My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future

"Still wondering what all the fuss over Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter was about? Let Alice Randall – esteemed novelist, Vanderbilt University professor and longtime Nashville songwriter – inform you. Recounting the role country music played in her Detroit childhood (The Supremes, she declares, were country) through her adulthood as a revolutionary presence on Music Row, Randall interweaves her own story with detailed histories of underacknowledged or misplaced figures like Jimmie Rodgers collaborator Lil Hardin and Hollywood’s Black cowboy Herb Jeffries, offering a unified theory of what “Black country” means. This gripping, graceful read shows that, no matter what boundaries others set around it, country is a Black art form growing from an obscured past toward a brighter future."