With All Eyes On Country Music, Will Black Nashville Get The Reckoning It Deserves?
Country music's longstanding race problem suddenly became a hot topic in early February after the white, twenty-something, good ol' party boy and newly minted country chart-topper Morgan Wallen was caught on tape drunkenly shouting a racist slur. Despite the fact that he was promptly booted from radio rotation, streaming playlists and award eligibility, and "suspended" by his label Big Loud in an ambiguous distancing gesture, sales and streaming of his double album surged.
Nashville-based writer Andrea Williams quickly emerged as an expert of choice for media outlets of all kinds, for good reason: She merges critical analysis with activist conviction and firsthand testimony, having watched her producer/musician husband Dre Williams marginalized as a Black man in an industry that privileges whiteness. Even before the Wallen scandal hit, Andrea Williams and NPR Music contributor Jewly Hight already planned to unpack the recent responses to the white supremacy embedded in the country music industry — ranging from the insufficient to the challenging, and originating with insiders, outsiders, institutions, corporations and grassroots coalitions alike — since the broader reckoning with the devaluing of Black lives and labor reshaped the national dialogue last summer. They tackled it all in this two-way conversation.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Jewly Hight: It seemed to me that the Morgan Wallen scenario was the first event that tested the industry in this era, the first time that we have seen how institutions and corporations will respond to an explicit display of racism.
Andrea Williams: I have said that whatever anybody was doing over the summer, that was the dry run. All of the, "Let's have a panel! Let's talk about it! Black Lives Matter!" — all of that was just rehearsal. Now the lights are up and this is the real show and we're on stage. Quite literally, the whole nation is watching, so it's important that we put into actual play the stuff that we were talking about.
When I watched how terrestrial radio and streaming platforms, media companies like CMT and even institutions like the ACMs dropped him, I was thinking that the ethical layer to those actions coexists with their business interests. There is that element of image management and PR, but when you're talking about
