Country Girl
I really liked our class discussion on music a few days ago and was especially intrigued by the mention of a country song written and by a black woman: Country Girl (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVIaiADsyYo). This was absurd to me as I’ve never really heard of any black person man or woman who sing country songs. Watching the music video of the song it came off as a bit strange to me. As Rhiannon Giddens (the singer) was singing about the things she loves about the south there was an older white woman that seemed to be waiting on her, making the food she loves. And when Giddens was singing in the tent that she enters in the video, a lot of white people were there too dancing and singing along to the beat. This just didn’t seem to fit with what my mindset of country music is. But further intrigued I looked up a little bit of background as to why Giddens wrote this song in the first place and things seemed to makes more sense from there. From what I got out of the article, Giddens wrote Country Girl as a way to move forward from all the atrocities that happened in the south for her ancestors. Instead of running away from the south and never going back she chose to stay there and try to make a change, having black and white people interact and celebrate their love for the south as one. Thus, the scenes from the music video I mentioned above make much more sense. The older white lady is not serving Giddens, but rather they are just at the same event interacting with each other, celebrating their southern comfort (and the same with the tent scene). This type of straying from the norm reminds me of white rappers. I wonder if black people have a similar reaction to white people rapping as white people have to black people singing country. Both seem to stray from cultural bounds.
This is an interesting post because I didn’t think much into this song at all, so I am intrigued that you decided to look into it. The music video seemed so natural that the fact that a black woman was singing in a genre that is predominately white men didn’t seem that out of place to me. The story behind the song is really inspiring. Thanks for sharing!