Speaker 1: Pushkin. Alice Randall is a country music songwriter, a New
Speaker 1: York Times bestselling author, and a newly minted memoirst. She
Speaker 1: calls her new book, My Black Country a love letter
Speaker 1: to black country music. In addition to her memoir, Alice
Speaker 1: has also released the album My Black Country The Songs
Speaker 1: of Alice Randall that includes her rendition of the song
Speaker 1: The Ballad of Sally Anne performed by Rhiannon Giddons. The song,
Speaker 1: which confronts the harsh realities of lynching and the American South,
Speaker 1: was nominated for a Grammy last year in the Best
Speaker 1: American Roots Performance category. On today's episode, Bruce Hettlam talks
Speaker 1: to Alice Randall about her lifelong love of country music
Speaker 1: and how growing up in Detroit during the height of
Speaker 1: Motown influenced her musical sensibilities. She also traces the countless
Speaker 1: contributions African Americans have made to country music and why
Speaker 1: she believes that history has been ignored. This is broken record,
Speaker 1: real musicians, real conversations. Here's Bruce Headlin's conversation with Alice Randall.
Speaker 2: So you have your book, My Black Country. We should
Speaker 2: mention it's far from your first book. You're also a novelist.
Speaker 2: You've done many other things. You had the tribute album
Speaker 2: My Black Country, which is the songs of Alice Randall
Speaker 2: and beautifully designed in that classical Nashville way. Now and
Speaker 2: you talk about all of this as your project. Are
Speaker 2: there other elements to this project? Is there more coming?
Speaker 3: Yes? There actually is more coming. There is my Black
Speaker 3: Country documentary that Reggie will be directing that will let
Speaker 3: us take a deeper dive into some of this material
Speaker 3: and a visual dive into it. And I've actually just
Speaker 3: begun work on my Black Country Country Cookbook, which will
Speaker 3: actually create taste monuments to some of the women who
Speaker 3: performed on the album and to some of the people
Speaker 3: that are make appearances in the book. In the memoir
Speaker 3: in history, but the memoir in History is very much
Speaker 3: focused on the past and up to the present, and
Speaker 3: my Black Country Cookbook is going to be focused on
Speaker 3: the present and into the future.
Speaker 2: When did this whole idea come to you that there's
Speaker 2: got to be some way to pull all these threads together?
Speaker 2: And we should mention the book is it's a history
Speaker 2: of Black country. It's a very personal history as well.
Speaker 2: It's your history, and it's also the music's history.
Speaker 3: Absolutely and succorded and unrecorded music history. The music of
Speaker 3: My Black Country begins in the seventeenth century and goes
Speaker 3: to the present, but it focuses on the recorded era
Speaker 3: that starts in nineteen twenty seven and the radio era
Speaker 3: with Deft Bailey on WSM radio, with Lil Harden playing
Speaker 3: on Blue Yodel number nine in nineteen thirty one, country's
Speaker 3: first million selling single. So that's the history part of
Speaker 3: the project. And then it takes up in nineteen eighty
Speaker 3: three with my forty year history, which is the memoir part.
Speaker 3: But the larger project occurred to me when I was
Speaker 3: a little girl in Motown. I was born in Detroit
Speaker 3: nineteen fifty nine, and my parents were not involved in
Speaker 3: the music business, but they were surrounded by people in
Speaker 3: the music business, particularly the Gordy family, particularly Marvin Gay,
Speaker 3: Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder. This very rich musical world swirled
Speaker 3: around me, and so did a lot of great music gossip.
Speaker 3: And so I had heard from early childhood's day that
Speaker 3: Lil Harden played on that big Sometimes they said Hillbilly hit,
Speaker 3: sometimes they said Pekko would hit, meaning Blue Yoga number
Speaker 3: nan and Lil Harden was still moving through that world
Speaker 3: when I was a little girl. So by the time
Speaker 3: fast forward, I'm at Harvard and I'm interested in country music,
Speaker 3: and I'm not hearing any of that, and I start
Speaker 3: to trace the oral history, track down the oral history
Speaker 3: I've been hearing in my Detroit childhood and interrogate it
Speaker 3: with the facts and the history that we were learning
Speaker 3: and was available, and see how much of it was true. Well,
Speaker 3: it turned out my daddy was right about who was
Speaker 3: playing on Jimmy Rogers and Orchestra, so that that was
Speaker 3: also Louis Armstrong and also a little hardened. And so
Speaker 3: I think the project began when I was a little
Speaker 3: girl in Detroit hearing counter narratives and continuing to hear
Speaker 3: counter narratives when I was in middle school, and that
Speaker 3: I loved the Johnny Cash Show, but my father had
Speaker 3: counter narratives to what was happening on the Johnny Cash
Speaker 3: Show too. But in Earnest twenty eighteen, I was diagnosed
Speaker 3: with breast cancer and it was a sort of serious
Speaker 3: of one, and I thought about if I did die soon,
Speaker 3: what were the things I wanted to do and the
Speaker 3: two projects I wanted to do was one write a
Speaker 3: history of the Motown music scene as I understood it
Speaker 3: that I thought should be a novel that was Black
Speaker 3: Bottom Saints. And the other was I wanted to write
Speaker 3: the history of black people in country music, everything that
Speaker 3: I've been collecting and learning and knowing for all that time.
Speaker 3: Then when Black Bottom Saints came out and that book
Speaker 3: did well, I was proud that the New York Times
Speaker 3: picked it as one of the best historical novels of
Speaker 3: the year. People wanted to hear my old records a lot,
Speaker 3: and they and even for the website, they wanted me
Speaker 3: to put up a Spotify playlist of these old recorded songs,
Speaker 3: many of which have been hit and I realized I
Speaker 3: could barely bear to listen to any of them. So
Speaker 3: it's a visceral, real hm event because particularly taken as
Speaker 3: a group, when you look at the one that starts
Speaker 3: off the album, small towns are smaller for girls. I
Speaker 3: was very proud to get that Holly Done cut. But
Speaker 3: when you listen to that cut, it doesn't sound like
Speaker 3: any black girl ever lived in a small town in
Speaker 3: the South, when small towns in the South were full
Speaker 3: of black girls. When you listen to girls ride horses too,
Speaker 3: my first Top ten sung by G. D. Rodman. You're
Speaker 3: thinking white girls in the West ride horses too, But
Speaker 3: I was actually thinking about black and brown women in
Speaker 3: the Western road horses and black and brown women who
Speaker 3: are being caught up in the drug trade that that
Speaker 3: song was about on the tax Mexican border. When Sister
Speaker 3: String sings that, you hear that and more significantly, even
Speaker 3: the Ballad of Sally Inn that had been on a
Speaker 3: Grammy nominated album that was an extraordinary album. Mark O'Connor
Speaker 3: is playing the fiddo, one of the great voices of
Speaker 3: new grass and blue grass. John Cowan is singing the lead.
Speaker 3: But when he sings the Ballad of Sally Anne, it's
Speaker 3: from the perspective of a white man who watched the
Speaker 3: body hung in the trees and couldn't at best do it,
Speaker 3: needing to stop it. When Rihannan sings the Ballad of
Speaker 3: Sally Anne, it's from the perspective of the woman whose
Speaker 3: husband has been lynched between his wedding and his reception.
Speaker 3: And it's the voice of love, transcending death, love eclipsing hate.
Speaker 3: It is a much more profound thing, and it's closer
Speaker 3: to the thing I was writing in the first place,
Speaker 3: because I was writing in my head for my own voice,
Speaker 3: though I did not want to be a singer.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm. Okay, you've just covered an enormous amount of territory.
Speaker 2: So you mentioned you were born in Detroit, but you
Speaker 2: were surrounded by country music.
Speaker 3: Yes, like many black people, I was born in nineteen
Speaker 3: fifty nine. Many black people from my era and before.
