Don Armstrong

The release of Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter sparked intense public debate over the definition of country music in a nation bedeviled by stereotypes about race and music genres.

So, I thought you might be interested in how country music was covered in Black newspapers during the music’s postwar wave of popularity. Especially, how Black writers came to terms with a genre long associated with Southern racism.

Beyonce clearly understands the history of Black country music and its struggle to find a mass audience, as well as the recent co-opting of country music by far-right groups. Despite this, she courageously released her album and faced criticism head-on.

In light of these recent events, examining the reception of country music in postwar Black newspapers is illuminating.

For example, a writer in a 1948 Pittsburg Courier thought it unfair that radio programmers played “hillbilly music” while ignoring another “folk medium,” the blues:

In 1950, a New York Age pundit pondered about the “strange group of people who go in for hillbilly music”:

One reader wrote the newspaper that she had broad tastes, with one exception:

But in the In the Alabama Tribune, a pair of record reviewers gave a thumb’s up to the state’s beloved country singer:

In 1956, the publisher of the Minneapolis Spokesman expressed anxiety over a “Great Migration” of rural White southerners:

The article reprints a recent piece in Time magazine in which a presumably White Chicago Tribune reporter accompanied by a “muscular” staffer went into Appalachian communities and surveyed the culture:

The fascination piece turned on its head a racist rant of that time: that a north-migrating Black underclass deteriorated America’s cities. The writer said the same about “hillbillies,” describing them as illiterate, lawless and hell-raising.

One can easily understand why any music associated with “hillbillies” would be rejected by many African Americans at that time. The ancestors of these Southerners had enslaved their ancestors.

However, in 1959, one of the most revered Black musicians in America said,

It’s unfair to call anything all bad … there’s good in every kind of music. Before anybody criticizes any kind of music, they ought to listen to it more. You don’t make up your mind in one or two hearings. I think a lot of hillbilly music is wonderful stuff. When I was a kid in Greenfield, Florida, I used to play piano in a hillbilly band. I liked it.

The musician, of course, was Ray Charles. For years, he’d defended rhythm and blues, a style of music also denigrated by its detractors. It should be noted that it wasn’t only Black folks who looked askance at country music; in the late 1940s, even some DownBeat magazine writers raged that it was ruining American music.

The quote from Charles is from an interview with George E. Pitts of the Pittsburgh Courier. Nat Hentoff was a fan of Pitts, whose column covered music and other forms of entertainment.

Here’s the column in full:

Thus, in the eleven years since that Courier writer lamented that country music sold more records than blues music, Black writers and musicians began giving country music a chance despite its connection with the Jim Crow South.

Sadly, I found no mention of early Black country musicians such as DeFord Bailey in the many African American Newspapers I looked through for this post. Perhaps Black writers from that time shied away from forms of Black folk music other than gospel and blues.

But today, musicians from Beyonce to Rhiannon Giddens express their Black identity through country music. The music press carries their example to a global audience.

In my book The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason I chronicled Gleason’s long history of covering country music. Gleason also wrote about how the 1950s-60s folk festival scene should have done more to acknowledge Black roots music and encourage Black attendance at festivals.