Alice Randall

Alice Randall is a country music songwriter, a New York Times bestselling author, and a newly minted memoirist. She calls her new book, My Black Country, a love letter to Black country music.

In addition to her memoir, Alice also released the album, My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall, that includes a rendition of the song, “The Ballad of Sally Anne” performed by Rhiannon Giddens. The song, which confronts the harsh realities of lynching in the American South was nominated for a Grammy last year in the Best American Roots Performance category.

On today’s episode Bruce Headlam talks to Alice Randall about her lifelong love of country music. And how growing up in Detroit during the height of Motown influenced her musical sensibilities. She also traces the countless contributions African Americans have made to country music and why she believes that history has been ignored.

You can hear a playlist of some of Alice Randall's favorite songs HERE.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Alice Randall is a country music songwriter, a New
York Times bestselling author, and a newly minted memoirst. She
calls her new book, My Black Country a love letter
to black country music. In addition to her memoir, Alice
has also released the album My Black Country The Songs

(00:35):
of Alice Randall that includes her rendition of the song
The Ballad of Sally Anne performed by Rhiannon Giddons. The song,
which confronts the harsh realities of lynching and the American South,
was nominated for a Grammy last year in the Best
American Roots Performance category. On today's episode, Bruce Hettlam talks
to Alice Randall about her lifelong love of country music
and how growing up in Detroit during the height of

(00:57):
Motown influenced her musical sensibilities. She also traces the countless
contributions African Americans have made to country music and why
she believes that history has been ignored. This is broken record,
real musicians, real conversations. Here's Bruce Headlin's conversation with Alice Randall.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
So you have your book, My Black Country. We should
mention it's far from your first book. You're also a novelist.
You've done many other things. You had the tribute album
My Black Country, which is the songs of Alice Randall
and beautifully designed in that classical Nashville way. Now and

(01:46):
you talk about all of this as your project. Are
there other elements to this project? Is there more coming?

Speaker 3 (01:53):
Yes? There actually is more coming. There is my Black
Country documentary that Reggie will be directing that will let
us take a deeper dive into some of this material
and a visual dive into it. And I've actually just
begun work on my Black Country Country Cookbook, which will

(02:16):
actually create taste monuments to some of the women who
performed on the album and to some of the people
that are make appearances in the book. In the memoir
in history, but the memoir in History is very much
focused on the past and up to the present, and

(02:37):
my Black Country Cookbook is going to be focused on
the present and into the future.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
When did this whole idea come to you that there's
got to be some way to pull all these threads together?
And we should mention the book is it's a history
of Black country. It's a very personal history as well.
It's your history, and it's also the music's history.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
Absolutely and succorded and unrecorded music history. The music of
My Black Country begins in the seventeenth century and goes
to the present, but it focuses on the recorded era
that starts in nineteen twenty seven and the radio era
with Deft Bailey on WSM radio, with Lil Harden playing
on Blue Yodel number nine in nineteen thirty one, country's

(03:18):
first million selling single. So that's the history part of
the project. And then it takes up in nineteen eighty
three with my forty year history, which is the memoir part.
But the larger project occurred to me when I was
a little girl in Motown. I was born in Detroit
nineteen fifty nine, and my parents were not involved in

(03:42):
the music business, but they were surrounded by people in
the music business, particularly the Gordy family, particularly Marvin Gay,
Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder. This very rich musical world swirled
around me, and so did a lot of great music gossip.
And so I had heard from early childhood's day that

(04:03):
Lil Harden played on that big Sometimes they said Hillbilly hit,
sometimes they said Pekko would hit, meaning Blue Yoga number
nan and Lil Harden was still moving through that world
when I was a little girl. So by the time
fast forward, I'm at Harvard and I'm interested in country music,
and I'm not hearing any of that, and I start
to trace the oral history, track down the oral history

