new urban country? k sanneh's latest

May 5, 2005
Ebony and Ivory Learn to Share Country Home
By KELEFA SANNEH
Late last year BET, the black cable channel, and CMT, the country music cable channel, found themselves in an unusual position. Maybe even an unprecedented position. They were both playing the same music video.

That music video is for the song "Over and Over," a collaboration between the hip-hop star Nelly and the country star Tim McGraw. For Nelly, the song was an adventurous excursion into country music, but Mr. McGraw told an interviewer, "Ain't nothing country about this song." Still, the song was not merely a hit but a strategic coup, a way for both men to expand their audiences.

The song was also proof of a curious phenomenon. Country music has been getting in touch with its roots - its black roots.

Last year, the white country duo Big & Rich sang "I'm a cowboy Stevie Wonder" while touring beneath a banner that says, "Country music without prejudice." Their friend and collaborator Gretchen Wilson proudly and loudly proclaimed herself a "redneck woman," but that didn't stop her from recording "Chariot," where she tries her hand at rapping - and, more surprising, doesn't embarrass herself. And right now the country duo Van Zant (Lynyrd Skynyrd's Johnny Van Zant along with his brother Donnie, of 38 Special) has a CMT hit with "Help Somebody." It starts off as a tribute to a "backwoods, backwards" grandfather (not a hip-hop fan, one presumes), but then mutates into a gleaming gospel song when the duo is joined by a black gospel choir.

On May 17, this trend will be taken one step further with the release of "Loco Motive" (Warner Brothers Nashville), the debut album from the Big & Rich protégé Cowboy Troy, a black rapper from Dallas who sells himself as a country act. The album's first video, "I Play Chicken With the Train," occasionally shows up on CMT. The album is full of fiddle and steel guitar, and even includes a chorus from a celebrated hip-hop veteran: Mr. McGraw. When, exactly, did country music get so black?

The answer, as more than a few Ray Charles fans already know, is that the history of country music has always been intertwined with the history of African-American music, sometimes subtly and sometimes (as with Cowboy Troy, who cheerfully describes himself as a "blackneck" and his music as "hick-hop"), very unsubtly. And while Cowboy Troy's new album shows how far these tangled roots can go, another new release shows how deep.

The same day that Cowboy Troy, "the last of the Bro-hicans," lands in record stores, listeners will also get a chance to buy "You Ain't Talkin' to Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music," an indispensable new three-disc set released by Sony Legacy. The discs compile recordings that Poole made for Columbia Records between 1925 and 1930, and to hear him is to hear a singer and banjo player and bandleader exploring and inventing some of the raucous sounds that would help define country music in the decades to come.

Among the embarrassment of riches is Poole's recording of "If the River Was Whiskey," a masterpiece of mischief, melancholy and nonsense. His voice is gaunt and faintly conversational (as if he's not just singing but telling), and he begins, "If the river was whiskey and I was a duck/I'd dive to the bottom and I'd never come up."

This isn't the first box set to collect Poole's recordings.The British label JSP recently put out a more exhaustive four-disc set, "Charlie Poole With the North Carolina Ramblers and the Highlanders." But "You Ain't Talkin' to Me" doesn't just compile old Poole recordings: the second and third discs contrast Poole's versions with other people's.

The contrasts are particularly valuable for the minstrel songs, written in faux black dialect by and for white performers. Eddie Morton's 1909 version of "You Ain't Talkin' to Me," with its theatrical delivery and comical trombone slides, emphasizes racial caricature.

But Poole's 1927 version plays down the dialect and plays up the plight of the henpecked husband in the narrative. Poole's de-blackfaced version makes it easier to hear the song as autobiography, but he also makes it easier to ignore the role of race and racism in the song's history. This is music that has lost none of its power to confound or to thrill.

These thorny issues are built into all of Poole's recordings, not just the minstrel songs. Few of these songs are his alone. "If the River Was Whiskey" can be traced back to a compositions by the African-American blues pioneer W. C. Handy. And even Poole's instrument, in the banjo, was for decades identified as an African-American instrument. The vexed figure of the white banjo player was in some sense ancestor to the vexed figure of the white rapper.

And so it would be pleasant, for symmetry's sake, to report that Cowboy Troy's new album was triumphant, the debut of a double-crossover: a cowboy turned rapper turned country star.

Unfortunately, "Loco Motive" isn't much better than its title. The sung choruses are pretty good but the rhymes almost always fall flat; in yet another twist, it sounds as if Cowboy Troy's biggest influence is Kid Rock, the white rapper who crossed over to become a kind of country star.