Speaker 3: Remember the Golden Age of black radio was yet to
Speaker 3: happen in nineteen fifty nine, that the vast majority of
Speaker 3: radio programming in America, in the American South was country programming,
Speaker 3: and so Ray Charles grew up listening to the opera
Speaker 3: on Saturday nights. He says that his mama would let
Speaker 3: him stay up late. That's the only time she'd let
Speaker 3: him stay up late to listen to it. But intimately,
Speaker 3: I have always said that my mother, my grandmother, and
Speaker 3: my aunt only had one thing in common, and it
Speaker 3: should have been loving me, but it was actually loving
Speaker 3: country music because my mother did not love me so
Speaker 3: but the music they loved was different. My grandmother would
Speaker 3: seemed to me on her lap the old songs, Will
Speaker 3: the circle be unbroken? My auntie would wear out the albums,
Speaker 3: particularly Ray Charles's Modern Sounds in Country and Western.
Speaker 2: Which came out I think a year after you were born.
Speaker 3: Yes, right after I was born, and my mother played
Speaker 3: the country radio. That was her secret pleasure. She would
Speaker 3: do it in the laundry room in the basement of
Speaker 3: the house, and she was playing Ernest Tubb and Hank
Speaker 3: Williams and all the honky tar kits of the radio.
Speaker 3: So I was getting country in live voice on my
Speaker 3: grandmother's lap, dancing around the living room with Mary Francis,
Speaker 3: my auntie, and snuck out to the radio with my mother.
Speaker 3: And then I eventually moved to Washington, d C. Where
Speaker 3: I got to hear a lot of live bluegrass, seldom
Speaker 3: seeing country gentlemen ROBERTA. Flack, who I actually think of
Speaker 3: as a country artist. So it live country would come
Speaker 3: into my life then. And I also fell in love
Speaker 3: with the Johnny Cash Show. I actually loved the Johnny
Speaker 3: Cash Show, and I watch got a lot of country
Speaker 3: in the television when I was in middle school.
Speaker 2: Do you remember was there one particular song, Was there
Speaker 2: one moment that made you think, maybe I want to
Speaker 2: do this?
Speaker 3: They were so oh many moments I mean I was
Speaker 3: literally a little girl. I think I was four or
Speaker 3: five in a Motown cherry tree when I wrote my
Speaker 3: first country song, Daddy, don't go in that var Please
Speaker 3: don't leave me alone in the car.
Speaker 2: But you need to tell the story of that song.
Speaker 3: Well, I was, I know, I was about three years
Speaker 3: old when the first event happened. It was a fall,
Speaker 3: dark was coming and my father had stopped in front
Speaker 3: of a door in his car and pointed to hands
Speaker 3: on the clock and said, when the hands got to
Speaker 3: this point, he'd be back. And I knew he would
Speaker 3: be because he was always back before the hands got
Speaker 3: to where he pointed the car. But this time it
Speaker 3: was cold and it was getting dark, and I was
Speaker 3: feeling a little scared. I did not want to be
Speaker 3: left alone in the car. And I looked at these
Speaker 3: letters hanging in the sky, write letters, and I said, Daddy,
Speaker 3: don't go in that baar, because that was the letters
Speaker 3: I saw. I couldn't read those letters. That's how I
Speaker 3: know it was three And he said, I've left you
Speaker 3: in fid of too many bar signs, neon signs. If
Speaker 3: you're spelling those letters out to me now. He still
Speaker 3: went in, but he took me with him, and so
Speaker 3: that was one when I learned the power of language
Speaker 3: and power of using my words. I got to go inside.
Speaker 3: He put me on a barstool. I got something with
Speaker 3: a Maraschino cherry in it. I remember that, And so
Speaker 3: that event happened to me. And fast forward about a
Speaker 3: year or two. It was not immediately, it was around
Speaker 3: the time I was starting kindergarten to around five. I
Speaker 3: used to spend four or five I used to spend
Speaker 3: a lot of time in the cherry tree on the
Speaker 3: side of our house we actually had. It was Detroit, Michigan,
Speaker 3: and there was four fruit trees, and then the highway,
Speaker 3: So the highway and the cars on that were like
Speaker 3: my river in Detroit. But I was actually sitting up
Speaker 3: in a fruit tree, a cherry tree. And of course
Speaker 3: they told me that birds poo pooed on the cherries
Speaker 3: in the tree, so I didn't get to eat any
Speaker 3: of those. So this is a Detroit childhood. I am
Speaker 3: sitting in a cherry tree, eating from a jar of
Speaker 3: bar Cherry's Marashino cherry, and I think thinking about that.
Speaker 3: In that first drink I started, you know, I was
Speaker 3: singing to the birds. John Lewis said he used to
Speaker 3: preach to the chickens. I never said I didn't have
Speaker 3: any chickens, and I didn't do any preaching, but I
Speaker 3: used to sing to the birds a very bad voice.
Speaker 3: I don't have a good voice, and usually first I
Speaker 3: was singing songs I learned from my grandmother, my mother,
Speaker 3: my aunt. But eventually I started making up my own
Speaker 3: little songs. And the first one I really remember making
Speaker 3: up was Daddy, don't go in that bar, Please don't
Speaker 3: leave me alone in the car. I'm wishing on a
Speaker 3: something star, Daddy don't go in that bar. And I
Speaker 3: love that song so much, the bones of it. I
Speaker 3: brought it with me to Nashville, and I brought it
Speaker 3: into several meetings, and I remember Archie Jordan, who wrote
Speaker 3: What a Difference You Made in My Life and some
Speaker 3: Grammy winning big songs. Archie said to me, that's the
Speaker 3: hit and I said that happened to me and he
Speaker 3: said I know, and I said, how could you know?
Speaker 3: He said, you can't invent that, but I love that
Speaker 3: event was so precious to me. I could never work
Speaker 3: on that song to make it a professional or co
Speaker 3: written song because I couldn't change anything about it. So
Speaker 3: I've known from almost my earliest hours music was so
Speaker 3: important to me. It's been a lifeline to me through
Speaker 3: my whole life. It was the soundtrack that filled up
Speaker 3: the silences around me in an unhappy home. I've always
Speaker 3: loved music and always wanted to write, write makeup songs.
Speaker 3: I love making up songs.
Speaker 2: And did you start playing piano or guitar when you
Speaker 2: were young as well?
Speaker 3: Weirdly I took some piano lessons. So I went to
Speaker 3: a school called the Ziggie Johnson School of the Theater,
Speaker 3: which I've written a lot about in Black Bottom Saints,
Speaker 3: And that's a real place. It was run by a
Speaker 3: man called Ziggie Johnson, who was, like you, an important journalist.
Speaker 3: He wrote for the Michigan Chronicle of the black newspaper
Speaker 3: there and it was a column largely about the national
Speaker 3: music industry from a Detroit perspective. And he had this
Speaker 3: dance school. So I'm at a dance school where, for example,
Speaker 3: the Supremes will come in and they actually perform on
Speaker 3: the yearly pageant, and Sammy Davis comes in. He's also
Speaker 3: showing us bootleg film a Barishnakov the man was very interesting.
Speaker 3: So I early knew one because I'm hearing not that
Speaker 3: much older than me. Stevie Wonder played the harmonica or
Speaker 3: make music that I am not a great musician. I
Speaker 3: am not a dancer, but I could write. I realized
Speaker 3: I did put words together in sort of interesting ways.
Speaker 3: But I knew so I did not play the piano
Speaker 3: long or the guitar long. And I will make a
Speaker 3: confession I've hardly ever confessed my own daughter, who now
Speaker 3: plays I think a very cool guitar and sings very interestingly.
Speaker 3: It will put out an album next year, and I
Speaker 3: love that. Justin Town's earl said, like he said, you're
Speaker 3: a guitar playing and worth the ship. I can do
Speaker 3: something with your voice that she actually does play some
Speaker 3: interesting guitar. But when she was a little girl, when
Speaker 3: she had been at it just a few years, and
Speaker 3: she went through all this great classical piano lessons, I said, Carol,
Speaker 3: if you were a great pianist for a guitar, we
Speaker 3: wouldn't know that. By now. This is like, Mommy, I
Speaker 3: am not the mother who could listen to this and
Speaker 3: say this is great. It wasn't originally great, but eventually
Speaker 3: she actually has become I think actually a very unusual,
Speaker 3: really great guitar player. And I love acclaiming she wasn't
Speaker 3: for a long time. But I never I cannot sing
Speaker 3: at all, and I cannot play the guitar, and I
Speaker 3: have very good ears. I have. I can tell when
Speaker 3: things are slightly off. I can recognize talent at the
Speaker 3: very beginning. But I have great ears and do not
Speaker 3: play any instrument or sing or anything.