(04:28):
I've been hearing in my Detroit childhood and interrogate it
with the facts and the history that we were learning
and was available, and see how much of it was true. Well,
it turned out my daddy was right about who was
playing on Jimmy Rogers and Orchestra, so that that was
also Louis Armstrong and also a little hardened. And so
I think the project began when I was a little
girl in Detroit hearing counter narratives and continuing to hear

(04:52):
counter narratives when I was in middle school, and that
I loved the Johnny Cash Show, but my father had
counter narratives to what was happening on the Johnny Cash
Show too. But in Earnest twenty eighteen, I was diagnosed
with breast cancer and it was a sort of serious
of one, and I thought about if I did die soon,

(05:14):
what were the things I wanted to do and the
two projects I wanted to do was one write a
history of the Motown music scene as I understood it
that I thought should be a novel that was Black
Bottom Saints. And the other was I wanted to write
the history of black people in country music, everything that
I've been collecting and learning and knowing for all that time.

(05:35):
Then when Black Bottom Saints came out and that book
did well, I was proud that the New York Times
picked it as one of the best historical novels of
the year. People wanted to hear my old records a lot,
and they and even for the website, they wanted me
to put up a Spotify playlist of these old recorded songs,
many of which have been hit and I realized I

(05:58):
could barely bear to listen to any of them. So
it's a visceral, real hm event because particularly taken as
a group, when you look at the one that starts
off the album, small towns are smaller for girls. I
was very proud to get that Holly Done cut. But
when you listen to that cut, it doesn't sound like

(06:20):
any black girl ever lived in a small town in
the South, when small towns in the South were full
of black girls. When you listen to girls ride horses too,
my first Top ten sung by G. D. Rodman. You're
thinking white girls in the West ride horses too, But
I was actually thinking about black and brown women in

(06:43):
the Western road horses and black and brown women who
are being caught up in the drug trade that that
song was about on the tax Mexican border. When Sister
String sings that, you hear that and more significantly, even
the Ballad of Sally Inn that had been on a
Grammy nominated album that was an extraordinary album. Mark O'Connor

(07:03):
is playing the fiddo, one of the great voices of
new grass and blue grass. John Cowan is singing the lead.
But when he sings the Ballad of Sally Anne, it's
from the perspective of a white man who watched the
body hung in the trees and couldn't at best do it,
needing to stop it. When Rihannan sings the Ballad of

(07:27):
Sally Anne, it's from the perspective of the woman whose
husband has been lynched between his wedding and his reception.
And it's the voice of love, transcending death, love eclipsing hate.
It is a much more profound thing, and it's closer
to the thing I was writing in the first place,

(07:47):
because I was writing in my head for my own voice,
though I did not want to be a singer.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
Mm hmm. Okay, you've just covered an enormous amount of territory.
So you mentioned you were born in Detroit, but you
were surrounded by country music.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
Yes, like many black people, I was born in nineteen
fifty nine. Many black people from my era and before.
Remember the Golden Age of black radio was yet to
happen in nineteen fifty nine, that the vast majority of
radio programming in America, in the American South was country programming,
and so Ray Charles grew up listening to the opera

(08:24):
on Saturday nights. He says that his mama would let
him stay up late. That's the only time she'd let
him stay up late to listen to it. But intimately,
I have always said that my mother, my grandmother, and
my aunt only had one thing in common, and it
should have been loving me, but it was actually loving
country music because my mother did not love me so
but the music they loved was different. My grandmother would

(08:46):
seemed to me on her lap the old songs, Will
the circle be unbroken? My auntie would wear out the albums,
particularly Ray Charles's Modern Sounds in Country and Western.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
Which came out I think a year after you were born.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
Yes, right after I was born, and my mother played
the country radio. That was her secret pleasure. She would
do it in the laundry room in the basement of
the house, and she was playing Ernest Tubb and Hank
Williams and all the honky tar kits of the radio.
So I was getting country in live voice on my

(09:26):
grandmother's lap, dancing around the living room with Mary Francis,
my auntie, and snuck out to the radio with my mother.
And then I eventually moved to Washington, d C. Where
I got to hear a lot of live bluegrass, seldom
seeing country gentlemen ROBERTA. Flack, who I actually think of
as a country artist. So it live country would come

(09:49):
into my life then. And I also fell in love
with the Johnny Cash Show. I actually loved the Johnny
Cash Show, and I watch got a lot of country
in the television when I was in middle school.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
Do you remember was there one particular song, Was there
one moment that made you think, maybe I want to
do this?

