Charlie Poole, in 1925, an early country singer who recorded minstrel songs.
Posted on 05/05/2005 4:30:52 AM PDT by MississippiMasterpiece
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?
Charlie Poole, in 1925, an early country singer who recorded minstrel songs.
The song they did together was GOOD.
More reasons why people should get to know the southern roots of America. Most all of the good old music is from the South.
CMT ain't country. I don't know what it is, but it sure isn't country.
Maybe Snopp Dogg and Toby Keith should do song together.
Charlie Poole bump.
Johnny Cash is country but he's gone.
I love Toby Keith but haven't heard much of him. There are no country stations in NY.
The large idol winner Ruben Stoddard? sang a beautiful rendition of "Sweet Home Alabama" on the talent show... I would love to see him release it commercially.
Charlie Pride is one of my favorites. I have a great cd of black Texan balladeers recorded - the men were well in their 70s and 80s, but they could sing perfect! Black folk/country music is not new, maybe it's becoming mainstream.
LOL when I read your post I just thought about Nat King Cole singing Cat Ballou :-)
It was excellent and even with all the air time it got, I never did tire of hearing it.
When I hear Big and Rich on the radio, I immediately shut the machine off. I saw both them and Gretchen Wilson on the CMA last year and wondered what happened to country music.
"CMT ain't country. I don't know what it is, but it sure isn't country."
It's rock and roll. It's sometimes has a "twang" but it's still rock. Most early rock had the same twang. Right now, that's the only thing keeping rock and roll alive. They used to say, "rock and roll will never die". They were wrong. We are witnessing it's death right now.
That's a shame. I used to drive my friends nuts in the late 70s and early 80s because I only listened to country on the radio and there was both an AM and an FM country station
Country music's black roots only go from the letters to the rims of their broken -down pickup trucks.
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