Speaker 2: Okay, this surprises me because your daughter clearly was working
Speaker 2: at it, and you were like, oh, you don't know
Speaker 2: she is going to get there. But you worked at
Speaker 2: being a lyricist. You write in the book about listening
Speaker 2: to the radio. I don't know when you had the typewriter,
Speaker 2: but you would type up the lyrics you would hear
Speaker 2: and then analyze them.
Speaker 3: Well at first what I do at night. So we
Speaker 3: have to back in the days. This is the early eighties.
Speaker 3: So I have worked so hard at being a lyricist.
Speaker 3: So in the early eighties, when I moved here in
Speaker 3: eighty three, I would let the radio run all night,
Speaker 3: and if on the country radio, and if I heard
Speaker 3: a song that I hadn't heard, I would wake up
Speaker 3: and write down so I started with a pad in
Speaker 3: my bed, you know, and of course radio format when
Speaker 3: things are moving up there on every hour, every couple hours,
Speaker 3: literally because there was no Google back then everything. I
Speaker 3: was literally catching the song all through the night, and
Speaker 3: then I would type it up in the daytime in
Speaker 3: this little portable typewriter, but it would be a pad
Speaker 3: in the bed with me during the night, that is how.
Speaker 3: And my goal first was you've heard and written down
Speaker 3: the lyrics for every single song on the top one
Speaker 3: hundred country chart. So once you got through all hundred,
Speaker 3: it wasn't as hard as it seems, because back in
Speaker 3: those days a song might take two three months to
Speaker 3: rise from the bottom of the chart to the top.
Speaker 3: So once it was on and I had it typed out,
Speaker 3: I had that one, and so I only was having
Speaker 3: to deal with that new songs, And there weren't really
Speaker 3: that many new songs that broke, but I truly would
Speaker 3: work on the new songs that way, and then I
Speaker 3: would go sometimes to the Country Music Hall of Fame
Speaker 3: they're archives a museum, and I would look up all
Speaker 3: songs and write them out, and then I studied those
Speaker 3: songs like I studied Jane Austen and Shakespeare at Harvard.
Speaker 3: I remember coming across Red Bandana, which is an amazing song,
Speaker 3: that red bandana tied around your abbn hair. You look
Speaker 3: like you ought to be somebody's wife somewhere. You ain't
Speaker 3: never gonna be no Bobby McGee, but you're trying to.
Speaker 3: What I learned from that is that country songs can
Speaker 3: actually reference characters in other songs, like that Bobby McGee,
Speaker 3: the Christofferson song being referenced in this other song. I
Speaker 3: found weird, wonderful old songs like Don't Forget the Coffee,
Speaker 3: Billy Joe, mamanise her medicine, She's got that real bad cough.
Speaker 3: I love that portrait of the depression. So I took
Speaker 3: it very seriously both the craft, but I also took
Speaker 3: it very seriously of finding the songs that truly utterly
Speaker 3: spoke to me, that I thought were as important as
Speaker 3: any poetry ever. And also I was interested from those
Speaker 3: very beginnings to find the evidences of what I recognize
Speaker 3: as black influence and black presence in these songs, and
Speaker 3: fascinated by whether it be banjo riff, whether it be
Speaker 3: evangelical Christianity, whether it be a sense of sacred place.
Speaker 3: All these things that I knew were part of what
Speaker 3: Africans brought to the American experience. I was tracing that down,
Speaker 3: but I was also just tracing down proud waves of
Speaker 3: human dignity in the face of poverty that claims, and
Speaker 3: I also chased down other wonderful portraits. I was on
Speaker 3: a panel last night, and I didn't get to straighten
Speaker 3: out this one thing. Somebody's saying, Oh, all these idealized
Speaker 3: usions of mothers in country songs. I'm thinking, what I
Speaker 3: love Bobby gentry Fancy and a cockroach rope pulled across
Speaker 3: the tip of her high heeled shoe, and she said,
Speaker 3: just be good to the gentleman, Fancy, and they'll be
Speaker 3: good to you. This is a mother. Your daddy's the
Speaker 3: baby's real sake, Your daddy's run off, and we're about
Speaker 3: to starve to death. And this mother is basically not
Speaker 3: basically she is pouring her daughter out. She takes the
Speaker 3: last money she has and buys her a tight fitting
Speaker 3: dress and sends her off. That is just one of many.
Speaker 3: Daddy Love Mama, Mama loved Men, mamposite in the graveyard,
Speaker 3: Daddy's in the pen, Country tells some very hard truths
Speaker 3: about mothers. One of the songs I love the most.
Speaker 3: It's the opposite of slut shaming. It's so of its time.
Speaker 3: It is done by many people, by Whitey Schaeffer is
Speaker 3: Hickory Holler, tramp Merle Haggard did it, Oci Smith did it.
Speaker 3: And it's about a mother who horse herself out in
Speaker 3: the very cabin with her children. And at the end
Speaker 3: of it, it moves to the graveside and there's a
Speaker 3: big bouquet of thirteen roses and a card that says,
Speaker 3: to the greatest mom on Earth in the history of
Speaker 3: American literature, there is nothing that feminist woman ford about.
Speaker 3: You know. That's the opposite of sluck shaining, that this
Speaker 3: woman is a dynamic sex worker doing her thing and
Speaker 3: her kids are getting it.
Speaker 2: And this is country music, and it's.
Speaker 3: Country music, and it's country music that traveled into other genres.
Speaker 3: It was country. It had multiple country cuts, and it
Speaker 3: also had R and B cuts. It's an amazing song.
Speaker 3: So this whole journey that Beyonce is making right now,
Speaker 3: it's not the first time. Ray Charles is what came
Speaker 3: before it. This song that I've just told you about
Speaker 3: it so much conversation going back and forth. I always
Speaker 3: loved this song about Midnight Train to Georgia. We all
Speaker 3: know that song, Gladys Knight. I knew Gladys Knight in Detroit,
Speaker 3: but I met Jim Weatherley, who wrote that song in Nashville.
Speaker 3: And the two things Jim Weathery said, I think one
Speaker 3: was there are no minor leagues of country songwriting, and
Speaker 3: the other was Midnight Train to Georgia started off as
Speaker 3: Midnight Playing to Houston and it was about Farah Fawcett
Speaker 3: and Lee Natures and when she was telling him, I'm
Speaker 3: going to have to leave Charlie's Angels because I can't
Speaker 3: keep it together with this man. And then a black
Speaker 3: group was recording it and they changed it. They said,
Speaker 3: can we change the name? But it shows you these
Speaker 3: this deep that's a real collaboration that black singers of
Speaker 3: this song collaborated. And I will just say that the
Speaker 3: hook Midnight Train to Georgia is a far stronger hook
Speaker 3: than Midnight Playing. Yes, and those collaborators even I don't
Speaker 3: know what their name are now because I'm not sure
Speaker 3: if it was the original artist that recorded it or
Speaker 3: somebody working with them. A producer that was working with them,
Speaker 3: and poor Jim Webber's dad, so he can't tell us.
Speaker 3: But the point being, there have always been migrations when
Speaker 3: you're talking about important stories. Because one of the things
Speaker 3: that's and important songs that I love about country music
Speaker 3: as well as what I love about soul food and
Speaker 3: Southern food, they're both evidences of how African all Americans
Speaker 3: are and how black and white and indigenous Southerners co
Speaker 3: created a world and multiple art forms, one of these
Speaker 3: art forms being country music, one of them being what
Speaker 3: we call soul food. But these are co created forms
Speaker 3: with English, Irish and Scottish plus African plus Evangelical Christian roots.
Speaker 1: We'll be back with more from Alice Randall after a
Speaker 1: quick break.
Speaker 2: You make a very sharp observation about country music the
Speaker 2: way it's understood, and it's largely understood. The narrative that
Speaker 2: your book argues against is largely understood as a white
Speaker 2: form of music.
Speaker 3: A lot of people think is white music made by
Speaker 3: white people for white.
Speaker 2: People, right, And you say that kind of country music,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the kind of tenets of that
Speaker 2: music is that the past is always better than the present.
