Alice Randall

27:21Try Claude for free at Claude.ai slash brokenrecord and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. Lexus is a company that believes in the importance of setting a standard, which I can appreciate as someone who holds themselves to lofty if not ridiculous standards, especially with the car I drive. The standard Lexus has set for themselves is to experience amazing. Lexus measures success by the feeling and emotions evoked in a driver, like exhilaration and joy. Amazing can only be achieved by knowing people on a deeper level. The standard of amazing results in a feeling in drivers that their car was built in anticipation of them.

27:59Machines that make you feel more human. Because a car that doesn't make you feel something is a car that stops short of amazing. Experience amazing at your Lexus dealer. You make a very sharp observation about country music the way it's understood, and it's largely understood, the narrative that your book argues against is largely understood as a white form of music. A lot of people think it is white music made by white people for white people. Right. And you say that kind of country music, you know, one of the kind of tenets of that music is that the past is always better than the present. I think there are four big themes in country.

28:41One is life is hard. God is real. The road, liquor, and family are compensations, and the past is better than the present. For most of white country, the past that's better than the country or some of it is a longed for and lost Dixie. For the black people, the past that's better than the present country is a longed for and lost Africa before colonization, I think. And both there's a shared sometimes sense that the past, it's a longed for and lost childhood before adult misery. but there never has been any country music that doesn't have black influences. Literally, it does not exist. And so it is just, there hasn't been the recognition that unfortunately we talk about when we're looking at the history of this country, stolen land, what we stole from indigenous people, stolen bodies and lives Africans brought in chains here.

29:42But there's also stolen creativity, that you take people's creations, the melodies. Now, the case of Leslie Riddle, I was very excited to just be able to be at Folk Alliance this year, and they gave me a Lifetime Achievement Award. But even more exciting to me than that, though that was very exciting, was I was able to accept Leslie Riddle's award posthumously and speak to his brilliance. And And this is a man we've always acknowledged that taught Mabel Carter and the Carter family a lot of songs and some guitar techniques. But it gets left out as long before any knowledge we have that Mabel Carter had ever played one bit of guitar or ever sung a song.

30:28Leslie Riddle was in a CMAP factory accident and lost his leg. Then he was so depressed and weirded out by this, he had a gun accident that may have been a suicide attempt in which he lost two fingers. And he began to play with three fingers. And the way he played is a whole lot like Carter Family Scratch. Yeah, which everybody, it's the basis of finger picking. Exactly. But the weird thing about this, what is the likelihood that these two sets of people in the extended same neighborhood both developed independently the same thing? Or did the Carters see how Leslie Riddle played the guitar and be in artistic communion with that?

31:16Which I don't have any problem with that. What I have a problem with is erasing Leslie Riddle from the story. Because we can document the only way he could have been playing the guitar was with those three fingers. And we know that because those are the only fingers he had. So I want to get back to your story and then get to some of these figures, particularly DeFord Bailey, who we've talked about before on our show, Lil Harden, who we haven't. So you left Harvard. You went to Nashville to become a songwriter. And form a publishing company. You formed a publishing company. But first, you got a letter from people who looked over your stuff.

31:54And it said what? I had no talent whatsoever. Roddy Gant, the head then of Acuff Rose. So I grew up in Detroit, but moved to Washington, D.C., as I said, and went to Harvard, where I started listening to a lot of country music. And my college roommate, freshman year roommate's mother, was a woman. And since we're talking about race, I will identify her as a white woman who went to Yale Law School. And she was the managing director of ASCAP by the time I was about to graduate. And so she was able to set up some meetings. And she got me with some of the biggest writers and publishers when I graduated from Harvard about a year later that were working in Nashville at the time.

32:35And one of them was Ronnie Gant. And, of course, I wanted to go there because Acuff Rose was Hank Williams' publisher, that they had done so many amazing things. And I got there, and Ronnie just put his feet up on the desk, and he first told me that I should just go back to wherever it was I came from. and then he told me that maybe I was at such a low level of development that he could not judge my material because people didn't send him people that were this undeveloped. And he was going to share it with some young writers of his. Then he sent me a letter. He said, I shared it with my writers and they agreed with me.

