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      in Music

      Beyoncé Joins a History of Black Pop Artists Going Country

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      When Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” arrives next week, it’ll join a lineage of albums by stars including Ray Charles, the Pointer Sisters, Tina Turner and more.When Beyoncé confirmed that she would be going all-in on country music with “Cowboy Carter,” the second part of a project that began with her 2022 album “Renaissance,” conversation about pop artists turning to the genre — and how Black artists are received in Nashville — began to heat up.Country remains a cloistered segment of the music industry where Black performers continue to face an especially challenging path — despite the fact that Black pioneers have been essential to the genre, including Lesley Riddle, known as Esley, a guitarist and folklorist who taught the Carter Family in the 1930s and Charley Pride, who scored more than 50 Top 10 country hits from the 1960s through the ’80s.In the past few years, Lil Nas X sparked cultural debate and hit chart gold with “Old Town Road,” a country-rap mash-up that was followed by the arrival of Breland’s aesthetic blend “My Truck,” and songs from O.N.E the Duo, a mother-daughter group making a hybrid of country, R&B and pop. But there’s also a long history of Black artists embracing country after establishing careers in other genres. Here’s how some key figures fared.Ray CharlesRay Charles in 1962, the year he released “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.”REPORTERS ASSOCIES/Gamma-Rapho via Getty ImagesRay Charles’s passion for country music dated back to childhood, when his mother would let him stay up late on Saturdays and listen to the Grand Ole Opry. As he told Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” in 1998, “it was fascinating what these guys could do with these banjos and these fiddles and the steel guitars.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Freaknik’ Documentary Invites Viewers to Black College Spring Break

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      A new Hulu documentary delves into the legendary Atlanta event and surfaces relics of 1980s and ’90s culture that were essential to partygoers.It’s an accepted spring break axiom that you can retake a class but you can’t relive a party. Until now, that’s been true of Freaknik, the annual bass-rattling spring break street party that drew hundreds of thousands of Black college students to Atlanta throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Traffic crawled. Music blared. Booties were shaken.“It’s a throwback time of nostalgia when we weren’t all on our phone or always trying to take a selfie,” said P. Frank Williams, the director of “Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told,” a documentary that aims to immerse viewers in the celebration when it premieres on Thursday on Hulu. “We were just enjoying the moment. It was about these young Black people finding freedom in a world that really didn’t welcome them, in a city that is one of the Blackest places on the planet.”Over time, Freaknik exploded from its roots as a local event organized by students at the Atlanta University Center into a nexus for Black college students from across the country. “They said it was Freaknik, and I just thought that I wanted to bring the freak into the ’nik and then it went from zero to 100 real fast,” said Luther Campbell, the rapper known as Uncle Luke, who is an executive producer of the film.Police and elected officials ended Freaknik after 1999 amid public safety concerns and reports of sexual assault. Other cities in recent years have sought to restrict Black spring breakers through curfews, bag checks and traffic rerouting. Miami Beach rolled out a social media campaign this year to discourage visitors.To tell the story of a party that became legendary before social media, “Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told” highlights several of the era’s artifacts that were essential to partygoers’ experience. We spoke with the makers of the film about five of them.CamcordersCamcorders were a fixture at Freaknik and a source of material for the documentary.Rich Mahan/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Gylan Kain, a Founder of the Last Poets and a Progenitor of Rap, Dies at 81

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      He spun gripping portraits of the Black experience starting in the 1960s with the seminal Harlem spoken-word collective, laying a foundation for what was to come.Gylan Kain, a Harlem-born poet and performance artist who was a founder of the Last Poets, the spoken-word collective that laid a foundation for rap music starting in the late 1960s by delivering fiery poetic salvos about racism and oppression over pulsing drum beats, died on Feb. 7 in Lelystad, the Netherlands. He was 81.He died in a nursing home from complications of heart disease, his son Rufus Kain said. His death was not widely reported at the time.The Last Poets, which originally consisted of Mr. Kain, David Nelson and Abiodun Oyewole, were aligned with the Black Arts Movement — the cultural corollary to the broader Black Power movement of the 1960s and ’70s — of which the activist poet and playwright Amiri Baraka was a central figure.The Original Last Poets, as they were billed, in the 1970 film “Right On!” From left, Mr. Kain, Felipe Luciano and David Nelson. Herbert Danska, via Museum of Modern ArtWith their staccato wordplay and sinewy rhythms, the Last Poets were pioneers of performance poetry, spinning out portraits of Black street life that often bristled with the guerrilla spirit of revolution.They made their public debut on May 19, 1968, in Mount Morris Park, now Marcus Garvey Park, in Harlem, at a celebration of the slain civil rights leader Malcolm X. Less than two months after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, it was a fraught period in Black America, but also a time percolating with calls for dramatic change.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      What to Know About Beyonce’s Country Album, ‘Cowboy Carter’

