Sepia Tones: Exploring Black Appalachian Music—E7: From Coal Mining to Country Music with Alice Randall

Dr. William Turner and Dr. Ted Olson talk to songwriter, author, and scholar Alice Randall, whose pioneering work in country music garnered her video-of-the-year recognition ("Is There Life out There," Reba McEntire) and acknowledgement as the first black woman to be the co-writer of a number one country song ("XXX's and OOO's," Trisha Yearwood). She is also a New York Times bestselling author (The Wind Done Gone) and serves on the faculty of Vanderbilt University, where she has taught courses on Black country music, coal mining history and culture, and soul food. Randall's most recent book, My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future, is a memoir tracing her experiences in the Nashville music industry and the roots of Black influence on the genre. Its companion album, My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall features her songs performed by artists such as Leyla McCalla, Rhiannon Giddens, and Alice’s own daughter, Caroline Randall Williams. Giddens' rendition of Randall's song "Ballad of Sally Anne" received a Grammy nomination in 2025.

Dr. William Turner is a longtime African American studies scholar and retired Distinguished Professor of Appalachian Studies and Regional Ambassador from Berea College. He was also a research assistant to Roots author Alex Haley and co-editor of the groundbreaking Blacks in Appalachia. In 2021, Turner received Western Carolina University's individual Mountain Heritage Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies. His memoir called The Harlan Renaissance, available from West Virginia University Press, was awarded the prestigious Weatherford Award at the 2022 Appalachian Studies Association Conference. 

Dr. Ted Olson is a music historian and professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of many books, articles, reviews, encyclopedia entries, and oral histories. Olson has produced and compiled a number of documentary albums of traditional Appalachian music, including On Top of Old Smoky and Big Bend Killing, both from Smokies Life. His work has received a number of awards, including nine Grammy nominations. The East Tennessee Historical Society honored Olson with its Ramsey Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2021. 

Transcript

Sepia Tones, Episode #7
“Alice Randall, Songwriter and Scholar”
Hosts: Bill Turner, Ted Olson
Guest: Alice Randall

[Guitar and banjo music and singing / "John Henry" by Amythyst Kiah and Roy Andrade from Big Bend Killing]

Alice Randall
Music naturally belongs in these natural spaces. And country music, in particular, grew up with nature. And I do not understand why we don't have $14-an-hour songwriters who get to do a two-week residency to pitch a tent in every national park that is comfortable enough to pitch a tent in and sing to people at their supper time or at dawn or whatever time—write new songs. I love the intersection of nature, receiving of songs, and creating songs. I personally love to write out in nature, particularly when I'm writing a country song…

Karen Key
Welcome to Smoky Mountain Air and our special miniseries Sepia Tones: Exploring Black Appalachian Music. I'm Karen Key, and in this episode, our mini-series co-hosts Dr. William Turner and Dr. Ted Olson will be speaking to songwriter and scholar, Alice Randall, whose groundbreaking work in the country music industry has spanned 40 years. 

Randall is also the author of The Wind Done Gone, a reinterpretation and parody of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind viewing the story from the perspective of a slave who was also the half-sister to Scarlet O’Hara. The novel became a New York Times bestseller. Her book My Black Country was published in 2024.

This mini-series is funded through the African American Experiences in the Smokies Project and supported by Smokies Life. Dr. Turner and Dr. Olson spoke with Alice Randall on an online video chat. 

Ted Olson
Welcome to Sepia Tones: Exploring Black Appalachian Music. I'm Ted Olson. Along with my co-host Bill Turner, we have explored the Black influences upon Appalachian culture and music. Today, we're going to share our final episode featuring a wonderful interview with the great artist, songwriter, writer, professor Alice Randall. This interview was conducted a while back, and we're happy now to share it with you. 

Alice Randall talks about her work as a pioneering country music songwriter, in fact, the first Black woman to co-write a number one country hit, “XXX's and OOO's” by Trisha Yearwood. And of course, she has many other hit songs performed by folks such as Glen Campbell, Moe Bandy, Marie Osmond, Jo-El Sonnier, Radney Foster, Holly Dunn, and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. 

Alice Randall has written such books as My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present and Future, published in 2024. Alice has also written several novels and a cookbook with her daughter, Caroline Randall Williams, entitled Soul Food Love: Healthy Recipes Inspired by 100 Years of Cooking in a Black Family.

Alice brings to close our podcast series with some very philosophical points, and we appreciate Alice articulating some of the reasons why Sepia Tones has been so important. So, with no further ado, let's introduce Alice Randall, and she'll start her conversation with my co-host, Bill Turner. 

[Guitar and banjo music and singing / "John Henry" by Amythyst Kiah and Roy Andrade from Big Bend Killing]

Bill Turner
I want to start, Alice, with a statement I've made several times in putting a framework around what we are trying to do. And it's a story about how Charlie Pride, when he came off the stage at the Grand Ole Opry for the first time, someone said to him, "Charlie, you look like them, but you sound like us." Which I guess points at the incredulity some people experience when you put Black and country and bluegrass in one sentence. So, tell me what comes up when people say, "Alice Randall, born in Detroit, raised in Washington, Harvard graduate who writes country songs." What do you get at a cocktail party when you say that? 

Alice Randall
I always win the competition when I say, "Guess what I do for a living” or “Guess what brought me to Nashville.” No one guesses to be a country songwriter. I always win that. I think one of the things I like to point out—and I'm just thinking about this today—is that, you know, prior to 1945 in the South and the rural South, there were no Black-owned radio stations in America.

Bill Turner
Mm-hmm. 

Alice Randall
There were not commonly Black-owned radio stations in America until the '60s. And so, if you were a rural Southerner and you listened to radio, you were listening to country radio and Southern White-owned and programmed radio. Now, that's not all the music you would hear, because juke joints were very important, and so you would get what was on the jukeboxes, get what's in the live music in what was then called the “chitlin’ circuit” coming through. You would get what's in the church. But what you heard on the radio on Saturday night, if you were Ray Charles as a little boy, was DeFord Bailey coming through on The Opry. 