But listeners looking for some good "hick-hop" needn't give up entirely. Just as the country world has been tentatively gesturing at hip-hop, so has the hip-hop world been gesturing back. Black Southern rappers proudly - even defiantly - call themselves country. A few years ago Bubba Sparxxx, a white rapper from La Grange, Ga., released an adventurous album called "Deliverance," a collaboration with the black producer Timbaland (from Virginia) in which the two invented a digitally mutated, beat-driven country-inflected sound. One song, "Comin' Round," was built around a sample of the Yonder Mountain String Band. And right now, one of the best songs circulating on Southern mix tapes is "Country Boy," a twangy collaboration between a couple of Houston rappers: Killa Kyleon, who is black, and Paul Wall, who is white, and who announces, "I'm a country boy, I speak Texas slang."

Maybe Cowboy Troy won't find himself on BET anytime soon, but "Country Boy" suggests yet another crossover. In an age of rapping cowboys and hip-hop-loving country crooners, why shouldn't Paul Wall and Killa Kyleon get a chance to flash their platinum teeth on CMT?

I'm trying to sense if this is negative criticism or just intrigued observation (I hope the latter).

Klosterman beat you to this observation.

who(')s country now? k sanneh's latest is better

i agree on the blowing, but this is a tendency that may actually have had and continue to help disolve some serious problems in this country. shifting the expectations of how race and culture correspond could lead to something like better.

but thats a "no kidding!!!" point.

Oblivious to popular success of Foghat in arenas 30 some years ago.

how many instances of that photo exist in the anals of this forum?

Anyway, the real McCoy:

http://www.furious5.net/cowboy2.jpg

also that charlie poole thing looks awesome, i'm amazed it got on sony's release schedule at all.

run on sentence!!!!

Heh. Perfect description. Or the place for big thinkers who couldn't cut it as investigative journalists.

http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0148,couch,30258,22.html

More like standard top-of-the-daily-newspaper-heap features section-ese. The LA Times's Calendar section regulary finds "proof of curious or trendy or interesting or hey, we just thought of it" phenomena.

Hey, I'll read the stuff. I've always thought of it as the modern equivalent of "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" without the "thanx and a tip o' the hat" credit at the end.

The legacies of Cub Koda and Mike Lutz crawl into the new country home

xp

At any rate, anybody who doesn't find plenty of the Times's Sunday Arts Section celebrity-reporting-as-music-crit stuff of late embarrassing probably doesn't have a home subscription.

as for Ridley Bent, nope. (But Charlie Poole, *Whiter Shade of Blue,* *Mr. Charlie's Blues,* Emmett Miller, Dock Boggs, all those kinda guys -- I listen to them so much that they're in my blood by now.)

so anyway haha i gave this seminar presentation on the black atlantic diaspora and music today except the professor totally sidetracked me from my reggaeton/m.i.a./diwali transculturation riff and we had to get into it all over again about the "crisis" of hip-hop culture and yawn and next thing i knew i was just schooling everyone against the typical "hip-hop was political music then it sold out and white ppl. started listening to it coz it was full of racist stereotypes" argument again.

the professor did bring up the sanneh article tho, while i was going on a "minstrel" riff, is the point.

everyone also grooved on this sweet bhangra mix over "get ur freak on" that i have.

Well, I meant the Gross Hold Steady piece, not the Jaswa sidebar. Though actually the sidebar ranks with just about any compendium of good lyrics I've read. And Rajiv's intro to it was pretty awesome!

yeah, those are dreck. but sanneh is great. and pareles is often quite good. i actually *like* the faintly middlebrow, let's-patiently-explain-this-phenomenon-to-our-readers quality of the NYT's music journalism. (In fact the pieces I like the least are the ones that strain to adopt a more jivey, in-the-know style.) even if i already sort of know what they're talking about, i think it's a demand that forces the writers to be clearer, more concise, more clearheaded about what they want to say. we've talked about this on a few other threads. it's also one reason why sasha frere-jones's pieces in the New Yorker can be pretty great.

-- Amateur(ist) (amateurist@gmail.com), May 5th, 2005.

totally OTM.

also, i think everyone is blowing this "blacks and whites! living together! making music TOGETHER!" thing waaaaaaay out of proportion. i would guess to most country fans rap still isn't music, and most rap fans view most country as cracker garbage.

-- strng hlkngtn

Blount vs. Jess Harvell/Strongo Hulkington

I wonder if there's any soundscan or poll data or whatever to back up either of these views re country and hiphop audience overlap. My personal experience is more in line with Jess.

OMG