He added: "In all of these cases, what's happening is that someone needs to help white America understand that the richest songs are Black American songs."ĭespite deriving from Black and white Southerners, country music at the time was packaged for segregated audiences. "White America was a bit blind to a greater truth about the music that it had inherited," said Ketch Secor, front man of old time band Old Crow Medicine Show. Arnold Schultz, considered an ace western Kentucky picker in the 1920s, imprinted his style on a young Bill Monroe. In the 1930s, a young Hank Williams met Rufus "Tee Tot" Payne, a bluesman who taught him “all the music training I ever had." Riddle was one of many Black musicians to influence formative white country singers. Riddle left music in the 1940s, but picked up a guitar again in 1965 at the request of folklorist Mike Seeger, who documented Riddle's songs and stories prior to his 1980 death. "And Lesley didn't try to make a career in music." "They traveled together for three or four years," said Dom Flemons, an award-winning musician and scholar. "There was no career in music in those years," he continued. Read along for nearly a century of Black presence in country music, from DeFord Bailey setting the world "on fire" with his harmonica to Mickey Guyton's vital Grammy-nominated 2020 single " Black Like Me." Intertwining Black and white communities shaped country music.ĭecades before Entertainer of the Year trophies and heated competition for radio placement, the fiddle - descending from European immigrants - and the banjo - created by African slaves - melded in the American South.īut record companies marketed early country music, known as "hillbilly music," to white listeners, a misnomer carried through the 20th century that many artists, historians and advocates continue to dispel today. Turn audio on Turn audio offĪs the National Museum of African American Music opens its doors, journalists from the USA TODAY Network explore the stories, places and people who helped make music what it is today in our expansive series, Hallowed Sound. This audio enhanced story is best with headphones.
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