So, number one is: Black people in the rural South have listened to country and recorded country as long as there has been radio and no Black-owned radio. And, you know, I want to get right into that thing about “sounds like us.” Well, my mother was born in Ironton, Ohio, a little town that—  People forget, but about a third of coal miners in West Virginia were Black people, and they had often very traditional Appalachian West Virginia accents. 

Bill Turner
Right. 

Alice Randall
Now, people also forget that there were also Alabama coal miners who have very different Deep South Alabama cotton field—that “cotton and coal” Alabama, which is very different than West Virginia. But the part— Ironton, Ohio, which is near the West Virginia border where my mother was born—Youngstown, all these Black coal towns in West Virginia—Black people sounded just like that. 

Bill Turner
Mm-hmm. 

Alice Randall
I don't know how that gets muted. It's not erased; it's muted—that Black people have never sounded one way. Black people in Alabama don't even sound the same way as Black people in Mississippi. There's so much nuance, but there's so much flattening of the story. And I am so thrilled, Bill and Ted, that you have been leading the charge to develop the entire prism of representation that represents the embodied experience of several hundred years of Black people living in Appalachia and influencing people throughout America and across the world, because that's exactly what happened. 

I mean, one of the people I also love to just shout out to at the very beginning who influenced me so much is Bill Withers. 

Bill Turner
Right. 

Alice Randall
I have always thought Bill Withers, whose grandfather was a coal miner, who had multiple male family members who were West Virginia coal miners.  “Lean On Me” is a country song coming out of his experience of being in a small town in West Virginia where people had to depend on each other, particularly in the hard times. And when you look at early album covers of Bill Withers in his denim, his lunch bucket, he is very similar to Merle Haggard in how he is representing himself as a working man, though that gets erased and people want to occlude that with— he's not wearing the same jeans that Jimmy Hendrix is wearing. These are working man's jeans and a working man's lunch pail. And he's writing extraordinary songs. “Lean On Me”, his train songs that don't get looked at about Appalachian Black life. So, I would just say that he's a superstar that transcends country, but he's so country. 

Bill Turner
I was glad to hear you mention that part about your mother in Ironton, Ohio, where I was up there recently in the area of Huntington and Ashland, Kentucky, which is, you know, in the same neighborhood. So, without knowing much about it, that it’s essentially part of my own upbringing. I was raised in Southeastern Kentucky, in Harlan County, Kentucky, which might be 100 miles southeast of Ironton, down what you call the “Hillbilly Highway,” Route 23, over in Harlan County. My father and grandfathers were coal miners. And when I think about our migration stream, it sounds like your mom might have been in the migration stream that left Southeastern Ohio on the river and went to Detroit. 

Alice Randall
Absolutely. 

Bill Turner
Yeah. So, thousands of Black people went that route. 

Alice Randall
My father's family came up from Selma… 

Bill Turner
Right. 

Alice Randall
...from Alabama up to Detroit. But as I said, I know, because I was born in Detroit at that time, a lot of them came right out of the coal mines of Alabama…

Bill Turner
Right. 

Alice Randall
...that people forget. 

Bill Turner
I'll have to send you a copy of my book. I wrote about some of those things in a book I recently published that looked at that. 

Alice Randall
What's it’s title? 

Bill Turner
It's called The Harlan Renaissance. A kind of play on the fact that during the period—  My mother, for example, was born in 1924 in Harlan County, and her mother had come up out of a combination of a little time in Macon, Georgia, where she was born, but the biggest stream of them, with their country music background, they came out of Jefferson County, Alabama, which was in and around Birmingham. 

Alice Randall
And that's Jefferson County, a lot of coal. 

Bill Turner
Yeah. 

Alice Randall
One of the things that I like to note how Black Appalachia influences the whole world is most of the great jazz bands, Black and White out of Chicago and Detroit, would never have survived the Great Depression without playing the coal camps of West Virginia. 

Bill Turner
Right. 

Alice Randall
'Cause in the middle of The Depression, the coal camps were still working, people were still making money, getting paid. 

Bill Turner
Mm-hmm. 

Alice Randall
And so jazz bands would come and play a month down in West Virginia, the coal camps, the Black ones, the White ones, the churches, the bazaars, because people that—  sometimes those coal camps were working 24/7. So, there was always somebody not working somewhere… 

Bill Turner Right. 

Alice Randall
…They could come, and that's how they survived The Great Depression on the backs of coal miners. 

Bill Turner
Right. 

Alice Randall
And that is the same way—  people don't realize that part of the pre-Motown story of Detroit is the—what I call the breadwinners—the men and women—but mainly men—working at Henry Ford's factories, working in the tire factories who are making a regular income with a boring job on an assembly line. When they got off the assembly line at 2:00 am, they were ready to go to a nightclub and hear music. 

Bill Turner
Right. 

Alice Randall
They were a great audience. They helped define a Black aesthetic, because if you are sharecropping all day, you are exhausted. And sharecropping is actually intellectually challenging and difficult every day dealing with the weather, dealing with the politics, dealing with everything. An assembly line is very boring, routinized work. It prepares you to go out and be a music critic to use your brilliant brain. 

Bill Turner
Mm. 

Alice Randall
And so, I love seeing how the Black audience helps define aesthetics and Black music in Detroit, but I truly love how Black and White coal miners working together sustain Black and White jazz bands in The Great Depression. And how do they get erased from the story—that these are the great Medicis that aren’t recognized; that they weren't philanthropists, but they were funders.

Bill Turner
Mm-hmm. Fantastic. That's fantastic. Yeah, I have a piece myself that I looked at again recently, and it was about the steady work of Cab Calloway. And they came into Bluefield, West Virginia, and they played the juke joints up and down the coal mining towns between Bluefield and Gary and Keystone and Welch, and all that area where there were thousands of Black people who had been displaced 50 years earlier from Alabama, and they came up into West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, and Southwest Virginia. Even in my little hometown, Cab Calloway came there once. Bessie Smith came to Harlan County in the 30s, and that was, like you said, people were— my grandparents were working full-time in the coal mines of Harlan County in 1931. 

Alice Randall
And you will be surprised. I have a daughter who is 34, who graduated from Harvard, and her first job out of Harvard was teaching down in the Mississippi Delta. 

