Alice Randall Talks Nation Music’s Black Historical past At Fisk College

As Alice Randall completes her year-long tour for her memoir and album My Black Nation, the award-winning songwriter stopped to go to Fisk College in Nashville, Tennessee, to debate how nation music is deeply rooted within the HBCU’s Black girls’s historical past.

On the night of March 31, the Fisk honorary doctorate recipient, her daughter, Caroline Randall Williams, college college students, and Fisk President Dr. Agenia Clark gathered within the Appleton Room of the HBCU’s iconic Jubilee Corridor for the student-led dialogue on “The Intersection of Nation Music and Fisk College.” In response to The Tennessean, Jubilee Corridor, which initially served as a dormitory, was designed within the 1870s following the Jubilee Singers’ European tour in 1871, which gained the refrain of seven feminine and 4 male college students main proceeds for the college. Nashville, acknowledged because the nation music capital, can be identified for its legacy because the “Music Metropolis.” After Queen Victoria of Britain witnessed the ensemble’s expertise, she reasoned that the singers will need to have been from a “music metropolis.” A video on the ensemble famous that the group relied on the “love, dignity, and keenness the songs introduced their enslaved ancestors,” and the tour was well-received by white patrons.

Nonetheless, the connection to the corridor continued as Randall emphasised Black girls’s contribution in shaping nation music tradition and historical past. She highlighted the contributions of American composer and bandleader, Lil Hardin Armstrong, a former undergraduate scholar at Fisk College who lived in Jubilee Corridor. The late jazz pianist made historical past in 1930 after she accompanied her then-husband, Louis Armstrong, on “Blue Yodel #9” (“Standin’ on the Nook”) and have become the primary Black girl on a document to promote 1,000,000 copies. Randall advised college students, “As a result of Lil was the pianist on ‘Blue Yodel,’ her work — greater than Jimmy Rodgers or Louis Armstrong’s — was heard on each bar of that tune.” Lil Hardin additionally collaborated with Nation Music Corridor of Fame artist Ray Charles.

Randall took college students again centuries and mentioned how the descendants of settlers of shade who based Nashville with James Robertson and Colonel John Donelson attended Fisk College. She delved into how commercially industrialized nation music developed from the spiritual and folks ballads that Black African enslaved girls in Virginia’s colonies sang. “Nation music’s mainstream trade has traditionally been based mostly on battling the inclusion versus exclusion of its influences…its Black historical past,” Randall mentioned. “All Individuals profit from recognizing true American genius.”

The dialog additionally coated the contributions of feminine quartet Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla, and Allison Russell, who debuted the “Songs of Our Native Daughters” folks album; nation artists Miko Marks and Rissi Palmer; Grand Ole Opry-performing artist Linda Martell; and jazz and gospel performers Billie Holliday and Mahalia Jackson. Monday’s occasion featured a efficiency by O.N.E. The Duo. The mother-daughter nation duo carried out their single “Hoedown,” a challenge that displays comparable melodies to Beyoncé’s “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM.”

Randall’s memoir, My Black Nation, celebrates “probably the most American of music genres and the novel pleasure in realizing the facility of Black affect on American tradition,” based on her web site. The e book and album, which had been launched in 2024, can be found for buy on-line.

RELATED CONTENT: Natural Soul Meals Cooking with Alice and Caroline Randall