Country? Rap? Lil Nas X’s chart-topping “Old Town Road” revived a long debate about borders and boundaries in American popular music. To sort out this strange history, Hari heads down to the foothills of Virginia, where a legendary collection of blues records holds the key to understanding the insidious separation of “Black” and “white” culture.
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Pushkin. This thing is four. My friend Chris King stands in the living room of his old house in rural Virginia. But this is where it actually gets fragile. This is like doing open heart surgery, because this is when you could slice that microscopic van. Chris takes a kitchen knife to a large package, a two by two foot cube. My friend cultivates an old timey look. He has a mustache, round towatu, shell glasses, suspenders holding up his core draws. He's approaching this job in a methodical way. Think of a nineteen thirties country doctor examining a patient. Holy shit. Inside the cube, he finds more packaging and still more. It's as if someone's playing a trick on him. Inside one box, there's another, and another, then a sandwich of cardboard and foam, and finally, in the very middle a record, just one record, shine mint copy. Holy shit. This record is ninety years old, more or less, made to spin at seventy eight revolutions per minute. The disc is fragile. It's coated with a substance called shellac, a resin secreted by an Indian beetle. Shellac was too expensive to use for the whole record, so it's only on the surface. The inside of a seventy eight is filled with clay and limestone dust. It makes them heavy and very brittle. Drop one and it will shatter like a china plate that's so clean you can shave off. Then I met Chris some years ago when I was researching my novel White Tears. The book is a ghost story about record collecting and the Mississippi Blues. To understand that world, I needed to talk to a seventy eight collector, someone who is deep in the subculture. Chris agreed to help me out. He's the kind of source a novelist can only dream off. Everything was stitched into the Fate's Harry. You know nothing, there's nothing by chance. Now I'm here to witness him in his happiest place somehow or another. The day that I was born, it was written into my fabric that I was going to play this record for you, and carefully lowers the needle into the groove. This is Into the Zone, a podcast about opposites and how borders are never as clear as we think. I'm hurry Kun's room. This episode is about music and authenticity. It's about tradition, and modernity. It's about black and white seventy eight. Collectors are notoriously secretive. The first one I contacted while writing White Tears Well, he told me that revealing information about collecting would be against his self interest, because if more people realize how amazing these records are, the prices would go up and it would be harder for him to collect. But Chris is the kind of guy who wants to share what he loves. He welcomed me into his lair in Virginia, and I've wanted an excuse to go back ever since, and we're lucky enough to be in your I mean, do you call it a listening room? What do you call this place? Yeah? I can do more than listen here. Chris isn't lying. He won a Grammy in two thousand and two for his work compiling early recordings. He remasters old records for re release. This room is a shrine to the early years of recorded sound. Thousands of records in identical brown cardboard sleeves sit on shelves. The walls are hung with memorabilia, portraits of long dead fiddlers and jug bands. There's a mixing desk, a turntable, two monitor speakers hung on cables from the ceilings. To your collecting of American music, I mean, do you have anything after the Second World War? I don't collect anything sucks. Don't collect anything that sucks. I think that is a valid collecting strategy. Well, there's there's completely a good rule of film for anybody. But is there a date at which you stop? Yeah, well, I mean I don't. I don't have hardly any post ward War two. I have no post World War two blues and I have like maybe one or two post World War two your belly things. The record Chris Just Unpacked is by Mississippi musician Robert Wilkins. The song is called rolling Stone Part One. Don't you Go? Hearing this on an original seventy eight is like the second coming for blues fans. There are very few known copies, and this is the one in the best condition rule Someday. Robert Wilkins is not the only early blues musician to have recorded a song with rolling Stone in the title, but he's the one. The English band called the Rolling Stones had to pay royalties on the album Beggars Banquet. There's a track called Prodigal Son. When it was released back in nineteen sixty eight. It was credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. It's actually a pretty straight cover of a song by Wilkins that he'd been playing since the nineteen twenties. After a long court case, the elderly bluesman finally got what he was owed. There are many stories like this. The