Roger O Green

Black country music landscape

DeFord Bailey

From the Greene County, OH library page: “Black artists have been part of the country music landscape since the beginning, with elements of African-American music, like blues, rock and roll, and southern gospel music, woven in. The banjo, an essential Appalachian music instrument, was introduced to the region by black slaves in the early 19th century (source: Smithsonian Music).”

It was probably in 2005, the year he was posthumously inducted, that I first learned about Country Music Hall of Fame member DeFord Bailey (1899-1982). “An influential harmonica player in both country and blues music, … Bailey was one of the Grand Ole Opry’s most popular early performers and country music’s first African American star… He grew up in a musical family that played what he called ‘Black hillbilly music,’ a tradition of secular string band music that drew upon the same core repertoire shared by rural Black and white musicians alike.”

From Opry.com: “Harmonica wizard DeFord Bailey wasn’t merely one of the Opry’s first stars — he was the first musician to perform the Saturday that announcer George D. Hay coined the name of the world’s longest-running radio show that would become famous – the Grand Ole Opry. Bailey, whose tunes helped popularize his instrument in the United States, boasted another first, as well: He was the first musician to hold a recording session in Nashville, setting the stage for a scene that would change the world.”

Listen to Pan American Blues and an album

Ray

The multifaceted Ray Charles released an album in 1962, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, which became his first album to top the Billboard 200 charts, and it did so for 14 weeks. The follow-up release, Volume Two, got to #2.

Doug Freeman of the Austin Chronicle wrote of Charles’s influence through the album, stating:

Country and soul have always had a tenuous connection, undoubtedly exacerbated by the racial identifications of their respective fanbases. Yet despite the perceived disconnect between the two genres, the populist formats of both have always been more fluid and contiguous than is traditionally recognized. Elvis‘ melding of country and R&B may even arguably be considered the genesis of rock & roll, though that middle ground has largely only served to allow soul and country to remain segregated. With his 1962 Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Ray Charles created the benchmark for crossing the line, highlighting the similarities in sentiment often overshadowed by sound

Ray Charles (1930-2004) was posthumously inducted into the Country Hall of Fame in 2021.

Modern Sounds In Country and Western Music

Charley Pride

The black country artist I remember best growing up was Charley Pride. “During the peak years of his recording career (1966–1987), he had 52 top-10 hits on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, 30 of which reached number one.

“In the late summer of 1966… he was booked for his first large show, in Detroit’s Olympia Stadium. Since no biographical information had been included with those singles, few of the 10,000 country fans who came to the show knew Pride was Black and discovered the fact only when he walked onto the stage, at which point the applause trickled off to silence. ‘I knew I’d have to get it over with sooner or later,’ Pride later remembered. ‘I told the audience: ‘Friends, I realize it’s a little unique, me coming out here – with a permanent suntan – to sing country and western to you. But that’s the way it is.'”

Charley Pride (1934-2020) was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000.

Listen to Greatest Hits

Others

There are many more black country artists, such as Darius Rucker, formerly of Hootie and the Blowfish. Here are 12 Black artists shaping country music’s future (2021) and 13 Black country artists you need to know (2024). There is some overlap; the latter group includes Shaboozy, whose A Bar Song (Tipsy) dominated both the pop and country charts for weeks.

Beyoncé’s album Cowboy Carter did not receive any nominations at the 58th Annual Country Music Association Awards, presented in November 2024. Still, it won Best Country Album and Album of the Year at the Grammys in February 2025.

Listen to Texas Hold ‘Em

Lying about time

inaccurate

As long as I can remember, I’ve been lying about time. When I was growing up, my household, probably my father, decided that the kitchen clock should run 15 minutes ahead. This was an attempt to get us to attend church and other events on time. I think it worked for a short while, but after a bit, we knew we had an extra quarter-hour and would get to events late anyway.

Incidentally, the clock in the kitchen was the only timepiece everyone could see. My parents may have had an alarm clock in their bedroom, but I do not recall a clock in the living room.

I’ve learned to lie to some people about time. If I tell someone I must get to a train station or airport by a specific time, I suggest the train or flight is earlier. I find this to be an acceptable fabrication. Doing otherwise would make me irritated with the driver when I get to my destination with too little time. (I have specific examples.)

