In the opening pages of her new memoir, My Black Country, which was released April 9 through Atria/Black Privilege Publishing via Simon & Schuster, hit country music songwriter, author, activist and scholar Alice Randall details the experience of being at The Bomb Shelter recording studio in Nashville last year. She was hearing new life being poured into one of her songs, as a Black female artist, Adia Victoria, sang the lyrics “He was Black as the sky on a moonless night,” from Randall’s cowboy ode “Went for a Ride,” a Radney Foster co-write that had been included on Foster’s 1992 album.
“It makes me feel like crying right now to even reflect on it,” Randall tells Billboard. “I fight for all the Black cowboys who have been erased, all the country and western songs through the years that did not tell those stories. When I wrote songs like ‘Went For a Ride,’ a lot of people did not realize they were Black cowboys I was writing about… but 20 or 30% of all cowboys were Black and brown in the 19th and 20th centuries, so it’s one of the ways that African-Americans have contributed so much to the legacy of country music, is through cowboy songs.
“The fact that some of [those songs] had their origins with Black cowboys and Black cowboy camps has gotten erased — that’s another way that we don’t understand the African-American presence in country music,” she continues. “So you get this moment with Lil Nas X [in “Old Town Road”] and he’s in jeans and cowboy clothing and people are questioning, saying, ‘Why is he wearing our culture as a costume?’ and not knowing that actually cowboy culture is white, Black, brown and indigenous, as is the culture of country music — that’s the great untold story of country music.”
Randall is one of the first Black women to write…
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