Decrypting "OId Town Road’s" Deeper Meaning

Brut America

The #KentuckyDerby is making headlines because of the horses on the track — but Lil Nas X made history for his song about "horses in the back." Country and folk musician Dom Flemons sat down with Brut to talk about race, country music, and why "Old Town Road" is so special.

Transcript

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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