Country music reckons with racial stereotypes and its future
When country singer Rissi Palmer was working on her debut album, she wanted a song like Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman,” a song that would introduce her and tell her story to fans.
On her 2007 debut single, “Country Girl,” she celebrated her country roots while explaining that she didn’t have to look or talk a certain way to call herself a country girl.
“I said that I am not white in the first verse, and the label was like, ‘No, no, no,’” said Palmer, who then rewrote the lyrics to make it feel more universal. “It was very intentional when I wrote that song to talk about all the women, or all the people, that might not necessarily fit in the box, but are still of the same mindset.”
The country music industry has long been hesitant to address its long and complicated history with race, but the death of George Floyd in police custody and the protests it sparked in the U.S. and around the world became a sound too loud for the genre to ignore.
Over the past weeks, country artists, labels and country music organizations posted about Black Lives Matter on social media, participated in the industry wide Blackout Tuesday or denounced racism outright.
But Black artists say the industry still needs to address the systematic racial barriers that have been entrenched in country music for decades. Stereotypes that country music is just for white audiences, written by white songwriters, and sung by mostly white males are reinforced daily on country radio, playlists, label rosters and tour lineups. In recent years, however, the conversations about country music have shifted to a broader acknowledgement that non-white artists have always been in the genre, even if they aren’t always recognized.
Historically country music was created by and played in both white and Black communities in the South, but the music became marketed along racial lines in the Jim Crow era, said Amanda Marie Martinez, a historian and writer who is studying country music and race. White country music was stigmatized early on as “hillbilly music” so the industry started pushing it toward the rising white middle class as a way to make the genre more respected and hugely profitable.