Including me

I lie to myself about when I have to leave for a CDTA bus. If I tell myself I must leave by 1 p.m., when I don’t need to leave until 1:05, I can return to the house and retrieve my wallet or find the house key.

When I worked at FantaCo in the 1980s, we had a great artist named Raoul Vezina. However, when he worked on a project, such as a Smilin’ Ed comic, he was such a perfectionist that he was invariably late. So Tom, the owner, would say, “Raoul, the book MUST be done by February 1!” It didn’t need to be completed until February 15, yet he’d still be putting on the finishing touches.

Sometimes, my wife tells me she’ll be home by a specific time. She is not lying, but she isn’t usually accurate. One time recently, I was supposed to start pre-heating the oven and then add the macaroni and cheese she had prepared the day before. I started the process 15 minutes late, just the right timing.

When planning a family trip in early February, the daughter suggested that we all agree to leave by 9:30 a.m., assuring that we would go by 10 a.m. We left the house at 10:08, pretty darn good.

Do YOU lie about time to yourself or others? Do others lie to you about time?

The Catholic tradition

Jesuit

When the movie Conclave came to the area, I had to go see it because it was all about the popes. For a Protestant kid, I’ve been oddly obsessed with the Catholic tradition.

As a kid, I was probably trying to understand the difference between my traditions and Roman Catholic ones at some level. At my African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, we recited the Apostles Creed. There’s a line about the “holy catholic church,” and I was confused by that because we were Protestants. They were talking about the universal church, small c catholic, not big C Catholic.

“The term comes from two Greek words that together mean ‘throughout the whole.’ This single word, ‘catholic,’ means throughout all time and places and also points to the essential unity or wholeness of the church in Christ. No one English term captures that dual sense of this ancient Greek term quite as well as ‘catholic.’ So when the creed states, ‘I believe in the holy catholic church,’ it refers to the wholeness of the whole church in all times and places rather than to any specific branch of Christianity.”

When I went to public school, Daniel Dickinson in Binghamton, NY, at the bottom of a wide driveway was Saint Cyril’s parochial school, with the church nearby. The kids from Dickinson and Cyril’s would occasionally get into mild skirmishes. Dickinson kids would call them St. Cheerios, and I’m sure they also offered some nicknames.

The ashes

But I was fascinated that some of my Catholic friends at Dickinson would go out at lunchtime on Ash Wednesday and return with dirt on their foreheads. Or so I thought.

During the decade before 1982, when I wasn’t attending church very much, I’d occasionally attend a Christmas Eve service. As often as not, it would be at a Roman Catholic church. I liked the ritual, and I tended to love the music.

Around 2005, I attended a FOCUS churches’ Ash Wednesday service at Israel AME church in Albany. They applied ashes to the foreheads of the congregants. Huh. I thought it was a great idea because I’m pro-ecumenicalism. My current church follows this tradition.

It’s like when I went to the Cathedral of All Saints in Albany for an anniversary concert, and they allowed, even invited, the Protestants to take communion, something that was otherwise not done. As I noted, some of my Protestant friends refused, but I felt that if they offered, I’d accept.

Pontiffs

This morphed into knowing all of the popes in my lifetime. When I was on JEOPARDY in 1998, there was a question in the category PUT ‘EM IN ORDER. The clue was Paul VI, John Paul I, Pius XII. Easy-peasy.

I wrote about them back in 2013. The first pope in my lifetime was Pius XII (1939-1958). There’s been a reevaluation of his papacy regarding his attitude toward the Holocaust.

He was followed by John XXIII (1958-1963), who named the first cardinals to Africa, Japan, and the Phillippines. Paul VI (1963-1978) was followed by John Paul I (1978), who was in office for five weeks before he died.

John Paul II (1978-2005) was the very popular Polish Pope in many circles, particularly for his anti-communist cadence. He tended to oppose the death penalty. He did apologize for many of the sins of the church, from complacency in the African slave trade to, late in his tenure, the first recognition of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy and others.

