COLOR ME COUNTRY

Glimpses of country music’s African American female trailblazers.

This book was named for a 1970 album by Linda Martell, the first Black woman to perform at the cathedral of American country music, the Grand Ole Opry. Martell is one of 18 Black female solo artists and groups who get their due in individual chapters authored by a variety of contributors. The profiles were written with awareness that the book’s subjects needed extra gumption to navigate the historically (and still predominantly) white country music world. These well-crafted minibiographies begin with pianist and composer Lil Hardin Armstrong, who got her surname and not much else from her two-timing husband, trumpeter Louis. Several of these female pioneers were uncredited, undercompensated, or held back by romantic partners as well as by racism. Among the book’s best-known 20th-century subjects are Odetta, the Pointer Sisters, and Tina Turner. (The editors use an elastic definition of what it means to be a “country artist.”) Among the contemporary country music marvels who earned their own chapters are Valerie June, Mickey Guyton, and Giddens, who conceived of this book and illustrated it to boot. Her cartoonish digital art, in which the featured women have round, wide-set eyes and outsize heads, gives everyone a Funko figure–like look, and why not? These performers are having fun. Readers will be, too.

An uplifting salute—and profiles in persistence.