African American Covers of Country Music Before Ray Charles

Timothy Dodge explores African American interest in and participation in country music from the earliest days of the recording industry’s racial segregation of vernacular music into African American “race” and white “hillbilly” music.

Ray Charles’s then-controversial decision to record an entire album of country music covers in 1962 turned out to be a major success that, in effect, made it “legitimate” for African Americans to record country music. However, the author’s intensive research reveals that African Americans had been recording such music as far back as the early 1920s.

Previous scholarship has focused on the important influence of African American popular music, especially the blues, on country music. This study investigates the prevalence of country music first recorded by white artists subsequently recorded by African Americans artists from several musical genres including blues, R &B, gospel, jazz, and pop.

The author analyzes and discusses his findings to confirm that African American interest in and participation in country has been part of the music’s history from the beginning despite the segregation of such vernacular music by the early recording industry into the basic racial categories of “race” and “hillbilly,” the influence of which to some extent continues to inform contemporary 21st-century understandings of country music.