Bill Turner
Mm. 

Alice Randall
But her first job out of graduate school when she was a baby professor—University of West Virginia…

Bill Turner
Yeah, I saw that. I saw that. 

Alice Randall
…where her grandmother was coming from. And so that was interesting that Caroline, you know, started ... She has taught in two of the poorest states in America. She's taught in Mississippi and she's taught in West Virginia, but she has stayed close to her Affrilachian and Appalachian roots. 

Bill Turner
Fantastic. Yeah. 

Ted Olson
Well, Alice, I was going to ask a question, if I may, regarding country music and Black folks. One of the themes that we've been developing throughout Sepia Tones as a podcast series has been that the entirety of the country music tradition has been remarkably informed by the contributions of Black folks, but often unattributed. And I was kind of curious your perception of that whole story of country music as having been an industry that was structured by people with great power kind of taking on the cultural contributions of many different people from many different walks of life, but packaging that musical culture in such a way so as to represent a reduced or a narrowed vision of what that music really has always been about. I was kind of curious, for example, when you got to Nashville, what kind of “country-music-official” perspective did you encounter as you worked within the industry? Did you find that the industry was quite open-minded and quite honest about the diverse heritage of country music? Or did you experience something else that, you know, seems to be changing in the present day in the 21st century with recognition of Black contributions in country music? But I’m kind of curious when you came to Nashville what you encountered? 

Alice Randall
I came to Nashville permanently in 1983, but in fall of ’82, I had a scouting trip to Nashville. And I will never forget that one of the top record executives in the town—it was at Acuff Rose, I won't call the person's name right now—  But I was so thrilled that I was going to Acuff Rose that had published Hank Sr. and also John D. Loudermilk, some beautiful, you know—and so many amazing songwriters—Mickey Newberry. And the then-head of the publishing company—I was a senior at Har- I had just gotten out of Harvard—put his feet up on the desk in his office. He asked me where I came from, and his next words were, "You need to just go back there." 

Bill Turner
Wow. 

Alice Randall
"Wherever it is that you came from." And then he said something along the lines of, "Maybe I just never have met— It's been a long time since I met anyone at this low level of development that you are.” He said, "I'm gonna share your writing with some of my younger writers and see what they think. " And he said, "But don't have much hope." 

And then he sent me a letter that I'm sure he was thrilled to write a few months later, the letter that made me decide to move to Nashville. And in that letter, he said, "I showed your work to my young writers and they agreed with me. You have no talent whatsoever." [laughs]

Bill Turner
[laughs] 

Alice Randall
[laughing] And that was the day I decided to move to Nashville and prove them wrong. 

Bill Turner
Wow. 

Alice Randall
And I want you to know that one of those two men, the young writers that he showed it to is a person that I ended up writing with after I met him at something called Weenie Roast, which was a big block party in the music industry back in that day. And he was talking to me, he wanted to write with me. And I said, "No, no, you don't want to write with me. I have no talent whatsoever," because I knew who he was. He didn't know who I was. And so, I knew his name when he said it, because he, of course, had just dismissed me. I'm sure they didn't even say my name and said "This Black girl." And so, I don't even think he ... So, I said, "No, no, you actually said I have no talent whatsoever." He said, "You're that girl, you're that Black girl." I said, "Yeah, I'm her." And then he was so embarrassed. And the second song we ever wrote became the B side of a number one single. 

Bill Turner
Hmm. 

Alice Randall
Very interesting song, a feminist country song. It was a song I brought to town with me when I came called “Reckless Night” about a “running-out-of-luck-town in old Virginia,” so on the Appalachian border. And a girl gets pregnant, and the boy is still inside the church singing in the choir, and she is shut out in the churchyard. So, it was about evangelical religious hypocrisy, slut-shaming before people were talking about it. That's what I do love about country. That's what Miss Loretta Lynn taught me. “I used all the diapers for dish rags last time. Don't come home from drinking with loving on your mind.” These let us talk about the actual realities of women's lives—songs that you do see in the country canon. And I decided to enter into that space. And that song did get recorded by the Forester Sisters, who've gotten forgotten, but actually if you add the Dixie Chicks, the Judds, and the Forster Sisters, the Forester Sisters had, I think, more top 10 songs. They're right there with the Dixie Chicks, if you think of the Judds as a duo, not a group. 

Bill Turner
Hmm. 

Alice Randall
So, but then they've disappeared, and one of them may have gone on to earn a doctorate, but I did love ... So I came to Nashville, and I will just say there are a lot of people— Some of what was said to me, I couldn't even tell you on this podcast. But I quote one thing that—I'll translate one thing—I went to meet one of my favorite writers. I was so excited to be able to meet him. And we were at a songwriting night, and he stepped away from me after he was introduced to me, and I'm translating what he said. And he said, "I've been doing this too long if I have to compete with “colored” girls from Harvard," but he didn't say “colored.” 

Bill Turner
Wow. 

Alice Randall
[laughing] You know what? I've got bigger hits than he has today! So, I said, "You've been doing it too long, and you do have to compete with me." 

Bill Turner
[laughs] 

When you mentioned this “you don't have any talent; you can't do this,” it takes me back to a statement from one of the most well-known persons from Detroit, and that was Malcolm X. You know, Malcolm was once told, "Malcolm, you don't want to be a lawyer. ‘Colored’ people don't do that kind of thing. You should study to be a carpenter. Stay in your place." And so, it sounds like you had that same exact experience in Nashville. Not surprised to hear about it. 

Alice Randall
With that Detroit chin-up swagger. See, Malcolm came through, you know, he was once known as, I know you know, “Detroit Red.” 

Bill Turner
Detroit Red, yeah. 

Alice Randall
And, yes—  In that coal mine-West-Virginia-Alabama spirit that goes into the making of Detroit, one of the things about people from Detroit coming out of those two parts of Appalachia—and also the Deep South—is that we are willing to outwork everybody else. And that it's a work hard, play hard spirit. 

Bill Turner
[laughs] Yeah. Mm-hmm. 