Speaker 3 (10:08):
They were so oh many moments I mean I was
literally a little girl. I think I was four or
five in a Motown cherry tree when I wrote my
first country song, Daddy, don't go in that var Please
don't leave me alone in the car.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
But you need to tell the story of that song.

Speaker 3 (10:25):
Well, I was, I know, I was about three years
old when the first event happened. It was a fall,
dark was coming and my father had stopped in front
of a door in his car and pointed to hands
on the clock and said, when the hands got to
this point, he'd be back. And I knew he would
be because he was always back before the hands got
to where he pointed the car. But this time it

(10:47):
was cold and it was getting dark, and I was
feeling a little scared. I did not want to be
left alone in the car. And I looked at these
letters hanging in the sky, write letters, and I said, Daddy,
don't go in that baar, because that was the letters
I saw. I couldn't read those letters. That's how I
know it was three And he said, I've left you

(11:09):
in fid of too many bar signs, neon signs. If
you're spelling those letters out to me now. He still
went in, but he took me with him, and so
that was one when I learned the power of language
and power of using my words. I got to go inside.
He put me on a barstool. I got something with
a Maraschino cherry in it. I remember that, And so

(11:30):
that event happened to me. And fast forward about a
year or two. It was not immediately, it was around
the time I was starting kindergarten to around five. I
used to spend four or five I used to spend
a lot of time in the cherry tree on the
side of our house we actually had. It was Detroit, Michigan,
and there was four fruit trees, and then the highway,

(11:53):
So the highway and the cars on that were like
my river in Detroit. But I was actually sitting up
in a fruit tree, a cherry tree. And of course
they told me that birds poo pooed on the cherries
in the tree, so I didn't get to eat any
of those. So this is a Detroit childhood. I am
sitting in a cherry tree, eating from a jar of
bar Cherry's Marashino cherry, and I think thinking about that.

(12:17):
In that first drink I started, you know, I was
singing to the birds. John Lewis said he used to
preach to the chickens. I never said I didn't have
any chickens, and I didn't do any preaching, but I
used to sing to the birds a very bad voice.
I don't have a good voice, and usually first I
was singing songs I learned from my grandmother, my mother,
my aunt. But eventually I started making up my own
little songs. And the first one I really remember making

(12:39):
up was Daddy, don't go in that bar, Please don't
leave me alone in the car. I'm wishing on a
something star, Daddy don't go in that bar. And I
love that song so much, the bones of it. I
brought it with me to Nashville, and I brought it
into several meetings, and I remember Archie Jordan, who wrote
What a Difference You Made in My Life and some

(13:01):
Grammy winning big songs. Archie said to me, that's the
hit and I said that happened to me and he
said I know, and I said, how could you know?
He said, you can't invent that, but I love that
event was so precious to me. I could never work
on that song to make it a professional or co
written song because I couldn't change anything about it. So

(13:22):
I've known from almost my earliest hours music was so
important to me. It's been a lifeline to me through
my whole life. It was the soundtrack that filled up
the silences around me in an unhappy home. I've always
loved music and always wanted to write, write makeup songs.

(13:43):
I love making up songs.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
And did you start playing piano or guitar when you
were young as well?