33:11You have no talent whatsoever. And that, of course, inspired me. I was moving to Nashville, Tennessee and show them wrong. Okay, but where does that come from? Because most people, if that happened, They would be devastated. You'd just been to Harvard. I'm sure Wall Street was calling, whatever else you wanted in life. Instead, it was like, I have no talent whatsoever. I'm going to go there and show them. When I was born in Detroit City, the same year as Motown Records, and at that time, and by five years later, Motown is the largest black company in America. So one thing is I do understand, and I'm a child who sat on the lap and realized how important music was to me.

33:52So Wall Street, my best friend did go to Wall Street. My friends were all going to investment banks and to law firms, and I did consider that. But I really love people and I love life. And I knew that how I wanted to impact the world was through songs because I'd seen the power of Motown. It wasn't the kind of music I wanted to do, but it had created a new narrative of what black life was, this sort of softer, sweet thing. I wanted to preach to the unconverted. Part of it, actually, no one asked these questions, but you did. I wrote my thesis on mothers and daughters in the novels of Jane Austen.

34:29And I did ultimately do well in that thesis. But I realized that there are probably six people in the world who could understand it and four people that could benefit from it. You had to know so much about Jane Austen, so much about structuralist criticism, and so much about feminist criticism to be able to evaluate what I did. And I wanted to create and write with words and affect lots of people. So country was the place I felt. You know, it was the Reagan era. I felt that I could enter in and that artistic voices are all political voices. I didn't want to write New Yorker poetry, and I didn't want to do what's now called Americana.

35:07I wanted to go on the charts in the radio and actually change what might be called hardened hearts and minds. I wanted people who were thinking about environmental justice to hear Glen Campbell saying, who's minding the garden? and maybe start wondering, oh, the Bible told me I'm supposed to be concerned with Eden. Maybe that means I should actually be supporting Earth Day. So one, because I thought the work was urgent. I actually think I was a person who knew. I've left out that hard part of my story. I told you I had a mother who didn't love me. She wasn't a good mother. And in high school, I was raped, you know, within the family circle.

35:46I had a very hard experience and music helped sustain me from that. So I also had human lived experience that music will crawl in to people's pain to isolation and sustain them. And I wanted to be one of the people creating the kind of music that could do that. Emily Dickinson did that for me. John Prime did that for me. Rosetta Tharp did that for me. And I wanted to be a person who's done that. And one of the most exciting things about this book tour is when I was in Indianapolis. I went to the Madam C.J. Walker Theater and gave a talk, and Layla McCullough played. But afterwards, a young woman came up to me, a black woman from Michigan, and she said, my brother was killed in a shooting accident.

36:36And I was so unhappy. She felt like the world is coming apart. And she said the first time I smiled again after that murder was when I heard X's and O's on the radio. Or people who told me that she, their mother, and they had cleaned their houses to X's and O's. So many times someone has told me how some one of these songs sustained them. So it took me a long time to find out it really happened, that it really worked. You send them out there. There's some things that you hear earlier. I worked at Nat Riba Video of the Year, Is There Life Out There?, which I actually put a lot of my own trauma.

37:15It has an abusive mother. I actually put Maya Angelou's, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is right in that. You can see it. Reba's reading it to her child. That's a book about a child that got abused. So I'm signing it. I walked through that video in case people don't believe it. But we know that video. It also starts off with sexual harassment, that the waitress, played by Reba, is trying to get her tip, and the man tries to touch or caress her hand when she does it. We know that the Department of Education said that that video sent thousands of women, mainly, I think, lower middle class white women, back to college or to college to get their education.

37:54They saw Reba do it. They thought they could do it. That's the kind of work I wanted to do. I want to send women back to colleges with a country music video. Backless Night was my first song that got recorded by the Forrester Sisters, who actually be one of the most successful female groups in the country that sort of get forgotten about. It was about a young unwed mother. It's one of the songs I did bring with me from Washington to Nashville. And I wrote it with that guy who told me I had no talent whatsoever. And it was the B-side of a number one single back when there were still number one singles.

38:28But X's and O's was your first number one. My first. It's my only number one. And two weeks at number one. And it wasn't my first top ten, which I'm very proud to say, you know, I got songs on the charts in the 80s, the 90s, the aughts, the 10s, and the 20s. But I do want you, because you were working on that song for a while, it wasn't working. You tell a great story about it. I would love to hear the X's and O's. I realized a lot of my songs were weird and that they need to be introduced to the world in special ways. And one of the ways I thought we could introduce them is by film or television.

