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3 books match the query 'African American country musicians'

cover of Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions

Black Country Music

Listening for Revolutions

Francesca T. Royster

University of Texas Press, 2022

2023 Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
2024 Woody Guthrie Book Award, International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch (IASPM-US)
2023 Certificate of Merit, ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, Association for Recorded Sound Collections​
2023 The Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award, American Musicological Society

How Black musicians have changed the country music landscape and brought light to Black creativity and innovation.

After a century of racist whitewashing, country music is finally reckoning with its relationship to Black people. In this timely work—the first book on Black country music by a Black writer—Francesca Royster uncovers the Black performers and fans, including herself, who are exploring the pleasures and possibilities of the genre.

Informed by queer theory and Black feminist scholarship, Royster’s book elucidates the roots of the current moment found in records like Tina Turner’s first solo album, Tina Turns the Country On! She reckons with Black “bros” Charley Pride and Darius Rucker, then chases ghosts into the future with Valerie June. Indeed, it is the imagination of Royster and her artists that make this music so exciting for a genre that has long been obsessed with the past. The futures conjured by June and others can be melancholy, and are not free of racism, but by centering Black folk Royster begins to understand what her daughter hears in the banjo music of Our Native Daughters and the trap beat of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” A Black person claiming country music may still feel a bit like a queer person coming out, but, collectively, Black artists and fans are changing what country music looks and sounds like—and who gets to love it.

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cover of Do My Heart Good: My Odyssey Through Country Music, Medicine, and History

Do My Heart Good

My Odyssey Through Country Music, Medicine, and History

Cleve Francis

University of Illinois Press, 2026

Born to a struggling family in Jim Crow–era Louisiana, Cleve Francis followed his love for music and passion for science into parallel careers as a singer-songwriter and cardiologist. One of the few Black artists to record for a major country music label, Francis had four Billboard hits as a Capitol Nashville/Liberty Records artist in the 1990s.

Francis’s account follows his “multidimensional life” through two milieus that rarely welcome Black men: country music and medicine. Merging rich storytelling with thoughtful insights, Francis shares the obstacles and triumphs he experienced through his lifelong love of performing music and writing songs, his abiding interest in science and medicine, and his determination to overcome racial barriers. He also offers an insider’s view of the 1990s country music world—the discipline of finding songs and recording in Nashville, the fight to get his music on the radio, and a whirlwind of shows and encounters with country music legends.

Engaging and inspiring, Do My Heart Good is the story of how resolve, hard work, and joy composed a uniquely American success story.
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cover of Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music

Hidden in the Mix

The African American Presence in Country Music

Diane Pecknold, ed.

Duke University Press, 2013

Country music's debt to African American music has long been recognized. Black musicians have helped to shape the styles of many of the most important performers in the country canon. The partnership between Lesley Riddle and A. P. Carter produced much of the Carter Family's repertoire; the street musician Tee Tot Payne taught a young Hank Williams Sr.; the guitar playing of Arnold Schultz influenced western Kentuckians, including Bill Monroe and Ike Everly. Yet attention to how these and other African Americans enriched the music played by whites has obscured the achievements of black country-music performers and the enjoyment of black listeners.

The contributors to Hidden in the Mix examine how country music became "white," how that fictive racialization has been maintained, and how African American artists and fans have used country music to elaborate their own identities. They investigate topics as diverse as the role of race in shaping old-time record catalogues, the transracial West of the hick-hopper Cowboy Troy, and the place of U.S. country music in postcolonial debates about race and resistance. Revealing how music mediates both the ideology and the lived experience of race, Hidden in the Mix challenges the status of country music as "the white man’s blues."

Contributors. Michael Awkward, Erika Brady, Barbara Ching, Adam Gussow, Patrick Huber, Charles Hughes, Jeffrey A. Keith, Kip Lornell, Diane Pecknold, David Sanjek, Tony Thomas, Jerry Wever

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