On Super Bowl Sunday, Beyoncé dropped new music and announced her next album, “Renaissance Act II…a country album.”
Outrage quickly followed after a country music radio station in Oklahoma “initially refused a listener’s request to play” Beyoncé’s new song “Texas Hold ‘Em.” Roger Harris, KYKC’s station manager, issued the rejection via email, writing “We do not play Beyoncé at KYKC as we are a country music station.”
But as The New York Times reports, “[i]n sending the email, Mr. Harris unwittingly ignited a new flame in a long-simmering debate over how Black artists fit into a genre that has Black music at its roots.”
And this isn’t the first instance of musical cultural appropriation. When it comes to music, Black people and culture have long been pioneers, helping to originate many genres of music, including rock & roll, country, to house music, blues, and the jazz.
Here are the Black artists who helped start popular music as we have come to know it today.
01
Sister Rosetta Tharpe – Rock ‘n’ Roll
Before Little Richard and Elvis, there was Sister Rosetta Tharpe. “Rock ‘n’ roll was bred between the church and the nightclubs in the soul of a queer black woman in the 1940s.”
The Arkansas-born musician started playing the guitar when she was four. When she was six, she started accompanying her mother, performing “with a travelling evangelist troupe in churches around the South.”
Over the years, she began blending together “Delta blues, New Orleans jazz and gospel music into what would become her signature style.” Despite being overlooked for much of history, Tharpe is known “the godmother of rock ‘n’ roll.”
02
DeFord Bailey – Country music
Harmonica player DeFord Bailey “was the grandson of a slave…[and] became the most frequent performer on the Nashville radio station WSM’s Barn Dance.” In 1927, one of Bailey’s performances set the stage for the birth of the iconic country music radio program, the Grand Ole Opry, of which Bailey was a pioneer member. However, “Bailey’s race was mostly hidden from his radio audience, and when he did go on tour with the Opry, he was forced to find separate accommodations in a segregated South.”
In addition, if you go even further back, the Black influence in this genre starts with musical instruments and can be traced back to slavery. Country music started with the banjo, brought over to the Americas by enslaved Africans, “which became a central part of slave music and culture in the South.”
03
W. C. Handy – Blues
On November 16, 1873 in Florence, AL William Christopher Handy was born. He would have been a third-generation Methodist minister but chose to go against the grain and turned to music. Handy “learned to play several instruments, including the organ, piano, and guitar.”
Handy would go on to develop the model for the blues, and with his songs “‘Memphis Blues’ (published 1912) and especially his ‘St. Louis Blues’ (1914), he introduced a melancholic element, achieved chiefly by the use of the ‘blue’ or slightly flattened seventh tone of the scale.”
Per the Smithsonian, “[h]is inspiration for the style came from an African American musical practice of singing away one’s sorrows to move on and up away from them.”
04
Buddy Bolden – Jazz
Bandleader Buddy Bolden, “was at the forefront of the jazz movement,” and has been called “the first man of jazz.” “Bolden played the cornet in dance halls during the day and in the red light district of New Orleans’ Storyville at night. Although no recordings of Buddy Bolden exist today, his music is said to have incorporated the improvisation characteristic of jazz.”
Unfortunately, his career was abruptly cut short in 1907 because of Bolden’s heavy drinking and mental health problems, which caused him to be “admitted to the Louisiana State Insane Asylum at the age of 30.” But Bolden did influence many of the legends who would go on to follow his legacy. For instance, even though Louis Armstrong was a young boy when Bolden was a hit on the jazz scene in New Orleans, allegedly “he too claimed that Bolden had been ‘too good for his time.’”
05
Frankie Knuckles – House music
The origins of house music are rooted in “Black, brown and LGBTQ+ communities. House music was born out of Chicago’s predominantly Black nightlife scene, with the godfather of house, Frankie Knuckles, pioneering the distinctive sound.”
Knuckles was a DJ, producer, and remixer, and the genre’s name comes from Chicago’s Warehouse nightclub, where Knuckles “drew huge crowds between 1977 and 1987.” As the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame writes, “His career spanned more time than any dance producer and without him, the landscape would be immeasurably different.”