British invasion bands of the nineteen sixties, like Cream and led Zeppelin did a good job of repackaging country blues and selling it back to Americans with an English accent. I grew up in England listening to a lot of those bands, and like many people, I eventually found my way back to the blues tradition that they were borrowing from. But it was a long time before I really understood how strange it is that rock and roll music that comes from the nes came to be thought of as a white style. It's one of the reasons I went to Virginia to talk to Chris. He knows this history better than almost anyone in modern popular music. We make this distinction between black and white traditions in America, and do you think that distinction has any validity? Well, obviously it has validity. Now, but if you go back to basically the Civil War, the American Civil War up until essentially the dawn of the of the recording industry, that was a false dichotomy. There was a pre blues tradition that was mixed, It was shared. It was neither neither a white nor black. It was mongrel. It was everything. Maybe you should you should play something, and we I mean, we could play the guessing game and see and imagine who might be playing. Yeah, okay, so I mean I'll play two records. One is by black musicians, one is by white musicians, but largely the instrumentation in the repertoire and the style is the same. And this sort of shows that, Um, if anything, it was the recording industry that started to parse out and say this is black and this is white. I think I had sent him knocking on that still now be read around him something that as far as I yeah, I think that they were very high during that session. You can hear the guy kind of like mumbling like whoa, and the way he's just experimenting with, like just how long he draws that New Orleans. Yeah, I was like completely improvised session. It sounded like black musicians to me, not so much because of how they were playing, but because of their accents. Chris pulls out the other record. This record also nineteen twenty nine, and also I didn't realize it until I pulled it. This is also Atlanta, Georgia. So both recorded in the same place, the same place. They probably knew each other. They probably around you. One of the speakers says, quit your foolishness around here. He says it, Yeah, I hear white people in that straight away. May say, who were we listening to? So we were listening. The first track was Chittland Supper by peg Leg Howell and Jim Hill peg Leg how he had a peg leg peg Leg and his band in it. Lanta were black, as I guessed correctly. And then the second record is the South Georgia Highballers doing bluegrass Twist, and they were a white group. The point of Chris's demonstration wasn't that back in the day, black and white musicians sounded into changeable, though it's true that they did seem to play their instruments in almost the same way. No, Chris's point was that someone has been training us all these decades to hear and recognize slight differences and immediately attribute them to race. We've been taught categories, and every day we're taught them anew by those who patrol the boundaries. Let's play a little game called that ain't country. This game has just played by me talking about stuff that ain't country. That's the country music YouTuber called Grady Tate who wants us to know what ain't country. And the first one and main one that really inspired this video is as I'm sure you've heard song Old Town Road by Lil Nasax. You might remember the internet drama around Old Town Road. For a while, TikTok was dominated by teenagers magically transforming themselves into cowboys and cowgirls to the sound of this song. Sixty seven million views later, Oldtown Road topped the Billboard Hot one hundred for nineteen weeks, a record, and it made both the country and the R and B charts. I'm not actually even mad at Lil NASA's at all for making this song. Who I'm mad at is like the gatekeepers over at iTunes and over on Billboard that are letting the song chart as a country song, and it's not a country song at all. This is a hip hop song. That I guess is about horses that ain't country was just a tiny part of the backlash against Lil Nas, and eventually Billboard pulled Oldtown Road from the Country, a category it did not contain quote enough elements of today's country music. Lilnar's X was officially not country. Like many people, I thought, I detected a racial subtext in this argument. Old Town Road has a heavy trap beat and big bass, but lots of contemporary country music uses elements of other popular styles, including hip hop. Why pick on Lilnar's X people said his song didn't sound authentic. I'm always on the alert when I hear the word authentic. It's a gate keeping word, a word used to exclude. It's also racially loaded. My mom's English and my dad's Indian. When I was growing up, I was made to feel that I wasn't white enough, but also that I wasn't brown enough. As a writer, I've always told stories that challenge simple ideas about authenticity, that try to show how