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Morgan Wallen and the Harsh Reality of Being a Black Country Music Fan
I feel like a nappy-headed stranger in a genre I’ve loved all my life.
The late singer Charley Pride, country music’s first Black superstar, once shared how the legendary Webb Pierce had welcomed him to the genre. “It’s good for you to be in our music,” Pierce had told him. Pride’s response? “It’s my music, too.”
I understand his sentiment. As a lifelong country music fan, I’ve often reacted the same way to side-eye welcomes by self-anointed gatekeepers. That’s how I felt when a shopkeeper in London in the 1990s nearly had a stroke when I brought the international version of Shania Twain’s CD Come on Over up to the counter. “I never would have expected you to buy this album,” he said, proving that Black stereotypes were alive and well across the pond.
That’s how I felt a few years later when the audience at a Lee Ann Womack showcase in L.A. gasped when I reminded her of the words to a song she forgot mid-performance. It was a cute moment, but I’ve always wondered if their reaction would have been the same if it was a White guy who had prompted her by singing the lyrics to Don Williams’ “Lord, I Hope This Day Is Good”?
I’m not sure how accepted Pride felt by the time he died of Covid-19 complications at age 86 last December, just one month after receiving the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement award from the Country Music Association. But I’ve often felt like a nappy-headed stranger in a genre I’ve loved all my life.
I’ve always known country was red-state music. Although that has never sat well with me, I’ve previously been able to look the other way while listening.
Morgan Wallen had been adding to my sense of ill ease even before a TMZ video emerged in which he’s heard drunkenly using the N-word. The former The Voice contestant was poised to be country music’s next big superstar; his face and music have been practically inescapable over the last few months, especially after he performed on Saturday Night Live in December. Now he’s been suspended by his record labels, Big Loud and Republic Records, and removed from all of the…
