Disc 4: Reclaiming The Heritage

“Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man?” appeared on Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Leaving Eden album (2012), which followed the Grammy-winning Genuine Negro Jig (2010). Cousin Emmy, one of country music’s pioneering solo women, wrote the song and released the original recording with her band, Her Kinfolk, in 1946. It became a bluegrass standard when the Osborne Brothers recorded the song a decade later.

Rhiannon Giddens

Singer, songwriter, and musician Rhiannon Giddens (born 1977) is a solo artist, the founder of the quartet Our Native Daughters, and a founding member of the Grammy-winning stringband Carolina Chocolate Drops. She also contributed an essay to this boxed set (“A Reckoning,” p. 4). More information about Giddens can be found in “Notes on the Contributors.”

“At the Purchaser’s Option” is the opening track of Giddens’s second solo album, Freedom Highway (2017). Giddens drew inspiration for the song, co-written with Joey Ryan (of folk duo the Milk Carton Kids), from an 1830s advertisement for an enslaved young woman who was the mother of an infant. It later became part of the score for the ballet Lucy Negro Redux, composed by Giddens and Francesco Turrisi.

Darius Rucker

As lead singer of Hootie & the Blowfish, one of rock music’s most popular bands of the 1990s, Darius Rucker (born 1966) often cited country music as a songwriting influence, and he and his bandmates visited Nashville to write songs. Rucker’s first solo album, Back to Then (2002), celebrated his R&B roots, but his 2008 LP, Learn to Live, released by Capitol Records Nashville, balanced contemporary and traditional country influences. Learn to Live was certified platinum just under one year after its release and helped the Charleston, South Carolina, native establish himself as the most successful Black artist in country music since Charley Pride.

Rucker, a Grand Ole Opry member since 2012, has released six solo country albums through 2022. “Don’t Think I Don’t Think About It,” his debut country single, was the first of three #1 songs from Learn to Live and the first of eleven total Top Ten singles through 2022. Of that tally, the biggest success is “Wagon Wheel,” a Grammy-winning, #1 hit originally recorded by the stringband Old Crow Medicine Show with a chorus written decades earlier by Bob Dylan. In October 2022, Rucker’s version of the song became only the fourth country single to date to be certified diamond by the RIAA, for sales and streams of more than ten million.

Valerie June

The music of Valerie June (born 1982) melds the vintage with the modern and the spiritual with the earthly. Her self-described “organic moonshine roots music”—a mix of Appalachian folk, traditional gospel, Memphis soul and blues, and rural country and bluegrass—reflects her roots in Humboldt, Tennessee.

June self-released solo albums in 2006 and 2008, as well as an EP with the stringband Old Crow Medicine Show, Valerie June and the Tennessee Express, in 2010. “Workin’ Woman Blues,” written by June, is the first track on her 2013 album, Pushin’ Against a Stone. Dan Auerbach, guitarist and vocalist for the blues-rock band the Black Keys, co-produced the album, which features Memphis-born R&B icon Booker T. Jones on two songs, one of which Jones and June co-wrote.

Our Native Daughters

Our Native Daughters unites Rhiannon Giddens and her former Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate Leyla McCalla with fellow multi-instrumentalists Amythyst Kiah and Allison Russell. Giddens originally assembled the quartet in 2018 to record an album of traditional folk songs and spirituals that would encourage listeners to reconsider what they know about the origins of those songs and styles of music.

Instead, those historical songs served as inspiration for new songs the women wrote for their 2019 album, Songs of Our Native Daughters. The songs—including the Grammy-nominated “Black Myself,” written by Kiah—focus on the often-marginalized viewpoints and untold stories of Black women. Fittingly, the album’s name is a reference to James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, a 1955 collection of essays focused on the topic of race.

Kiah re-recorded “Black Myself,” in a more blues-influenced style, for her 2021 solo album, Wary + Strange.