the world is complex and more mixed up than we give it credit. For the kind of stories I'm telling in this podcast. To get a better handle on authenticity in American popular music, I took the A train. It goes all the way uptown from where I live in Brooklyn to Harlem. I was going to see a writer friend called Kevin Young. Kevin is a poet and the director of one of the most important libraries in the US, the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture. I wanted to ask Kevin. By dressing up as a cowboy, was Lil nas X somehow appropriating white culture? Well, I mean cowboy face. Is that where you're suggesting, is that there's such a thing. Now we'd have to go back and talk about cowboys who weren't all white. In fact, there are many many black and brown and Asian cowboys. The way we think of cowboys as shaped I think entirely by cinema. And John Wayne couldn't ride a horse. I should leap in here and say that, of course John Wayne could ride, he just wasn't that fond of horses, and he only rode on set, never for fun. But Lil nas X isn't playing a cowboy in the same way as John Wayne is playing a cowboy. John Wayne fans revere him because they feel he's channeling something authentic. He convinces them that he's a cowboy in his dazzling stage suits. Lil nas X isn't trying to convince you of anything but his fabulousness. He's giving a knowing performance. It's cowboys style. It's camp, a kind of camp with deep roots in African American culture. And here's where things get really interesting. Kevin connects that form of camp to the cake walk, a parade like competitive dance that started in the days of slavery. It was performed for a prize, sometimes a cake. It was a dance from the plantation of blacks, the enslaved, mocking there would be masters. They're putative slave owners, the holders of them. Supposedly they are imitating them, you know, being quote fancy. And of course it depends on where you stand how you took that. If you were the white slaveholder, you thought, wow, look at them, not quite able to do what I do in my elegant dance. And if you were the black performer, you were like, boy, they don't understand how much fun we're making of them, you know, and how much fun we're having in this limited system which within which we can only operate this way. The k Kolk was the ancestor of everything from the line dance on soul Train to bull room voguing. It's the ancestor of Lil Nazek, sacheting along in his hot pink mesh cowboy shit. At the same time, you know, there's this parodic satiric quality of the music that you know, I'm tracing back to the cake Walk, but we can trace back any number of ways, which is, give me a form, and I'm gonna make fun of it, and I'm gonna make it better than you made it. Of course, when Lil nas X was having a showdown with a country music authenticity sheriffs, an outlaw rode to his rescue. Billy ray Cyrus, famous mullet haver and father of Miley, teamed up with Nas. It should be fast. We'll settle in here for the night. I don't know, man, last time I was here. They want to welcome and the outsiders. In the video they made together, Nas rides a horse down a street in East la He and Billy also face down an all white crowd of seniors in a community hall. The segregated bingo game turns into a line dance, and it all ends in a sweet interracial prom photo. Nas fixes a smile and his old white lady dance partner gazes admiringly up in him. But let's be honest, this kind of thing is exactly what makes a lot of country music fans uneasy in a world of style and flimflam. Country sells itself on authenticity, on realness, though it sometimes wears Ryan stones and hairspray. Country means songs about growing up poor, about enduring hard times, and it has musical traditions. Country fans feel there's a way it ought to sound. Everyone knows that country has that thing that twang. No, you can't take my door, I don't want to love you anymore. Whiskey good straightened on you get If that sounded off to you, Congratulations, your bullshit detectors are still functioning. That was country music generated by artificial intelligence. Researchers trained a neural network on country music's greatest hits. This was what it came up with, Well, get yourself at a sham Away. The melody and the lyrics were the work of the AI. The arrangement and singing humans Elsewhere on the Internet, there's a twenty four to seven live stream of AI generated death metal created on the fly with no human intervention at all. I don't want to make you listen to that. I really don't, all right, I do sorry. At some point, possibly very late at night, I realized that in twenty twenty, any conversation about country music and authenticity is best conducted by two men of South Asian descent in a living room in Brooklyn, drinking old fashions. I am from Pennsylvania and I grew up in a college town. I've always loved music, but I think that I came across country music just artificially, just you know, collecting records as a teenager, discovering that unexpectedly I really liked this stuff. This is Shuja