ON MARCH 16, 1983, THE COUNTRY MUSIC Association (CMA) celebrated its 25th anniversary, and I was invited. Buddy Killen, the song publisher who pitched "Heartbreak Hotel" to
Elvis Presley, thought "the Black girl from Harvard" might just be the second coming of that hit's songwriter, Mae Boren Axton. He put me on the guest list and paid for the tickets.
It was a complicated night. The event was held at the DAR Constitution Hall, built by the Daughters of the American Revolution, an infamous venue whose management had refused to allow Black opera star Marian Anderson to perform on its stage in 1939. I took special pleasure in seeing guitarist and singer Charley Pride stride onto that stage-in a building named to honor the U.S. Constitution, but run to exclude Black artists-and stake his claim as part of that "We the People" that document claims to represent.
At one point in the ceremony, singer Roy Acuff announced that "country music is a family." Then he proclaimed Jimmie Rodgers "the father" of that family. But he did not mention Lil Hardin Armstrong, the pianist who played on Rodgers' hit "Blue Yodel No. 9." Acuff nodded to Will Rogers, the comedian, but shamelessly omitted DeFord Bailey, the Grand Ole Opry's first superstar.
My idea to name and spotlight the First Family of Black Country was conceived in that moment. It was nurtured in the silence of missing names. Quiet as it was being kept, country had Black founders. I knew it; Buddy Killen, who arrived in Nashville playing bass for a blackface comedy act on the Grand Ole Opry, knew it; Roy Acuff, who had played on stages with Bailey, Ray Charles, and Pride, knew it. And more than four decades later, Beyoncé knew it when she broke the internet on Super Bowl Sunday by surprise releasing two country songs and announcing an album, Act II, which has her devoted fans in the Beyhive buzzing about line-dancing into the summer of country.
This story is from the March 25, 2024 edition of Time.
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This story is from the March 25, 2024 edition of Time.
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