On Thursday, August 8, Alice Randall shared excerpts from her new book “My Black Country,” at Featherstone Center for the Arts, and engaged the audience in conversation. People in the house were also privy to several songs from her new album of the same title, “My Black Country,” via the late John Prine’s Oh Boy Records. The album is produced by Ebonie Smith, whose credits include “Hamilton” and Janelle Monae’s “Dirty Computer,” and is a brilliant companion 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 lays down a stunning rendition of XXX’s and OOO’s.
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 to be: DeFord Bailey, Lil Hardin, Ray Charles, Charley Pride, and Herb Jeffries.
“The book is history — 300 years of Black people working in country music. It’s also a memoir of my life and what music has meant to me,” Randall said.
Randall is also a seasoned producer, lecturer, and chair in the Department of African-American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. Aside from “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 racial underbelly of Southern gentility, and “Soul Food Love,” a cookbook co-created with her daughter Caroline.
Born in Detroit and raised in Washington, D.C., Randall attended Harvard University, earning an honors bachelor’s degree in English and American literature and graduating cum laude. In 1983, Randall relocated to Nashville to become a country songwriter. “I came to Nashville to be a part of producing music and have helped launch many careers,” she said.
Though Randall resides in Nashville, the Island has been a significant part of her life for many years. “I believe it was in ‘78 or ‘79 when I first came here. I was in Cambridge in college at the time and I came multiple times,” Randall shared. Randall and her first husband Avon Nyanza Williams III, honeymooned on the Vineyard. “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 I wrote the book, ‘The Wind Done Gone,’ and I’ve been coming many, many summers since. In my living room in Nashville, I have a painting of Oak Bluffs by Aaron Douglas, who was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. I have a view of the Vineyard in my house!”
Country music was, in many ways, the glue that held Randall’s family together. “Country music was the one thing my mother, aunt, and grandmother had in common. And they are all Black women,” Randall said. “Prior to 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 what we had access to was country music. Even Ray Charles’ mom would let him stay up late to listen to the Grand Ole Opry.”
Randall is the only Black woman in history to write both a number one country song, Trisha Yearwood’s “XXX’s and OOO’s,” and an ACM video of the year, “Is There Life Out There?” starring Reba McEntire. According to PBS.com., several of the more than 20 songs Randall has written have been listed in the top 10 and top 40 records. Some of the 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 is lonely being in a room by yourself. Collaborating a song is like therapy or conversation with a longtime best friend,” Randall said. “You discover something that is important to both of you, and then you agree on the language you’re going to use to describe this.”
With 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 mom, love, and money worries when you have a child. “The second verse was more about my writing partner’s experiences — keeping the romance and house together with her partner and balancing love and money stressors. If I had written it solely, it would have focused on mothering.”
There have been many discussions, arguments, misinformation shared, and at times complete obliteration of the contribution, creation, and influence Black people have had (and are still having) on country music. There are also questions around what makes a song a country song. “Country music has hope that recognizes pain,” Randall said. In “My Black Country,” she writes that “Country music is three chords and four very particular truths: life is hard, God is real, whiskey and roads and family provide worthy compensations, and the past is better than the present.” She goes on to say that “a common way to define country music is that it is American folk music that has Celtic, African, and Evangelical Christian influences.”
Randall shared at the reading, and penned in more detail in her book, that “the earliest Black country song I know rose from the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and dates back to sometime before 1838.” Some of the lines in the song are “We raise de wheat, Dey gib us de corn; We bake the bread, Dey Gib us de crust; We sif de meal, Dey gib us de huss. We is the Black folk, Dey are the white folk. And the specific ‘we’ is enslaved Africans and the ‘dey’ are the Scots.” She goes on to write that “the lyric to this early Country song was included in My Bondage and My Freedom, the second of Frederick Douglass’s three autobiographies. Published in 1855, it details Fredick’s escape to freedom in 1838. So, we know the song was being sung by enslaved Africans in these Americans sometime before that in the days between Christmas and New Year’s, when it was heard and remembered by a young Frederick.”
Randall’s passion for inquiry, knowledge, and exploration is palpable, and her sharing of what she’s learned, a gift. “There is a lot of hidden Black genius in country music. My job is to reveal it. The work of uncovering is still going on. It has been sustaining me for all of my life,” Randall said. “At the end of the day, the beauty I encounter listening to Black country music has been wholly redemptive. One thing I’m just so pleased about is that I’ve become an icon to young people in the music business. And I am just thrilled with the new artists coming up. I’m beholden to those who came before me and those rising 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.com. Her album is available to purchase on a variety of sites, including ohboy.com, and amazon.