Hider. Shujia is a smart cultural critic who's always happy to share his opinions on political philosophy or the best Michael Mann movie Collateral. Shujia also loves country music, and I think it may actually have something to do with with my South Asian background. That you know, I grew up on hearing the sort of Hollywood music of the forties and fifties and sixties that my dad used to play. And those songs are all full of stories, you know, they were associated with the movies of the time. They describe rural life or urban life in India and they're written by you know, some great poets. The lyrics we would some favorites of USB Well, my dad loved Muhammad Raffi and taddethmod N, Johnny Tunkab. Yeah, these are songs that are very intricately written. They draw on the folk traditions of the landscape, and I think country music kind of does the same thing. Jiujia has written about his own attempt to pin down the essence of country music that's set in something that feel that twang. Twang is a word that initially is used to describe language people who speak with various kinds of accents, the way you are aticulate a vowel or so on. We're often described as twang all the way back to Europe in the seventeenth century, and it often is used to denote a Southern accent, dropping the geese and you know, kind of twirling your vowels and so on. I would ride number nine heads, Carol Ride, and that's a sound that I think at the time that people in the South started to migrate to California towards the north towards city centers. They brought their accents with them, and they brought their musical traditions with them, and once they came into contact with the new technologies that we're being used to produce music and to record music, they started to emerge in new ways. So you have the sound of an electrified string, you know, being picked up by a magnet that's being fed into an amplifier, and people are giving it the same kind of articulation that they would give their speech. And I think that's what we call twang. Choose it points out that the twang, the sound I think of when I think of country music, is an electrified sound. The sound of an instrument called the pedal steel. Pedal steel is a wooden board that has strings across it, and rather than actually being touched with fingers, it's played with a steel bar and usually sort of false like metal claws, and it's got not just not just the steel bar to change the notes, but also a system of pedals that change the notes after they've already been articulated. The quintessential sound of a genre that prides itself on tradition is the sound of a modern instrument pedal steel. Sums it up. It was invented in the twentieth century. It was constantly revised and tinkered with. You know. It originally has its roots in Hawaiian music with the lap steel. So you can't play the pedal steel on a farm. The pedal steel is an electric instrument. It needs to be amplified otherwise you can't really hear it. And it's really kind of a space age sound, you know, it sounds something like the phamin or it even sounds like a synthesizer. You know, give everyone, this is what commercial country and Western music sounded like. In nineteen thirty seven, Blue Yodel Number two, recorded in Los Angeles by a band called The Rhythm Records. This song is a cosmic collision of styles and influences. It's a blues about a loving gal called Lucille. The growling vocal is copied from black singers like Bessie Smith, but the singer is a fourteen year old white boy from Oklahoma who goes by Whitie McPherson. And what about that yodel? It sounds so good, yet it's so weird. Yodeling was actually a solid part of American life for at least a hundred years. Yodling started in the Swiss Alps, of course, but American yodeling had a long history in blackface minstrel shows. The writer of this song was the huge star Jimmy Rogers. He started out performing as a black face minstrel. What you're hearing is, in fact a space age Hawaiian Alpine black face minstrel song. May carry me back to old Virginny. That's where the cotton and the corn and the tatoes grow. That's where the birds warble sweet in the springtime. There's where the darky's heart am long to go. That's an old minstrel song. Until nineteen ninety seven, it was also the state song of Virginia. This version was sung by Marion Anderson, the first black singer to appear at the Metropolitan Opera House. Carrying Me Back was written in eighteen seventy eight by a black singer and composer called James A. Bland. But would you say the song was black music? Marion Anderson sings in a European style with European orchestration and Bland's lyrics repeat one of the primary racist fantasies of the South that free black people long for the certainties of the plantation that they actually want to be enslaved again. The black man who wrote the words had never been a slave on a Virginia plantation. He was a Howard University graduate from Flushing, Queens who made his living writing minstrel songs. Carrying Me Back to Old Virginia has a quality I find in Oldtown Road, in