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      The singer and her collaborators have been dropping hints about “Cowboy Carter,” her upcoming album and first full-length foray into country music.It started with a western-style Grammys outfit, complete with a cream-colored cowboy hat, studded string tie and matching Louis Vuitton jacket and skirt.After a year and a half of Beyoncé’s “Renaissance,” the lauded dance music spectacular that included a world tour and a concert film, the awards show outfit signaled to fans that a new era was beginning. From the start, Beyoncé had described “Renaissance” as the first part of a three-act project, and fans wondered if the second act was on its way.One week later, the pop star made herself abundantly clear, this time in a Verizon ad that aired during the Super Bowl.“Drop the new music,” she said at the end of the intricately produced commercial, which featured the comic actor Tony Hale, a robot Beyoncé and the real version, who showed off 10 outfit changes.She had our attention.At her command, her team released a minute-long teaser video that culminated with a small crowd staring at a roadside billboard displaying another cowboy hat-wearing Beyoncé. Then came two new singles, “Texas Hold ’Em” and “16 Carriages,” filled with the kind of Southern twang and country instrumentation seldom heard in her catalog.Confirmation of the new album, Beyoncé’s eighth solo release, came via an Instagram post last week. “Cowboy Carter,” due on March 29, is her first full-length foray into country music. It is expected to tap into her Houston upbringing and reclaim the Black origins of the genre while challenging the largely white country music establishment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Book Review: ‘The House of Hidden Meanings,’ by RuPaul

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      Chronicling the high-heeled path to drag-queen superstardom, the new memoir also reveals a celebrity infatuated with his sense of a special destiny.THE HOUSE OF HIDDEN MEANINGS: A Memoir, by RuPaulAs “The House of Hidden Meanings” is RuPaul’s fourth book and his first straightforward memoir, it’s understandably being marketed as an opportunity to see the pop culture icon in a new light. The striking, almost intimidating, black-and-white cover photograph notably subverts the expectation of seeing Ru in glamorous technicolor drag. All the artifice has been stripped away, we’re being told: This is RuPaul stripped bare.But the meanings laid bare in the text contradict RuPaul’s narration again and again. What’s revealed is a striver high on his own supply who tries to spin his story as empathetic wisdom draped in Instagram-ready captions.About 70 pages in, RuPaul — at the time, a Black high school dropout driving luxury cars across the country to help a relative flip them for profit — declares without irony, “Americans have always been frontiersmen, people who are open to a new adventure, and I felt this as I drove cars alone, back and forth, across the United States.”I wearily recalled an earlier section of the book. Explaining the conservative environment of his childhood in San Diego, RuPaul summarizes the Great Migration in a paragraph that would be considered too concise even for a Wikipedia entry, then declares, “All the Black people in our neighborhood were transplants from the South, and so they had inherited a kind of slave mentality, which was based on fear.”Aside from breathtaking dismissiveness of the decades of racial violence that made the migration necessary, it’s chilling to see a public figure known as a champion of the marginalized so easily dismiss survivors of Jim Crow-era terror as people who “hold onto their victim mentality so fiercely; it becomes a defining feature of their identity.”The way we tell our stories has a way of telling on us. The memoir reveals an author who thinks he understands outsiders when, really, all he understands is that he wanted to become famous and eventually became famous. And given RuPaul Charles’s truly extraordinary talent, that would be fine if the book (and his brand) weren’t so invested in trying to convince the rest of us that he has unique insight into the joke called life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Reviving ‘The Wiz’ Through ‘the Blackest of Black Lenses’

