10/09/2020 Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music on JSTOR

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Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in

Country Music
DIANE PECKNOLD EDITOR

Copyright Date: 2013

Published by: Duke University Press
Pages: 384

https://www-jstor-org.ucc.idm.oclc.org/stable/j.ctv11cw0ph

Table of Contents

Export Selected Citations 

Front Matter (pp. [i]-[iv])

Table of Contents (pp. [v]-[vi])

Introduction COUNTRY MUSIC AND RACIAL FORMATION (pp. 1-16)

Diane Pecknold

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10/09/2020 Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music on JSTOR

Country music’s debt to African American influences and musicians has long been recognized. In his
canonical history of country music, first published in 1968, Bill Malone opened with the frank acknowledgment
that country was distinguished from its European ballad roots by “influences from other musical sources,
particularly from the culture of Afro-Americans,” and emphasized the fact that “country music—seemingly the
most ‘pure white’ of all American musical forms—has borrowed heavily” from African Americans.¹ Other
historians have been equally quick to point out the role relatively unknown African American musicians have
played in shaping the styles and repertoires of...

PART ONE Playing in the Dark

CH 1 Black Hillbillies AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSICIANS ON OLD-TIME RECORDS,

1924–1932 (pp. 19-81)
Patrick Huber

In the summer of 1930 Ralph S. Peer, RCA-Victor’s A&R (artists and repertoire) man, arranged a
working holiday in Hollywood for Jimmie Rodgers, the nation’s leading hillbilly recording star. There,
working at a relaxed pace during the three weeks between June 30 and July 17, Rodgers recorded
fifteen selections at the newly completed Victor Hollywood Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard. Several
of these sides would become among his most famous recordings, including “Blue Yodel No. 8 (Mule
Skinner Blues),” “Pistol Packin’ Papa,” and “My Blue-Eyed Jane.” But the most celebrated recording
Rodgers made in Hollywood, what his biographer Nolan Porterfield...

CH 2 Making Country Modern THE LEGACY OF MODERN SOUNDS IN COUNTRY

AND WESTERN MUSIC (pp. 82-99)
Diane Pecknold

Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962) is the soul of paradox. First, there’s
the apparently obvious, though actually somewhat misleading, incongruity of a black man recording an
album in the musical style most closely associated with the aggressive performance of whiteness and
even with overt racism at one of the most racially charged moments of the twentieth century. Then
there’s the genre confusion arising from the fact that the Genius of Soul recorded the first million-selling
album of country songs, and the record-keeping conundrum that, in spite of its platinum status, the
album is not generally...

CH 3 Contested Origins ARNOLD SHULTZ AND THE MUSIC OF WESTERN

KENTUCKY (pp. 100-118)
Erika Brady

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10/09/2020 Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music on JSTOR

There’s a favorite story about Arnold Shultz (1886–1931), the African American instrumentalist whose
distinctive style impressed a generation of musicians white and black, in an area where virtuoso playing
was already commonplace. As John Hartford tells it:

In the fall of the year [Arnold] would take his guitar one morning, and simply walk out of the house and
into the woods and sit down on a stump and play. After a little spell of that he would pick up and move on
out into the forest where he would find a stump or somewhere else to sit and repeat...

CH 4 Fiddling with Race Relations in Rural Kentucky THE LIFE, TIMES, AND
CONTESTED IDENTITY OF FIDDLIN’ BILL LIVERS (pp. 119-140)
Jeffrey A. Keith

William “Bill” Livers (1911–88) was the last African American old-time fiddler from Kentucky. Throughout
his life, Livers worked as a tenant farmer in rural Owen County, located in Kentucky’s Outer Bluegrass
region. His employment as a tenant on a white-owned farm was common for rural African Americans
living in the Upper South during the early twentieth century, but his experiences as a renowned fiddler,
storyteller, humorist, and showman made his life unique in many ways. These talents enabled Livers to
transcend some of the social restrictions placed upon African Americans during the era of Jim Crow
segregation. Moreover the...

PART TWO New Antiphonies

CH 5 Why African Americans Put the Banjo Down (pp. 143-170)

Tony Thomas

Twenty-first-century African Americans are picking up the five-string banjo. The black banjo revival has
been led by the blues artists Taj Mahal, Otis Taylor, Corey Harris, and Alvin Youngblood Hart; by the
African musical percussionist Sule Greg Wilson; by black old-time string bands like the Ebony Hillbillies
and the Carolina Chocolate Drops; by the soul, jazz, and rhythm and blues bassists and guitarists turned
banjoists Al Caldwell and Don Vappie; and by scholar banjo players like Rex Ellis and myself. The 2005
Black Banjo Gathering at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, the 2005 release of
Recapturing the Banjo,...

