When I was growing up in a small town in Ohio in the 1980s, the rules were simple: anything sung by white people was white music, anything sung by black people was black music.
At our school, friendships between whites and blacks were rare and racial tensions were high, so the lines between the two were strictly maintained. Crossing racial lines in music resulted in public ridicule, so if I liked a song by a white artist, I listened to it privately and didn't tell anyone.
Back then, if you wanted to record a song you liked, you had to wait by the radio, sometimes for hours, to press the record button on a clunky tape recorder at just the right time (which meant also recording snippets of the DJ's voice and local adverts).
So I waited to secretly record Duran Duran and A Flock of Seagulls. I wasn't alone. My dad kept his Charley Pride tapes in the closet and only took them out when no one was around. In 1979, my mom made the mistake of buying a 45 RPM record of Journey's “Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'” and when she put it on the turntable, she got such a backlash from the family that she never dared to listen to it again. At least, not until she thought she was alone.
At the time, listening to white music was seen as a betrayal of who I was as a black person. Even now, I have black friends who would call me names if they found out I loved Silversun Pickups and The Shins. They would jokingly but seriously suggest that I was betraying who I was as a black person. If they're reading this, they know now.
Follow this author Brian Broome's opinion
Beyoncé's latest album, “Cowboy Carter,” hit the radio on Friday, and it makes me wonder how and why my community got to this point. When I heard Beyoncé was releasing a country-themed album, I was a little jaded. But when I heard the first single, “Texas Hold 'Em,” I stopped being jaded. I loved it right away, not only because it's catchy and danceable, but also because it's Beyoncé, so it's okay to like it.
And when I saw the album cover, I couldn't help but laugh: She's riding a white horse, wearing a white Stetson hat, waving an American flag. All the quintessential American symbols, except for the bald eagle and the rifle, are prominently and tongue-in-cheekly displayed.
Then there's the music: I listened to the whole album on Friday and it was, as the kids say, “amazing.”
Beyoncé mixes country's traditional elements of guitar stomping and yodeling melodies with elements of hip hop and R&B. That's not new: Modern country music has long borrowed from those genres, adding 808 kick beats, snappy tracks and rap to produce hits like Jason Aldean's “Dirt Road Anthem” and Morgan Wallen's “Last Night.”
Elements of hip hop and R&B were accepted into country music because the people who adopted them were white. In country music, it's not just about what's made, it's also about who's making it.
This helps explain why those opposed to Beyoncé's bold foray into country music aren't opposed to the music itself. They're more likely to be drawing clear lines about who is and isn't allowed to make country music. They may feel that someone different from them is trying to steal their culture for profit.
It's ironic, especially when you watch Luke Combs take Tracy Chapman's “Fast Car” to No. 1 on the country charts, something Chapman never could. He can turn Roy Hamilton into Elvis Presley. He can water down Little Richard into Pat Boone. He can remake New Edition into New Kids on the Block. The list goes on and on.
Some would call this cultural appropriation today, but it is also part of our history. It only took a little reading to know that country music has always been the domain of black Americans, drawn from our traditions. I didn’t know this before, and I feel that this fact wasn’t hidden from me, but obscured by something much deeper and more ingrained that I was embarrassed to know. I was never taught that there were black cowboys, or that the banjo originated from a West African instrument. And the embarrassment that comes with hiding that information from me is part of a larger effort to tell black people that there are things they can’t do, that we can’t have; places we don’t belong to, things that are uniquely American and not ours.
“Cowboy Carter” reminds us that there is nothing black people can't have, nothing black people haven't accomplished, and that our culture and history is much deeper and richer than we've been led to believe. Black artists have been making country music since before it was even considered a genre. Beyoncé wasn't the first to make it, but she's just the most famous.