Alice Randall
That it's creativity plus literally, you know, you go down in a coal mine, you have to be precise. You're depending on each other for your very life. It is literal life and death, and it's sudden death. And these things prepare you for a kind of exactitude, and they test your actual courage and what you will do for your family—that you are willing to die, go down into the mine, and to face death, face the tomb, so these people can live. And there's another version of that of the car factory. 

Bill Turner
Right. 

Alice Randall
But that is what— Detroit is compiled of those two things. There's no “making do” on either of those things. They are dangerous, hard, exacting places. 

Bill Turner
I bet you can sing a line from a song called “Working in a Coal Mine.”

Alice Randall
I can sing you so many coal mining songs. 

Bill Turner
Boy, I like that. [singing] “Working in a coal mine, going down, down now; Working in a coal mine, oop, going down.” 

By the way, Ted, I know we'll get back to where you started this, but please, Alice, help me with this part. You mentioned your having an unforgettable experience meeting Steve Earl early on when you got to Nashville, and he taught you how to write country songs, and that the first thing he taught you was quote, "Write the song only that you could write, write it from your own perspective, and then find something that you know about that was universal." Would you expand on that a little bit because I think that really gets at the point of Appalachia, Black Appalachians, White Appalachians, whomever, is the universality of these stories, particularly of working class people. And I have to say in some underlying context, I understand Avon Williams out of Knoxville is your uncle? 

Alice Randall
No, no. He is my daughter's grandfather. 

Bill Turner
Okay, yeah. 

Alice Randall
He was my father-in-law. So, about Steve Earl, who is from Texas, Steve did actually— Steve was a pure Texan—he did give me that advice about writing only the songs that I could write. 

Bill Turner
Mm-hmm. 

Alice Randall
So that was— and he really did sit down with me and work on songs in my early career with me. So that was a very, you know, big influence on me. 

Bill Turner
Yeah.  

Alice Randall
And I said, my daughter's grandfather was Avon Williams from Knoxville, and they were from Knoxville and before that, Maryland. But he went to, I think, Johnson C. Smith, which is I guess in North Carolina. 

Bill Turner
Yeah, in Charlotte. Yeah. Yeah. 

Alice Randall
And so he had very much an Appalachian childhood. 

Bill Turner
Yeah, and I know Mr. Williams. I met him in Knoxville, must have been in the ... I want to think it was in the ’70s. Because Alex Haley at one point, after Roots came out in the mid ’70s, Alex ended up buying a farm 25 miles north of Knoxville in Clinton, Tennessee. 

Alice Randall
Right. I've been there. 

Bill Turner
Yeah. Yeah. And the museum is on that ground. So, when I read about Avon Williams and your family two years ago, I was like, oh, wow, this is—  

Alice Randall
Well, my daughter's father, who's deceased, is Avon Williams III. 

Bill Turner
Yeah. Yeah. 

Alice Randall
And we've actually been recently to that museum—the Black Museum in Knoxville.

Bill Turner
The Beck Center. 

Alice Randall
Yeah. Her great uncle is Lee Livingston, who was the, well, one of the first prominent Black doctors in Knoxville. And then, of course, Big Avon, as we called him, who was practicing law in Nashville. And of course, their first cousin was Thurgood Marshall. 

Bill Turner
Yeah. What a tree, what tree. 

Alice Randall
You know, one of the things about my ... I'm, I'm working on my memoir now, and one of the things that's just interesting is that I say my grandmother, my mother, and my aunt only had one thing in common. They were very different, different, different women. And the one thing they had in common is they all love country music. And they all loved different kinds of country music. 

Bill Turner
Wow. 

Alice Randall
And so that is such an— and they were all Black women, but they all had a very different experience of country music, and that's one of the things I'm exploring. 

Bill Turner
Mm-hmm. That's fascinating. 

Ted Olson
Alice, do you sense that the consciousness of the Black contributions to country music have increased within the Nashville music industry in the 21st century? By all intents and purposes, it appears so from the outside, but just curious from your insider perspective if the country music industry's kind of awakened and much more ready to be open and honest about the true roots of country music. 

Alice Randall
I think it's very, very complicated. Certainly an evolution is going on. I'd say that it's been a period of both reckoning and reconciliation. What I think that hasn't been noticed enough is that, actually, the biggest change is there has become an awareness of two things: the Black audience for country music and the international audience for Black country music, I think it's become a different awareness of the audiences. Does that make sense? Because I think that, just today, I won't go into it, I think that most people here in Nashville who are even in the business couldn't tell you what I could tell you about why Linda Martell is important and what she means, even though she is today the highest ranking on the country charts Black woman. That I could point out her— 

They don't realize that, oh, what's interesting about her is she sings like Lynn Anderson—has that sweet, that quality of voice, extraordinary like Lynn Anderson, Dolly, one of the great stylists—and at the same time, looks incredibly fantabulous like Bobbie Gentry, and was great about picking songs and is depicting parts of Black life that we haven't seen before, such as the Black Hippies in San Francisco where the actual Black Panthers are being founded on that Plantation Records album—that she got all that in there. Do I think people in Nashville know that, that if you say, "Why is Linda Martell important?" No, they don't understand that yet. They know she hit the charts, but they haven't ... 

So I don't think yet there is the full shift of understanding what she really accomplished, and that it would have been even more had things been politically different because, actually, her songs, which are racially conscious at that time, “Color Him Father,” which is not a song about race but about stepfathers, so therefore it is truly about identity and the mutability of identity. She is 40 years ahead of her time about identity as a construct there, in terms of capturing the Black migration to California. 

Another thing that is interesting, we can look at a song such as, in Porgy and Bess, “It Ain't Necessarily So”—and we can point out it has a White writer and composer—but John Sublett, the original singer, the person who introduced the role of “Sporting Life” on Broadway that Sammy Davis will step into, others will step into, John Sublett adds a layer of creation, a layer of meaning that others picked up after him that wasn't in the literal song that was in the lyric, wasn't in the literal notes. It is his, he's a co-creator of that song. And when you look at Sammy Davis, in my opinion, I don't think the industry has caught up with that yet. The fullness of how Black aesthetics and the fullness of Black politics, how they are embedded in country, or even the fact that no one wants to talk about— In the 20s, and I know, Bill Turner, you're gonna get what I'm coming from here on some of these small Appalachian towns… 

Bill Turner
Mm-hmm. 

