I created my last album as a way to contextualize one aspect of the Lil Nas X story, because it’s really three stories wrapped up into one. Those three stories are country music as a genre; the story of African-Americans’ role in country music; and then the third one is black cowboys as a cultural phenomenon. When it comes to black people, almost everyone has some sort of black cowboy story within their family history. There is a history of black culture, or black Western culture, which includes people that migrated out West from the South. There are a lot of people who can relate to that story. My reaction to everything that’s going on has been, “Great, I’m glad I’ve helped give people the template, so if anyone needs to go back and reference black cowboy history, then they’re set.”
How are those three stories related?
The first part of the story, black cowboys, is an important cultural history that we have to embrace. A lot of things that have happened in African-American culture were relegated to the past, because they weren’t written down. The second part of this story is country music as a genre. In the 21st century, we don’t think about genres in strict categorical terms in the way they did when they created these genres, and this is causing a disconnect. You would think an African-American who writes a song about country-ish themes with a slight country twang, with imagery that is country-based, would be country music. But when you look back to the roots of country music, one of the things that happened that we’re still trying to get around or side step is that country music was created alongside race records in the early 20th century as a means of hyper-focusing record-buying audiences.
The third story, then, is African-Americans’ role in country and Western music. Even though country music looks very white in the foreground, when you delve deeper into the history you find a whole prehistory of African-American musicians working with these white country pioneers. You have the soul country era, with Ray Charles and Solomon Burke. You have Charley Pride, and in the more modern era, people like Darius Rucker and Kane Brown. All of this is why this one song, this one minute and fifty-nine second song, has caused so much controversy.
You would think an African-American who writes a song about country-ish themes with a slight country twang, with imagery that is country-based, would be country music.