39:02So I actually worked to write a series for CBS that we presented as a movie of the week back to our pilot, but of the ex-wives of country stars. And the George Jones star, we named him George S. Randall after my father. But the show was focused on the women, the ex-wives of their lives. And I got it in my contract that I got to write the theme song because I knew the theme songs were really, those are very profitable and that would be a great way to launch a song. So when I got that opportunity, I knew I wanted to share it with Matresa Berg, who's one of my favorite writers. When I was driving down to Nashville in the 80s, I was listening to her first number one, I think, Fake in Love, Only Temporary Lovers.

39:44So Matresa and I get together to write, and we write a couple of songs, and they're just not good. And I remember calling my publisher, it was a Sunday night, I think, and saying, I can't do it. We're going to use Ring of Fire or something. I'm not going to pretend something's good that's not good. That theme song is just going to have to be a country classic. And I woke up the next morning. I was feeling so depressed thinking, you know, you got a picture of your mama in heels and pearls. You're trying to make it in your daddy's way. It's not working. And then my phone rings and it's my child's school that I had forgotten to put something in her backpack.

40:19She absolutely had to have that morning. I'm thinking, you are, get into the shower. And that line comes with, you got a picture of your mama in heels and pearls. you're trying to make it in your daddy's world that any kid. I thought, that's my song. That is my song. And I took, went, raced to my daughter's school first. I raced over to Matrice's house. This is, I don't think we had cell phones. We certainly didn't use them. I banged on her door. And when she was opened it, I start telling her that first lyric on the porch. And then she quickly is telling me the second verse. But that first lyric, phone rings, baby cries, TV diet guru lies.

40:57Good morning, honey. It's just what actually had happened, except for it wasn't a baby crying. It was a baby school calling. We had to change it around a little bit. And Matreza was newly married to Jeff Hanna. And they had this beautiful house that I'd driven over to. He was with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. And so they were more in this beautiful house that they're renovating. And how do you keep love and romance going into the deep of it? So hers was fix the sing mow the lawn really isn't all that hard. If you could think, Mama needs romance and a live-in maid. They were in that like couple thing.

41:31And so that's what the second verse was about. I was in the single mom thing. That's what the first verse was. It became this universal anthem for all the women trying to keep the balance up between love and money, which is pretty much all the women living in any capitalist society anywhere. And so 30 years later, it's still being played. And I now have generations of students at Vanderbilt who are raised on it. I'm probably about to have grandchildren. But we wrote that song from our heart and experience. Instead of calculating anything, and those X's and O's, that was all about Caroline. Signs her letters with X's and O's.

42:06She's got these big ribbons in her hair. And we were thinking consciously about Aretha Franklin and Patsy Cline, who make an appearance in the song, because we were thinking about our life as women writers. And Aretha wrote only a little bit, but her sister Caroline was a great songwriter. And Patsy Cline, people may or may not know, was a great letter writer. So we love connecting women's high culture to low culture that women can write songs and women can write letters. And all of this informs the music we hear. And so we love putting Aretha Franklin and Patsy Cline in the same song. We love putting Aretha Franklin first.

42:43Aretha Franklin loved that even more than we did. And it was just something that was ripped literally from our life experiences. And I think it didn't take us 40-some minutes after all those days of writing, not writing it. It took us 40-some minutes to write that song, and it has endured. It's also one of those songs that if you hear it on the radio, you're not paying attention. It just sounds like a great boppy song about a little girl growing up. But then when you listen, it's about this almost fracture between this very feminine childhood and now she has to succeed in this whole other difficult world.

43:24There's an amazing generational shift. Absolutely. And it's about money anxiety if you get paid. All of this anxiety. And it's wild because the song was savage. I will still call it. I'll call it Bob Orman. And when it first came out in terms of reviews and this whole thing, there's just saying it's like a radio hit, that it's just this superficial thing. Well, two weeks at number one, from the very beginning, women listened to it and they heard beneath the surface. And that was part of the black part of it. It has code switching. It seems like one thing on one level. Like, yeah, sing along, sing along.

44:01That's how the Ballad of Sally Ann sounds in Image One. But this is the deep. and I like that because I like making things accessible. That's what I like about Cowboy Carter. Actually, that song is to me is really about life isn't a game. Texas Hold 'em is a card game. Texas Hold 'em is about life is not a game. It's about redemption. It's about real love. It's about a whole lot of things. I always thought I even made the case for Achy Breaky Heart. It's about love and death. That's the American sublime. All the great songs are about something deeply. We're used to those songs that wear their poetry and their complexity on their surface.

