On this week’s episode of Apple Music’s Colour Me Country, Rissi Palmer hosts a virtual roundtable special with Maren Morris, Cam, and author/journalist/activist Andrea Williams for a vitally important and relevant conversation about representation in country music and what it truly means to be an ally. The group discuss the issues the country music industry faces with race and genre, obstacles toward progress and diversifying the industry to support people of colour. Listen to the full episode here.
Rissi Palmer recently hosted a vitally important conversation around diversity and authentic representation in country music, on Apple Music. Rissi tells Apple Music about barriers within the music industry, ‘I don’t know that that’s necessarily a Nashville thing. I think that that’s a music business thing. I think that in this business we’re a dime a dozen. And if you’re too much trouble, or if you cost too much, or if you’re not making them enough money, it all has to do with the bottom line and if you’re not meeting that, I think that you’re disposable. And then for me on top of being a girl singer – and there’s a million girl singers I’m a Black girl singer.’
Maren Morris had even faced some backlash as a result of her CMA speech, of the speech, she said, ‘So much of Black history in this country has been so whitewashed…So when people look back at the country music records and what happened at the CMAs…there’s a difference between nuking your career because you’re pissed at everyone and you want it all to just burn. And then also standing up, waking up and just being like, “No, f*ck this. I’m so over this outdated paradigm and saying, ‘Thank you’ for crumbs. I’m going to say what I have to say. I just thought, “You know what?…Whose name can you put in this that will drive people to go to their Spotifys, go to their Apple Musics, go to their iTunes, go to their socials, and…actually go and listen to some new music for a change after a three-hour show awarding the same white people the same sh*t. So that was sort of my thinking. And I certainly was not trying to be performative at all. I genuinely was thinking about the people that kind of kicked the door in for me and gave my name a platform like that, some recognition…Several people did that early on in my career, and that’s kind of where my heart was at.’
Country has long had a diversity issue – in its lack of diversity – and as Cam says, ‘Country music has been continually defined as white men’s music and it has been done in that image so well that now we have to spend time explaining – like you had to do – why you even are in country music, Rissi. Like why you, as a Black woman, could even have heard of country music? That’s how directly they’ve erased everything. And that story isn’t just Black women don’t get a shot and everybody else does. There’s varying degrees of, “We’re not going to let you in.’
The whole conversation is important, in order for fans of country music to be better allies, as Maren says, ‘We’re told that our own fight is getting more women in country music on the radio, and that’s our [only] fight. And that’s what we zone in on. All the while Black women artists, especially in country music, are completely left out of that conversation and I feel partly responsible for that. All I can really do going forward is do my homework and my research.… I feel like the best way to validate someone is to pay them. Everything going from writing songs in the room with someone, production, instrumentation, your crew people that you bring out on the road, I feel like there are so many…So it’s just such an insular bubble that we have to burst, and I am absolutely aware of it. Like I said, embarrassingly late, but I’m just trying to do the right thing. I feel like we all should be uncomfortable. The nature of it is change, is being uncomfortable. It’s breaking out of something that has worked for very few for far too long, and for the many stopped so short.’