Mavis Staples

As mentioned in the notes for Disc 2, Mavis Staples (born 1939) got her start with her family’s vocal group, the Staple Singers. Beginning in 1969, she pursued a solo career in tandem with her work with her father and siblings. She is a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Blues Hall of Fame, and Gospel Music Hall of Fame member, as well as a Kennedy Center honoree and a National Heritage Fellowship recipient.

Staples has inspired many singers, who revere the distinctive vocalist and civil rights activist for not only her earthy vocal style but also her commitment to bettering the world around her. Her list of collaborators is diverse, ranging from Bob Dylan and Patty Griffin to Dolly Parton and Margo Price to the hip-hop duo Run the Jewels and the rock band Gorillaz. While Staples has never worked specifically in country music, her work has influenced the genre, and she originally recorded her version of “Touch My Heart” for a 2004 tribute album to Johnny Paycheck, who co-wrote the song with Aubrey Mayhew. Ray Price first recorded the song in 1966. A-Team steel guitarist Lloyd Green, who played on Price’s version of “Touch My Heart,” backs Staples on her rendition as well.

Tony Jackson

Before he released his self-titled debut album in 2017, at age forty, Tony Jackson (born 1977) served in the Marines and worked as an IT executive at a major bank. He also performed in two local bands in the Richmond, Virginia, area. It was his cover of George Jones’s classic song “The Grand Tour,” recorded after Jones’s death in 2013 and shared online, that propelled Jackson’s music from a casual pastime to a full-time career.

Jackson’s version of “The Grand Tour” impressed Donna Meade Dean-Stevens—widow of Jimmy Dean and a country recording artist in the 1980s—who invited Jackson to play the live revival of the long-running Old Dominion Barn Dance radio show and encouraged him to visit Nashville to further his career. Jackson recorded the album Tony Jackson at RCA Studio A, with Paul Franklin, Vince Gill, Mickey Raphael, and other session players who were well suited to his traditional sound. In addition to his Jones cover, Jackson’s first album includes “I Didn’t Wake Up This Morning,” written by Bill Anderson, Mo Pitney, and Bobby Tomberlin.

In 2018, Jackson competed on the USA Network show Real Country. He continues to tour and released his latest album, I’ve Got Songs to Sing, in 2023.

Rissi Palmer

Rissi Palmer (born 1981), originally from the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area, was offered her first publishing deal and recording contract in her late teens by the songwriting and production duo of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, known for their work with pop and R&B artists. Palmer turned them down. She knew country music was where she belonged, though it took her several more years to land a country record deal, during which time she sang jingles, competed on Star Search, and was featured in a CMT documentary about Black artists in country music. “Country Girl,” from Palmer’s self-titled debut album (2007), is the first of three singles Palmer placed on the Billboard country chart in 2007 and 2008, making her the first Black woman to appear on that chart since 1987.

Palmer moved away from Nashville in 2010, but throughout the next decade she kept working in music, releasing a children’s album, a Christmas single, and her 2019 album, Revival, independently. Palmer began hosting her Color Me Country Apple Music radio show in 2020 and became a special correspondent for CMT one year later. She uses both positions to advocate for and promote historically marginalized country music artists, and she established the Color Me Country Artist Grant Fund to support performers of color.

Miko Marks

Miko Marks (born 1972) grew up in Flint, Michigan. While her single mother worked the third shift at a local automobile factory, she left young Miko in the care of her grandmother, who was originally from Mississippi. From her mother, who often attended rallies and protests, Marks learned the importance of fighting for a cause. She earned a political science degree from Grambling State University, a historically Black university. She intended to go to law school and become a criminal defense attorney, but after putting those plans on hold to get married and have a baby, Marks decided to pursue a career in country music.

Marks moved her family to Nashville in the early 2000s and released her debut album, Freeway Bound, in 2005. “It Feels Good,” is the title track of her second album, from 2007. Discrimination Marks encountered within the country music industry prompted her to leave Nashville for the San Francisco Bay area before the end of the decade, and although she continued to perform occasionally, she took a job as a legal secretary and focused on her family.

