Rhiannon Giddens, Allison Russell, and More Celebrate the Country Songs of Alice Randall on ‘My Black Country’

If you haven’t heard of Alice Randall, you’ve definitely heard her work. She was a co-writer on the 1994 Trisha Yearwood hit “XXX’s and OOO’s,” making her one of the first Black women with a songwriting credit on a hit country song. And her songs have been recorded by Glen Campbell, Marie Osmond, Mo Bandy, and more.

But for as well as they performed Randall’s songs, none of those artists looked like her or shared the life experience to get the characters within them quite right. A new collection of Randall’s songs performed by Black female artists aims to give the songs the context she intended.

“My Black Country” cover artwork

My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall, coming April 12 on Oh Boy Records, features interpretations of Randall’s songs by Rhiannon Giddens, Allison Russell, Sunny War, Adia Victoria, and many more, highlighting the ongoing contributions of Black women to modern country and roots music.

“Because all the singers of my songs had been white, because country has white-washed Black lives out of country space, most of my audience assumed the stars of my songs were all white. I wanted to rescue my Black characters,” Randall says in a press release announcing the album. “This album does that; it centers black female creativity, but it welcomes co-creators and allies from a myriad of identities. This is the good harvest: abundant love and beauty for all.”

The first single from the album is “Went for a Ride,” co-written with and recorded by Radney Foster on his 1992 album Del Rio, Tx 1959. A wistful ballad with a Black cowboy at its center, here the song is performed, with an edge, by blues singer-songwriter Adia Victoria:

Still an active songwriter on Music Row, Randall also is a professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and writer-in-residence at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University. She’s written several books, including the best-selling 2001 novel The Wind Done Gone, which re-imagined the world in Gone With the Wind through the lens of Cynara, mixed-race half-sister to Scarlett O’Hara. Randall’s newest book, also called My Black Country, will put the spotlight on Black figures in country music history, as well as her own experience in the genre, including a fateful meeting with Steve Earle at the Bluebird Café in 1983, soon after she’d moved to Nashville to become a songwriter. The book will be out April 9 via Simon and Schuster.

Here’s a look at the tracklist and artists for My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall:

1. Leyla McCalla – “Small Towns”
2. SistaStrings – “Girls Ride Horses”
3. Adia Victoria – “Went for a Ride”
4. Rhiannon Giddens – “Sally Anne”
5. Sunny War – “Solitary Hero”
6. Miko Marks – “Cry”
7. Allison Russell – “Many Mansions”
8. Saaneah Jamison – “Get the Hell Outta Dodge”
9. Rissi Palmer – “Who’s Minding the Garden”
10. Valerie June – “Big Dream”
11. Caroline Randall Williams – “XXX’s and OOO’s”