CH 6 Old-Time Country Music in North Carolina and Virginia THE 1970S AND 1980S
(pp. 171-190)
Kip Lornell

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10/09/2020 Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music on JSTOR

On September 20, 2007, Joe Thompson, an African American fiddler from Mebane, North Carolina,
received a National Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the most prestigious
recognition for a folk artist in the United States. In addition to the public recognition, this honor came with
a hefty $20,000 cash award. The awards ceremony—held just outside of Washington, in suburban
Maryland—always includes performances by the award winners. During Joe’s fifteen minutes on stage
he was accompanied not by his banjo-playing cousin Odell Thompson (fig. 6.1), with whom he had
performed for decades until Odell’s death in...

CH 7 “The South’s Gonna Do It Again” CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF THE USE OF

“COUNTRY” MUSIC IN THE ALBUMS OF AL GREEN (pp. 191-203)
Michael Awkward

In a review that appeared in Rolling Stone, the renowned music critic Greil Marcus boldly asserts—
prophetically, it turns out—that Al Green’s 1978 The Belle Album, the self-produced, “completely
idiosyncratic,” religious-themed album that he released after his split with his mentor and longtime
producer, Willie Mitchell, might “someday” be considered his “best” LP.¹ For some readers, such a claim
must have seemed preposterous, given the fact that the smooth, subtly delivered albums from his early
1970s heyday such as Let’s Stay Together, I’m Still in Love with You, and Call Me are chock-full of his
quintessential hits and definitive...

CH 8 Dancing the Habanera Beats (in Country Music) THE CREOLE-COUNTRY TWO-
STEP IN ST. LUCIA AND ITS DIASPORA (pp. 204-233)
Jerry Wever

Shortly after I first arrived in St. Lucia, a former St. Lucian parliamentarian told me this popular joke
about how much St. Lucians love country music: “The French police—when they wanted to catch up with
the St. Lucians in Martinique who were illegal—you know what they do? Just put up a country dance—a
country music dance—and you just catch everybody who is illegal.”¹ Despite the fact that St. Lucians are
predominantly Afro-Caribbean, the joke was referring to American country music. This essay examines
the creolization of American country and western music in St. Lucian society and...

CH 9 Playing Chicken with the Train COWBOY TROY’S HICK-HOP AND THE
TRANSRACIAL COUNTRY WEST (pp. 234-262)
Adam Gussow

There was no necessary reason why Cowboy Troy’s country-rap single, “I Play Chicken with the Train,”
should have caused such an uproar among country music fans when it was released in the spring of
2005. The song itself is a sonic Rorschach test: not so singular a curiosity as many might think but still a

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10/09/2020 Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music on JSTOR

challenge to what passes for common knowledge in the music business. It is animated by a sound and a
lyric stance that might strike us, in a receptive mood, as uncanny—at once unfamiliar, a half-and-half
blend of two musical idioms that rarely find themselves...

CH 10 If Only They Could Read between the Lines ALICE RANDALL AND THE
INTEGRATION OF COUNTRY MUSIC (pp. 263-282)
Barbara Ching

“She’s got her God and she’s got good wine, Aretha Franklin and Patsy Cline,” sings Trisha Yearwood in
her top-selling 1994 single “XXXs and OOOs (an American Girl).” Cowritten by Matraca Berg, a Nashville
singer-songwriter, and Alice Randall, an African American Harvard graduate, it is one of the first songs
written by an African American woman to top the country charts. Randall takes special pride in the
“moment of integration” created by naming Franklin and Cline, and such juxtapositions energize nearly
all of her writing.¹ Unlike Donna Summer, with her wondrous number 1 hit, Dolly Parton’s 1980 “Starting
Over Again,”...

CH 11 You’re My Soul Song HOW SOUTHERN SOUL CHANGED COUNTRY MUSIC

(pp. 283-305)
Charles L. Hughes

In the summer of 1977, Buddy Killen, one of Nashville’s most powerful music men, wrote and produced
“Ain’t Gonna Bump No More (with No Big Fat Woman),” the final hit single for the legendary soul star Joe
Tex, whom Killen had produced and marketed for the entirety of Tex’s fifteen-year run as an R&B
hitmaker. Killen wrote “Ain’t Gonna Bump” after observing the growing popularity of the titular dance at
black nightclubs, venues that had been such fertile ground for previous Tex hits. In disco’s pulsating
rhythms, the cagey Killen saw a chance to return his semiretired client to the...

CH 12 What’s Syd Got to Do with It? KING RECORDS, HENRY GLOVER, AND THE
COMPLEX ACHIEVEMENT OF CROSSOVER (pp. 306-338)
David Sanjek

One of the many peculiarities about country music can be illustrated by the fact that however much its
practitioners, admirers, and merchandisers venerate its raw and unmediated characteristics, from the
start of the professional recording of the genre, there has been a whole lot of mediation going on. The
boundaries that have been erected in order to protect the repertoire from the encroachment of
heterogeneous musical practices and keep the material true to its roots have proven time and again to
be flimsy at best and, perhaps, ultimately misguided. Neither the makers nor the admirers of country
music, however, exist...

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10/09/2020 Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music on JSTOR

Bibliography (pp. 339-360)

Contributors (pp. 361-364)

Index (pp. 365-384)

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