Alice Randall
I think about—I have an auntie who got arrested more than once for being with her husband, because they looked like she was a White woman and he was a Black man, right? 

Bill Turner
Mm-hmm. 

Alice Randall
But she was a Black woman. We're not even beginning to count how many Black people played on country records passing for White…

Bill Turner
Right. 

Alice Randall
…because it was the only way. No one has done an analysis of that. 

Bill Turner
Mm-hmm. 

Alice Randall
We have looked at people that we can identify in census—there weren’t pictures. So many that were Black who played on the records, they just never put their figures out there. But we haven't even started to touch on how many were passing when a large percentage, particularly in Appalachia, and we're, you know, creating faux categories, Melungeon—which only means, you know, now that we've done DNA testing, we are seeing that these are mixed race, Black and White people…

Bill Turner
Right. 

Alice Randall
…with maybe some Native American—or not. But they are calling themselves “White.” So, my point is, no, do I think anyone is looking at all of this? But what I do think there is this awareness of the audience, there is a desire to celebrate the history, and there is this thing that I love about country music, and I loved it the day I arrived here.

Bill Turner
[laughs]

Alice Randall
In 1983, if you got in a room with the real musicians—and I was not any kind of intimate friend of, say, Willie Nelson, but I have met him. I have been very close to Garth Brooks at times. I have had many ... you know, I wrote a video of the year for Reba. If you got in the room of A-list players, and you asked them, "What is the greatest country song of all time?" One of the answers you would get is Ray Charles' Modern Sounds of Country and Western Music. You would also get people who were talking about George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” but you would also get, from those old-time people, people realize that the bent notes of the steel guitar, which is the Whitest instrument out there— These people have memories. They know it came from the Second World War, from Hawaii, from Brown people, they also know that the bent notes of the steel guitar are imitating blues bent notes. They might not have known the phrase “open throat, bent notes singing of the African tradition.” They don't know that phrase. 

Bill Turner
Right. 

Alice Randall
But they lived long enough that they remember their mamas’ mamas’ mamas talking about some Black banjo-playing woman. And they might not know that the banjo is literally an African instrument, but they certainly might know that in their grandparents' days and in pictures, the people playing the banjo, the people playing the fiddle were Black women and men along with White people. 

Bill Turner
Right. 

Alice Randall
So, they knew, and then everybody living in music as opposed to screenwriting— I was explaining this as different, I also worked in screenwriting. When you go into Hollywood, one of the big differences is there are lots of intellectual people who do not believe there is a great African American screenwriter that is the equivalent of the greatest screenwriters. There are many people who do not believe there are any great Black directors of the equivalent of Ingmar Bergman, the equivalent of Hitchcock. There is nobody in the music industry, particularly in the country music industry, that believes that Michael Jackson and Prince aren't two of the greatest musicians of all time. And so it's just a very ... And that Black aesthetics are the foundation of this music that they are doing. They know that and they know that Jimmy Hendrix, from the same time in ’67, they knew that Jimmy Hendrix is teaching Duane Allman how to play the guitar. Not literally, but in Woodstock. When you watch it, they know these things. 

So that was one of the parts that was wonderful about being here, that if you could figure out how to make people when they began to say, "Oh, she might be ... " Buddy Killen, who signed me to publishing at Tree eventually, he signed The Allman Joys, Duane Allman before they were the Allman Brothers. And he thought I might could be that brilliant. He had heard Aretha Franklin down in Muscle Shoals. These people knew that Big Mama Thornton sang better than Elvis. They knew this. And, so, it's very different— Now, they may have been wanting to make the money off of it and not have me make my own money. But they did know Black musical genius. 

And that is very different as opposed to in screenwriting when I worked in that, you're proving to people, or when I was at Harvard as an undergraduate working on Jane Austen, there are people who doubt that a Black woman can be the top Jane Austen scholar, even as an under- you know, the top undergraduate Jane Austen scholar. I had to prove that. And I think I managed eventually, maybe, maybe didn't. But in country, they can take it off the awards and do this, but everybody knows that Beyonce’s “Daddy Lessons” is one of the great country songs of the last decade. They may can argue about what “Old Town Road” is or isn't, but everybody knows “Daddy said shoot,” that that is in a completely country music tradition. And I've written scholarship on that. 

So that is— The good thing about Nashville is Nashville knows it is built on Black genius. The bad thing about Nashville is it has done a lot of thinking about how to make money and not pay the Black geniuses it's built on. 

Bill Turner
Mm. 

Alice Randall
And DeFord Bailey is one of the worst examples of that. 

Bill Turner
Right. 

Alice Randall
But I also think intellectually a lot of people don't understand the relationship of DeFord Bailey to funk and rhythms and to mimesis, going back to Aristotle. That— I wanted to say this one simple, strange thing, because that Appalachian harmonica, DeFord Bailey. One of his most famous songs is “Pan-American Blues.” It was played all through hollers of Appalachia from people who heard it on the Grand Ole Opry. If you lived in a holler in Appalachia or anywhere in the South, you didn't need an imitation train whistle. The train was all around you. The train whistle that you heard in the music was the escape out of town, emotionally, abstractly of the trip you couldn't take. It was an absolute act of abstract mimesis. It's not an imitation. You didn't need an imitation train whistle. You could hear it all the time. And so that's why I say that the scholarship hasn't caught up to the art. That DeFord Bailey sung for when you're stuck on that cotton field, and you hear the train all the time, but here's a train in your head that is art and creation. Here's a Black man in a suit, even if you just saw that one picture who people dismissed as crippled, who is actually ... You remember that actually he was a bigger star than Roy Acuff. Roy Acuff remembered that and talked about it, but then later would call him a “crippled boy,” which so offends me. 

