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Color Us Country
Reviewing Black Country Music
DePaul Professor of English Francesca T. Royster enjoys Country Music. In her latest book, Black Country Music: Listening For Revolutions (Univ. of Texas Press 2022), she invites us to travel with her, exploring how old country becomes new; new country invokes and beckons the old; and how we can choose or not to hear the music in all its many coats.
Focusing each chapter on a specific artist — from Tina Turner to Darius Rucker, Beyonce to Valerie June, and Our Native Daughters to Lil Nas X — Royster shows us how style, sound, and vision can challenge and surprise us; how Black musicians and songwriters defy our notion of what Country Music is, and what we Country Music followers expect.
Along the journey, Professor Royster also narrates her own story — being wrenched from her Chicago home to accompany her parents to Nashville where her father had secured a teaching job at Fisk University. Can a move like this be both a lamentation and an opportunity? Here’s part of the problem Royster faced in finding a place in the New Nashville:
“But there was also a grander image of Nashville linked to an older, more refined, and definitely more plantation-flavored past, encouraged by the city’s proximity to the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s stately home. You could feel it in the richer neighborhoods…