Speaker 3 (13:49):
Weirdly I took some piano lessons. So I went to
a school called the Ziggie Johnson School of the Theater,
which I've written a lot about in Black Bottom Saints,
And that's a real place. It was run by a
man called Ziggie Johnson, who was, like you, an important journalist.
He wrote for the Michigan Chronicle of the black newspaper
there and it was a column largely about the national

(14:12):
music industry from a Detroit perspective. And he had this
dance school. So I'm at a dance school where, for example,
the Supremes will come in and they actually perform on
the yearly pageant, and Sammy Davis comes in. He's also
showing us bootleg film a Barishnakov the man was very interesting.
So I early knew one because I'm hearing not that

(14:35):
much older than me. Stevie Wonder played the harmonica or
make music that I am not a great musician. I
am not a dancer, but I could write. I realized
I did put words together in sort of interesting ways.
But I knew so I did not play the piano
long or the guitar long. And I will make a
confession I've hardly ever confessed my own daughter, who now

(14:57):
plays I think a very cool guitar and sings very interestingly.
It will put out an album next year, and I
love that. Justin Town's earl said, like he said, you're
a guitar playing and worth the ship. I can do
something with your voice that she actually does play some
interesting guitar. But when she was a little girl, when
she had been at it just a few years, and

(15:19):
she went through all this great classical piano lessons, I said, Carol,
if you were a great pianist for a guitar, we
wouldn't know that. By now. This is like, Mommy, I
am not the mother who could listen to this and
say this is great. It wasn't originally great, but eventually
she actually has become I think actually a very unusual,
really great guitar player. And I love acclaiming she wasn't

(15:43):
for a long time. But I never I cannot sing
at all, and I cannot play the guitar, and I
have very good ears. I have. I can tell when
things are slightly off. I can recognize talent at the
very beginning. But I have great ears and do not
play any instrument or sing or anything.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
Okay, this surprises me because your daughter clearly was working
at it, and you were like, oh, you don't know
she is going to get there. But you worked at
being a lyricist. You write in the book about listening
to the radio. I don't know when you had the typewriter,
but you would type up the lyrics you would hear
and then analyze them.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
Well at first what I do at night. So we
have to back in the days. This is the early eighties.
So I have worked so hard at being a lyricist.
So in the early eighties, when I moved here in
eighty three, I would let the radio run all night,
and if on the country radio, and if I heard
a song that I hadn't heard, I would wake up
and write down so I started with a pad in

(16:45):
my bed, you know, and of course radio format when
things are moving up there on every hour, every couple hours,
literally because there was no Google back then everything. I
was literally catching the song all through the night, and
then I would type it up in the daytime in
this little portable typewriter, but it would be a pad
in the bed with me during the night, that is how.

(17:08):
And my goal first was you've heard and written down
the lyrics for every single song on the top one
hundred country chart. So once you got through all hundred,
it wasn't as hard as it seems, because back in
those days a song might take two three months to
rise from the bottom of the chart to the top.
So once it was on and I had it typed out,

(17:28):
I had that one, and so I only was having
to deal with that new songs, And there weren't really
that many new songs that broke, but I truly would
work on the new songs that way, and then I
would go sometimes to the Country Music Hall of Fame
they're archives a museum, and I would look up all
songs and write them out, and then I studied those
songs like I studied Jane Austen and Shakespeare at Harvard.

(17:51):
I remember coming across Red Bandana, which is an amazing song,
that red bandana tied around your abbn hair. You look
like you ought to be somebody's wife somewhere. You ain't
never gonna be no Bobby McGee, but you're trying to.
What I learned from that is that country songs can
actually reference characters in other songs, like that Bobby McGee,
the Christofferson song being referenced in this other song. I

(18:13):
found weird, wonderful old songs like Don't Forget the Coffee,
Billy Joe, mamanise her medicine, She's got that real bad cough.
I love that portrait of the depression. So I took
it very seriously both the craft, but I also took
it very seriously of finding the songs that truly utterly
spoke to me, that I thought were as important as

(18:34):
any poetry ever. And also I was interested from those
very beginnings to find the evidences of what I recognize
as black influence and black presence in these songs, and
fascinated by whether it be banjo riff, whether it be
evangelical Christianity, whether it be a sense of sacred place.