Speaker 3: I think there are four big themes in Country. One
Speaker 3: is life is hard, God is real, the road, liquor
Speaker 3: and family are compensations. And the past is better than
Speaker 3: the present. For mouch of White Country, the past is
Speaker 3: better than the country, or some of it is a
Speaker 3: long foreign lost dick see. For the black people, the
Speaker 3: past that's better than the present. And country is alonged
Speaker 3: for and lost to Africa before colonization, and I think
Speaker 3: and both there's a shared sometimes since that the past
Speaker 3: that's it's a longed for and lost childhood before adult misery.
Speaker 3: But there never has been any country music that doesn't
Speaker 3: have Black influences. Literally it does not exist. And so
Speaker 3: it is just there hasn't been the recognition that unfortunately
Speaker 3: we talk about when we're looking at the history of
Speaker 3: this country, stolen land, what we stole from indigenous people,
Speaker 3: stolen bodies and lives Africans brought and chains here. But
Speaker 3: there's also stolen creativity that you take people's creations, the melodies.
Speaker 3: No the case of Leslie Riddle, I was very excited
Speaker 3: to just be able to be at Focal Alliance this
Speaker 3: year and they gave me a Lifetime Achievement award, but
Speaker 3: even more exciting to me than that though. That was
Speaker 3: very exciting was I was able to accept Leslie Riddle's
Speaker 3: award posthumously and speak to his brilliance. And this is
Speaker 3: a man we've always acknowledged that top maybe Carter and
Speaker 3: the Carter family a lot of songs and some guitar techniques,
Speaker 3: but it gets left out is long before any knowledge
Speaker 3: we have that maybel Carter ever played one bit of
Speaker 3: guitar or ever sung a song. Leslie Riddle was in
Speaker 3: a cement factory accident and lost his leg. Then he
Speaker 3: was so depressed and we're out by this. He had
Speaker 3: a gun accident that may have been a suicide attempt
Speaker 3: in which he lost two fingers, and he began to
Speaker 3: play with three fingers, and the way he played is
Speaker 3: a whole lot like Carter family scratch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which everybody it's the basis of fingerpicking exactly.
Speaker 3: But the weird thing about this, what is the likelihood
Speaker 3: that these two sets of people in the extended same
Speaker 3: neighborhood both developed independently the same thing, or did the
Speaker 3: Carters see how Leslie Leslie Riddle played the guitar and
Speaker 3: be in artistic communion with that which I don't have
Speaker 3: any problem with that. What I have problem with is
Speaker 3: erasing Leslie Riddle from the story because we can document
Speaker 3: the only way he could have been playing the guitar
Speaker 3: was with those three fingers, right, and we know that
Speaker 3: because those are the only fingers he had.
Speaker 2: So I want to get back to your story and
Speaker 2: then get to some of these figures, particularly DeFord Bailey,
Speaker 2: who we've talked about before on this on our show,
Speaker 2: Lil Harden, who that we haven't So you left Harvard,
Speaker 2: you went to Nashville to become a songwriter.
Speaker 3: And form a publishing company.
Speaker 2: Yes, you formed a publishing company, but first you got
Speaker 2: a letter from people who looked over your stuff and
Speaker 2: it said.
Speaker 3: What I had no talent whatsoever. Ronnie Gant the head
Speaker 3: din of a Cuff Rows. So grew up in Detroit,
Speaker 3: that moved to Washington, DC, as I said, and went
Speaker 3: to Harvard, where I started listening to loutcountry music. And
Speaker 3: my college roommate freshman year. Roommate's mother was a woman.
Speaker 3: Since we're talking about race, I identify her as a
Speaker 3: white woman who went to Yale Law School and she
Speaker 3: was the managing director of ASCAP by the time I
Speaker 3: was about to graduate and so she was able to
Speaker 3: set up some meetings and she got me with some
Speaker 3: of the biggest writers and publishers when I graduated from
Speaker 3: Harvard AB a year later that were working in Nashville
Speaker 3: at the time, and one of them was Ronnie Gant,
Speaker 3: And of course I wanted to go there because acaf
Speaker 3: Ros was Hank Williams publisher that they had done so
Speaker 3: many amazing things. And I got there and Ronnie just
Speaker 3: put his feet up on the desk and he first
Speaker 3: told me that I should just go back to wherever
Speaker 3: it was I came from. And then he told me
Speaker 3: that maybe I was at such a low level of
Speaker 3: development that he could not judge my material because people
Speaker 3: didn't sent him people that were this undeveloped, and he
Speaker 3: was going to share it with some young writers of his.
Speaker 3: Then he sent me, He said, I shared it with
Speaker 3: my writers and they agree with me, you have no
Speaker 3: talent whatsoever. And that, of course is parb me. I
Speaker 3: was moving to Nashville, Tennessee and show them wrong.
Speaker 2: Okay, but but where does that come from?
Speaker 1: That?
Speaker 2: Because most people if that happened, they would be devastated.
Speaker 2: You'd just been to Harvard, I'm sure Wall Street was
Speaker 2: calling whatever else you wanted in life. Instead, it was like,
Speaker 2: I have no talent whatsoever. I'm going to go there
Speaker 2: and show them.
Speaker 3: I was born in Detroit City the same year as
Speaker 3: Motown Records, and at that time when by five years later,
Speaker 3: Motown is the largest black company in America. So one
Speaker 3: thing is I do understand. And I'm a child who
Speaker 3: sat on the lap and realized how important music was
Speaker 3: to me. So Wall Street, my best friend did go
Speaker 3: to Wall Street. My friends were all going to investment
Speaker 3: banks and to law firms, and I did consider that.
Speaker 3: But I really love people and I love life, and
Speaker 3: I knew how I wanted to impact world was through
Speaker 3: songs because I had seen the power of Motown. It
Speaker 3: wasn't the kind of music I wanted to do, but
Speaker 3: it had created a new narrative of what black life was,
Speaker 3: a sort of softer, sweet thing I wanted to take
Speaker 3: use to preach to the unconverted part of it. Actually
Speaker 3: no one asked these questions, but you did so. And
Speaker 3: I wrote my thesis on mothers and Daughters in the
Speaker 3: novels of Jane Austen, and I did ultimately do well
Speaker 3: on that thesis. But I realized that there are probably
Speaker 3: six people in the world who could understand it and
Speaker 3: four people that could benefit from it. You had to
Speaker 3: know so much about Jane Austen, so much about structuralist criticism,
Speaker 3: and so much about feminist criticism to be able to
Speaker 3: evaluate what I did. And I wanted to create and
Speaker 3: write with words and affect lots of people. So country
Speaker 3: was the place I felt, you know, it was a
Speaker 3: Reagan era. I felt that I could enter in and
Speaker 3: that artistic voices are all political voices. I didn't want
Speaker 3: to write New York or poetry, and I didn't want
Speaker 3: to do what's now called Americana. I wanted to go
Speaker 3: on the charts in the radio and actually change what
Speaker 3: might be called hardened hearts and minds. I wanted people
Speaker 3: who were thinking about environmental justice to hear Glenn Campbell
Speaker 3: saying who's minding the garden and maybe start wondering. Oh,
Speaker 3: Bible told me I'm supposed to be concerned with Eden.
Speaker 3: Maybe that means I should actually be supporting Earth Day
Speaker 3: so one because I thought the work was urgent. I
Speaker 3: actually think I was a person who knew I've left
Speaker 3: out that hard part of my story. I told you
Speaker 3: I had a mother who didn't love me. She wasn't
Speaker 3: a good mother, and in high school I was raped,
Speaker 3: you know, within the family circle. I had a very
Speaker 3: hard experience and music helps sustain me from that. So
Speaker 3: I also had human lived experience that music will crawl
Speaker 3: in to people's pain, to isolation and sustain them. And
Speaker 3: I wanted to be one of the people creating the
Speaker 3: kind of music that could do that. Emily Dickinson did
Speaker 3: that for me, John Prime did that for me. Was
Speaker 3: that a tharp did that for me? And I wanted
Speaker 3: to be a person who's done that. And one of
Speaker 3: the most exciting things about this book tour is when
Speaker 3: I was in Indianapolis, I went to the Madam C. J.
Speaker 3: Walker Theater and gave a talk and Layla mccallall played.
