Beyoncé Gave Country's Black Trailblazers a Mic. Alice Randall Is Giving Their Legacies a Required Reckoning. 

One morning in April 1994, a 34-year-old mother and songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee was scrambling. Somewhere between rushing her first-grade daughter off to school, cursing herself for forgetting to send a signed permission slip along with her, and squeezing in a shower, a string of words materialized in Alice Randall's mind: Got a picture of your Momma in heels and pearls, and you're trying to make it in your Daddy's world. Months (and a few verses) later, that sentiment would become the chorus of a number-one hit on country radio called “XXX’s & OOO’s (An American Girl)"—the first co-written by a Black woman. While it was ultimately made famous by Trisha Yearwood, that mother, songwriter, and award-winning professor and author's song is now part of a sweeping history known to very few and understood by even less: Black Country. Fortunately, Randall hasn't just chronicled it in her book My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future, out April 9, but also in a companion album of the same name, out April 12. The 11-track album features Randall's songs reimagined and re-recorded by today's award-winning artists and female arbiters of Black Country like Rhiannon Giddens, Rissi Palmer, and Allison Russell. Days before the release of Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter, Randall joined me on Zoom to discuss the book and album—the latter of which sees the stories she put to song told the way they were always intended. When they're both released this week, the parallels between My Black Country and Cowboy Carter will be obvious. For starters, both serve as needful reminders that the genre was started, shaped, and sustained by Black creatives.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Alice Randall (@msalicerandall) "Black Country is a big tent with many entry points," Randall tells readers straight away. "My checklist is not a litmus test. It's a likeliness test. It's a way to educate your ears and your eyes. Is there Blackness you have refused to see and hear?" According to Randall, the whole of Black Country is comprised of four truths: "Life is hard, God is real, whiskey and roads and family provide worthy compensations, and the past is better than the present." But where country music created by white artists largely finds itself longing for a slavery-era South, Black Country longs for a pre-colonization Africa. "Country is 'Black as the sky on a moonless night,'" Randall writes. "Knowing that has everything to do with when, where, and to whom I was born." Randall told Jezebel the book was always a threat of sorts—a weapon to wield against a whitewashed industry. But after facing a private health crisis in 2018, writing it became that much more urgent. In recognizing her own mortality, she realized the memory of Linda Martell, Florence Joplin, Kossi Gardner, and more, could also be lost. "I started thinking 'What do I really want to do?'" she said of the moment. "I was very aware I was approaching my 40th anniversary in the city [Nashville] as a Black woman songwriter." So, she finished her 2020 novel, Black Bottom Saints, which paid tribute to Detroit's artful communities—remembered by the mainstream (Motown) and forgotten (Paradise Valley)—and began researching American country music. While documenting her own experiences navigating the industry as a Black storyteller—especially in the eighties, nineties, and early aughts, she revisited old recordings of her own songs and was struck by the fact that her words—inherent to, and evocative of, the Black experience—had only ever been sung by white artists. "The Ballad of Sally Ann," for instance, mourns a man's lynching.…