The easiest way for my words to make any sense to anyone reading this is to begin this treatise on how I’ve come to understand how to survive America at-present by writing about country music is to couch my words betwixt Langston Hughes’ 1925-composed poem, I, Too.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Music is a brotherhood. Yes, it’s a sisterhood and personhood, too, but I didn’t call it that when I was breaking bread with a friend of mine that I hadn’t spoken to since the onset of the coronavirus worldwide.

My friend: So, you do country music now, huh? That makes country along with rap, EDM, R&B, Latin music, jazz, pop, am I forgetting something…and no, I’m not joking, I’m just trying to keep up!

Me: Well, I did get published in No Depression with a piece about reverse gentrifying the Great American Songbook, too….

My friend: Reverse gentrification?

Me: Yeah, so you know, the great American songs. Like “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess and stuff. Yeah. You know, the songs that white people wrote about Black people’s lives and then Black people had to reclaim from white lyrcism?

My friend: I get it. But yeah, man. I guess the question is, why do you do it?

Me: Well, you see, music is a brotherhood, and I’m the darker brother they finally let sit at the table.

My friend: Goddamn, man. You eating, huh?

Me: Like Rick Ross said in “Hold Me Back,” “Steaks, no more soup.”

On June 1, 2020, I watched, back-to-back, the two most challenging things in the world that I ever watched. Foremost, that’s the day I finally watched Derek Chauvin kill George Floyd. Following that was seeing Elvis Presley’s 1973 Aloha from Hawaii special. At that point, I realized where 42 years of my life had gone wrong. 

As a journalist, my job is to truthfully tell stories and ultimately create the space where right can effectively face wrong in the court of public opinion. Unfortunately, for the better part of 12 years, I hadn’t done that. Yes, I’d revealed the truth that reggaeton was the future, that the digital era could radically transform the music industry, and hip-hop was the ubiquitous lingua franca of the modern age. However, the actual truth that needed not telling, but fixing, is that if Elvis Presley — but not the Black people he stole from — could sit at the metaphorical table of “American equality,” Black people needed to destroy it. Before assuming that I had to set forth upon radical revolutionary action to achieve this, I opted for a far less invasive solution to maybe sit in Elvis’ chair: write about country music.

See, that’s the one morosely funny thing about watching bloating, sweaty, and chemically altered Elvis Presley slur through quasi R&B, and pop-country leaning hits in 1973 after seeing an innocent Black man be knelt upon and treated like prey murdered by a Trump child on an African safari. It didn’t piss me off. Instead, it led me down a dark YouTube hole of attempting to find the exact moment in which Black people lost control of our culture, then our humanity. And it led me to country.

Country music is a fascinating genre because it occurs at the literal intersection of where Black people and white people occupied the same land, musical instruments, and comparatively similar folklore. However, because America fundamentally, as a nation, was built on the idea that commerce is a space defined, owned, and operated — in generational perpetuity — by white men, there is very little chance that Black people would ever see financial and representational equity from the land, instruments, and folklore they shared with white people.

The video that stopped my YouTube descent was one of Charley Pride — America’s first African-American, color TV era, mass-marketed, big-budget, and prime-time country music superstar — performing his cover of Hank Williams’ 1953 hit “Kaw-Liga,” in 1975. It crystallizes everything about race, gentrification, reclamation of culture. It serves as the point of inspiration for me, the darker brother, to claim my seat at the table.

“Kaw-Liga,” as performed by Hank Williams, is a chug-a-lugging traditional country song about a cigar store wooden Indian, Kaw-Liga, who falls in love with an “Indian maid over in the antique store.” However, he can never bring himself to tell her how he feels. The fact that a white guy would have the audacity to sing a blissful yet bittersweet song in the stylings of Black-innovated country music about the sentience of emblematically racist imagery is starkly poignant enough. However, consider that I watched that alongside watching Elvis Presley attempting to cosplay a “come hither” taking Black, disco-era mack. This, after seeing nine minutes of a Black man’s soul being forced out of their physical essence.

I had enough. 

But then, seeing and hearing Williams’ bluegrass-style “Kaw-Liga” covered by Pride with the twist of a late-’60s era British Invasion/mod-influenced swing gave me hope.

Inspired by Elvis Presley, Derek Chauvin, Hank Williams, and Charley Pride, I’ve been writing about country music for 14 months now. And in those 14 months, I already feel like — without radical revolutionary action — that I’ve achieved the metaphorical seat at the table of American equality that I desired.

There’s something bizarrely motivating about working in a space where the very thing that inspires your passion is currently the most damning notion that defines the racist, misogynistic, and horrific inequality that uniquely identifies America as itself in the vast array of nations worldwide. 

A perpetually heartbreaking notion exists when the moment you enter into country music also doubles as a time wherein the top-selling artist worldwide is Morgan Wallen, a country star. And sadly, like so many country stars before him, when he gets drunk, he can’t seem to figure out a way to not say the word “nigger.” As well, the other top-selling star is Aaron Lewis, a nu-metal retread, whose anti-liberalism hit single, “Am I The Only One,” is begrudgingly fantastic. Nevertheless, with bitter sadness, it must be admitted that the tune is noteworthy because it’s a recitation of a litany of stereotypes that provide a master class presentation on how far America has gone insofar as embodying the lampooning of its founding essence.

At this moment as well, I — a Black man inspired by stealing country music back from white people who bastardized the brilliance of Black creativity — write about country music for Country Music Television and Billboard, have spoken at length about the genre to the Associated Press and Apple Music, and from Rolling Stone, was awarded the 2020 Chet Flippo Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism. Trust me when I say that noting this as “a wild time” is vastly undercutting how mind-blowing my life is right now.

And yes, though — as noted — the food served to me as I sit at the metaphorical table of equity isn’t ideal, I refuse to leave.

Why do I still eat the music-as-metaphorical equivalent of gross, bloating garbage served by the likes of Wallen and Lewis? Because, as I remember Langston Hughes’ previously mentioned poem I, Too, I know the beauty of what lies ahead, as the darker brother finally seated at the table.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

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