the history of Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern when she stepped onto the stage one cold night in January. She just played her heart out.
A few people around me shake their heads. Yola, of course, can’t hear any of this. She’s dancing her heart out.of country music as you know it is a lot of construction. A lot of mythmaking. The man credited with setting the foundation of commercial country also just happened to have been given a pen to write his own version of how it came about.
“The idea of what country music is has been carefully constructed to seem like it was always white,” she says. I ask her why people don’t know the history of country music. This is not her first rodeo: She’s got this answer down to a science. “White supremacy,” she tells me. “There is no other way to put it: It was constructed by numerous people as part of the white-supremacy movement.”
I mention one of country music’s foundational groups — the Carter Family, a Peer discovery. “Yes, but A.P. Carter didn’t know how to write music,” she says. “So who did he take with him to gather the songs? Lesley Riddle, who could take them to black churches.” I ask Yola if it ever throws her off that the shows she plays attract a lot of white audiences. She answers with a booming laugh. “Listen, I play jazz festivals and blues festivals and country festivals, and the audience ranges every night, but that makes no difference to me. When I am playing this music, when I am connected to its history, there are no blacker spaces than country festivals or blues festivals.
His career is extraordinary. Just between 1969 and 1971, he had eight Number Ones on the country charts — eight chart-toppers in two short years. Overall, he has 30 chart-toppers to his name. He became the second black man to become a member of the prestigious Grand Ole Opry . In an updated version of Jimmy Webb’s “Highwayman,” where each new verse tells the story of a persecuted woman in history, Yola’s is about a Freedom Rider — a protester who rode buses into segregated states to confront discrimination in public transit — who gets killed during a protest. The protests of the Freedom Riders form an especially dark part of America’s history.
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