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fused to play Lynn’s “The Pill.”.
Indeed, female musicians have faced an
uphill battle to win airplay on country radio
going back to the 1930s, despite the pioneer-
ing contributions noted in Burns’ film of in-
fluential figures such as Maybelle and Sara
Carter of the Carter Family, Patsy Montana,
Kitty Wells, Cline, Lynn, Parton, Tammy
Wynette, Emmylou Harris and Rosanne
Cash, among others.
Combine that with the hurdles facing Af-
rican American country musicians and the
result is a double whammy facing female Af-
rican American musicians such as Dona
Mason, Rissi Palmer and Mickey Guyton.
For a time in the late 1980s, ’90s and early
2000s, female musicians rode high on the
country charts regularly while a few, includ-
ing Shania Twain, Faith Hill, Dixie Chicks
and Martina McBride, expanded their
reach beyond the core country audience
and won fans in the broader pop music
world as well. That pendulum swing toward
women gave way over the past decade to the
“bro-country” surge — songs celebrating
tailgate-party culture, rural life and and
comely women commonly outfitted in song
in cutoff jeans. The male-centric genre saw
the rise of acts including Luke Bryan, Flor-
ida Georgia Line, Aldean and Blake Shel-
ton, among others.
Concurrently, country radio — the most
popular radio format in the U.S., with more
than 2,100 stations among the nation’s 15,500
AM and FM broadcast outlets — scaled
back on the amount of airtime devoted to re-
cords from women. In December, Billboard
noted that for the first time since the publi-
cation launched its Country Airplay chart in
1990 to measure the most popular songs on
the airwaves, not a single record in the Top
20 of that ranking was by a female artist or
female-fronted group.
“The disparity on the country charts just
doesn’t make sense and doesn’t reflect the
female talent we have in our midst,” Johnny
Chiang, director of operations for Cox Me-
dia Group Houston, told Billboard at that
time. “I don’t know whose fault it is, but ev-
eryone needs to look at themselves in the
mirror and ask if they’re contributing to this
issue.”
As much as radio programmers work to
draw listeners to tune in, they are equally or
more concerned with existing listeners tun-
ing out, engendering a conservative ap-
proach to including new voices and new
sounds into radio playlists so as not to
threaten their all-important advertising
revenues. The condensing of ownership of
radio stations into fewer and fewer corpo-
rate hands has only exacerbated a risk-
averse approach.
“Country tends to be more artist-fo-
cused than other formats,” explains
Michael Gray, senior museum editor for the
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in
Nashville. “Whether a musician is playing
‘Old Town Road’ or mainstream country,the question becomes, ‘Is he someone who’s
going to continue to make country music?
Has he participated in the community of
country music the way other people have
who are building a career in country music?”
Career-building has long been a function of
the degree to which those artists court the
country music establishment in Nashville,
which has been something akin to the all-en-
compassing studio system of old Holly-
wood. Artists were often told what songs to
record as well as which producers, musi-
cians and recording studios they could use.
“A lot of pop and rock artists have tried to
transition to country, but how many have
had success?” Country AirCheck’s Aly said.
“The one shining example in all of it is
[Hootie & the Blowfish singer] Darius
Rucker. He came into the format and proved
to everyone how important and how real it
was — that it was not a part-time job for him.
“That’s part of the reason that Blanco
Brown is getting airplay for ‘The Git Up,’”
Aly said. “He’s gone out on a radio tour and
is showing people that country music is im-
portant to him.”
That practice is an important part ofwhat’s opened doors for rising country sing-
er Jimmie Allen.
“Growing up in Delaware, my dad lis-
tened to country and my mom listened to
Christian music,” he said. “When I was a
teenager, people said, ‘You’re black, you
should do R&B.’ But music is supposed to
be a representation of the person, and I’m a
little country boy. Now the music I make has
country lyrics with pop-rock production
and pop-R&B melodies.”
That, however, also speaks to the hurdles
facing African American musicians in coun-
try music, whether it was harmonica player
and Grand Ole Opry star DeFord Bailey in
the 1920s, singing cowboy Herb Jefferies in
the 1930s and ’40s, Charley Pride in the ’60s,
’70s and ’80s on through Kane Brown, Jim-
mie Allen and Blanco Brown today.
“I think Kane Brown has done a lot to
prove his bona fides,” said historian-author
Hughes. “That’s a very common thing for
black performers to do. They’re constantly
having to say ‘I’m country, I’m legit.’ Charley
Pride had to do that, Stoney Edwards did
that, Darius Rucker certainly did it, and
Kane Brown is doing it too.