44:42But I am the beneficiary of a—my daughter Caroline is an amazing poet, and she is an amazing poet. And she sings the last cut on our album, and she deconstructs and reconstructs this word poem homage to X's and O's. that is X's and O's, like if Picasso got a hold of it and fragmented it, but showing its greater unities and greater significance. She said, raise me at how she paid for it. Like she just explicates it all out there. And so I feel that she provided all the footnotes and structure for those people who did not get what Matrice and I did, that my daughter, Matrice's goddaughter, she got the last word in a sung literary criticism.

45:29She also went to Harvard and studied English. We got a song literary defense of our literature. And we should mention Trisha Yearwood because she sang Exorcist. Was that her first album? No, it was her second album. And it was funny, she was almost in a little bit of a lull when she came. So the rest of that story, which I did not tell you, is everybody wanted to sing that song because it was going to be the theme song. and everyone could feel it felt like a hit. I will not name names of the people who didn't get to do it, except the person who did get to do it originally was not Tricia. It was Wynonna.

46:10And so we go in the studio with Wynonna. We got all the A players. It is like Willie Weeks. It is just fire. She does an extraordinary job. She just has to come back and do the tiniest little overdubs, what the network needs. And we come back to the studio and we wait for Wynonna and we wait for Wynonna and we wait for Wynonna and Wynonna does not show up. It's down to about one hour in the day. She's come and come and doesn't come. That's another story. But I knew where Tricia was in the studios recording her second album. The Garfunks in a small town. I barely drive. I literally run into the room where they are recording.

46:47They weren't physically recording. They were talking at that moment. But into the actual room. And I just said, I remember I think the first words I said to her, we know each other back to our first marriages. This is my last chance. Wynonna is not shown up. We've got those tracks. Everyone knew the song was out there. All we have time to do is pull Wynonna's voice off and put your voice on. Because it was so late in the day. Please come. And she said yes. That generous, extraordinary woman left her own stash. It still makes me cry. Left everything there to come and sing on that record. in not good circumstances.

47:28I was going to ask you what it was like to be working as hard as you were in Nashville and suddenly you have a number one. But it seems that even before it was a number one, everybody wanted a piece of that. Did everybody want your next song then? You know, I ended up quitting not long after X's and O's. Part of it was I wanted to get to the number one spot and once I achieved it, I was looking on for a new challenge. and part of it was, you know, they call it the music business for a reason. I was never just in it for the business. You make money when you connect to audiences and I always wanted to connect to larger audiences.

48:09I wasn't trying to do something esoteric for me. But I was very committed to the art and so it did feel like, I've said, having a number one song sort of puts a target on your back. Everybody wants a piece of you, but not for the good reasons. Before this, people wanted to write with me because they knew my ideas were so original and my work ethic was so strong and that I had really good taste in music, that I knew so many songs. All along the way, because I knew so much, I knew the country canon of recorded country music, and I had what other people recognize as good taste about songs. What song is really amazing?

48:52there was a decent amount of respect and engagement but my big breakthrough was actually getting those songs and that the title song in the thing called love because all the big songwriters had competed for that and i just won out and got it i didn't know the man who was doing it but it's also interesting how much was it noticed until this album and fiona prine until a few years ago people i got these songs recorded but people never noticed that i had had multiple chart hits people would assume that someone like, you know, Steve Earle has more cuts than me. Well, I have more cuts in terms of, if you look at things he didn't record himself in country, I actually have had quite a significant career in country.

49:35I don't think anyone noticed until a few years ago, because I think they insisted on looking at each individual song, many people, as a one-off, just anomaly. But in fact, it was a big pattern. and it was with known artists and non-known artists. Some of these songs, Girls Ride Horses 2, made Judy Robin. It wasn't the other way around. A lot of times the one, these really one weird songs was elevating the artist. Then you get someone like a Glenn Campbell who's heard hundreds of songs, one of the greatest, thousands of songs, one of the greatest compliments I've ever had, is that in the studio, he kneeled down to my little girl and said that this one is Galveston strong.

