Black History

Part 2: Black Roots of Country Music

Country music’s foundation runs deeper than commonly told. From DeFord Bailey’s harmonica on the Grand Ole Opry stage to the Black bluesmen who shaped Hank Williams and Bill Monroe, African-American artistry helped build the genre while rarely receiving equal recognition.
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By Dr. Wornie Reed Ph.D

Last week, as a Black History Month feature, I wrote about DeFord Bailey, who was the first star of the Grand Ole Opry. He helped usher in the Opry as the grandest stage in country music.

Deford Bailey played other key roles. He popularized the harmonica as a country music instrument.

When Roy Acuff came to Nashville in the 1930s, Bailey helped him by touring with him. Acuff, of course, became known as the King of Country Music.

Bailey did the same with Bill Monroe. He toured with Monroe to attract audiences to his type of music, which became known as Bluegrass, and Monroe was dubbed the father of Bluegrass.

Although no other Black performer became a country music superstar until Charley Pride in the 1960s, several Black musicians played key roles in its development.

The influence of Black music on country music began long before DeFord Bailey. It probably started with the banjo, which often conjures the hazy image of a white pastoral South. But the instrument is a descendant of West African lutes, made from gourds, that were brought to America by slaves, and which became a central part of slave music and culture in the South. Soon, the instrument was standardized, adopted, and spread to white audiences through minstrel and Blackface shows, which influenced the rise of hillbilly music, a term later rebranded as “country music.” Many of the songs that early hillbilly artists played were likewise inherited and adapted from Black sources – like slave spirituals, field songs, and religious hymnals.

While the South remained deeply segregated in the ‘20s and ‘30s, Black and white musicians frequently engaged in musical collaboration, even appearing on many recordings together. Country Musicdetails the collaboration between Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong on 1929s “Blue Yodel Number 9.” On that song, the “Father of Country Music” yodels and sings the tale of a Tennessee hustler, while Satchmo, the most influential person in jazz, “seamlessly fills the space with jaunty blues licks.”

Jimmie Rodgers built his fame on being a white musician who sang the blues, a style he learned from Blacks while working on southern railroads. The Carter Family, enshrined alongside Rodgers as the First Family of Country Music, owed much of its success to Lesley Riddle, a Black man who composed several of their songs and helped A.P. Carter collect and rework many of the rest. The “Father of Bluegrass,” Bill Monroe, credited the Black fiddler and guitarist Arnold Schultz for inspiring his blues-inflected style.

Hank Williams’ foundational country sound was deeply influenced byRufus “Tee-Tot” Payne, a Black blues street musician in Alabama who mentored him as a youth, teaching him chords and rhythm, and influenced his “hard time” singing style.. Williams acknowledged Payne as his primary musical instructor, and the stage play, Hank Williams: Lost Highway, dramatizes Williams’ rise from rural Alabama to stardom, heavily featuring Payne’s influence on his blues-inflected sound.

These notes on country music provide an example of the quote, “America’s love for Black culture, but not Black people has erased African-Americans’ role in pioneering American music.”