Musicians RHIANNON GIDDENS and BRITTNEY SPENCER on COUNTRY music's BLACK HISTORY and why the genre is at a TURNING POINT

Country music's popularity is at an all-time high in America, with the genre boasting a more diverse audience base than ever before.

- ARIANA MARSH

But the marginalization of Black performers was once an institutional part of the business. For decades, artists of color in the Nashville-centered music world were largely excluded from popular venues and circuits, and labels divided their releases into records for white audiences and "race records" for nonwhite ones.

It's a subject that Beyoncé delved into headlong with the release this past spring of Cowboy Carter, which pays tribute to some of the trailblazing Black women who have helped shape country music. Among them: Linda Martell, the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry; author, educator, and award-winning songwriter Alice Randall, who released her memoir and accompanying album, My Black Country, in April; and singer and pianist Frankie Staton, who created the first Black Country Music Showcase at the Bluebird Cafe, a famed Nashville listening room, in 1997. The album also serves as a showcase for important contemporary talent, including Rhiannon Giddens, who plays banjo on "Texas Hold 'Em," and Brittney Spencer, who sings on "Blackbiird," Beyoncé's version of the classic Beatles cut, alongside Tanner Adell, Tiera Kennedy, and Reyna Roberts.

Giddens, a founding member of the Grammy-winning Black string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops, is one of the preeminent banjo players in the country and an educator on the West African origins of the instrument, which was brought to America through the slave trade. Giddens has released three solo albums and won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Omar, the opera she cowrote with composer Michael Abels. In 2017 and 2018, she appeared on the CMT series Nashville, which was set against the glitzy backdrop of the city's mainstream country scene, portraying gospel singer and social worker Hannah Lee "Hallie" Jordan.