I didn’t like Benedict XVI (2005-2013) from Germany as pope or afterward. But I didn’t know one could resign. “In 2019 [as Pope emeritus], Benedict released a 6,000-word letter that attributed the Church’s sexual abuse crisis to an erosion of morality driven by secularization and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The letter was in sharp contrast to the viewpoint of his successor, Francis, who saw the issue as a byproduct of abuses of power within the Church’s hierarchical structure.” He died in 2022.

The current guy

Francis (2013-) from Argentina “is the first pope to be a member of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuit Order), the first from the Americas and the Southern Hemisphere, and the first born or raised outside Europe since the 8th-century papacy of the Syrian pope Gregory III.”

“In December 2019, Francis abolished the pontifical secrecy privilege in sexual abuse cases, clarifying that bishops do not need authorization from the Vatican to turn over to materials from canonical trials upon request of civil law enforcement authorities. The lifting of the confidentiality rule was praised by victim advocates, but did not require the Church to affirmatively turn over canonical documents to civil authorities.”

While progressive in many ways, “Francis has categorically rejected the ordination of women as priests. Early in his papacy, he initiated dialogue on the possibility of deaconesses, creating in 2016 a Study Commission on the Women’s Diaconate to research the role of female deacons in early Christianity.” But his position seems to have hardened.

Anyway, that was part of the reason I had to see a movie about selecting a Catholic pope.

Navy Exonerates 256 Black Sailors Punished in 1944

Port Chicago, California

I asked a couple of people whether they knew the story of the US Navy exonerating 256 black sailors who were punished in 1944. It’s not as well known as I thought.

This Smithsonian story from 2022 sets the table. A Deadly World War II Explosion Sparked Black Soldiers to Fight for Equal Treatment. “At the U.S. Navy ammunition depot at Port Chicago, on Suisun Bay some 36 miles northeast of San Francisco, Black seamen worked in shifts around the clock loading ships bound for the Pacific. Every day, they transferred hundreds of tons of bombs and shells from railroad boxcars to the ships. Sometimes, the bombs were wedged so snugly in the boxcars that the sailors struggled to loosen them safely. It was dangerous work; shortly after 10 p.m. on July 17, 1944, it proved deadly…

“All the people on the pier, aboard the two naval ships, and on a nearby Coast Guard fire barge were killed instantly. Three hundred and twenty people died, including 202 Black enlisted sailors. Only 51 bodies were recovered. It was the worst home-front disaster of the war.”

Tragedy compounded

Tragic, yes. And yet, it got worse. “Four days after the explosion… the Navy began its investigation. Three senior officers and a judge advocate interviewed 125 witnesses over a month, only five of whom were Black sailors. The officers … pointed their fingers at the enlisted men. ‘The consensus of opinion of the witnesses…is that the colored enlisted personnel are neither temperamentally or intellectually capable of handling high explosives,’ the judge advocate concluded. ‘It is an admitted fact, supported by the testimony of the witnesses, that there was rough and careless handling of the explosives being loaded aboard ships at Port Chicago.'” This was nonsense.

More than 250 black sailors initially refused to continue to work under these dangerous conditions. Under enormous pressure, “more than 200 men decided to return to work, and the admiral recommended they be charged with summary courts-martial for refusing to obey orders.”

But 50 were held and charged with conspiring to make a mutiny; they were convicted. An NAACP lawyer named Thurgood Marshall took up their appeal, but it was unsuccessful.

However, in July 2024, the Secretary of the Navy announced “the full exoneration of 256 defendants who were court-martialed following the 1944 Port Chicago explosion”. This was one more piece of hidden history, only 80 years later.

Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame 2025 nominees

Bad Company, The Black Crowes, Mariah Carey, Chubby Checker, Joe Cocker, Billy Idol, Joy Division/New Order, Cyndi Lauper, Oasis, Outkast, Phish, Soundgarden, and The White Stripes

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2025 nominees were announced recently. They are Bad Company, The Black Crowes, Mariah Carey, Chubby Checker, Joe Cocker, Billy Idol, Joy Division/New Order, Cyndi Lauper, Oasis, Outkast, Phish, Soundgarden, and The White Stripes. Nominees in italics are considered for the first time. Of course, it doesn’t matter, but I vote anyway; we get seven picks daily.

