00:00I'm gonna take my horse to the old town road, I'm gonna ride, yeah I'm gonna take my horse
00:27down the old town road.
00:39The reason we don't associate African American people with cowboy music or with country and
00:44western is that this goes back into the very early days when they built the genres, when
00:49they were creating a market for southern working class black people and they decided to call
00:53it race records.
00:54Blues, jazz, spirituals, and gospel music became the foundation and the core of race
01:00records and when it came to white working class music, that music was defined by western
01:07music as well as string bands, folk music, vaudeville, sentimental parlor ballads.
01:13So the idea that people are saying, hey I'm country, let them know that I'm country, this
01:17is a completely different phenomenon than we've seen for many, many decades.
01:36We just have no association of cowboys with African American people even though they've
01:41been there the whole time and they continue to be there because this is a living tradition,
01:45it's not even something strictly relegated to the past.
01:48It tells you a lot about how starved this particular marginalized community has been.
01:54Black popular culture is really not built on the idea of being nostalgic or being country-fied
02:00because of the nature of the history that comes with that.
02:02The
02:17acknowledgment of black rural culture as through black cowboys, black westerners, homesteaders
02:24and all of these different parts of African American culture, that is something that's
02:28very exciting to have it acknowledged.
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