2023 Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame 2024 Woody Guthrie Book Award, International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch (IASPM-US) 2023 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, Association for Recorded Sound Collections 2023 The Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award, American Musicological SocietyHow Black musicians have changed the country music landscape and brought light to Black creativity and innovation. After a century of racist whitewashing, country music is finally reckoning with its relationship to Black people. In this timely work—the first book on Black country music by a Black writer—Francesca Royster uncovers the Black performers and fans, including herself, who are exploring the pleasures and possibilities of the genre.
Informed by queer theory and Black feminist scholarship, Royster’s book elucidates the roots of the current moment found in records like Tina Turner’s first solo album, Tina Turns the Country On! She reckons with Black “bros” Charley Pride and Darius Rucker, then chases ghosts into the future with Valerie June. Indeed, it is the imagination of Royster and her artists that make this music so exciting for a genre that has long been obsessed with the past. The futures conjured by June and others can be melancholy, and are not free of racism, but by centering Black folk Royster begins to understand what her daughter hears in the banjo music of Our Native Daughters and the trap beat of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” A Black person claiming country music may still feel a bit like a queer person coming out, but, collectively, Black artists and fans are changing what country music looks and sounds like—and who gets to love it.
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Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions
2023 Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame 2024 Woody Guthrie Book Award, International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch (IASPM-US) 2023 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, Association for Recorded Sound Collections 2023 The Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award, American Musicological SocietyHow Black musicians have changed the country music landscape and brought light to Black creativity and innovation. After a century of racist whitewashing, country music is finally reckoning with its relationship to Black people. In this timely work—the first book on Black country music by a Black writer—Francesca Royster uncovers the Black performers and fans, including herself, who are exploring the pleasures and possibilities of the genre.
Informed by queer theory and Black feminist scholarship, Royster’s book elucidates the roots of the current moment found in records like Tina Turner’s first solo album, Tina Turns the Country On! She reckons with Black “bros” Charley Pride and Darius Rucker, then chases ghosts into the future with Valerie June. Indeed, it is the imagination of Royster and her artists that make this music so exciting for a genre that has long been obsessed with the past. The futures conjured by June and others can be melancholy, and are not free of racism, but by centering Black folk Royster begins to understand what her daughter hears in the banjo music of Our Native Daughters and the trap beat of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” A Black person claiming country music may still feel a bit like a queer person coming out, but, collectively, Black artists and fans are changing what country music looks and sounds like—and who gets to love it.
2023 Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame 2024 Woody Guthrie Book Award, International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch (IASPM-US) 2023 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, Association for Recorded Sound Collections 2023 The Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award, American Musicological SocietyHow Black musicians have changed the country music landscape and brought light to Black creativity and innovation. After a century of racist whitewashing, country music is finally reckoning with its relationship to Black people. In this timely work—the first book on Black country music by a Black writer—Francesca Royster uncovers the Black performers and fans, including herself, who are exploring the pleasures and possibilities of the genre.
Informed by queer theory and Black feminist scholarship, Royster’s book elucidates the roots of the current moment found in records like Tina Turner’s first solo album, Tina Turns the Country On! She reckons with Black “bros” Charley Pride and Darius Rucker, then chases ghosts into the future with Valerie June. Indeed, it is the imagination of Royster and her artists that make this music so exciting for a genre that has long been obsessed with the past. The futures conjured by June and others can be melancholy, and are not free of racism, but by centering Black folk Royster begins to understand what her daughter hears in the banjo music of Our Native Daughters and the trap beat of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” A Black person claiming country music may still feel a bit like a queer person coming out, but, collectively, Black artists and fans are changing what country music looks and sounds like—and who gets to love it.
Francesca T. Royster is a professor of English at DePaul University, author of Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era and Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon, and coeditor of “Uncharted Country,” a special issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies on race and country music.
Table of Contents
Introduction. Where My People At?
Chapter 1. Uneasy Listening: Tuning into Tina Turner’s Queer Frequencies in Tina Turns the Country On! and Other Albums
Chapter 2. “Love You, My Brother”: Darius Rucker’s Bro-Intimacy and Acts of Sonic Freedom
Chapter 3. How to Be an Outlaw: Beyoncé’s Daddy’s Lessons
Chapter 4. Valerie June, Ghost Catcher
Chapter 5. Can the Black Banjo Speak? Notes on Songs of Our Native Daughters
Chapter 6. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road
Conclusion. Black Country Afrofuturisms: Mickey Guyton, Rissi Palmer, and DeLila Black
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
Daphne A. Brooks
As superstar Lil Nas X might put it, 'can’t nobody tell me' that Francesca Royster’s dazzling book isn’t a necessary and groundbreaking work in popular music studies. Both riveting and moving, Black Country Music weaves together a number of urgent and critical threads of inquiry—interrogating overlooked and ofttimes underloved Black pioneers who made rich and innovative music in spite of marginalization, and exploring present-day rule-breaking artists who are inventing new ways of narrating their own sounds and their often complicated relationships to country. At its heart, this book insists that we reckon with both the Blackness that lies at the heart of country music and the fearlessness of generations of musicians who laid claim to a sonic culture that was slow to acknowledge their worth. It's a book for the national moment in which we find ourselves.
Alice Randall
Francesca Royster’s extraordinary book puts Black country artists and audience in conversation with Black thinkers Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, bell hooks, and Camille Dungy, among others, to center the radical work that is revealed as Royster listens for, and finds, strains of revolution within Black country. Her work at the intersection of Afrofuturism and Black country is necessary reading for all interested in the evolution of Black aesthetics.
Hanif Abdurraqib
Black Country Music holds within it vital history and also serves as a vessel for Francesca Royster's gentle, reliable, and immersive storytelling, weaving an expansive narrative to hold up the untold and undertold stories of the music-makers at the heart of America's many sounds.
Rissi Palmer
Francesca Royster gets to the heart of the matter with this book. She plots the journey of self-acceptance and defiance that has marked every one of our journeys in country music.