Speaker 3: But afterwards, a young woman came up to me, black
Speaker 3: woman from Michigan, and she said, my brother was killed
Speaker 3: in a shooting accident, and I was so unhappy. She
Speaker 3: felt like the world has coming apart. And she said,
Speaker 3: the first time I smiled again after that murder was
Speaker 3: when I heard x's and o's on the radio, or
Speaker 3: people who told me that their mother and they had
Speaker 3: cleaned their houses to exes and o's. So many times
Speaker 3: someone has told me how some one of these songs
Speaker 3: sustained them. That's so it took me a long time
Speaker 3: to find out it really happened. Then it really worked.
Speaker 3: You send them out there, there's some things that you
Speaker 3: hear early. I worked up Ariba video of the Year
Speaker 3: is their Life out There, which I actually put on
Speaker 3: a lot of my own trauma has an abusive mother.
Speaker 3: I actually put Maya Angelo's I Know Why the Cage
Speaker 3: Bird Sings is right in that you can see it.
Speaker 3: Reba's reading it to her child. That's a book about
Speaker 3: a child that God abused. So I'm signing it. I
Speaker 3: walk through that video in case people don't believe it.
Speaker 3: But we know that video it also starts off with
Speaker 3: sexual harassment. That the waitress played by Riba is trying
Speaker 3: to get her tip and the man tries to touch
Speaker 3: or caress our hand when she does it. We know
Speaker 3: that the Department of Education said that that video sent
Speaker 3: thousands of women, mainly I think lower middle class white
Speaker 3: women back to college or to college to get their education.
Speaker 3: They saw Riba do it, they thought they could do it.
Speaker 3: That's the kind of work I wanted to do. I
Speaker 3: want to send women back to colleges with a country
Speaker 3: music video. Becklas Night was my first song that got
Speaker 3: recorded by the Forrester Sisters, who to be one of
Speaker 3: the most successful female groups in country that sort of
Speaker 3: get forgotten about. It's about a young unweb mother. It's
Speaker 3: one of the songs I did bring with me from
Speaker 3: Washington to Nashville. And I wrote it with that guy
Speaker 3: who told me I had near tilant whatsoever. And it
Speaker 3: was the B side of a number one single back
Speaker 3: when there were still numbers one single.
Speaker 2: But X's and O's was your first number one, my first.
Speaker 3: It's about only in two weeks at number one, and
Speaker 3: it wasn't my first top ten, which which I'm very
Speaker 3: proud to say. You know, I got songs on the
Speaker 3: charts in the eighties and nineties, the hots at tens
Speaker 3: in the twenties.
Speaker 2: But I do want you there's a because you were
Speaker 2: working on that song for a while it wasn't working.
Speaker 2: You tell a great story about it.
Speaker 3: I would love to year the x'es and o's I had.
Speaker 3: I realized a lot of my songs were weird and
Speaker 3: that they need to be introduced to the world in
Speaker 3: special ways. In one of the ways I thought we
Speaker 3: could introduce them is by film or television. So actually
Speaker 3: worked to write a series for CBS that we present
Speaker 3: it as a movie of the week, blacktoor pilot, but
Speaker 3: of the ex Wives of Country Stars and the George
Speaker 3: Jones star renamed him George S. Randall, after my father.
Speaker 3: But the show was focused on the women, the X
Speaker 3: wives of their lives, And I got it in my
Speaker 3: contract that I got to write the theme song because
Speaker 3: I knew that theme songs were really those are very
Speaker 3: profitable and that would be a great way to launch
Speaker 3: a song. So when I got that opportunity, I knew
Speaker 3: I want to share it with Mtresa Burg, who's one
Speaker 3: of my favorite writers. When I was driving down to
Speaker 3: Nashville in the eighties, I was listening to her first
Speaker 3: number one. I think fake in love only temporary lovers.
Speaker 3: So Matrasa and I get together to write and we
Speaker 3: write a couple of songs and they're just not good.
Speaker 3: And I remember calling my publisher it was a Sunday night,
Speaker 3: I think, and saying I can't do it. We're going
Speaker 3: to use ring a fire or something. I'm not going
Speaker 3: to pretend something's good, that's not good. That theme song
Speaker 3: is just going to have to be a country classic.
Speaker 3: And I woke up the next morning. I was feeling
Speaker 3: so depressed. You know, you got to picture your mama
Speaker 3: and heals some prolls. You're trying to make it, and
Speaker 3: your daddy's it's not working. And then my phone rings,
Speaker 3: and it's my child's school that I had forgotten to
Speaker 3: put something in her backpack she absolutely had to have
Speaker 3: that morning, I'm thinking, you are get into the shower
Speaker 3: and that line comes with you got to picture your
Speaker 3: mama and heals some prolls, you're trying to make it,
Speaker 3: and your daddy's world that in it. I thought, that's
Speaker 3: my song. That is my song, and I raised to
Speaker 3: my daughter's school. First, I raced over to Matreesa's house.
Speaker 3: This is I don't think we had cell phones. We
Speaker 3: certainly didn't use. I begged on her door, and when
Speaker 3: she was opened it, I start telling her that first
Speaker 3: lyric on the porch, and then she quickly is telling
Speaker 3: me the second verse. But that first there phone rings,
Speaker 3: baby cries, TV, die Guru lies, good morning, honey. It's
Speaker 3: just what actually had happened, except for it wasn't a
Speaker 3: baby crying, It was a baby's school calling. We had
Speaker 3: to change it around a little bit. And Matrey said
Speaker 3: was newly married to Jeff Hannah and they had to
Speaker 3: this beautiful house I'd driven over to. He was with
Speaker 3: the nitty gritty dirt band, and so they were more
Speaker 3: in this beautiful house that they're renovating, and how do
Speaker 3: you keep love and romance going into the deep of it?
Speaker 3: So hers was fixed to sink mowed the law and
Speaker 3: really isn't all that hard if you could pay. Mama
Speaker 3: needs romance and a live in Maine. They were in
Speaker 3: that couple thing, and so that's what the second verse
Speaker 3: was about. I was in the single mom thing. That's
Speaker 3: what the first verse was. It became this universal anthem
Speaker 3: for all the women trying to keep the balance up
Speaker 3: between love and money, which is pretty much all the
Speaker 3: women living in any capitalist society anywhere. So I thirty
Speaker 3: years later, it's still being played, and I now have
Speaker 3: generations of students at Vanderbilt who are raised on it.
Speaker 3: I'm probably about to have grandchildren. But we wrote that
Speaker 3: song from our heart and experience instead of calculating anything,
Speaker 3: and those exes and O's that was all about Carol
Speaker 3: signs her letters with x'es and o's, she's got these
Speaker 3: big ribbons in her hair. And we were thinking about
Speaker 3: consciously about Aretha Franklin and Patsy Clin, who make an
Speaker 3: appearance in the song, because we were thinking about our
Speaker 3: life as women writers. And Aretha wrote only a little bit,
Speaker 3: but her sister Carolyn was a great songwriter, and Patsy Klin,
Speaker 3: people may or may not know it, was a great
Speaker 3: letter writer. So we love connecting women's high culture to
Speaker 3: low culture. That women can write songs and women can
Speaker 3: write letters, and all of this informs the music we hear.
Speaker 3: And so we love putting Aretha Franklin and Patsy Clin
Speaker 3: in the same song. We love putting Aretha Franklin first.
Speaker 3: Aretha Franklin loved that even more than we did, and
Speaker 3: it was just something that was ripped literally from our
Speaker 3: life experiences. And I think it didn't take us forty
Speaker 3: some minutes after all those days of writing not writing it.
Speaker 3: It took us forty minutes to write that song, and
Speaker 3: it is endured.
Speaker 2: It's also one of those songs that if you hear
Speaker 2: it on the radio, you're not paying attention. It just
Speaker 2: sounds like a great boppy song about this little girl
Speaker 2: growing up. But then when you when you listen, it's
Speaker 2: about this almost fracture between this very feminine childhood and
Speaker 2: now she has to succeed in this whole other difficult world.