“But there’s no reason Kane Brown
should have to prove himself being country,”
Hughes said. “When people talk about what
is and isn’t country, it always seems to come
with an added requirement of authenticity
for artists who aren’t white. People argue
about Jason Aldean and whether he’s hav-
ing a positive or negative influence on coun-
try, but nobody argues whether he is or isn’t
country.”
The relationship between of white and
black music has been evident in country
from the beginning, yet it’s often obscured
by the dominance in the genre of white per-
formers.
Burns’ film cites the musical marriage
that took place in the rural American South
in the 18th and 19th centuries that set the
stage for what became country music: the
meeting of the violin from European classi-
cal and folk traditions with the banjo, which
came to the States from Africa because of
the slave trade.
Biographical portraits of some of coun-
try’s foundational figures highlight their
collaborations or influences with African
American musicians: Carter Family patri-
arch A.P. Carter gathered songs from the
hills and hollers of Appalachia with invalu-
able but often overlooked help from African
American musician Lesley Riddle, who had
a facility for remembering melodies and mu-
sic, while Carter focused on the lyrics and
stories. Jimmie Rodgers carried water to Af-
rican American laborers while working in
railroad labor camps. Hank Williams often
cited blues musician Rufus “Tee Tot” Payne
as his only true musical mentor and teacher.
Bluegrass patriarch Bill Monroe said the
same about African American fiddler and
guitarist Arnold Schultz.
All get their moments onscreen in Burns’film, an important first step toward recogni-
tion for musicians who haven’t simply been
forgotten, according to Rhiannon Giddens,
another key contemporary voice in Burns’
film. The singer, songwriter and banjo vir-
tuoso has spent much of her adult life trac-
ing the history of African American folk and
country music.
“African American musicians are not
just slighted — they get erased,” said Gid-
dens, the recipient of a 2017 MacArthur
Foundation “genius” grant who scored the
music for “Lucy Redux,” the first ballet writ-
ten for an African American ballerina and
which premiered earlier this year by the
Nashville Ballet.
“Why didn’t they record black people
singing country music?” she asked. “They
had this thing they had to sell. It’s all about
what is being sold, why’s it being sold and
who’s it being sold to.”Demise of the gatekeepers
If the general arguments over what con-
stitutes “authentic country” is repetitive
over the decades, an important element
that’s unique to the latest iteration of the
conversation stems from the role of social
media and music streaming.
“To a degree, yes, this is cyclical,” said
RAC Clark, interim executive director of the
West Coast-based Academy of Country Mu-
sic. “Yet because of the way music is con-
sumed, things are just so different today
from when everyone got their music over the
radio or by buying a record.
“Today’s new artists didn’t grow up lis-
tening to full albums,” he said. “They’re
shuffling songs from any genre onto their
playlists.”
Thus the heavily collaborative nature of
hip-hop and R&B has carried over increas-
ingly to country in recent years, evidenced
by a bevy of cross-genre duets including
those by Brown and Marshmello, Rexha-
Florida Georgia Line’s “Meant to Be,”
Maren Morris and Russian-German record
producer and DJ Zedd and American elec-
tronic music duo Grey (“The Middle”), and
Diplo’s single “Heartless” featuring country
singer-songwriter Morgan Wallen.
As musicians and fans find new ways to
discover and listen to music, it affects the
music itself.
“This is the first time that the gatekeep-
ers of the genre are losing the power to de-
termine what exactly is country music,” said
author-historian Hughes. “The lines are
starting to break down because the audi-
ence, through streaming and other things,
has a great deal more power over music. Lil
Nas X, Kane Brown and Blanco Brown — all
of them are doing something that’s very
much a kind of millennial or post-millennial
moment. As important as country radio and
the Billboard charts continue to be, these
agents of change have created an opening
for that. It’s an interesting moment of free-
dom.”topping fuel to Lil Nas X’s already high-flying crossover smash “Old Town Road.”Frazer HarrisonGetty ImagesSHANIA TWAINmanaged to rack up sales in a tough genre for female artists.Francine OrrLos Angeles TimesLORETTA LYNNdonned the authenticity cloak for “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”Hulton Archive / Getty Imageses country music debates
‘We mask [country
music debate] with
jokes about pickup
trucks, dogs,
girlfriends and the
beer.’
—KENBURNS,
filmmakerEvan BarlowCOUNTRY?