country music tagged posts

Back in 1951, the publication of John Howard Griffin’s “Black Like Me” landed like a bomb on American culture. Griffin was a white man who had spent months working with his dermatologist to turn his skin black before setting out on a bold odyssey from his New Orleans home through the deep South. His intention was to experience first-hand what it would feel like to be a black person in Jim Crow America. The result was a stark, shattering testimony to the virulent racism still prevailing in American life nearly a century after the Emancipation Proclamation. The book’s power resonates to this day.

So much so that country singer Mickey Guyton, one of the few African Americans navigating the sometimes treacherous shoals of her genre with its predominantly white artists and audiences, had it very much in mind when releasing her song of the same title just weeks ago...

Ran into Brandy Clark last night. Well, not on the sidewalk or at the grocery, but on the Internet, as I was thinking and listening hard to a bunch of songs by Loretta Lynn. Then something or other happened in that way the world of links works, and suddenly, here was this youngish (43) singer-songwriter hailing from rural Washington, saying hello via the dozen songs from her 2013 debut album, “12 Stories.”

Talk about an unbidden fall harvest. These are tales of flesh-and-blood people, mostly working-class, often plain beyond imagining, but no less engaged in the struggle to get some type of lasso around their world and bring it to heel. What complicates things is that the lasso is often frayed, as are their reflexes and nerves.

I found myself considering half a dozen or more songs that could have worked for inclusion in this “Brilliant Songs” series...