50:15Wow. That this song, Galveston, was such an important anti-war song. And at this time in his life, he was interested in Christianity as a positive social influence. And he understood that singing about environmental justice. He came in the studio and there was no entourage, just musicians and him and me and my little girl. And he sang that song so beautifully, the vocal on it. After one last break, we'll be back with the rest of Bruce Hedlum's conversation with Alice Randall. In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

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53:08Try Claude for free at Claude.ai slash brokenrecord and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. Lexus is a company that believes in the importance of setting a standard, which I can appreciate as someone who holds themselves to lofty if not ridiculous standards, especially with the car I drive. The standard Lexus has set for themselves is to experience amazing. Lexus measures success by the feeling and emotions evoked in a driver, like exhilaration and joy. Amazing can only be achieved by knowing people on a deeper level. The standard of amazing results in a feeling in drivers that their car was built in anticipation of them.

53:46Machines that make you feel more human. Because a car that doesn't make you feel something is a car that stops short of amazing. Experience amazing at your Lexus dealer. I'm going to ask you for a little Nashville gossip. up, who were the writers you worked with, because you worked with so many, that really knocked you out when you sat down to work with them? Well, one would be Steve Rall. I love, Steve is an amazing songwriter, syllable and sound. So that was very important. Another would be Bobby Braddock. I'm very thrilled that, you know, he wrote D-I-V-O-R-C-E, and he stopped loving her today.

54:24Which was one of your favorites. He stopped loving her. Yes, one of my favorites. He Stopped Loving Her Day may be arguably my all-time favorite country song. So Bobby. Pat Alger, who's a very subtle melody person, listening to the sweetness of his guitar when you sit down to write with Pat Alger was a wonderful thing. Obviously, Matresa, some people that people don't think about anymore that much. Kevin Welch. I did some really art songs with Kevin. They're on a project called Mother Dixie. Mark Sanders. I wrote most of my biggest songs with. We were almost like siblings. And what was writing like with, were you throw lines back and forth?

55:04How did it work? So we were very title driven typically and subject driven. Like if you think girls ride horses too or reckless night about young unwed mothers and religious hypocrisy, small towns are smaller for girls. So one, we would identify a subject we wanted to write about or often I would bring in subjects and titles, and then we would, sometimes the other person would have another piece of a line or something from that very beginning, but usually it was subjects and titles, and then they would suggest some different, a groove for it, a melody for it. We would start that way. Sometimes when we got the music all straightened out, Mark would be able to write.

55:49I had my own weird way. I wanted it. It was unstressed dress. I needed to know what kinds of words I needed, And so he would scan it out for me sometimes. Or I could just do it sitting with the person and they sing when I suggest a song and we can see whether it works. But Mark is also a great lyricist. So he was definitely adding lots of words. I developed a very collaborative way of writing songs. I think with the exception of one song that's not on the album, a song called My Hometown Boy, which was Marie Osmond. I don't feel, that's the only song that my name is, that I don't feel that I contributed a lot to.

56:26And as you can even just see across who I've written with, there are themes. Like this girl thing is a big theme. Certain kinds of gothic situations, death, murder, certain kinds of injustices. I have a whole, what I call a cowboy suite. My cowboy songs sound a lot, whether I'm writing with Rodney Foster or Kevin, because they're my cowboy songs. So I think that one of the things that is interesting about this project and this album is because I co-write a lot, and I do co-write, and because I don't perform, it's been harder sometimes for people to see or question, are you an artist? Are you a songwriter?

57:06Are you, as opposed to some kind of artisan, that a lot of times, as opposed to thinking of it as being art and is self-expressive, they think if you're co-writing, it's craft. It's not about self-expression. But in fact, all of my work has been very much, I've never said this before out loud, but it's akin to psychoanalysis. It's my story. The therapist is very much facilitating it. And maybe I'm being the therapist for them to some degree, and they're also telling their story. That's what the greatest thing. What is wonderful about this album that I don't even think is so much a tribute album as my grandma Moses' immersion as an artist album, that you can see what the art, the themes of Alice Randall's songwriting body is.

57:56We should talk a bit about the album. There's other things I want to get to. But the sort of marquee names here are like Rhianne Giddens, who does an amazing job on Ballad of Sally Ann. You mentioned, I think, in your biography that you were really influenced by Joan Baez's ballad book. And that just, this song takes me sort of back to that. I listened to that album over, I mean, hundreds of times. I mean, I used to know every song on it. So I think when I internalize that, it's part of my artistic DNA. But even the ballad of Sally Ann references that directly. Sally Ann is also an old folk and black fiddle tune.

