“You Look Like Them, But You Sound Like Us”: An Exploration of Blackness in Country Music

• In Event: Country, Hip Hop and Punk: Cultural Resistance to Black Oppression

Abstract

In the summer of 2020, the nation experienced a surge of uprisings prompted by the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, which produced a vast awareness of racial injustice. Inspired by the protests, Black country music artist Mickey Guyton released her track entitled “Black Like Me.” The track’s release prompted a slew of articles spotlighting the intersection of Blackness and country music, as well as a brief period of introspection within the genre.
Simultaneously, a question arose about why, in 2020, there would still be such an uproar about Guyton’s release. My research analyzes the career uniqueness of Charley Pride, country music’s first Black superstar in the 1970s, and why no one else had followed that same path of superstardom for nearly three decades. Through this research, I explore issues of ambient racism, prominence of racial salience, and the establishment of institutional barriers to create a genre of whiteness based initially on Black musical art forms.

My research centers on the performance of race within a space that has intentionally excised blackness and how that has impacted both Black artists and fans of the genre. Additionally, this work looks at the continued cyclical nature that country music represents of America’s history of progress and regression as explored through the recent popularity of Morgan Wallen, the aggressive right-wing, leaning lyrics of Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town, and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond.” By continuing to explore Country’s continued push toward right-wing conservatism in the face of racial progress, it also revealed the impact it had on allies within the space attempting to create room for people of color in the genre.

Author

• Natasha Popowich, California State University Fullerton