Marks revived her career after a dream she had in 2019 prompted her to reunite with two of her former bandmates, Justin Phipps and Steve Wyreman, and work together on new music. Marks released both an album, Our Country, and an EP of covers, Race Records, in 2021, followed by another album, Feel Like Going Home, the next year.

Kane Brown

Born in 1993, Kane Brown endured a tumultuous childhood in northwest Georgia and Chattanooga, Tennessee: his father was incarcerated, and Brown endured homelessness and frequent moves with his single mother, was abused by a stepfather, and watched friends land in jail and die of overdoses and gun violence. After a successful high school talent show performance, he started sharing videos online of himself covering songs by George Strait, Randy Travis, and other traditional-country baritones..

Brown cultivated a large enough fan base to crowdfund a 2014 EP and push an independent 2015 single to the top of the iTunes country and all-genre charts. He signed a recording contract with Sony Music Nashville and released his debut album in 2016. “What Ifs,” a 2017 single with former high school choirmate Lauren Alaina, was Brown’s first #1 single. “Heaven,” from the deluxe version of Kane Brown (2017), was his first solo country radio #1. It has been certified seven-times platinum, for sales and streams of more than seven million. Brown released this acoustic version of the song in 2018.

Brown released “Worldwide Beautiful” on his 2020 EP, Mixtape, Vol. 1, and donated $100,000 in royalties from the song to the Boys & Girls Club of America. The song’s music video, which features Brown’s first child, Kingsley, won the Academy of Country Music’s 2020 Video of the Year award.

Yola

Powerhouse vocalist Yola (born Yolanda Quartey in 1983 and originally known professionally as Yola Carter) is a first-generation Briton from Portishead, a working-class suburb of Bristol, England. She was raised by a single mother, after Yola’s father abandoned the family when Yola was a toddler. She has been performing since she was a teenager and, after enrolling in college in London, dropped out to sing for a living.

Early on, Yola worked as a frontwoman-for-hire for electronic dance music groups, including Bugz in the Attic, Massive Attack, and Phantom Limb. In 2012, she started learning guitar and focusing on a solo career. She released her first EP in 2016.

Well-received performances at AmericanaFest in Nashville in 2016 led to a recording contract with Black Keys member Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound. “Ride Out in the Country” comes from Yola’s debut album with the label, Walk Through Fire (2019).

In 2022, Yola portrayed Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis films. She is a frequent guest member of the Highwomen, the group of Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, and Amanda Shires.

Allison Russell

Montreal native Allison Russell had been performing for more than two decades by the time she released her first solo album, Outside Child, in 2021. After Russell’s early forays in a series of groups including Po’ Girl with Be Good Tanyas member Trish Klein, Russell collaborated with her partner, JT Nero, to release three albums as Birds of Chicago in the 2010s. She continues to perform as Our Native Daughters with Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, and Leyla McCalla.

On Outside Child—the 2022 Album of the Year at both the Americana Honors & Awards and Canada’s Juno Awards—Russell discusses childhood traumas. In “Nightflyer” specifically, she confronts her past and finds the power within herself to overcome it.

Wendy Moten

Wendy Moten (born 1964) was a new name to many viewers of the twenty-first season of the televised singing competition The Voice, but the Memphis, Tennessee, native had been singing professionally for more than three decades by 2021, when she competed and placed second on the show. Moten grew up singing at her pastor father’s church, in her high school choir, at a Memphis theme park, and in local musical theater productions. But she did not consider a professional singing career until she toured as a backup singer for a friend who was opening for Debbie Gibson in 1990.

Moten signed a recording contract with EMI and released three R&B albums with the label in the early to mid-1990s. Her 1992 single “Come in Out of the Rain” was successful in the United States, the U.K., and Japan. After a few years, however, Moten paused her solo career to tour with Latin pop star Julio Iglesias—a partnership that would last fifteen years. Her work as a backing vocalist for Iglesias and others led Moten to move to Nashville. She toured with Faith Hill and Tim McGraw for more than a decade beginning in 2005, with Martina McBride for two years in the mid-2010s, and with Vince Gill beginning in 2016. She is also a member of the Time Jumpers, a long-running western swing band with a rotating lineup of studio musicians and recording artists, including Gill.