Speaker 2: There's an amazing generational shift.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and it's about and money, anxiety if you get
Speaker 3: picked all of this anxiety. And it's twelve. Because the
Speaker 3: song was savage, I will still call it. I'll call
Speaker 3: Bob Orman. When it first came out in terms of reviews,
Speaker 3: and you know this whole thing, you know that there's
Speaker 3: just saying it's like a radio hit, that it's just
Speaker 3: this superficial thing. Well, two weeks at number one. From
Speaker 3: the very beginning, women listen to it and they heard
Speaker 3: beneath the surface, and that was part of the black
Speaker 3: part of it. It has code switching. It seems like
Speaker 3: one thing on one level, like yeah, sing along and
Speaker 3: sing along, that's how the Ballad of Aally Hand sounds
Speaker 3: and image one. But this is a deep and I
Speaker 3: like that because I like making things accessible. That's what
Speaker 3: I like about Cowboy Carter. Actually, that song is to
Speaker 3: me is really about life, is it a game. Texas
Speaker 3: Hold Him is a card game. Texas Hold Him is
Speaker 3: about life, is not a game. It's about redemption, It's
Speaker 3: about real love. It's about a whole lot of things.
Speaker 3: I always thought, I even made the case for Achy
Speaker 3: Breaky Heart. It's about love and death. That's the American sublan.
Speaker 3: All the great songs are about something deeply. We're used
Speaker 3: to those songs that were their poetry and their complexity
Speaker 3: on their surface. But I am the beneficiary of a
Speaker 3: My daughter Caroline is an amazing poet, and she is
Speaker 3: an amazing poet, and she sings the last cut on
Speaker 3: our album, and she deconstructs and reconstructs this word poem
Speaker 3: homage to X's and O's that is X's and O's,
Speaker 3: like if Picasso got a hold of it and fragmented it,
Speaker 3: but showing its greater unities and greater significance. She said
Speaker 3: raised me and how she paid for it, and she
Speaker 3: just excates it all out there. And so I feel
Speaker 3: that she provided all the footnotes and structure for those
Speaker 3: people who did not get what Matraca and I did.
Speaker 3: That my daughter, Tracea's goddaughter, she got the last word
Speaker 3: in a sung literary criticism. She also went to Harvard
Speaker 3: and studied English. We got a song literary defense of her.
Speaker 2: And we should mention Trisha Yearwood because she sang was
Speaker 2: that her first album.
Speaker 3: No, it was her second album, and it was funny.
Speaker 3: She was almost in a little bit of a lull
Speaker 3: when she came. So the rest of that story, which
Speaker 3: I did not tell you, is everybody wanted to sing
Speaker 3: that song because it was going to be the theme song,
Speaker 3: and everyone could feel it felt like a hit. I
Speaker 3: will not nickname to the people who didn't get to
Speaker 3: do it, except the person who did get to get
Speaker 3: to it. Originally was not Tricia. It was why Nona.
Speaker 3: And so we go in the studio with Whyona. We
Speaker 3: got all the A players. It is like Willie Weeks.
Speaker 3: It is just fire. She does an extraordinary job. She
Speaker 3: just has to come back up to the tiniest little
Speaker 3: overdubs what the network needs. And we come back to
Speaker 3: the studio and we wait for Wyona, and we wait
Speaker 3: for Whyona and we wait for Winona, and why Noa
Speaker 3: does not show up. It's down to about one hour
Speaker 3: in the day. She's come and come and doesn't come.
Speaker 3: That's another story. But I knew where Tricia was in
Speaker 3: the studios recording her second album with Guardfunds A small town.
Speaker 3: I barely drop. I literally run into the room where
Speaker 3: they are recording, and they weren't physically recording, they were
Speaker 3: talking at that moment, but into the actual room and
Speaker 3: I just said, I remember I think the first words
Speaker 3: I said to her. We know each other, back to
Speaker 3: our first marriages. This is my last chance. Whyona is
Speaker 3: not shown up? We've got those tracks. Everyone knew the
Speaker 3: song was out there. All we have time to do
Speaker 3: is pull why Nona's voice off and put your voice on?
Speaker 3: Because it was so late in the day, Please come,
Speaker 3: And she said yes. That generous, extraordinary woman left her
Speaker 3: own stassion. It still makes me cry, left everything there
Speaker 3: to come and sing on that record in not good circumstances.
Speaker 2: I was going to ask you what it was like
Speaker 2: to be working as hard as you were in Nashville
Speaker 2: and suddenly you have a number one. But it seems
Speaker 2: that even before it was a number one, everybody wanted
Speaker 2: a piece of that. Did everybody want your next song?
Speaker 3: Then you know I ended up quitting not long after
Speaker 3: X's and O's.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: Part of it was I wanted to get to the
Speaker 3: number one spot, and once I achieved it, I was
Speaker 3: looking on for a new challenge, and part of it was,
Speaker 3: you know, they call it the music business for a reason.
Speaker 3: I was never just in it for the business. You
Speaker 3: make money when you connect to audiences, and I always
Speaker 3: wanted to to larger audiences. I was trying to do
Speaker 3: something esoteric for me, but I was very committed to
Speaker 3: the art, and so it did feel, like I've said,
Speaker 3: having a number one song sort of puts a target
Speaker 3: on your back. Everybody wants a piece of you, but
Speaker 3: not for the good reasons. Before this, people wanted to
Speaker 3: write with me because they knew my ideas were so
Speaker 3: original and my work ethic was so strong, and that
Speaker 3: I had really great chaste in music that I knew
Speaker 3: so many songs all along the way because I knew
Speaker 3: so much, I knew the country canon of recorded country music,
Speaker 3: and I had what other people recognize, this good taste
Speaker 3: about songs, what song is really amazing. There was a
Speaker 3: decent amount of respect and engagement. My big breakthy was
Speaker 3: actually getting those songs and that the title song and
Speaker 3: the thing call Love. Because all the big songwriters that
Speaker 3: competed for that and I just went out and got it.
Speaker 3: I didn't know the man who was doing it. But
Speaker 3: it's also interesting how much wasn't noticed until this album
Speaker 3: and Fiona Prine until a few years ago. People I
Speaker 3: got these songs recorded, but people never noticed that I
Speaker 3: had had multiple chart hits. People would assume that someone
Speaker 3: like you know, Steve Girl has more cuts than me. Well,
Speaker 3: I have more cuts in terms of if you look
Speaker 3: at things he didn't record himself in country. I actually
Speaker 3: have had quite a significant career in country. I don't
Speaker 3: think anyone noticed until a few years ago, because I
Speaker 3: think they insisted on looking at each individual song. Many
Speaker 3: people as a one off, just anomaly, but in fact
Speaker 3: it was a big pattern, and it was with known
Speaker 3: artists and non non artists. Some of these things girls
Speaker 3: ride Horses too made Judy Robin. It wasn't the other
Speaker 3: way around. A lot of times. The one these really
Speaker 3: one weird songs was elevating the artists. Then you get
Speaker 3: someone like a Glen Campbell, who's heard hundreds of songs.
Speaker 3: One of the greatest thousands of songs. One of the
Speaker 3: greatest compliments I've ever had is it in the studio
Speaker 3: he kneeled down to my little Girl and said that
Speaker 3: this one is Galveston Strong, that this song Galveston was
Speaker 3: such an important anti war song, and at this time
Speaker 3: in his life he was interested in Christianity is a
Speaker 3: positive social influence, and he understood that singing about environmental justice.
Speaker 3: He came in the studio and there was no entourage,
Speaker 3: just musicians and him and me and my little girl,
Speaker 3: and he sang that song so beautifully, the vocal on it.
Speaker 1: After one last break, we'll be back with the rest
Speaker 1: of Bruce Hedlm's conversation with Alice Randall.
Speaker 2: I'm going to ask you for a little Nashville gossip.
Speaker 2: Who were the writers you worked with, because you worked
Speaker 2: with so many that really knocked you out when you
Speaker 2: sat down to.
Speaker 1: Work with them.
Speaker 3: Well, one would be steebral I love Steve is an
Speaker 3: amazing songwriter, a syllable and sound, so that was very important.
Speaker 3: Another would be Bobby Braddock. I'm very thrilled that you
Speaker 3: know he wrote the IVO RC and he stopped loving
Speaker 3: Her Today.
Speaker 2: And which was one of your favorites, he stopped loving
Speaker 2: It's one of my favorites.
