The Blues and Black in Country

To be sure, country music and blues share the same roots. But whereas blues has been a musical tradition of African Americans, country music has largely maintained a white majority of artists. Ray Charles has said that country and blues are not only cousins, they're blood brothers. In 1962, Ray released Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music to critical acclaim. I found an old copy of Modern Sounds on vinyl in record shop and it's been a favorite of mine for years. The album is a collection of classic country songs covered in Ray's R&B soul styles. It has been considered to be a landmark album in American music, as Charles's integration of soul and country bended racial barriers in music, amid the height of the civil rights struggle. In the process of recording the album, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to exercise complete artistic control over his own recording career.

But cross-over blues musicians who are black are not entirely rare; country artists who are black are an anomaly.

African-American influences in country music can be documented at least as far back as the 1920s. Harmonica ace, DeFord Bailey, appeared on the Grand Ole Opry stage in 1926. Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music, learned guitar from black laborers he worked with. Country music has been called the white man's blues. And though many African-Americans have contributed their talents to country music, only Charley Pride has ever achieved true and lasting success. His career is even more remarkable when one considers that he entered country music in 1966 during a period of great racial unrest in this country.




Why was he successful when all others have failed?

"Charley Pride made it because Chet Atkins stood up for him," says Frankie Staton, director of the Black Country Music Association, "They didn't put his face on his album covers. They put out this album by a brother and nobody knew he was black. So, radio stations were playing his records before they discovered his ethnicity and, at that point, how do you get off the record? How do you pull it without labeling yourself a racist? So, it was kind of shrewd on RCA's part because once they're on it, they can't just jump back out."

The approach taken by major-label RCA in launching Charley Pride's career indicates that executives feared racism in their audience and media outlets. How many artists might have followed Charley's lead if only the record companies had given them or their audiences the benefit of the doubt?

See also:

Solomon Burke

Trini Triggs

Cleve Francis

From Where I Stand: The Black Experience in Country Music

"Twang Is Not a Color"