Issue #48: "Black Music Is American Music"— Brandi Waller-Pace
How two North Texas non-profits are fostering Black roots music
By Natalie
It is Beyoncé week here on the country side of things, a time for a lot of breathless analysis and posturing and often ahistorical assessments of what her album Cowboy Carter, out this Friday, means. I am, of course, very excited to hear it and happy to see it prompting still depressingly necessary discussion of racism in country music. But! I also want to use its release as an opportunity to draw attention to some of the on-the-ground work being led by Black women to make the country/Americana/roots/etc space broader and more inclusive happening right here in North Texas.
We told you to go to the Fort Worth African American Roots Festival before it happened. You should have listened, because it was wonderful — I did not see an act that wasn't jaw-droppingly talented, and the energy of the place was so positive and invigorating. The Bluegrass Situation did a nice gallery recap, as did the Dallas Morning News. There was such an impressive range of sounds, from traditional acoustic blues via Corey Harris to more contemporary singer-songwriter fodder with a progressive point of view from Stephanie Anne Johnson and Crys Matthews to virtuosic old-time music from Jerron Paxton to thrilling experiments in tradition and genre-refusal from Lizzie No (and that's just a sampling!). I walked away deeply inspired, wanting to do anything I could to amplify the work being done and hoping for future iterations of the festival to be sold out months in advance.
The festival was founded by Brandi Waller-Pace, an artist, educator and scholar originally from Atlanta who spent years teaching in Fort Worth public schools — experience that led her to organize Decolonizing the Music Room, a nonprofit dedicated to (as its name would suggest) modes of music education that center Black, Brown, Indigenous and Asian art and voices. The quote that is the title of this piece forms a genre-less bedrock of the organization's mission, one that includes roots and folk music as a matter of course. FWAAMfest is just one part of the Decolonizing the Music Room's efforts, which continue year round both locally in Fort Worth and beyond. A great cause to support, if you have funds and are able — and if you're in North Texas, I'd better see you at the festival next year!
At the festival, I learned about Swan Strings — a Dallas-based (yes, Fort Worth and Dallas are very different! confusing them will have you in trouble, at least with locals), Black woman-led music education non-profit that offers free guitar lessons at local libraries and community centers, mostly in historically Black and Latinx neighborhoods in Dallas. Swan Strings was founded by local musician Jess Garland (who is also on the board of Decolonizing the Music Room! It's a community!), a singer-songwriter who plays both harp and guitar, and has been offering hundreds of hours of gratis lessons since 2017. Its a remarkable, admirable effort, as music education offerings in school continue to shrink and the cost of everything (read: instruments and lessons) rises — Garland even solicits donated guitars, ensuring anyone who might want to take a crack at an instrument that is too often delusionally wrongly coded white (via country and rock) can. Another excellent cause to support if you have the means, whether you live in Dallas or not.
Anyway! All that is to say that there is so much crucial work being done to make this music accessible and welcoming for everyone; hopefully Cowboy Carter is a prism through which to shine light on all of it :)