Member-only story
Tell Me Who You Are
The Blackness of Country Music
The foundation of all American music — blues, bluegrass, swamp grass, and everything else — is African music traditions
By Queen Esther, as told to Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi
People are caught up in the fantasy of the Whiteness of country music. It’s just White, White, Whitey White White, and it’s something that they think belongs to them. Well, it doesn’t.
I came up with Black Americana in 1996 or ’98 and everybody asked me, “Shouldn’t you be singing R&B? I mean… you’re Black.” But no, believe it or not, I’m a Black country singer, and I sing Black Americana. The phrase seems like an oxymoron. But Americana is just Black, Black, Blackity Black, and no one is willing to say it or acknowledge it. To me, the genre is all-encompassing because it acknowledges that the foundation of all American music — blues, bluegrass, swamp grass, and everything else — is African music traditions. There isn’t anything in popular American music that can’t sit in that tree that is Black Americana.
The banjo came from West Africa, built like an akonting, which is from Senegal and Gambia, played with the same downstroke technique as that classic 1840s banjo. Until the 1840s, we were the only ones who played banjo. But then Joel Sweeney came along and commercialized it. But it belonged to us.
There are so many things that were invented by slaves, but slaves weren’t allowed to claim their own inventions so their owners — the White colonizers — could say that they created them and get the patent and get the money and get the historical credit. A popular filament in lightbulbs was created by a Black man. Jack Daniel’s whiskey was created by a slave named Nearest Green. Green taught him top to bottom how to do this, and Jack Daniel and his whole family and everybody knew it. Green never got any money for it, though. He’s never gotten acknowledgment, never even gotten praise for it, until very recently in 2016.
So many tools your gynecologist uses came from this guy, J. Marion Sims, from South Carolina. He didn’t believe Black people could feel pain. After he failed miserably as a general practitioner, he went to plantations and used…
