon & Schuster describes Randall’s novel, My Black Country, as lyrical, introspective and an account of Randall’s past as she searched for the first family of black country music. Randall identifies that family as: DeFord Bailey, Lil Hardin, Ray Charles, Charley Pride and Herb Jeffries.
“The book is history – 300 years of black work in country music. It’s also a memoir of my life and what music has meant to me,” Randall said.
Randall is also a veteran producer, lecturer and chair of the African American and Diaspora Studies Department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In addition to My Black Country, some of Randall’s other books include Ada’s Rules, the New York Times bestseller; The Wind Done Gone, which tells some of what Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind left unsaid about the racist underbelly of Southern gentility; and Soul Food Love, a cookbook she co-wrote with her daughter Caroline.
Randall was born in Detroit and grew up in Washington, DC. She attended Harvard University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English and American literature with honors. In 1983, Randall moved to Nashville to become a country songwriter. “I came to Nashville to produce music and have helped launch many careers,” she said.
Although Randall lives in Nashville, the island has been a big part of her life for many years. “I think it was 1978 or 1979 when I first came here. I was in college in Cambridge at the time and I came here several times,” Randall said. Randall and her first husband, Avon Nyanza Williams III, honeymooned on the island. “He was a Martha’s Vineyard person and had worked for a moving company on the island for a while. I also came to the island to rest after writing the book ‘The Wind Done Gone,’ and I’ve come here many, many summers since then. In my living room in Nashville, I have a painting of Oak Bluffs by Aaron Douglas, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. I have a view of the island from my house!”
Country music was, in many ways, the glue that held Randall’s family together. “Country music was the only thing my mother, my aunt and my grandmother had in common. And they’re all black women,” Randall said. “Before the golden age of radio, if you lived in the South in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, you heard country music. You could hear black music in churches and other spaces, but we had access to country music. Even Ray Charles’ mother let him stay up late to listen to the Grand Ole Opry.”
Randall is the only black woman in history to have written both a No. 1 country song, “XXX’s and OOO’s” by Trisha Yearwood, and an ACM Video of the Year, “Is There Life Out There?” featuring Reba McEntire. According to PBS.com, several of the 20-plus songs Randall has written have charted in the top 10 and top 40. Artists who have recorded her work include Glen Campbell, Moe Bandy, Marie Osmond, Jo-El Sonier, Judy Rodman, Radney Foster and Holly Dunn.
“I love songwriting, but it’s lonely when you’re sitting in a room alone. Collaborating on a song is like therapy or talking to a long-time best friend,” Randall said. “You discover something that’s important to both of you, and then you agree on the words you’re going to use to describe that.”
In the song “XXX’s and OOOs,” which Randall co-wrote with Matraca Berg, the first verse is based on Randall’s experiences – being a single mother, love and money worries when you have a child. “The second verse is more about my writing partner’s experiences – keeping the romance and the house together with her partner and balancing love and money stressors. If I had written it alone, it would have focused on motherhood.”
There has been a lot of debate, argument, misinformation, and sometimes total ignoring of the contribution, creation, and influence that black people have had (and still have) on country music. There are also questions about what makes a song a country song. “Country music has hope that acknowledges pain,” Randall said. In “My Black Country,” she writes, “Country music is three chords and four very specific truths: life is hard, God is real, whiskey and roads and family provide adequate balance, and the past is better than the present.” She goes on to say, “A common definition of country music is that it is American folk music with Celtic, African, and evangelical Christian influences.”
Randall shared at the reading and wrote in more detail in her book that “the earliest black country song I know of rose on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and was written sometime before 1838.” Some of the lines of the song are: “We grow the wheat, they give us the corn; we bake the bread, they give us the crust; we sift the flour, they give us the crust. We are the black people, they are the white people. And the specific “we” are enslaved Africans and the “they” are the Scots.” She further writes that “the lyrics to this early country song were contained in My slavery and my freedom, the second of Frederick Douglass’ three autobiographies. Published in 1855, it describes Frederick’s escape to freedom in 1838. So we know that the song was being sung by enslaved Africans in the Americas sometime before, in the days between Christmas and New Year’s, when young Frederick heard it and remembered it.”
Randall’s passion for research, knowledge and exploration is palpable and the fact that she shares her knowledge is a gift. “There is a lot of hidden black genius in country music. My job is to uncover it. The work of discovery is ongoing. It’s fed me my whole life,” Randall said. “Ultimately, the beauty I discover listening to black country music has been completely cathartic. One thing I’m so happy about is that I’ve become an icon for young people in the music business. And I’m just excited about the new artists that are coming up. I’m indebted to those who came before me and those who are coming up now, and at 65 years old, I have my first album.”
To learn more about Randall and to find a list of her books, visit her website alicerandall.comHer album can be purchased on various websites including ohboy.comAnd Amazon.