And I'm so glad, Bill, that you brought up Avon Williams. When I was about ... I can't even remember what exact year it was right now, but I think it was about 1990, approximately. I was married in ’87, and it was after I was married to Avon Williams III.  Avon Williams Jr., who was the first Black state senator elected in Tennessee since Reconstruction, was in the fight for his political life. He was also—it’s making me tear up—he was also fighting ALS, but his mind was 100 percent sharp, but he could not speak. His voice was very slurred. He was getting legislation passed. This is a man who had desegregated every school system in Tennessee but Shelby County. At my first husband's 13th birthday, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on the lawn at their house at 1818 Marina Street. And that's in 1973. So, he's an extraordinary man.

So, I'm here trying ... I'm a songwriter and he can't get out and campaign the same way. So, I say, "We need to write you a jingle. We're gonna get it on these Black radio stations that are here in Nashville now”—in that, in about 1990. And I even get my White allies. Ray Kennedy—we recorded in his studio who's gone on to win Grammys on Lucinda Williams. We had Black voices, I think it was Scat Stevens, I'm trying to remember who it was. I write this thing and we get it recorded. It goes onto the radio, and I think it helped him get elected. And I said to Big Avon, I said, "How does it feel?" Thinking, feeling like the big stuff, you know, 29 years old. “How does it feel to have your first jingle?” And he banged on the table. I hope you can hear that. And he could hardly lift his fist, but he raised his fist to bang on this table. And he said, "DeFord Bailey wrote my first jingle." 

Bill Turner
Hmm. 

Alice Randall
“DeFord Bailey sang my first jingle.” 

Bill Turner
[laughs] 

Alice Randall
When they tell the story of DeFord Bailey, they tell it like he died in literally a housing project, which he may have been living in at that time, as if he had never done anything when he got off the radio, WSM. But that's not true. He continued to play in the Black community, and he didn't just play in the Black community and teach lessons. He continued to be an important influence. And he wrote and played and recorded the jingle that got the first Black state senator in Tennessee since Reconstruction elected, and that's in my memoir. 

Big Avon, he loved DeFord, and he was a proud, brilliant man who had a PhD in law, and he, when he told me DeFord was a genius, when he told me he thought I should be equal, he thought I might be a baby genius like Deford, he wasn't talking about a “little crippled boy.” He was talking about a genius who refused to let White people continue to monetize him when they were not paying him correctly. They wanted him to write new songs so they could have the copyrights on those songs— And it's a very long story, and I'm not an economic historian. 

So, I only speak here as a woman who wrote Avon Williams’ from Knoxville, Tennessee, last jingle. And I love that he pulled my coat and told me that DeFord wrote his first one. And I was thrilled to be bookending a DeFord Bailey, Black country, Appalachian experience—that our work has always been more political. 

And if I could veer off to one thing and say, you know, when Aretha Franklin played The Ryman the first time—feels like it was a little more than 10 years ago—she invited me backstage after we— she approves her whole backstage list herself, and we had asked. Turns out she did love “XXX's and OOO's,”  she told me that. And she had very few people backstage. It was a few family members. Some big stars asked to come back—no. We got to talk to her before and after the show and had great seats for during the show. But that was political work, and she understood that. When we say, “She's got her God and she's got good wine; Aretha Franklin and Patsy Cline. She's an American girl.” And “she signs her letters with XXX’s and OOO’s.” Aretha Franklin is a writing woman, a songwriting woman, as was her sister Carol. Patsy Cline wrote letters to her fans. They were both writing women, and that song was about writing women and about also the economic anxiety. “Hard to keep the balance up between love and money.” These are real things that real women, including myself, experienced and real women of Appalachia and real women of the Deep South. And those real women made that song two weeks at number one. 

And that song got savaged by critics at the time. Savaged. They called it a “ditty,” because these people don't know anything about hard days and earning money. My people, my father never had a pair of shoes until he was 13 years old, he claims. And I certainly don't think he regularly had a pair of shoes till he was 13 years old. So, the point is, I understand, even though I've been successful, the hard work of how to keep the balance up between love and money. And so do all of our people. 

And I've been, I right now have been doing— you know, one of the people I admire the most is Mr. John Prine. I love what Fiona Prine is doing with that legacy. And, you know, the wonderful songs that he wrote from that place, and how they, as you said, become universal. Because keeping the balance up between love and money, that's a problem for everybody. People can get so lost in making money that they forget to rock the cradle, to love each other, to connect. But everybody, these, that is the wonderful thing about ... 

I don't put any sentimentality on this about poverty, but when you have to make something out of nothing at all, you will privilege the creative, you will privilege beauty, and you will privilege love and nature. And those are great things to privilege. And then if you are from Detroit and West Virginia, you will privilege your own audacious self-definition. You know, the coal mine, I'll die before I do it the other way. And I, you know, one of my funny things I always say, from childhood, I learned it from my relatives, “I'm gonna do it or die trying.” You know, those are hard things. My child doesn't say that, but that's how we grew up. 

So, I think that's what I love about country music and Black country. It's hard music for people from hard times. So, to some degree, to answer that question about the 21st century, these are some kinds of hard times. To the degree country will get ahold of that and the degree country will recognize that we've had one of the largest redistributions, in a negative way, of wealth in the history of the West during COVID, is the degree whether country will stay true to its working in a coal mine roots. 

Ted Olson
Yeah, country music is entering its second hundred years of existence—if one traces country music back to those recordings of 1922 or ’23 of fiddlers. It's high time to embrace the full influence upon country music, to challenge the genre to grow and also to return to its roots simultaneously. And it seems like a poignant moment to be talking about country music for that reason. I don't hear enough people talking about it, but, you know, there's a whole lot of history related to the genre and beyond that's not been properly acknowledged and interpreted. And with Sepia Tones, we're certainly trying to add our voices to effort to interpret the full story. 

And that kind of leads me to a question for you, Alice, which would be about the National Museum of African American Music there in Nashville. And we understand that you've done some work with them and for them. And could you, for anyone who's not been there yet, give us a sense of what that particular endeavor, that institution, what it tries to do in terms of serving the legacy of African American music, in America, in the world, and anything that it may try to interpret about Appalachian music heritage. We'd love to hear about it. 

