EGN NEWS DESK
When Beyoncé confirmed that she could be going all-in on nation music with “Cowboy Carter,” the second a part of a undertaking that started together with her 2022 album “Renaissance,” dialog about pop artists turning to the style — and the way Black artists are obtained in Nashville — started to warmth up.
Country stays a cloistered phase of the music trade the place Black performers proceed to face an particularly difficult path — even supposing Black pioneers have been important to the style, together with Lesley Riddle, often called Esley, a guitarist and folklorist who taught the Carter Family within the Thirties and Charley Pride, who scored greater than 50 Top 10 nation hits from the Sixties by means of the ’80s.
In the previous few years, Lil Nas X sparked cultural debate and hit chart gold with “Old Town Road,” a country-rap mash-up that was adopted by the arrival of Breland’s aesthetic mix “My Truck,” and songs from O.N.E the Duo, a mother-daughter group making a hybrid of nation, R&B and pop. But there’s additionally an extended historical past of Black artists embracing nation after establishing careers in different genres. Here’s how some key figures fared.
Ray Charles’s ardour for nation music dated again to childhood, when his mom would let him keep up late on Saturdays and take heed to the Grand Ole Opry. As he instructed Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” in 1998, “it was fascinating what these guys may do with these banjos and these fiddles and the metal guitars.”
When he tried his hand on the style, with “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music” in 1962, he largely did away with these floor trappings, as a substitute reimagining nation favorites from the prior decade-plus as affecting, pop-crooner fare. Focusing on lovelorn ballads, together with Eddy Arnold and Cindy Walker’s “You Don’t Know Me,” Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and Hank Williams’s “You Win Again,” Charles elegantly conveyed the wistful ache on the coronary heart of those songs, his voice framed by luxurious orchestral preparations.
It was an excellent idea that paid off in gross sales: The album topped the Billboard pop chart and its second quantity, launched later the identical 12 months, hit No. 2. In subsequent years, amid his regular work in pop, R&B and jazz, Charles would return to nation music often, on albums equivalent to “Love Country Style” (1970) and “Wish You Were Here Tonight” (1983), the place he brazenly paid homage to his roots by incorporating the banjos, fiddles and metal guitars he’d first heard many years earlier.
An total album themed round nation music wasn’t an enormous stretch for Tina Turner. “The music I heard on the radio once I was a child was largely nation and western,” she wrote in her memoir, “I, Tina,” and her superlative covers of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” and the Beatles’ “Get Back” confirmed her mastery of the rootsier facet of rock ’n’ roll.
On “Tina Turns the Country On!,” her 1974 solo debut, she amplified the deep craving of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” added a righteous twang to a gender-flipped model of Bob Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me,” toughened up Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On” and located the gospel undertone in Dolly Parton’s “There’ll Always Be Music.”
The album earned a Grammy nomination for greatest R&B vocal efficiency, feminine, however didn’t chart, and Turner discovered better success together with her subsequent LP, “Acid Queen,” which leaned again towards rock. Though she by no means made one other nation album, outtakes from the “Tina Turns the Country On!” classes got here out later, together with fiery renditions of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson’s “Good Hearted Woman” (a track initially impressed by an advert Jennings had learn for an Ike and Tina launch), Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man” and Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man).”
Linda Martell
Linda Martell had recorded a couple of early ’60s singles in a girl-group R&B vein when an aspiring music manager heard her singing nation covers at a U.S. Air Force base in South Carolina. He satisfied her to return to Nashville, the place she rapidly signed a document deal and tracked a debut LP, “Color Me Country” from 1970, that solidified her reboot as a rustic singer.
Three singles made Billboard’s nation songs chart, with Martell’s superbly understated cowl of Richard Lewis Spencer’s latest hit “Color Him Father” peaking at No. 22. Martell turned the primary Black lady to carry out on the Grand Ole Opry, however she confronted racial discrimination on the street. A falling out together with her producer — “He blackballed me” after she recorded for an additional label, Martell instructed Rolling Stone in 2020 — marked the tip of her Nashville recording profession. She continued to sing nation and R&B in later years however by no means made one other album. As a now-acknowledged pioneer within the style, she’s impressed modern Black nation artists together with Mickey Guyton.