Moten recorded “Til I Get It Right,” originally sung by Tammy Wynette, for a 2020 EP of classic country covers, I’ve Got You Covered, produced by Gill.

Cowboy Troy

Born Troy Coleman III in Victoria, Texas, in 1970, Cowboy Troy spent part of his childhood in Fort Worth, moved to Dallas as a teenager, and attended college in Austin. Though he initially had ambitions to be a rapper, Troy listened to a wide variety of music, and he saw similarities between the subject matter of country and hip-hop songs and noticed rap-style cadences in some older country songs with spoken lyrics.

Although Troy did not coin the term “hick-hop,” which grew popular in the 2000s to describe—sometimes disparagingly—country songs influenced by hip-hop, he was one of the first to use the term to identify his music, including on his self-released first EP, Hick-Hop Hysteria (2001). Around the same time, he became involved with the Nashville collective MuzikMafia, headed by “Big Kenny” Alphin and John Rich, the country duo Big & Rich, whom Troy met in 1993.

A cameo appearance on Big & Rich’s song “Rollin’ (The Ballad of Big & Rich),” from their multi-platinum-certified 2004 debut album, gained Troy wider attention. He signed with Warner Bros. Nashville and released two albums with the label, in 2005 and 2007. “I Play Chicken with the Train,” Troy’s debut single, combines his rapping with energetic fiddle, amped-up electric guitar, and a chorus sung by Big & Rich.

Blanco Brown

Blanco Brown, born Bennie Amey III in 1985, grew up in public housing in Atlanta’s Bankhead neighborhood but spent summers with relatives in rural Butler, Georgia, where he recalls being introduced to country music. Brown started performing country music in his early twenties and began incorporating elements of trap music, a style of hip-hop that originated in Atlanta, a few years later. Rather than calling his sound “hick-hop,” Brown prefers the term “trailer trap,” in a nod to his hometown.

Brown signed with Wheelhouse Records in 2018 and released “The Git Up,” his debut single, the following year. The song, from Brown’s first album, Honeysuckle & Lightning Bugs, fuses a country-meets-hip-hop beat with spoken lyrics that lead listeners through a line dance. It spent twelve weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Through 2022, the song was certified four times platinum, for sales and streams of more than four million.

Brown has also worked in pop and hip-hop: as a songwriter for rapper 2 Chainz, a producer for R&B singer Monica, and a background singer for pop artist Fergie, among others.

Breland

Daniel Gerard Breland (born 1995) grew up in Burlington Township, New Jersey, in a home often filled with gospel music. He worked with the rapper Chinx while in college and, following a move to Atlanta after college, had songs cut by R&B artist Trey Songz and rapper YK Osiris. His breakout country single, “My Truck,” was re-recorded as a collaboration with Sam Hunt. Breland has also collaborated with Dierks Bentley and Keith Urban.

Breland describes his sound—a fusion of country, gospel, R&B, and trap music—as “cross country.” His song “Cross Country,” the title track of his 2020 album, features Mickey Guyton, with both artists sharing their paths to country music in the verses. Breland and Guyton co-wrote the song with Will Gittins and Lizzo and Usher collaborators Sean Small and Sam Sumser.

Brittney Spencer

Brittney Spencer (born 1988), from Baltimore, Maryland, started singing in church as a toddler, and she sang classical music and learned the basics of guitar and piano at school. After a church friend introduced her to the music of the Dixie Chicks (now the Chicks), Spencer became a frequent CMT viewer, wrote her first songs, and dreamed of moving to Nashville, making that dream a reality in 2013.

Once in Tennessee, Spencer studied music business and public relations at Middle Tennessee State University and worked as a vocal coach for underprivileged kids while driving into Nashville for songwriting sessions and to busk and play songwriter rounds. She sang backup for Carrie Underwood at awards shows and for soft rock artist Christopher Cross on tour.