(18:54):
All these things that I knew were part of what
Africans brought to the American experience. I was tracing that down,
but I was also just tracing down proud waves of
human dignity in the face of poverty that claims, and
I also chased down other wonderful portraits. I was on

(19:15):
a panel last night, and I didn't get to straighten
out this one thing. Somebody's saying, Oh, all these idealized
usions of mothers in country songs. I'm thinking, what I
love Bobby gentry Fancy and a cockroach rope pulled across
the tip of her high heeled shoe, and she said,
just be good to the gentleman, Fancy, and they'll be
good to you. This is a mother. Your daddy's the

(19:37):
baby's real sake, Your daddy's run off, and we're about
to starve to death. And this mother is basically not
basically she is pouring her daughter out. She takes the
last money she has and buys her a tight fitting
dress and sends her off. That is just one of many.
Daddy Love Mama, Mama loved Men, mamposite in the graveyard,

(19:58):
Daddy's in the pen, Country tells some very hard truths
about mothers. One of the songs I love the most.
It's the opposite of slut shaming. It's so of its time.
It is done by many people, by Whitey Schaeffer is
Hickory Holler, tramp Merle Haggard did it, Oci Smith did it.
And it's about a mother who horse herself out in

(20:20):
the very cabin with her children. And at the end
of it, it moves to the graveside and there's a
big bouquet of thirteen roses and a card that says,
to the greatest mom on Earth in the history of
American literature, there is nothing that feminist woman ford about.
You know. That's the opposite of sluck shaining, that this

(20:41):
woman is a dynamic sex worker doing her thing and
her kids are getting it.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
And this is country music, and it's.

Speaker 3 (20:49):
Country music, and it's country music that traveled into other genres.
It was country. It had multiple country cuts, and it
also had R and B cuts. It's an amazing song.
So this whole journey that Beyonce is making right now,
it's not the first time. Ray Charles is what came
before it. This song that I've just told you about
it so much conversation going back and forth. I always

(21:12):
loved this song about Midnight Train to Georgia. We all
know that song, Gladys Knight. I knew Gladys Knight in Detroit,
but I met Jim Weatherley, who wrote that song in Nashville.
And the two things Jim Weathery said, I think one
was there are no minor leagues of country songwriting, and
the other was Midnight Train to Georgia started off as

(21:34):
Midnight Playing to Houston and it was about Farah Fawcett
and Lee Natures and when she was telling him, I'm
going to have to leave Charlie's Angels because I can't
keep it together with this man. And then a black
group was recording it and they changed it. They said,
can we change the name? But it shows you these
this deep that's a real collaboration that black singers of

(21:56):
this song collaborated. And I will just say that the
hook Midnight Train to Georgia is a far stronger hook
than Midnight Playing. Yes, and those collaborators even I don't
know what their name are now because I'm not sure
if it was the original artist that recorded it or
somebody working with them. A producer that was working with them,
and poor Jim Webber's dad, so he can't tell us.

(22:18):
But the point being, there have always been migrations when
you're talking about important stories. Because one of the things
that's and important songs that I love about country music
as well as what I love about soul food and
Southern food, they're both evidences of how African all Americans
are and how black and white and indigenous Southerners co

(22:42):
created a world and multiple art forms, one of these
art forms being country music, one of them being what
we call soul food. But these are co created forms
with English, Irish and Scottish plus African plus Evangelical Christian roots.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
We'll be back with more from Alice Randall after a
quick break.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
You make a very sharp observation about country music the
way it's understood, and it's largely understood. The narrative that
your book argues against is largely understood as a white
form of music.

Speaker 3 (23:25):
A lot of people think is white music made by
white people for white.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
People, right, And you say that kind of country music,
you know, one of the kind of tenets of that
music is that the past is always better than the present.

