It’s Black Folks’ Country, Too
As of last Tuesday, Lil Nas X’s trap-country crossover Old Town Road broke the streaming record previously held by Drake’s megahit God’s Plan clocking in 143 million streams in the last week. The close of this week marks its seventh straight week on the charts, the third week at number one. Old Town Road’s journey to the top has been anything but linear, as Billboard previously pulled the song from the would-be top spot on the Hot Country chart claiming that, despite Lil Nas X’s inclusion of both cowboy and country imagery, the song’s individual elements did not fit the definition of “country.” Arbitrarily, that remained the case until pop-country music and Hannah Montana patriarch, Achy-Breaky Billy Ray Cyrus, jumped on the track’s remix and, since then, Old Town Road has held tight to its rightful spot atop the Billboard 100. Critics across the web were quick to point out the hypocrisy of Billboard’s cowardly move, putting the otherwise irrefutable country elements of the song aside, any credible musical authority should know of country music’s origins in the rhythm and blues popularized by black artists’ in and from the South. The banjo, for example, a country music staple, has been traced back to the Gambian akonting, West African ngoni, xalam or any other of the 60 or more a long-necked, stringed instruments of similar sound and form deriving from the region.