58:36But the Ballad of Sally Ann, as far as we know, was never put together, that phrase. And as I've noticed it, those songs are a lot about death. Oh, Mother, dear, I cannot tell. But go dig my grave, both long and wide and deep. And Marvel had my hand and feet until the world I died of love. They found her hanging on by a rope. Like it has death, has all kinds of young women's trauma in it. A lot of it around love and domestic violences of different kinds, betrayals, intimate betrayals of different kinds. So I think those songs really went into my artistic DNA, and they prepared me to be a country songwriter because I had also all this Black music wealth in me.

59:23And I had my Detroit Lutheran and Baptist Sunday school. So I had the Celtic ballad forms. I had the African influences. And I had the evangelical Christianity. So I was set up to be a country songwriter. Another song, another version I thought was so impressive was I'll Cry For Yours. I love the Nico Marks. We did a video of that one. I think that's just heartbreakingly beautiful. And so I hope that one still becomes a theme song for this time. A beautiful brass arrangement in it. It's really unexpected. That's Ebony Smith. She's brilliant. No one expected those horns on the Ballad of Sally Ann either.

1:00:07No, no. To me, they remind us that lynching happened into the age of jazz. And those horns, that's also our homage to Louis Armstrong playing on Blue Yodel No. 9. Their horns on Blue Yodel No. 9. You know, we've avoided talking about it, so we have to talk about it. most people don't know that Jimmy Rogers, who's supposed to be the father of country music, played a version of Blue Yodel No. 9 with Lil Hardin and Louis Armstrong. The one that was the million seller. Right. Yes. Yes. And they only say on the label and orchestra, but the orchestra. Was that right? They didn't list? But this is 19.

1:00:45No, they're not listed. In fact, it was far until recently, as late as when I worked on the Ken Burns documentary, Country Music. And Ken Burns has been supportive of my book. But other scholars, they just debated and fought with me. It took so much work to get Louis Armstrong mentioned as part of the Jimmy Rogers story. And ultimately, even though I was able to prove it and prove it to everyone's satisfaction, I didn't find it, but the sheet music has been found and it's been authenticated by Jimmy Rogers scholars in Jimmy Rogers' own hand that he wrote after the session. And Louis' wife, Lil, played piano.

1:01:21But up until the time, it was that literally it's only been the 21st century we've been able to prove that. And people denied it. But what's wild is Lil Harden was alive when I was alive. She knew whether or not she played on Blue Yodel No. 9. And so it required not believing her. But what's wild is Roy Acuff knew it too. Everybody knew it because it wasn't a secret at the time. That's why they had to go out. They recorded in L.A. Do you think Jimmy Rogers didn't say, I just played on this big session with Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin Armstrong? These were two of the top jazz players of that day.

1:01:59But it was hidden. So that's a little bit sad. Louis Armstrong is one of those characters who is so accessible, including to white Americans. Like, why would the fact that he performed with Louis Armstrong be an issue? because then it became less authentic? What was the thinking? I'm asking you to think about the other side here. I realize that's unfair. Well, we don't. First, I never think I know what other people are thinking and to wonder what Jimmy Rogers was thinking in 1931. It could have been not his idea. He could have just wanted to play with Louis and Lil, and it had to do with the people who are marketing the record.

1:02:39There have been arguments made that part of the way that country music was marketed was that part of the value you got, like when you buy a Hermes scarf, you're buying into an image of yourself of luxury or this or that. This is not just the silk scarf and the pattern. That part of what was being marketed with country music was quote unquote white identity. And that that's part of what people were buying when they got it. And so that's what they wanted to see. So you see in the early 30s, there are examples of bands that were actually integrated bands, But when they made pictures of them, they would take out the black member and put in a white person, sometimes a manager or some other person, as if that was the band.

1:03:24And we know for sure, because he talked about it, when Charlie Pott was originally being broken in the industry, they did not send out any pictures of him or indicate to radio when they were getting him established that he was black. They hid that because they thought it would make it more difficult to sell. And we know that that had happened with earlier artists that had people thought were white that we now know for sure were black and that their images were replaced at an earlier time. That was not always the case with country music. You talk a lot about DeFord Bailey, who was the most popular star on the Grand Ole Opry when it started.

