I wake up and I read the news as presented by the Wall Street Journal, the NY Times, the Washington Post, and maybe The Atlantic every day. I follow many of the links that I come across, and those take me to numerous other publications. I’m generally looking for anything that involves America’s Thing With Race where it is not intuitively obvious to White Americans that if you were to pull back the covers, you’d find yet another troubling story about race in America. There is seldom a day that I don’t catalogue something away that fits the bill. Our mission here at The Civil Conversations Project is to help America understand just how much of our everyday day has to do with America’s Thing With Race. Today my eyes lit on a story about the country music genre and its reputation as ‘White music’.
It hit home a bit. I grew up and came of age in the 60’s. Think Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, and of course the Beatles. Country music was not on my radar, and what I’d heard didn’t appeal to me anyway. To my New England ears, much of it sounded like a dying cowboy. But The Texas Tavern in Sydney Australia changed all of that.
While in Viet Nam we combatants had a one-time-only chance to go on R and R - short hand for Rest and Recuperation. As I recall, the choices were Hong Kong, China Beach in Viet Nam, and Sydney Australia. None of us were looking to either rest or recuperate. War zones are rather male-oriented places - or they were in the 70’s. And while drinking beer in the company of a bunch of drunk, amped up Marines was better than not drinking at all, it really was not much fun.
On the advice of people who’d been, I chose Sydney. Lots of bars. And when I learned that 3 of them were in the Texas Tavern, that sealed the deal. The Texas Tavern seemed like the place to be for the resting and recuperating that I hoped to do. All 3 bars played country music. Maybe it was the cross-over variety. I can’t recall. But during my week there, to my surprise, I became a fan. But despite the presence of Black super stars Charlie Pride and Darius Rucker (I can’t think of any others), and burgeoning stars like Mickey Guyton, I’ve always felt kind of uncomfortable and even embarrassed that I enjoy country music. I’ve felt like I’m almost not supposed to like a music genre where some of its adherents are likely to not like people who look like me. I’ve walked into more than one country music bar in some cowboy town I was road-tripping through, felt uncomfortable and unsafe and left without even one beer under my belt.
The article I was reading was titled ‘Beyoncé has a country hit. How will country radio handle that?’ I had wondered the same thing when I heard she had released two country songs, “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages” right after the Super Bowl in early February. Good songs, by the way. Both of them. “Texas Hold ’Em” is already a country hit. The song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart last month, making Beyoncé the first Black woman to make it that far with Billboards. Before her, only seven Black female country acts have appeared on the chart in its entire eighty-year history. Yet when a fan emailed a small Oklahoma radio station and requested “Texas Hold ’Em,” he received a reply. “We do not play Beyoncé on KYKC as we are a country music station.”
As it happens, the annual Country Radio Seminar was held in Nashville just a couple weeks later. One of the presentations was on diversity and inclusivity on country radio - a fair topic I’d venture. As the presentation began, the presenter, Jada Watson, assistant professor at the University of Ottawa who researches country music, front loaded her material by saying, “I want to preface this: The data really won’t be easy to digest. It’s not a pretty picture, right now, of representation.” She was right.
Watson started clicking through slides: From 2002 through 2023, songs by White artists averaged 96.5 percent of country radio airplay, leaving 3.5 percent by artist of color. And of that, almost all of them - some 96 percent of the 3.5 percent - were from only three singers: Darius Rucker, Kane Brown and Jimmie Allen. Songs by women of color averaged .06 percent of the overall spins on country radio, and that includes Mickey Guyton who in 2020 became the first Black woman to ever be nominated in the Grammy Awards Best Country Solo Performance category and in 2021 became the first Black female country artist to ever perform on the Grammy Awards since their inception 85 years ago. Even Mickey can’t seem to get air time.
Jada Watson, the researcher, noted that “The audience of country music is far more diverse in every way than we even know, and I think that once we start to know who that audience is, we’re going to start to see changes that reflect a greater diversity within the industry as well.” Yeah. Maybe.
In my hometown of Grand Junction Colorado, I’ve opted to not see artist I enjoy like Willie Nelson when they’ve come through town because I just did not want to be the lone Black person in a sea of White people who enjoy Country and Western music. It was just last July that a wrote about a Country hit, Try that in a small town, by Jason Aldean, glorifying violence…and lynching. I definitely don’t want to be in that audience.
Race permeates and fractures so much in this country, right down to our music and who is expected to listen to or record what. I wonder if we’d have less hatefulness, especially in our politics, if we could crack that.
Sources:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/2024/03/17/beyonce-country-radio-play/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/of-interest/2024/02/11/beyonce-new-album-music/