I’ve supported Joy Division/New Order (Love Will Tear Us Apart – Joy Division) and Cyndi Lauper (Time After Time) in the past, so I will again.

In 1970, I went to the movie theater with a bunch of my friends and watched Woodstock. It was a hypnotizing experience. Joe Cocker’s With A Little Help From My Friends performance was epic. Later, I bought the Mad Dogs and Englishman album. That’s a YES.

The White Stripes (We’re Going To Be Friends): I have the one album. I’m pulling for them because a friend of mine who worked in the music biz liked him and disliked folks who were schmucks. Frankly, I wish Jack White had gotten into that fuzzy category of musical excellence, which “shall be given to artists, musicians, songwriters, and producers whose originality and influence in creating music have had a dramatic impact on music.” He’s worthy because of his innovations and collaborations. He produced Loretta Lynn! His involvement in restoring and preserving deteriorating sound recordings on media is impressive. YES. BTW, a few days ago, I went to his Wikipedia page, and someone added: “He’s a bit racist…” and with no context (e.g., a citation). I removed it.

The Black Crowes (She Talks To Angels): The same friend worked well with this band. I have a couple of their albums. YES.

Mexican pop rock

Maná (Labios Compartidos): I had no idea who they are, and neither does much of the public. In the fan voting, at 11 pm EST on 2/15, The White Stripes were in next-to-last place with 23,000 votes, while Maná had fewer than 9,000. (Conversely, Phish had about 70,000, over 2,000 more than second-place Billy Idol.)

Wikipedia: Maná is a Mexican pop rock band formed in 1981… The band is considered one of the best-selling Latin Mexican music artists and the most successful Latin American band of all time with over 25 million records sold worldwide. Moreover, Maná has earned four Grammy Awards…” and a bunch of other accolades. Selva Negra Foundation (“Black Jungle Foundation”) is a foundation formed by Maná in 1995… they finance and support important projects aimed at protecting the environment.” I like their politics. Even though they’re unlikely to get in, that’s a YES.

My seventh vote goes to the group that started first, Bad Company (Shooting Star), in 1973, even though I own none of their music. If Jack White got in as a Musical Excellence, I’d support Billy Idol (Dancing With Myself); I don’t have any of his albums.

Twist

Chubby Checker (Let’s Twist Again): My buddy Johnny Bacardi wrote: “Genial fella… but what else did he do but endless variations on that one hit of a lifetime?” NO

I didn’t vote for Mariah Carey (Vision Of Love) last year because she uses her five-octave voice unnecessarily, to the music’s detriment. And I likely a bias against her seeming to co-opt Christmas every November 1.

Oasis (Don’t Look Back In Anger): I have the one album most people own. Frankly, I’m fascinated how some folks have gone gaga over their re-forming. Meh.

Outkast: I have one of their albums. Hey Ya is my first favorite song of the 21st century not performed by Johnny Cash. Not enough for me.

Phish (Bouncing Around the Room): They had a massive foolwing among my Grateful Dead friends. Never got into them.

Soundgarden (Black Hole Sun): a I have a couple cuts on a couple compilation albums. NO.

More musical excellence

I pull for John Prine and Warren Zevon, and I’d like to see more of the Wrecking Crew picked, particularly Carol Kaye, who created the bass line for Sonny and Cher’s The Beat Goes On in the studio. They should also pick Glen Campbell, a mighty guitarist, before having success as a singer.

I plug Estelle Axton, the co-founder of STAX Records, as I have been nagging about since 2015. As I noted, her brother, Jim Stewart, was inducted in 2002! My late friend Dustbury opined: ” So why is Stewart in the Hall and Axton not? Because Stewart, who couldn’t comprehend contract law, signed all those early Stax masters over to Atlantic, and at the Hall, Ahmet Ertegun sits at the right hand of God. Estelle, had she seen the paperwork, would have figured out the deal from day one.”

Estelle Axton for the ROCK HALL. Estelle Axton for the ROCK HALL. Oh, and Estelle Axton for the ROCK HALL.