Of Banjos and Afrofuturism
Thinking about "Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions," by Francesca T. Royster
The other day I finished reading Francesca T. Royster’s 2022 book, Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions, an astute analysis of the place of mostly contemporary Black country artists in the contemporary country scene, and the variety of their complicated relationships with the country music industry, woven together with moving, powerful vignettes from her life, a partial memoir of her own complicated relationship with country music as a queer Black feminist and a daughter, sister, wife, mother, English professor, and amateur banjo player.
Astute, moving, powerful.
And elegantly constructed. Each chapter weaves together artist profile, analysis of a topic that the artist’s work suggests, cultural theory, accounts of Black resistance to white oppression, and personal reminiscence. Having apparently decided on a chronological approach to her partial memoir, Royster appears to have organized her material by association: which artist illustrates, exemplifies, or otherwise connects with which issue that coincides with which period in her life? So: her life as an undergraduate student in Kansas, when she spent a lot of time hanging out in a mostly white fraternity as a pal of the frat brothers – that autobiographical episode rhymes with country music’s embrace of the “bro,” with male comradery foregrounded and attendant problems of sexism, and the Black country artist who intersects with that bundle of imagery best is Darius Rucker. Her account and analysis of Rucker’s career is persuasive and sympathetic, and her transitions between artist profile, musical description, cultural criticism, and memoir glide smoothly, without hitch.
In the chapter in which she weaves together her first teaching job after grad school, her interest in seeking hauntings from the past in small-town and rural antique shops, and the music of Valerie June, Royster, an English professor at DePaul University, achieves a style that hit me as poetry.
Valerie June is a ghost catcher. Her voice slips through our ribs, like a ghost, attracted by our hunger, by the space made for her in our shrunken, unfed bellies. Her voice is the ghost, or it conjures up ghosts. It makes my hands ache as she snatches at my heart, mistaking it for a ghost, and weaves through the cathedral of hard bone that protects me.
And a few pages after I was thinking, “Poetry!” — Royster included an actual poem of her own. Her multimodal approach is exemplary of her interest in innovation and flexibility — and beauty.
Royster’s (and June’s) ghosts connect with the book’s continuous interest in Afrofuturism, which Royster quotes the cultural theorist Daphne Brooks as describing as a worldview “that faces forward, that leans toward new conditions of black possibility.” June’s work evokes ghosts to learn from them, to ask (in June’s words), “How can we grow?” Royster and some of her profiled musicians play the banjo as an act of ancestral and cultural connection, always in service to the present and future.
While every chapter addresses the racism of the country music milieu and our society in general, Royster tells stories of resistance and triumphing over adversity. The artists she profiles mostly succeeded in finding success despite the obstacles and abuse our society visits on Black people, including Black artists. Royster weaves themes as elegantly as she does modes of discourse. The unifying vision of Afrofuturism reveals the ceaseless innovation and invention of Black musicians, including Black country musicians, with a sense of solidarity and mutual care, and an archivist’s interest in the continuity of the present with the efforts of forebears, all as part of the centuries-long efforts to, in Royster’s words, “survive the unfreedoms of” and “subvert appropriation and the control and constraints of white supremacy.”
With chapters devoted to Tina Turner (whose first solo album was a collection of country covers, and whose classic song “Nutbush City Limits” can be considered a country song), Beyonce (and her collaboration with the Chicks, formerly the Dixie Chicks, and whose album Lemonade includes country songs and traditional country imagery), Our Native Daughters, and Lil Nas X, in addition to Rucker and June, along with shorter profiles of Charley Pride, Mickey Guyton, Rissi Palmer, DeLila Black, Linda Martell, and DeFord Bailey (the latter two of whom both abandoned or lost their country music careers), the book does not attempt a comprehensive history of Black country music. Nor did Royster intend it to be a complete account of the influence of Black musical practices and techniques on country, which is ubiquitous, from repertory (spirituals are common currency in country; Glen Campbell’s second biggest hit was a rhythm and blues song by Allen Toussaint), to instrumentation (the banjo, originally an African instrument, provides a marvelous throughline in her book), to rhythms (country borrowed ragtime, stomps, swing, boogie, rap, and even disco beats from earlier Black musicians), to ensemble-style (whenever you hear a fiddle or a pedal steel moan an improvised melody behind a country singer, that’s a legacy of jazz and blues, not of Europe).
Black Country Music doesn’t need to be comprehensive. It’s a deep and irreplaceably personal contribution to the conversation about the centrality of Black music to country and American culture in general. It embodies and enacts Royster’s vision of Afrofuturism through innovation, solidarity, care for others, and historical mindedness combined with forward thinking. It’s a celebration of Black triumph and beauty and family and community love in the face of oppression. And – the ending – no spoilers – gave me goosebumps.
Image: the cover of Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions, by Francesca Royster, and featuring photographs of the members of the group Our Native Daughters, from left to right: Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell, and Amethyst Kiah, each of them playing a banjo.