Blue Yodel Number two, and so many other American popular songs. It's like a Merbius strip with a white side and a black side that run together, impossible to separate. My Virginia friend, Chris, the collector, lives inside that strip. He loves it. It's a wonder that you can find anything, because these are all identically sleeved records. They're all in these uniform brown paper sleeves. And I mean, I don't know how many you have. He had enough. You know how many you have here? He has five thousand, five hundred records. Could you, I mean, talk about your cataloging. How do you oddly enough? Oddly enough talking about segregation? So this is all black, so shelf it's about here, huh. And the one from there yonder is all Cajun and from here over to there is all white Hillbilly, and then Ukrainian, Polish, Indian, Albanian, Greek, Turkish, African, Mongolian. I didn't know you didn't know you did? Mongolian is our evening together gets later and later. Chris ranges across topics, occasionally pausing to roll a cigarette to will refill out glasses. All right, I'm gonna get another glass of wine and then I'll play you something that will go good with that. But but black, But you won't be able to tell it's black. I swear to God. At that time, in nineteen twenty nine, you would have been able to encounter William Moore playing that piece, and then somebody like my grandfather playing the exact same piece with probably the same vocal inflection, the same style. In Britain, folk singers revived ballads and traditional regional songs, always striving to sound as authentic as possible, searching back in time for some pure original version. American music was from the earliest days a hybrid. I asked Chris to play me English ballads, Irish jigs and African banjo playing to show how elements from many different places went into the sounds of American music and how they began to blend together into something that couldn't have been from anywhere else. This is old country stomp by a Texan musician called Henry Thomas. Very little is known about him. He was a wondering songster and sometimes a hobo who rode the rails across America in the early years of the twentieth century. We never would have heard him a tool had he not been brought into a studio in Chicago where he recorded this in nineteen twenty eight. Henry Thomas isn't somebody who was born early, wasn't. He was quite old by the time he was recorded in the twenties, and he's he's like one of the poster boy examples of like where black and white get very muddy. But he's one of those musicians that I would find his records mixed in with white country records because people just like the way he sounded. They said he sounded country. It's a typical country breakdown. I mean, that's what you would have heard in a barn being played on fiddle and banjo with somebody just making calls, you know, swing your partner. But it's a black guy Henry Thomas cut twelve records in Chicago, twenty four sides, and one in particular found its way into the ears of white folk musicians in the nineteen sixties. If you're of the love and Peace generation, and even if you're not, you might find this familiar. It was performed at Woodstock in nineteen sixty nine Canned Heat, who had a huge career in the late sixties, performing a lot of let's call them homage to the pioneers of country blues, pioneers like Henry Thomas. I love that record. You should have seen a look on my eyes when I saw that. Where did you find shit? Man? I found this fourteen years I didn't find it. I bought it from a junker fourteen years ago, a guy who was just going around picking up stuff, and he met me in the back of Walmart in town. Eventually we got onto the topic of what they used to call hot jazz, the fast paced, syncopated sounds that made flappers crazy in the twenties. Chris isn't a big jazz collected, but jokes that he keeps one record around for conversations just like this, one other than cocaine. What is going on? There. It's a hardcore traditional New Orleans group which just happened to be Why yeah, but that kind of music really worried a lot of people, or a lot of a lot of white moral gatekeepers didn't then yeah, I mean you've heard of the shimmy she wobble? Right? Actually, have not heard of the shimmy she wobble? Okay, it's a nasty dance. It's a fun dance. It's it's simulated copulation while standing up with another woman and dancing. And it was our laud in twenty three states the shimmy she wobble? At one point? How could you not be fascinated by the shimmy she wobble? These fast, sexy jazz dances were once the subject of a full scale moral panic. I found a screed against jazz dancing in a nineteen twenty one edition of Ladies Home Journal. It's by An Shaw Faulkner, national Music Chairman of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. The title does jazz put the sin in syncopation? That it has a demoralizing effect upon the human brain has been demonstrated by many scientists. Jazz produces an atrophied condition on brain cells of conception until very frequently those under the