Speaker 3: He stopped loving her day. Maybe my arguably my all
Speaker 3: time favorite country song, So Bobby pat Alger, who's very
Speaker 3: subtle melody person. You know, listening to the sweetness of
Speaker 3: his guitar when you sit down to write with Pat
Speaker 3: Alger was a wonderful thing. Obviously, matreesa some people that
Speaker 3: people don't think about anymore that much. Kevin Welch. I
Speaker 3: did some really art songs with Kevin. They're on a
Speaker 3: project called Mother Dixie. Mark Sanders I wrote most of
Speaker 3: my biggest songs with. We were almost like siblings.
Speaker 2: And what was writing like with? Would you throw lines
Speaker 2: back and forth? How did it work?
Speaker 3: So we're very titled driven typically and subject driven, like
Speaker 3: if you'd think girls ride horses too or reckless night
Speaker 3: but young unweed mothers and religious hypocrisy. Small towns are
Speaker 3: smaller for girls. So one we would identify a subject
Speaker 3: we wanted to write about, or often I would bring
Speaker 3: in subjects and titles, and then we would Sometimes the
Speaker 3: other person would have another piece of a lun or
Speaker 3: something from that very beginning, but usually with subjects and titles,
Speaker 3: and then they would suggest some different a groove for it,
Speaker 3: a melody for it. We would start that way. Sometimes
Speaker 3: when we got the music all straightened out Mark would
Speaker 3: be able to write I have my own weird way
Speaker 3: I wanted it was unstressed, stressed. I needed to know
Speaker 3: what kinds of words I needed, and so he would
Speaker 3: write scan it out for me sometimes, or I could
Speaker 3: just do it sitting with the person and they sing
Speaker 3: when I suggest a song and we can see whether
Speaker 3: it works. But Mark is also a great lyricist, so
Speaker 3: he was definitely adding lots of words. I developed a
Speaker 3: very collaborative way of writing songs. I think the exception
Speaker 3: of one song that's not on the album, a song
Speaker 3: called My Hometown Boy, which was Marie Osmond, I don't
Speaker 3: feel that's the only song that my name is. I
Speaker 3: don't feel that I contributed a lot to And as
Speaker 3: you can even just see across who I've written with,
Speaker 3: there are themes like this girl thing is a big theme,
Speaker 3: certain kinds of gothic situations, death, murder, certain kinds of injustices.
Speaker 3: I have a whole I call a cowboy suite. My
Speaker 3: cowboy songs sound a lot whether I'm writing with Rodney
Speaker 3: Foster or Kevin because they are my cowboy songs. So
Speaker 3: I think that one of the things that is interesting
Speaker 3: about this project and this album is because I co
Speaker 3: write a lot and I do co write, and because
Speaker 3: I don't perform, it's been harder for some times for
Speaker 3: people to see or question are you an artist? Are
Speaker 3: you a songwriter? Ar you as opposed to some kind
Speaker 3: of artisan a lot of times as opposed to thinking
Speaker 3: of it as being art and is self expressive? They
Speaker 3: think if you're co writing, it's craft, it's not about
Speaker 3: self expression. But in fact, all of my work has
Speaker 3: been very much I would I've never said this before
Speaker 3: out loud, but it's a kin to cycle analysis. It's
Speaker 3: my story that their biss is very much facilitating it,
Speaker 3: and maybe they are un being the there bis for
Speaker 3: them so to some degree, and they're also telling their story.
Speaker 3: That's what the greatest thing. But it was wonderful about
Speaker 3: this album that I don't even think is so much
Speaker 3: a tribute album as my Grandma Moses Immersion as an
Speaker 3: artist album that you can see what the art, the
Speaker 3: themes of Alice Randall's songwriting body is.
Speaker 2: We should talk a bit about the album. There's other
Speaker 2: things I want to get to. But the sort of
Speaker 2: marquee names here are like Rhanne Giddens, who does an
Speaker 2: amazing job on the Ballot of Sally Anne. You mentioned
Speaker 2: I think in your biography that you were really influenced
Speaker 2: by Joe as his ballad book, and that just this
Speaker 2: song takes me sort of back to that.
Speaker 3: I listen to that album over, and I mean hundreds
Speaker 3: of talks. I mean I used to know every song
Speaker 3: on it. So I think when I internalize that it's
Speaker 3: part of my artistic DNA. But it even the Ballad
Speaker 3: of Sallyent references that directly. Sallyanne is also an old
Speaker 3: folk and black fiddle tune. But the Ballad of sally Ane,
Speaker 3: as far as we know, was never put together that
Speaker 3: phrase and that and as I've noticed that those songs
Speaker 3: are a lot about death, A mother dear I cannot tell,
Speaker 3: but go dig my grave, both long and wide and deep,
Speaker 3: and marvel head, you know what my head had and feet,
Speaker 3: and tell the world I died of love. They found
Speaker 3: her hanging on vi a rope like it has. Death
Speaker 3: has all kinds of young women's trauma in it, a
Speaker 3: lot of around love and domestic violences of different kinds, betrayals,
Speaker 3: intimate betrayals of different kinds. So I think those songs
Speaker 3: really went into my artistic DNA, and really they prepared
Speaker 3: me to be a country songwriter because I had also
Speaker 3: all this black music wealth in me and I had
Speaker 3: my Detroit Lutheran and Baptist Sunday School, so I had
Speaker 3: the Celtic ballad forms, I had the African influences, and
Speaker 3: I had the evangelical Christianity, So I was set up
Speaker 3: to be a country sunger.
Speaker 2: Another song, another version I thought was so impressive was
Speaker 2: I'll Cry for Yours.
Speaker 3: I love the Miko Marx that we did a video
Speaker 3: of that one. I think that's just heartbreakingly beautiful, and
Speaker 3: so I hope that one still becomes a theme song
Speaker 3: for this time.
Speaker 2: A beautiful brass arrangement. And it's really unexpected that.
Speaker 3: Ebany Smith, she's brilliant. No one expected those horns on
Speaker 3: the ballat of Sally Ann either and they're married or no.
Speaker 3: To me, they've reminded us that lynching happened into the
Speaker 3: age of as and those horns. That's also our homage
Speaker 3: to Louis Armstrong playing on Blue Yodel number nine. Their
Speaker 3: horns on Blue Yoda number nine.
Speaker 2: You know, we've avoided talking about it, so we have
Speaker 2: to talk about it. Most people don't know that Jimmy Rodgers,
Speaker 2: who's supposed to be the father of country music, played
Speaker 2: a version of Blue Yodel Number nine with Lil Hard
Speaker 2: and Louis Armstrong.
Speaker 3: The one that was the million seller. The right, yes, yes,
Speaker 3: and they only say on the label and orchestra, but
Speaker 3: the orchestra.
Speaker 1: Was that right?
Speaker 2: They didn't list. But this is nineteen and.
Speaker 3: In fact it was fought until recently, as late as
Speaker 3: when I worked on the ken Burns documentary Country Music,
Speaker 3: and ken Burns has been supportive of my book, but
Speaker 3: other scholars they just debated and fought with me. It
Speaker 3: took so much work to get Louis Armstrong mentioned as
Speaker 3: part of the jew and Me Rogers story. Ultimately, even
Speaker 3: though I was able to prove it and prove it
Speaker 3: to everyone's satisfaction, sheet I didn't find it. But the
Speaker 3: sheet music has been found and it's been authenticated by
Speaker 3: Jimmy Rogers scholars that then Jimmy Rogers' own hand that
Speaker 3: he wrote after the session, and Louie's wife lil played piano.
Speaker 3: But up until the time it was that Literally, it's
Speaker 3: only been the twenty first century we've been able to
Speaker 3: prove that, and people denied it. But what's wild is
Speaker 3: Lil Harden was alive when I was alive. She knew
Speaker 3: whether or not she played on Blue YOLDA number nine,
Speaker 3: and so it required not believing her. But what's wild
Speaker 3: is Roy Acuff knew it too. Everybody knew it because
Speaker 3: it wasn't a secret at the time. That's why they
Speaker 3: had to go out. They recorded in LA. Did you
Speaker 3: think Jimmy Rogers didn't say, I just put on this
Speaker 3: big session with Louis Armstrong and Lil Harden Armstrong. These
Speaker 3: are two of the top jazz players of that day.
