Not Their First Rodeo

“Texas Hold ‘Em,” one of the lead singles from Cowboy Carter, begins with a syncopated banjo lick played by Black multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. It is an appropriate intro, as no other instrument more clearly shows the influence Black Americans have had on the genre quite like the banjo. The banjo’s roots are firmly African, with similar lute-like instruments having existed all over western Africa for centuries before enslaved Africans brought them to the Caribbean and the American South as early as the 17th century. By the 19th century, the banjo was well established in American music. Its popularity crossed the color line, with white Americans appropriating the instrument and incorporating it into their own European-rooted musical traditions.

Despite widespread innovation by African Americans throughout the 19th century, as well as widespread use by white Americans, the difficulty in notating banjo techniques has meant that musicians and historians have had little to go on when trying to reconstruct the way the banjo was played in the early 19th century. Banjo sheet music of the time, written in traditional music notation and without modern additions such as tablature, mostly documents melodies. It fails to capture gestural aspects of playing—plucking and strumming styles that can greatly impact the sound of the music played. These techniques would have been transmitted aurally, leaving historians and musicians at a loss when determining when and where specific styles emerged.

Black contributions to early American folk music extend far beyond the banjo. African Americans have been playing the violin, better known in folk contexts as the fiddle, since the colonial era. Enslaved Africans adopted fiddles in the English colonies by at least the 1690s, and over time they developed unique styles while also mastering those of their European enslavers. Enslaved people were often responsible for providing musical entertainment to white colonists. They mastered the popular forms that would be heard at balls of the era, and in many places they became the primary musicians in the colonies.

In the early American period, New Orleans emerged as a center for training enslaved Africans in the art of European dance music. Enslaved people were sent from as far as Arkansas to learn to play the pieces their enslavers wished to hear. The city’s close connections with the Caribbean brought already creolized blends of European and African music, as well as the quadrilles and other set dances that accompanied them. These influences would have a lasting effect on American contradance and square dancing, and there are reports of Black musicians and callers playing for audiences of both Black and white dancers from colonial times straight through the 19th century. 

Black musicians also changed how folk music was arranged and performed. As early as 1774, enslaved musicians had combined the fiddle and banjo into a single ensemble. This combination spread throughout the Americas, including the streets and docks of New Orleans. The combo eventually became the foundation for minstrel show bands, and, later, for bluegrass and folk bands.

These folk forms set the stage for the recording of the earliest country songs in the 1920s and ’30s. Called “hillbilly” records, this music, released by white performers, was marketed to rural white southerners. (“Race records,” marketed to African Americans, featured Black musicians and genres like blues, jazz, and gospel.) Racially integrated recording sessions were common in “hillbilly” records of the time, and many white stars had Black mentors, collaborators, and influencers.

Bill Monroe, the “Father of Bluegrass,” learned from Black blues guitarist Arnold Shultz. The Carter Family, one of the most influential acts in the history of country music, was heavily influenced by Black musician Lesley Riddle. A shotgun accident in his youth claimed two of Riddle’s fingers, leading him to develop a unique style of picking the guitar. Riddle’s influence on Maybelle Carter, to whom he gave guitar lessons, led to her development of the distinctive Carter “scratch” style of playing. Riddle also accompanied Maybelle’s father, A. P. Carter, when he went searching for new songs to record. Riddle helped him gain access to Black spaces such as churches to learn songs that may have never become part of the white country music tradition otherwise. One of the founding members of the radio show that would become the epitome of country music, the Grand Ole Opry, was Black harmonica player DeFord Bailey.

As the music industry increasingly sought to market country music along color lines, studios and producers worked to hide the fact that recording sessions were integrated, using white stand-ins in promotional images and advertisements, and pigeonholing Black recording artists into “race records”. Eventually, the pioneering Black musicians of country music were largely forgotten by the public. Still, Black artists continued to contribute to the genre. From national stars like Charley Pride to local favorite (and frequent Jazz Fest performer) Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Black musicians proved much more than a footnote in the story of country music. And modern innovators such as Beyoncé continue to show that they will remain so for a long time to come.