The Pointer Sisters’ early hits dipped right into a seize bag of genres, together with jazz, rock and funk, and on their proudly defiant 1974 breakup track “Fairytale,” full-on nation, recorded in Nashville with fiddle, pedal metal and all the trimmings. The track charted at No. 13 and received the quartet a Grammy for greatest nation vocal efficiency by a duo or group, making them the primary and, thus far, solely Black girls who’ve taken residence a Grammy in any nation class.
“When I wrote ‘Fairytale,’ I wasn’t making an attempt to do one thing intelligent to interrupt into the nation market,” Anita Pointer, who co-wrote the track together with her sister Bonnie, stated within the group’s autobiography, additionally referred to as “Fairytale.” “I wrote it as a result of that’s the way in which I felt.”
The Pointer Sisters broke one other barrier with the track, changing into the primary Black feminine group to carry out on the Grand Ole Opry, the place they confronted protesters carrying indicators that stated “Keep Country, Country.” Their sound remained eclectic in later years, as they scored pop hits like “I’m So Excited.” But a follow-up to the nation stylings of “Fairytale,” “Live Your Life Before You Die,” earned one other Grammy nod, and on the 1994 genre-blending “Rhythm Country and Blues” compilation, the Pointers teamed with Clint Black to cowl the Aretha Franklin hit “Chain of Fools.”
Millie Jackson
“I took these nation songs that I like and funked them up a bit of,” the soul singer Millie Jackson stated in 1981, forward of the discharge of “Just a Lil’ Bit Country,” her first full LP specializing in the style. Like Charles and Turner, the Georgia-born singer-songwriter grew up on nation radio, and he or she recorded songs by Merle Haggard and others whilst she established herself as a grasp of passionate, straight-talking R&B.
On “Just a Lil’ Bit Country,” she added a strutting modern groove to Charles’s “Modern Sounds in Country and Western” smash “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” tackled ballads made well-known by Tammy Wynette and John Conlee, and reimagined Kris Kristofferson’s “If You Don’t Like Hank Williams” as an ode to her favourite soul singers (together with herself) on “Anybody That Don’t Like Millie Jackson.”
Despite cracking the Top 50 on the R&B albums chart, the album turned out to be Jackson’s final full-LP foray into the style, as she continued to discover soul, pop and even raunchy comedy. But in 2014, she confirmed she nonetheless had a knack for funking up nation together with her playfully express riff on Tyler Farr’s 2013 nation hit “Redneck Crazy.”
Darius Rucker
In 2008, when the singer-songwriter Darius Rucker introduced that Hootie & the Blowfish could be happening hiatus, he instructed followers to not anticipate one other album or tour from the group “till I do three or 4 nation information.” That quantity really turned out to be 5, as he discovered speedy success with “Learn to Live,” his second solo LP and first nation album.
The album topped the Billboard nation albums chart and yielded the primary of a string of nation No. 1 hits, culminating with “Wagon Wheel,” his Grammy-winning, diamond-certified Old Crow Medicine Show cowl from 2013. Rucker would turn into essentially the most outstanding Black artist within the style in many years: the primary to high the Billboard nation songs chart since Charley Pride in 1983, and the primary to turn into a member of the Grand Ole Opry since Pride had in 1993.
Rucker did be a part of again up with Hootie & the Blowfish in 2019, however his nation profession continues to be very a lot a going concern: His sixth album within the style, “Carolyn’s Boy,” got here out in 2023.
Traces of nation have been evident on Commodores hits like “Sail On” from 1979, the place Lionel Richie sang with a pronounced twang. But the Alabama native discovered even better success within the style the next 12 months, when “Lady,” a stirring love ballad he’d unsuccessfully pitched to his then-bandmates, turned an enormous hit for Kenny Rogers, topping Billboard’s Hot 100, country-songs and adult-contemporary charts, and likewise making a exhibiting on the R&B songs chart.
Even as Richie’s solo profession exploded within the ’80s due to pop hits like “Truly,” “All Night Long (All Night)” and “Hello,” he tipped his hat to Nashville on tracks like “Stuck on You” and “Deep River Woman,” a collaboration with the nation veterans Alabama. He spotlighted his nation previous on “Tuskegee,” a 2012 LP the place he revisited his main forays into the style, alongside together with his pop smashes, with assist from Rogers, Willie Nelson, Shania Twain, Darius Rucker and different nation A-listers.
In 2022, Richie made it clear that he hoped to make extra time to document nation music going ahead. “I’m so vested in nation music, you don’t have any concept,” he stated at that 12 months’s C.M.A. Awards.