Speaker 3: But it was hidden. So that's a little bit sad.
Speaker 2: Louis Armstrong is one of those characters who is so accessible,
Speaker 2: including to white Americans, Like why with the fact that
Speaker 2: he performed with Louis Armstrong be an issue because then
Speaker 2: it then became less authentic. What was the what was
Speaker 2: the thinking? I'm asking you to think about the other
Speaker 2: side here. I realized, that's unfair.
Speaker 3: Well, we don't first, I never think I know what
Speaker 3: other people are thinking. And to wonder what Jimmy Rogers
Speaker 3: was thinking in nineteen thirty one, and couldn't it could
Speaker 3: have been not his idea. He could have just wanted
Speaker 3: to play with Louis a Lil and it had to
Speaker 3: do with the people who are marketing the record. That part.
Speaker 3: There have been arguments made that part of the way
Speaker 3: that country music was marketed was that part of the
Speaker 3: value you got, like when you buy armez scarf, you're
Speaker 3: buying into an image of yourself of luxury or this
Speaker 3: or that. Does this not just the silk scarf from
Speaker 3: the pattern, that part of what was being marketed with
Speaker 3: country music was quote unquote white identity, and that that's
Speaker 3: part of what people were buying when they got it,
Speaker 3: and so that's what they wanted to see. So you
Speaker 3: see in the early thirties they are examples of that
Speaker 3: were actually integrated bands, but when they made pictures of them,
Speaker 3: they would take out the black member and put in
Speaker 3: a white person, sometimes a manager or some other person
Speaker 3: as if that was the band. And we know for
Speaker 3: sure because he talked about it. When Charlie Pridde was
Speaker 3: originally being broken in the industry, they did not send
Speaker 3: out any pictures of him or indicate to radio when
Speaker 3: they were getting him established that he was black. They
Speaker 3: hid that because they thought it would make it more
Speaker 3: difficult to sell. And we know that that had happened
Speaker 3: with earlier artists that people have thought were white that
Speaker 3: we now know for sure were black, and that their
Speaker 3: images were replaced at an earlier time.
Speaker 2: That was not always the case with country music. You
Speaker 2: talk a lot about DeFord Bailey, who was the most
Speaker 2: popular star on the on the Grand Old Operay when
Speaker 2: it started. Was there a particular moment when it went
Speaker 2: from being this art form that had a lot of
Speaker 2: different contributors to being this representative of white culture.
Speaker 3: I think the same way that African influences have been
Speaker 3: in country music since its birth, the erasure of Black
Speaker 3: contributions to country music have been there since the beginning
Speaker 3: of it. It's the same. I think it comes out
Speaker 3: of the idea of you owning people's bodies, and you're
Speaker 3: owning their labor, and you're owning their creation. So I
Speaker 3: think that there's a very complicated history that it's only
Speaker 3: right now that we're seeing open collaboration and accrediting of
Speaker 3: what black contributions a country have been. Because even it's
Speaker 3: recently as the Lil nas X thing, one of the
Speaker 3: quote unquote controversies with this first song Old Town wrote
Speaker 3: with people you would see all over the internet versions
Speaker 3: of this. Our culture isn't your costume. But what they
Speaker 3: didn't know is that at least twenty percent of cowboys
Speaker 3: were black and brown. Some people estimate as highest thirty percent.
Speaker 3: These people actually don't know this because it's a raised
Speaker 3: history that when we look at another long term contribution
Speaker 3: to country music is cowboy songs and the whole wealth
Speaker 3: of them. And we know that Thorpe I write about this,
Speaker 3: the guy first in the teens who collected the first
Speaker 3: cowboy songs and put them in a book. Well, people
Speaker 3: don't realize that the first cowboy camp he went to,
Speaker 3: because it's been a race from the story, was a
Speaker 3: black cowboy camp. That a lot of songs come from
Speaker 3: black cowboys. I don't even think people are lying or
Speaker 3: repressing that. I think most people just don't even know
Speaker 3: that any and so it's a distorted story of the
Speaker 3: past that distorts our potential for the future.
Speaker 2: Or the other you know, the other great source of
Speaker 2: country music, Appalachia. People don't And I think you might
Speaker 2: mention this in your book, just huge number of African
Speaker 2: American foundations in coal miners.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, A large, A large amount of co owners
Speaker 3: are black. Bill Withers, who I love, who I think
Speaker 3: of as a country artist. Grandma's hands, wonderful country songs.
Speaker 3: He kissed. His grandfather was a coal miner. They're black,
Speaker 3: So Appalachian music is influenced by the presence of black people.
Speaker 3: M H.
Speaker 2: And you'd always have some performers would release. The Pointer
Speaker 2: Sisters released a country album. I think one a.
Speaker 3: Great a huge single fairy Tale that Elvis Presley would
Speaker 3: cover and they that was a big single and that
Speaker 3: family winning duel. We've always said Ray Charles, the Pointer Sisters.
Speaker 2: Tina Turner did one.
Speaker 3: Jana Turner had amazing Tina Turns a country on. But
Speaker 3: one of my other memories is my nineteen sixty four
Speaker 3: five with the Supremes played the Copa Cabana for the
Speaker 3: first time and I was there and they sang a
Speaker 3: country song. They sang Queen of the House and that
Speaker 3: song became country song of the Year, and they were
Speaker 3: part of putting that song in that place.
Speaker 2: And Al Green did did great versions of He did
Speaker 2: blunsome I could cry, He did.
Speaker 1: A bunch of way.
Speaker 3: He had a whole country album about that. I love.
Speaker 3: I love the Grand Tour by George Jones. That it
Speaker 3: equally interesting is aaron Nevills.
Speaker 2: I have to confess I like Grand Tour a little
Speaker 2: bit better than he stopped loving Her today.
Speaker 3: Well waite until you hear this other one. Grand touris
Speaker 3: are just a sad song about the divorce and that.
Speaker 3: But he' stop living today. To me, in terms of criticism,
Speaker 3: is about what I call dynamic stasis, stasis frozenness. In
Speaker 3: Western literature and Western art, one of the things we
Speaker 3: look for is the hero evolving, changing, becoming more. But
Speaker 3: in real life we know most people don't change. People
Speaker 3: get very set. What I love in country there is
Speaker 3: a dynamic that I have labeled dynamic stasis. We're a
Speaker 3: frozen character. The narrator moves around them like that line
Speaker 3: he stopped loving her today. Soon they'll they'll hang a
Speaker 3: reef upon his door. He stop loving her day. The
Speaker 3: change is death. When you see the price of dynamic
Speaker 3: stasis for being frozen, that you may die, you may
Speaker 3: have a life that mounts to nothing. It actually can
Speaker 3: provoke you to change. That's why I love he stopped
Speaker 3: loving her Today, because it's about what the penalty of
Speaker 3: not moving on is and that could be from a
Speaker 3: success or a failure in work life, Like we all
Speaker 3: need to be reminded that we do not want to
Speaker 3: be the person who's going back and saying he had
Speaker 3: underlined and read every single I love you like all
Speaker 3: these people's death, scrolling and commenting on other people's lives
Speaker 3: instead of doing something that's the equivalent of he had
Speaker 3: underlined and read every single I love you.
Speaker 2: Okay, I love that. I love that theory. I think
Speaker 2: we're going to end on that because that is so.
Speaker 3: Great dynamic stasis. I'm a stritter, but I'm a critic
Speaker 3: of the form, and I love this form when it's
Speaker 3: at its best, and it's an Afro Celtic form. I
Speaker 3: love great journalists like you that give us a chance
Speaker 3: to put the footouts on and complete the story.
Speaker 2: Well, we're going to talk the next time you do
Speaker 2: something then, because this has been just fabulous.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much. I appreciate you.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Alice Randall for walking us through her professional
Speaker 1: history and her many projects around black country music. You
Speaker 1: can hear her new album My Black Country The Songs
Speaker 1: of Alice Randall, as well as other songs she's written
Speaker 1: on a playlist at broken record podcast dot com. You
Speaker 1: can subscribe to our YouTube page at YouTube dot com
Speaker 1: slash broken Record Podcast to watch all of our video interviews,
Speaker 1: and be sure to follow us on Instagram at the
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Speaker 1: broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose,
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Speaker 1: Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.