Shortly before the release of her 2020 EP, Compassion, Spencer connected with the group the Highwomen after sharing a cover of their song “Crowded Table” on Twitter. The attention led to opportunities to perform with the band and a shout-out from Highwomen member and solo artist Maren Morris at the 2020 Country Music Association Awards. Spencer signed a recording contract with Elektra Records in late 2022 and released her debut album with the label, My Stupid Life—on which “Bigger Than the Song” appears—in early 2024.

Mickey Guyton

When Mickey Guyton signed to Capitol Records in 2011, she was the only Black woman on a major Nashville record label. She spent years trying to appeal to country radio, with little success.

Born Candace Mycale Guyton in 1983 in Arlington, Texas, Guyton and her family moved often but always maintained close ties to local Baptist churches. She began to dream of a career in country music after a church trip to a Texas Rangers baseball game, at which ten-year-old LeAnn Rimes performed the national anthem.

Between 2011 and 2020, Guyton released two EPs and a handful of singles and gradually cultivated a reputation as a strong vocalist. Sustained success eluded her, though, until 2020, when she became a vocal force for equality within country music. On Blackout Tuesday, a day-long music industry protest in response to racial inequality within the United States, Guyton released the single “Black Like Me.” She wrote the song in early 2019, inspired by and named after journalist John Howard Griffin’s 1961 book. The song earned Guyton a Grammy nomination for Best Country Solo Performance, making her the first Black female solo artist to receive a nod in that category. One year later, Guyton’s debut album, Remember Her Name (2021), on which “Black Like Me” appears, became the first album by a Black artist to be nominated for the Best Country Album Grammy.

Keb’ Mo’

Born Kevin Roosevelt Moore in 1951 and raised in Compton, California, Keb’ Mo’ learned from his parents to appreciate blues and gospel music, and began playing guitar as a child. His first big break came at age twenty-one, when he joined Jefferson Airplane violinist Papa John Creach’s band. Keb’ Mo’ also worked behind the scenes, as a staff songwriter for A&M Records and as a demo recording arranger for Almo/Irving Music Publishing.
He released a solo album, billed as Kevin Moore, in 1980 and his first album as Keb’ Mo’, a self-titled project, in 1994. Through 2022, he has released nineteen albums, which have won five Grammys and fourteen Blues Music Awards. In 2021, the Americana Music Association awarded Keb’ Mo’ its Lifetime Achievement in Performance honor.

He gave this performance of Dobie Gray’s 1973 single “Loving Arms”—during which he played Jimmie Rodgers’s 1928 custom Weymann guitar—for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s 2020 online concert fundraiser, BIG NIGHT (at the Museum). The song was the title track of a 1973 album by Gray.

The War and Treaty

Tanya Blount Trotter and Michael Trotter Jr.—the duo known as the War and Treaty—took disparate paths to the music industry. Tanya, from the Washington, D.C., area, sang with Lauryn Hill in the 1993 movie Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit and on tour, released a solo R&B album in 1994, and signed to Sean “Puffy” Combs’s Bad Boy Records label in 1996, though her recording contract never yielded an album. Michael grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, living with his mother in shelters after they left his abusive father, and found comfort in learning piano and writing songs while deployed in Iraq. The couple, who met in 2010 at a Maryland music festival, began making music together in 2014 and married.

The War and Treaty released their first album with Universal Music Group, Lover’s Game, in 2023. Emmylou Harris sings on their 2018 album, Healing Tide, produced by Buddy Miller, and Hearts Town, released in 2020, includes guest musicians Jerry Douglas, Chris Etheridge, and Jason Isbell. The duo has toured with Al Green and John Legend. This live performance of “A Lesson in Leavin’” is from the 2018 Country Music Hall of Fame Medallion Ceremony and honored Dottie West, who took the song to #1 in 1980—her first solo chart-topper.