1:04:06Was there a particular moment when it went from being this art form that had a lot of different contributors to being this representative of white culture? I think the same way that African influences have been in country music since its birth. The erasure of black contributions to country music have been there since the beginning of it. But it's the same, I think it comes out of the idea of you owning people's bodies and you're owning their labor and you're owning their creation. So I think that there's a very complicated history that it's only right now that we're seeing open collaboration and accrediting of what black contributions as a country have been.

1:04:53because even as recently as the Lil Nas X thing, one of the quote-unquote controversies with this first song, Old Town Road, with people you would see all over the internet versions of this, our culture isn't your costume. But what they didn't know is that at least 20 % of cowboys were black and brown. Some people estimate as high as 30%. These people actually don't know this because it's erased history. that when we look at another long-term contribution to country music is cowboy songs and the whole wealth of them. And we know that Thorpe, I write about this, the guy first in the teens who collected the first cowboy songs and put them in a book.

1:05:36Well, people don't realize that the first cowboy camp he went to, because it's been erased from the story, was a black cowboy camp, that a lot of Thorpe's songs come from black cowboys. I don't even think people are lying or repressing that. I think most people just don't even know that anymore. And so it's a distorted story of the past that distorts our potential for the future. Or the other, you know, the other great source of country music, Appalachia, people don't. And I think you might mention this in your book, just a huge number of African-Americans working in coal miners. Yeah. Yes. A large amount of coal miners are black.

1:06:15Bill Withers, who I love, who I think of as a country artist, Grandma's Hands, wonderful country songs. His grandfather was a coal miner. So Appalachian music is influenced by the presence of black people. And you'd always have some performers would release, the Pointer Sisters released a country album, I think won a Grammy. The huge single fairy tale that Elvis Presley would cover, and that was a big single. And that family-winning duel, as I said, Ray Charles, the Pointer Sisters. Tina Turner did one. Tina Turner had amazing Tina turns a country on. But one of my other memories is my 1964-65 when the Supremes played the Copacabana for the first time.

1:07:06And I was there, and they sang a country song. They sang Queen of the House. And that song became Country Song of the Year. And they were part of putting that song in that place. And Al Green did great versions of, he did Lonesome I Could Cry. He did a bunch of songs. He has a whole country album, Belle, that I love. I love the Grand Tour by George Jones. But equally interesting is Aaron Nevels. I have to confess, I like Grand Tour a little bit better than He Stopped Loving Her Today. Well, wait until you hear this other one. Grand Tour is such a sad song about the divorce. But He Stopped Loving Her Today, to me, in terms of criticism, is about what I call dynamic stasis.

1:07:56Stasis frozenness. In Western literature and Western art, one of the things we look for is the hero evolving, changing, becoming more. But in real life, we know most people don't change. People get very set. When I live in country, there is a dynamic that I have labeled dynamic stasis. We're a frozen character. The narrator moves around them. Like that line, he stopped loving her today. Soon they'll hang a reef upon his door. He stopped loving her today. The change is death. When you see the price of dynamic stasis for being frozen, that you may die. You may have a life that amounts to nothing.

1:08:35it actually can provoke you to change. That's why I love He Stop Loving Her Today, because it's about what the penalty of not moving on is. And that could be from a success or a failure in work, life. We all need to be reminded that we do not want to be the person who's going back and say, he had underlined in red every single I love you. Like all these people's death scrolling and commenting on other people's lives instead of doing something. That's the equivalent of he had underlined and read every single I love you. Okay, I love that. I love that theory. I think we're going to end on that because that is so great.

1:09:13Dynamic stasis. I'm a storyteller, but I'm a critic of the form. And I love this form when it's at its best and it's an Afro-Celtic form. I love great journalists like you that give us a chance to put the footnotes on and complete the story. Well, we're going to talk the next time you do something then, because this has been just fabulous. Thank you so much. I appreciate you.

1:09:58And be sure to follow us on Instagram at The Broken Record Pod. You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Talliday. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for$4.99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app.

1:10:37Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richman. The more you learn about your favorite artists, the more you want to know. Claude helps you keep digging, finding new threads and rabbit holes to explore. Whether it's discovering deeper meaning behind a detail in an interview or figuring out the influence behind an artist's particular era. Claude thinks with you to find the next clue. If you can't get enough of the stories behind your favorite music and artists, Claude will help you discover new layers you didn't know existed. Try Claude for free at claude.ai slash brokenrecord. This episode of Broken Record is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve.

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