My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future

Award-winning songwriter and fiction and cookbook author Randall (Black Bottom Saints: A Novel; Soul Food Love: Healthy Recipes Inspired by One Hundred Years of Cooking in a Black Family) highlights the contributions of Black country artists and musicians while reflecting on her own life. She developed her love of country music as a young child in 1960s Detroit. When she moved to Washington, DC, with her activist mother, she found a love for listening to music from artists that she later dubbed “the First Family of Black Country”: Lil Hardin, DeFord Bailey, Charley Pride, Ray Charles, and Herb Jeffries. Shortly after college, Randall set her sights on starting a music-publishing company in Nashville, where she was often the only Black person in the room at events. This memoir parallels Randall’s tenacious journey as a songwriter with the history of country music and the contributions of the First Family and other Black artists. Her life story begins as the main focus but takes a backseat to the vast biographies of others after her bittersweet success in the 1990s.