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      Schele Williams first saw “The Wiz” when a tour of the original Broadway production came through Dayton, Ohio. She was 7 years old, and recalled it being the most “beautiful reflection of Blackness that I had never seen.”Years later, she was cast as Dorothy in a high school production of “The Wiz,” and the thrill of that experience led Williams to pursue a career in musical theater. She even used the show’s soaring finale, “Home,” as one of her audition songs.Now, after working on Broadway as an actor (“Aida”) and an associate director (“Motown”), she is directing the first Broadway revival of “The Wiz” in almost 40 years. It’s a chance, Williams said, to celebrate what “The Wiz” has meant to her and to pass the story along to her daughters.Since becoming a Broadway hit in 1975, “The Wiz,” a gospel, soul and R&B take on Dorothy’s adventures in Oz, largely composed by Charlie Smalls, with a book by William F. Brown, has been a vibrant cornerstone of Black culture. The show blends Afrofuturism with classic Americana to enact a sort of creative reparation, reframing an allegory about perseverance and self-determination to feature Black characters who, in the ’70s, had rarely appeared in popular children’s stories.The 1978 Motown film adaptation, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, was a critical and box-office flop. But the movie has been a trippy favorite of family living rooms for multiple generations, and the musical has remained a staple on local stages around the country.“The weight of that is not lost on me,” said Williams.The new production of “The Wiz,” beginning previews on March 29 at the Marquis Theater, arrives in New York after a 13-city national tour that began in September. The creative team said its goal is to celebrate both the property’s legacy and the richness of Black American history and culture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Robert Macbeth, Founder of Harlem’s New Lafayette Theater, Dies at 89

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      He created a vibrant space for actors and playwrights that became a seedbed for the emerging Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s.Robert Macbeth, a rising Black actor in the New York theater scene, was sitting in a Greenwich Village bar in September 1963, getting a drink before going onstage for an Off Broadway improv show. The evening news played in the background.“I happened to look up and there was a flash, and the flash was about the four little girls getting killed in Birmingham,” he said in a 1967 interview, recalling the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. “And there I was, sitting in a Village bar, with a Scotch in my hand.”He went onstage that night, and, rather than following the show’s loose routine, he began shouting, walking up and down the aisles, getting in the faces of the mostly white crowd.“I must have scared the audience half to death,” he recalled in the interview. But rather than absorb his message, they seemed to take it as entertainment: “They loved it, but that wasn’t the idea.”Mr. Macbeth, distraught over his inability to convey his anger and sadness, stopped acting after that night in 1963 and, in his words, went into “exile” from the stage. He worked in a bookstore, taught acting classes and tried to process the violent changes rippling through Black America in the 1960s.Slowly, an idea took form: Black actors and playwrights could never be fully effective in white-dominated spaces. They needed their own. So, in 1967, he gathered together a troupe of more than 30 actors and artists to open the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Beyoncé Becomes First Black Woman to Top Billboard Country Chart

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      Her single “Texas Hold ’Em” debuted atop the country airplay chart after its release during the Super Bowl.Beyoncé’s new country single “Texas Hold ’Em” reached No. 1 on the Billboard country airplay chart this week, making her the first Black female artist to hold the top spot.Beyoncé’s other single, “16 Carriages,” released simultaneously on Feb. 11, also debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard country chart. The songs reached No. 2 and No. 38 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Texas Hold ’Em” has already drawn more than 19 million streams, and “16 Carriages” has 10.3 million streams.Historically, Black artists have struggled to gain recognition in the genre of country music, a field often dominated by white male singers. But the sudden success of Beyoncé’s country singles comes at a time when Black women have started to receive acclaim within that realm. At last year’s Country Music Awards, Tracy Chapman won song of the year for “Fast Car,” which topped country charts three decades after it was released, thanks to a cover by Luke Combs. Black female country artists like Mickey Guyton and Brittney Spencer have also gained popularity in recent years.Beyoncé is the first woman to top both the Hot Country Songs chart and the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart since they were established in 1958, according to Billboard. Both Beyoncé singles are part of her upcoming album, a country-themed follow-up to “Renaissance,” which she referred to as “Act II.” The full album, announced during a Verizon ad that aired during the Super Bowl, is expected to be released March 29. More