Alice Randall
Well, one, I love the National Museum of African American Music. It is a jewel in downtown Nashville, a wonderful conversation with the Country Music Association and the Hall of Fame Museum, and also in conversation with the Smithsonian African American History Museum. Interestingly, I love— I wrote the chapter on Black Country in their museum guide. There is not a permanent Black Country exhibit in that museum—something I fought for and I lost that fight. But I think they're doing interesting work on that and it's evolving, and I believe one day there will be. But it's a wonderful museum. And I think that it takes a global perspective, it takes profoundly intellectual, embodied, immersive perspective. 

I think museums are incredibly important in this 21st century because museums are inherently one of the most profoundly equitable scholarships. There are a lot of boundaries between many people and a scholarly article, a scholarly book. There's boundaries of access to get them, a lot of journals are very expensive, cost thousands of dollars to access. The language can be very complicated. The whole point of a museum, and what this museum does magnificently, is to translate scholarship about an elemental art form into an embodied, immersive experience that anyone can learn from, engage with, and evolve, internalize, and add to. And that's what the museum allows. And so that's why I'm extremely interested in museums in the 21st century. I think— I love libraries. I grew up in libraries, but I think the cutting edge is museums right now, and because I think that, one, with all the different language groups in the world, museums allow you to have more visual aspects, to have instant translations. All kinds of immersive experiences that allow us to celebrate a lot of intellectual difference and a lot of difference about learning styles that people want to bring into the space, whereas journals and libraries are often going to privilege one kind of thinker.

So, I am excited about both museums. One of the things I like about the Smithsonian Museum is, like all the Smithsonians, it's 100 percent free. I'm very interested in free access, digital access. I am fascinated in terms of country music. One of the reasons I wanted to be in this podcast was I'm very familiar with Bill's scholarship, and I just feel that he's an amazing person that I couldn't believe I get to have a chance to have a conversation with. And, Ted, I was very excited to meet you and what you're doing. But I am really ... I push in every place I can. I think we're missing so much experience that there should be, we should be hiring, aspiring songwriters to sing in all of our national and state parks, because music naturally belongs in these natural spaces. And country music, in particular, grew up with nature. And I do not understand why we don't have $14-an-hour songwriters who get to do a two-week residency to pitch a tent in every national park that is comfortable enough to pitch a tent in and sing to people at their supper time or at dawn or whatever time—write new songs. I love the intersection of nature, receiving of songs, and creating songs. I personally love to write out in nature, particularly when I'm writing a country song, and I love to hear—nothing better than hearing a song around a campfire. 

So, I know that some ... North Carolina has done some really great things about that. Rissi Palmer has sung in some really interesting programs there. But every time I get an opportunity, I say, we need to do more with that, including new songs and having residencies of songwriters in these parks.

Ted Olson
That's a great idea. And with luck, the people affiliated with the park service will be listening attentively. And, who knows, maybe in a year or two, we'll see and hear  songwriters at the front entrance to every national park around the country. We can hope. 

Alice Randall
Troubadours! Absolutely. 

Bill Turner
[laughs] Let me ask you one question before we stop, Alice. I saw where you either still do or you once did teach a course at Vanderbilt titled “Blood Money: The Story of Coal.” Please tell me a little bit about that course. 

Alice Randall
Yes, I did. As I said, I've been always fascinated by Black coal miners. That course, one of the things I love about that course is it was so multiple genre. And what I mean by that is we looked at legal cases, we looked at paintings, we looked at country songs, we looked at recipes coming out of the coal camps. They did oral histories. It was focused on America, but we did go as broad as looking at coal practices in China and in Wales. So, we were contextualizing it in the global experience. 

Bill Turner
I see. 

Alice Randall
Students did a lot of original research interviewing people who had been coal miners. So that was not a course on Black country or Black coal miners. That was a course on coal miners and coal, period, and this idea of blood money and the complex opportunity and cost of working in these spaces. And we looked at the film Matewan, for example, I mean, there's so many things. Let me just see if I can slow down one moment. I did just send you the syllabus. I had to download it. So, we read Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future. We read Upton Sinclair's King Coal, D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. We read The Buffalo Creek Disaster, Mary Harris's The Autobiography of Mother Jones, who the students love. A beautiful book edited by William B. Thesing called Caverns of Night: Coal Mines and Art, Literature, and Film… 

Bill Turner
Wow. 

Alice Randall
... where I learned a lot about the original jazz bands playing through Appalachia. Lost Mountain by Erik Reese. We did the entire coal album that was just brand new and Kathy Matea came and sang to us in the class. And we actually had coal miners speak, and we also had coal owners speak. And at the time that we were doing the course, Vanderbilt's electricity was still coal powered. So that was interesting. So, we were really looking at what was— we could still see the smokestacks. 

And so that was that course, and it was very real. I had one student in the class who, you know, lost uncles, daddy lost legs, left bodies and limbs in the coal mines. It was very interesting. One of, you know, the favorite movies of mine, oddly enough, from childhood was How Green Was My Valley, the Welsh coal mining stories. I think that I've always found the coal mining stories of Wales particularly and England to be something that existed with the hard sharecropping Black stories of Alabama and Mississippi to remind me that there are kinds of universal exploitation, wage-based exploitation, life-and-death exploitation. But at the same time, coal camps are very different. Coal camps had really sometimes very vital schools for their children, very vital food cultures. It was far worse to be enslaved than to be in a coal mine, in a coal camp. So, studying coal camps, you realize as much as this is very, very difficult, it was also a land of opportunity, an opportunity to make a lot of money, to have a lot of agency. 

And, you know, some of the only Black people who voted in West Virginia in early days were Black coal miners. And they insisted on the right to vote and succeeded in ways that Black people in Alabama and Mississippi tried to insist on the right to vote and got literally beaten to death. So, there are parts of triumph in the Black West Virginia story that I have just built so much of my own hopes from. You're lucky, Bill, that you can draw your roots from that. Ironton, Ohio, it's not the same, it's not the same thing as Alabama, that part of Alabama, coal Alabama or coal West Virginia, but it has commonalities. 