demoralizing influence of the persistent use of syncopation combined with enharmonic partial tones, are actually incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, right and wrong. Personally, I think that sounds awesome, But here's where we get to the nitty gritty. There's an effort to get rid of the shimmyshi wobble or the more the safe name foxtrot. There was this notion to like push traditional values of hillbill and music of going back to square dancing. I wanted to know if this was because there was less physical contact between the dances. Yeah, exactly. There's no touching at all unless you held the hand of the person while they cut corners with you. One thing I'm very interested is that there was an attempt to make the square dance the official dance of America. That was one of Henry Ford's less great ideas. Henry Ford. Yes, that Henry Ford the one best known for the model t But like the billionaires weighing in on today's politics, Henry Ford had many opinions and they got taken seriously because he was Henry Ford. Mister Ford didn't just think jazz was bad, he thought it was a conspiracy. In his self published pamphlet The International Jew, he writes, popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes are of Jewish origin. Ford's solution, wholesome white traditions of music and dance, take it away, the Henry Ford all Time dance orchestra. Denunciation of the dance by the protectors of public morals has usually been occasioned by the importations of dances which are foreign to the expressional needs of our people, with characteristic American judgment. However, the balance is now shifting toward that style of dancing which best fits with the American temperament. Don't you feel cleaner for hearing that? Like a spiritual, high colonic Now you're free of all that dangerous foreign syncopation rotting your brain and destroying your morals. By the end of the nineteen twenties, after Henry Ford's campaign, almost half the school children in America were learning square dancing and other forms of folk dance. Later on, there was a concerted push to make square dancing the official folk dance of the US, not tap dancing or the jitterbug or any number of Native American dances. Dozens of bills and resolutions endorsing square dancing went before Congress and state legislatures right into the early two thousands. Racists like Henry Ford were trying to create an authentic, segregated folk culture. The recording industry took care of the rest. In nineteen twenty two, the Oka label began to market what it called race records, specifically to the African American market. Between the nineteen twenties and nineteen forties, many major labels issued their own series of race records, bringing jazz, blues, sermons, gospel, and other genres of music to a Black audience that was excited to hear their culture on the phonograph. Eventually, the race terminology fell away, to be replaced by rhythm and blues, R and B, and of course the insidious term urban. But from the earliest times, Americans have made music together with no regard for categories or labels. Some years ago, Chris King stumbled on a rare Cajun record, This is our La valse abe abe waltz from our nineteen twenty nine with third Ennis McGhee. I'm a derad One. Amadouine was a black accordion player in southwest Louisiana who recorded almost everything that he made was with a white fiddler, Dennis McGee. So it's an instance of neither black nor white, but together. And when you listen to the recordings, you can they're so hand in glove. It's not like it's two friends playing together. It's like two brothers playing together. The American birth riot is fusion, the talent for blending things together and making something new. For every Henry Ford trying to separate us, there are a hundred amade Adowas and Dennis McGee's making music together like brothers. The most beautiful fucking thing you've ever heard. I say goodbye to Chris King and the beautiful sounds on shell It disks. I have an appointment with the memory of Alcyone. I maintain that truth is a powerless land and cannot be approached by any part whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any part whatsoever, cannot be organized. Gurus on the beach colonizers on the astral plane and a very special guest in the Kunzru family home that's next week on Into the Zone. Into the Zone is produced by Ryder Also and Hunter Braithwaite. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mer La Belle is our executive producer. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Music for this episode composed by Griffin Jennings. Our theme song is composed by Sarah K. Pedinatti, also known as lip Talk Special. Thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Faine, John Schnaz, Maya Kanig, Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, and Maggie Taylor. Into the Zone is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider letting others know the best way to do this is by rating us on Apple Podcast. You could even write a review. See you next week. I'm Harry Kunzru