RECKONING and REPRESENTATION
As Beyoncé’s new album arrives, meet four Black pioneers who blazed a path forward in country music
With the release of Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter,” there has never been more focus on country music’s erasure of Black artists.
If you dig deep enough into the record books, you’ll find names of Black men like DeFord Bailey, Charley Pride and Cleve Francis, whose quiet contributions as frontfacing musicians helped make the genre (a little) more inclusive for BIPOC artists (Black, Indigenous and people of colour). Keep digging and you’ll learn about the Black women whose sacrifices behind the scenes left the genre a better place for the artists who followed.
In honour of Beyoncé’s gamechanging album, I talked to four of those women — MaryAnne Howland, Frankie Staton, Rissi Palmer and Holly G — about country’s complicated history and how representation can move it forward.
When MaryAnne Howland moved her successful marketing business to Nashville from New York in the mid 1990s, she planned to stay for six months but ended up staying 29 years. While there, Howland “accidentally” helped start one of the most important anti-Black racism organizations in the history of country music.
In Nashville, Howland became an activist and community leader. A music executive eventually connected her to Cleve Francis, a cardiologist turned country music singer who wanted to start an organization dedicated to educating the public about the role Black artists have played in country music’s history.
“Since the business used my address as its office, I started getting letters from all over the world from inspired Black musicians and country enthusiasts,” said Howland.
In 1995, with Howland’s help, Francis started the Black Country Music Association, the first antiBlack-racism organization in country music. Three years later, with some help from Warner Bros., the association released “From Where I Stand,” a three-disc box set chronicling the history of Black people’s contributions to country music. When Howland moved on to focus on raising her son, she passed the leadership to Frankie Staton.
“You have to seek gifts in other people”
The first time Frankie Staton sang on a Nashville stage was in 1981 at 2:30 a.m. at the Captain’s Table, while wearing an evening gown and rhinestone earrings. She had arrived at the restaurant three hours early to be the first person to sign up for an open jam session. A police officer had followed her there, she says, because he assumed she was a sex worker.
“I went up there and I said, ‘I’m doing the ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ in the key of D,’” recalled Staton. “By the time I got to the end, they asked me to sing another one.”
The next day, Staton went back and played the grand piano, which landed her a residency at a hotel. From there, Staton became a Nashville staple: she performed at nightclubs, radio shows and small community events, but she never got her big break.
One day, Staton read an article in the New York Times that upset her: titled “Has Country Music Become A Soundtrack for White Flight?” the article argued that country music’s lack of diversity was due to the poor calibre of Black artists in the genre, not a systemic problem rooted in racism. In the article, the then-president of MCA Nashville was quoted as saying that Black country artists were singers without the talent to make it as pop stars. Staton decided she needed to prove him wrong. She came up with the idea of putting on the first ever all-Black country music showcase. Over the next 10 years, Staton’s showcases offered more than 60 Black musicians the chance to perform in front of Nashville music executives. “You have to be a very unselfish person to do the work that I did: to lay your own music down and seek gifts in other people and push them,” said Staton. “That’s probably the thing that I’m the proudest of.”
“It made me realize this is systemic”
In 2007, Rissi Palmer became the first Black woman in 20 years to make the Billboard Country Music chart. Her debut single, “Country Girl,” is a swinging banjo anthem that peaked at No. 54.
The success of the record and Palmer’s self-titled debut album skyrocketed her to success in the late ’00s. She went on tour with Chris Young, opened for Taylor Swift and the Eagles, and played at the White House. In 2020, Palmer started a passion project: an Apple Music radio show called “Color Me Country,” for which Palmer interviewed and exclusively highlighted Black, Indigenous and Latino country artists.
“I just wanted to get these stories recorded,” Palmer said. “Then, as I got more into the stories and realized how similar all of our stories were, it was therapeutic. It made me realize this is systemic. It also lit a fire under my butt, and the show went from being a historical record to a form of resistance, advocacy and activism.”
Palmer eventually started the Color Me Country Artist Grant Fund to support artists of colour in the industry. Her work would also eventually inspire a country music fan to start a blog that bloomed into the first ever record label exclusively signing BIPOC artists.
“I’d like to see Black artists be granted the same freedom as white artists”
In September 2021, flight attendant Holly G gathered a group of Black musicians in a rented Nashville house temporarily christened “The Outlaw House.” She rearranged the furniture, gathered everyone in a circle as they told stories, strummed their acoustic guitars and sang songs.
A year earlier, Holly’s strongest connection to the music industry was as a fan. She ran a modest blog called “Black Opry,” on which her only goal was to find a different Black country musician to highlight every month. She soon connected with music journalist Marcus K. Dowling, who asked her to co-host a gathering for Black country musicians the same weekend as the Americana Music Festival and Conference. The following year, she hosted showcases for Black country musicians across Nashville. Today, she works in the music industry full-time as the head of Black Opry, a country record label that exclusively signs BIPOC country musicians.
Holly says she was inspired by the legends who came before her, including Staton and Palmer, whose music show she listened to religiously.
As Beyoncé prepares to dominate the country charts, Holly G has one request.
“One of the ways that country music has been so successful in shutting Black people out is because it has all of these random authenticity tests,” she said. “We watch white artists bring hip-hop into the space and nobody questions them. They are allowed to flourish. I’d like to see Black artists be granted the same freedom as white artists and be able to exist in the space without being questioned.”