Bill Turner
Well, you know, I think that there's no small coincidence that both Booker T. Washington and Carter G. Woodson were raised in West Virginia. And then Booker T. took his show to Alabama. It was just so logical. And of course, Dr. Woodson left Berea College in 1905 and ended up where he died in Washington in that building that houses the  Association for the Study of African American Life and History to this day. It's a fascinating story. 

Alice Randall
And you know who also is from West Virginia is, of both extremes, is Bricktop,…

Bill Turner
Right, right.

Alice Randall
…we often forget, who opened a bar in Paris in about ’24, one in Rome in, I think, ’26, and one in Mexico City. This international woman of not just song but actually a beverage entrepreneur and entrepreneur, very successful. That's that West Virginia industry. 

Bill Turner
Yeah. Yeah. We can't forget about your friend Henry Louis Gates. He's out of West Virginia. 

Alice Randall
Yeah, Skip Gates. Yeah. Well, I’ll say that I actually think, Bill, you need to do a book of Black West Virginians… 

Bill Turner
I know. 

Alice Randall
…and the ethos and aesthetic of Black West Virginians. I think that is actually a book that really needs to be done. There's so much that's been done in Alabama and Mississippi, but just look at who— West Virginia needs that and America needs that, because there's something very specific that comes in that air that needs to be celebrated. I think you should write a book on Black West Virginia. 

Bill Turner
We'll be playing around with that. One of my dearest friends with whom I edited a book, almost 40 years ago, called Blacks in Appalachia, is a guy named Ed Cabbell, God rest his soul. And Ed talked about the specialness of West Virginia and African Americans, 40 years ago I listened to him. 

Alice Randall
Well, zoom right in on West Virginia. Appalachia is big and amazing. You need to tell the West Virginia story, and then you can do a whole series and go to the other states. 

Bill Turner
I cranked out a piece 10 years ago that I need to work on some more. I never published it, but it's called “The Black People of WestVatucky.” 

Alice Randall
Ah. 

Bill Turner
And it takes in West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, and Southwest Virginia, which was the heart and soul of coal country. So, recently, a young poet I know whose name is Crystal Good, who runs an organization called Black, By God, West Virginia, she's at West Virginia University, and she's putting together a Chautauqua-style show on Bricktop. She looks like Bricktop, in fact. So, yeah, we got a lot of things going on. 

Alice Randall
Well, you know, Bricktop is in my most recent novel. She's one of the Black Bottom Saints of that book. 

Bill Turner
Oh, okay.

Alice Randall
And I quote her, that “Black, by God, West Virginia.” 

Bill Turner
Great, great. 

Alice Randall
Congratulations on your podcast winning a very big award. Very excited for you. I think you're doing incredibly important work. Next, I can't wait to include Harlan Renaissance in my course the next time I teach Black Country. I am starting to teach and consider a section on the scholars of Black Country. I think that's something ... When I teach course on “Soul Food in Text and as Text,” I also focus on scholars as makers too and as creators and creatives. And I think that now there are getting to be enough scholars of Black Country and archivists that we can start to study the studiers. And I think that's happily meta. 

It's been exciting for me to be able to talk with you today. 

Bill Turner
Thank you so much, Alice. Great talking to you, here. 

Alice Randall
Thank you for having me. Ted, it was a pleasure. 

Ted Olson
It was perfect and a wide-ranging conversation, and we so appreciate every thought you shared with us and every perspective. And I've certainly learned a lot from you today, Alice. Thank you so much. 

[Guitar and banjo music and singing / "John Henry" by Amythyst Kiah and Roy Andrade from Big Bend Killing]

Ted Olson
And as a final thought, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Smokies Life and Great Smoky Mountains National Park for the support of Sepia Tones. Over seven episodes, we've talked with many wonderful musicians and scholars about their lives and about their music, and it's been quite the adventure for Bill and for me. So, with heartfelt thanks, we appreciate all the support. And to our listeners who have joined us on this journey through Black Appalachian music, thank you as well. 

Karen Key
Thank you to our guest hosts Dr. William Turner and Dr. Ted Olson. Dr. William Turner is a longtime African American studies scholar and retired distinguished professor of Appalachian Studies and regional ambassador from Berea College. He was also a research assistant to Roots author Alex Haley and co-editor of the groundbreaking Blacks in Appalachia. In 2021, Turner received Western Carolina University's individual Mountain Heritage Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies. His memoir called The Harlan Renaissance, available from West Virginia University Press, was awarded the prestigious Weatherford Award at the 2022 Appalachian Studies Association Conference. 

Dr. Ted Olson is a music historian and professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of many books, articles, reviews, encyclopedia entries, and oral histories. Olson has produced and compiled a number of documentary albums of traditional Appalachian music, including On Top of Old Smoky and Big Bend Killing, both from Smokies Life. His work has received a number of awards, including nine Grammy nominations. The East Tennessee Historical Society honored Olson with its Ramsey Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2021. 

Valerie Polk
Special thanks to guest Alice Randall, a pioneering songwriter in country music and all-around creative force. Randall is a New York Times bestselling novelist, an award-winning songwriter, and an educator. She is a graduate of Harvard University, holds an honorary doctorate from Fisk University, and serves on the faculty at Vanderbilt. Her memoir, My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future, traces the roots of Black influence and reflects on her experiences in the Nashville music industry. It's companion album, My Black Country, The Songs of Alice Randall features her songs performed by artists such as Leyla McCalla, Rhiannon Giddens, and Alice’s own daughter, Caroline Randall Williams. Make sure to check out both of these recent projects, which encapsulate her extraordinary career.

“John Henry” is performed by Amythyst Kiah and Roy Andrade from the album Big Bend Killing: The Appalachian Ballad Tradition. 

[Old-time guitar music from Old-Time Smoky Mountain Music and bird song]

Karen Key
Our theme music is from Old Time Smoky Mountain Music, our Grammy-nominated music collection. Bird recordings by Mark Dunaway. Thanks for listening. 

Valerie Polk
Smokies Life is an educational nonprofit partner of the National Park Service. We support the perpetual preservation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park by promoting greater public understanding and appreciation through education, interpretation, and research. Learn more about our work and the benefits of membership by visiting our website at smokieslife.org.