Breaking a color line, song by song Country music attracts more and more African-American listeners–and artists BY JOHN MARKS When he first took his country music act on the road in the early 1990s, Trini Triggs booked himself into the most remote honky-tonks in the state of Texas. He wanted to make sure his audience would accept a black man doing hillbilly songs. "There were a few stares at first," Triggs remembers. "But as soon as I started to play, it didn't matter anymore." Triggs, whose debut CD will be released by Curb records this summer, is attempting what once seemed impossible. In his impeccably starched button-down shirts, his omnipresent George Strait Resistol Stetson, and his ostrich-skin cowboy boots, Triggs is trying to break into the most ethnically homogenous of all American popular music forms. Country music has only ever had one black superstar, and in 1966, when Charley Pride's "The Snakes Crawl at Night" became a hit, RCA executives made sure no listeners knew he was African-American. They feared alienating a mostly rural Southern white audience. It's one of the stranger truths of American popular culture: Country music, with its profound debt to African-American musical traditions, has become so deeply associated with whites that black artists seem wildly out of place when they perform it. In the mid 1990s, when Nashville was doing some of the best business in its history, a few black artists landed record deals, but none have sustained careers. Now, some in the industry–especially Frankie Staton, head of the Black Country Music Association–think it's time to break down what they see as the country color line. "Did you ever think you'd hear a song like that coming out of a brother?" asks Staton, after watching one of her artists, Dwight Quick, sing a hymn to the American South in a twang worthy of Dwight Yoakam. Country music, in its current form, was invented in the 1920s as one format for the newly emerging radio and phonograph markets. Before that time, rural, working-class people, black and white, had a shared musical heritage, a broad-based folk music stemming from a variety of sources: African-American gospel and blues, Appalachian mountain songs, and traveling vaudeville shows, among others. Jimmie Rodgers drew upon all of these sounds, particularly the blues, to become country's first major star in the 1920s and '30s. Both black and white performers played in groups called stringbands, which were popular at that time. Yet the eclectic music soon collided with a renewed period of segregation and tension between the races. "Earlier there had been less concern about differences between blacks and whites, particularly in the working class," says Vanderbilt sociologist Richard Peterson, author of Creating Country Music. "Suddenly, whites became more self-conscious about doing black culture, and blacks did, too, about white culture." Blues they could use. Segregated markets never hindered black influence on the sound. The blues, for instance, had a far more profound impact on country lyrics than pop did. The classic hillbilly song, like classic blues, typically focuses on alcohol, marital breakups, sin, and death, often in the form of a tale. (When asked why he liked country music, jazz great Charlie Parker replied, "The stories, man. Listen to the stories.") In the civil rights era, says Peterson, most of the black audience turned its back on country. At a time when both country and bluegrass were identified by some racist adherents as "white people's music," the hillbilly sound, he says, "was the very opposite of what [blacks] wanted to be." Charley Pride turned out to be an anomaly: He had 29 No. 1 hits between 1966 and 1989, but no other black country artists followed. Staton's BCMA, founded in 1997, is taking up where he left off, organizing showcases in Nashville, sending CDs and tapes of black artists to label executives and using every opportunity to spread the word. The timing is good. After one of the most lucrative decades in its history, country music is stagnating. Listenership has dropped 25 percent over the past five years, meaning that the industry is desperate to find the next big thing. Black country acts have emerged all over the United States. On the West Coast, Mike Mann and the Knight Riders play what they call cowboy soul, a combination of pedal steel guitar, country harmonies, and a rhythm and blues beat. Wheels, an Alabama-based five-man band, has been playing the national casino circuit, and until recently, had a record deal with Asylum. Trini Triggs is alone on the star track, however. A native of Natchitoches, La., Triggs, 33, got a taste for country music from his mother, who listened to nothing else. When he entered high school, he organized bands with black and white members who could play both the Commodores and Kenny Rogers. Three years ago he was discovered by a West Texas businessman who offered to become his manager. And last month Triggs was featured on Nashville's New Faces show, which launched the careers of stars like Randy Travis and Brooks & Dunn. Meanwhile, he takes lessons to improve his onstage dancing, chats up disk jockeys on cross-country tours, and sings songs that appeal to that all-important female demographic–songs more about "lovin'," he says, than "cheatin'." Disk jockeys say that their listeners don't care about the color of the singer. They buy into the lyrics. Still, Staton remains skeptical that the industry has opened its mind. For every Triggs, she says, there are 100 others who feel that they've been rejected for being the wrong color. Music-industry executives scoff at charges of racism. It's a question of money (and luck) rather than race, says Ed Benson, head of the Country Music Association. If one black singer becomes a star, every label will want to have one. Staton isn't betting on it, though. "We're fighting a battle down here," she says. FINDING A Y'ALLTERNATIVE Americana's inner hillbilly In American commercial music, the big money has always been in pop. So, once every two decades or so, hoping to cash in, the country industry in Nashville tries to kill its inner hillbilly. It bans banjos and fiddles, chases the twang out of vocal arrangements, and generally discourages the sorrowful strain that emerges in traditional lyrics. Steve Earle, a musician who is at the forefront of a movement to rescue the redneck element in the music, insists that Nashville has never been able to escape a basic truth about its sound, however. "We are hillbillies," he says. "In trying not to look like hillbillies, we end up looking like the worst hillbillies of them all." In the past decade, the inner hillbilly has been under siege like never before, with stars like Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks edging the country category as close to pop as possible. A backlash is occurring among musicians young and old who revere the older traditions, and audiences are beginning to respond. Banjos welcome. The movement goes by many names. In punk and grunge circles, it is called "alt.country" or "Y'allternative." The bible for these listeners is a magazine called No Depression, which is also the name of the Uncle Tupelo CD that converted a broad swath of gen X-ers into Hank Williams fans. Radio calls the music "Americana," a category that includes virtually anything with fiddles, banjos, pedal steel guitars, or mandolins that mainstream country stations refuse to play–like Earle's new bluegrass opus, The Mountain; Kelly Willis's Austin roots-rock What I Deserve; and the forthcoming Emmylou Harris-produced tribute to Gram Parsons, the original hippie cowboy. While there are precious few full-time Americana stations, disk jockeys around the country have begun to devote special hours to it. Compared with mainstream country, however, Americana is a tiny phenomenon commercially. Mainstream has more stations than any other format–approximately 2,600. By contrast, about 100 stations report to the Americana chart, which was launched in January 1995. This music also differs from country in its politics. Most mainstream Nashville musicians steer away from controversial themes like immigration, capital punishment, labor unions, and racism. But artists like Earle embrace them, emphasizing the folk element in country, which has always had a social agenda. "There is only one place where I support the death penalty," Earle likes to say in concert. "And that's in hillbilly music."–J.M.