Speaker 3 (23:40):
I think there are four big themes in Country. One
is life is hard, God is real, the road, liquor
and family are compensations. And the past is better than
the present. For mouch of White Country, the past is
better than the country, or some of it is a
long foreign lost dick see. For the black people, the

(24:03):
past that's better than the present. And country is alonged
for and lost to Africa before colonization, and I think
and both there's a shared sometimes since that the past
that's it's a longed for and lost childhood before adult misery.
But there never has been any country music that doesn't

(24:23):
have Black influences. Literally it does not exist. And so
it is just there hasn't been the recognition that unfortunately
we talk about when we're looking at the history of
this country, stolen land, what we stole from indigenous people,
stolen bodies and lives Africans brought and chains here. But

(24:44):
there's also stolen creativity that you take people's creations, the melodies.
No the case of Leslie Riddle, I was very excited
to just be able to be at Focal Alliance this
year and they gave me a Lifetime Achievement award, but
even more exciting to me than that though. That was
very exciting was I was able to accept Leslie Riddle's

(25:07):
award posthumously and speak to his brilliance. And this is
a man we've always acknowledged that top maybe Carter and
the Carter family a lot of songs and some guitar techniques,
but it gets left out is long before any knowledge
we have that maybel Carter ever played one bit of
guitar or ever sung a song. Leslie Riddle was in

(25:31):
a cement factory accident and lost his leg. Then he
was so depressed and we're out by this. He had
a gun accident that may have been a suicide attempt
in which he lost two fingers, and he began to
play with three fingers, and the way he played is
a whole lot like Carter family scratch.

Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah, which everybody it's the basis of fingerpicking exactly.

Speaker 3 (25:58):
But the weird thing about this, what is the likelihood
that these two sets of people in the extended same
neighborhood both developed independently the same thing, or did the
Carters see how Leslie Leslie Riddle played the guitar and
be in artistic communion with that which I don't have
any problem with that. What I have problem with is

(26:19):
erasing Leslie Riddle from the story because we can document
the only way he could have been playing the guitar
was with those three fingers, right, and we know that
because those are the only fingers he had.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
So I want to get back to your story and
then get to some of these figures, particularly DeFord Bailey,
who we've talked about before on this on our show,
Lil Harden, who that we haven't So you left Harvard,
you went to Nashville to become a songwriter.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
And form a publishing company.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
Yes, you formed a publishing company, but first you got
a letter from people who looked over your stuff and
it said.

Speaker 3 (26:56):
What I had no talent whatsoever. Ronnie Gant the head
din of a Cuff Rows. So grew up in Detroit,
that moved to Washington, DC, as I said, and went
to Harvard, where I started listening to loutcountry music. And
my college roommate freshman year. Roommate's mother was a woman.
Since we're talking about race, I identify her as a

(27:17):
white woman who went to Yale Law School and she
was the managing director of ASCAP by the time I
was about to graduate and so she was able to
set up some meetings and she got me with some
of the biggest writers and publishers when I graduated from
Harvard AB a year later that were working in Nashville
at the time, and one of them was Ronnie Gant,
And of course I wanted to go there because acaf

(27:39):
Ros was Hank Williams publisher that they had done so
many amazing things. And I got there and Ronnie just
put his feet up on the desk and he first
told me that I should just go back to wherever
it was I came from. And then he told me
that maybe I was at such a low level of
development that he could not judge my material because people

(28:03):
didn't sent him people that were this undeveloped, and he
was going to share it with some young writers of his.
Then he sent me, He said, I shared it with
my writers and they agree with me, you have no
talent whatsoever. And that, of course is parb me. I
was moving to Nashville, Tennessee and show them wrong.

Speaker 2 (28:18):
Okay, but but where does that come from?

Speaker 1 (28:20):
That?

Speaker 2 (28:21):
Because most people if that happened, they would be devastated.
You'd just been to Harvard, I'm sure Wall Street was
calling whatever else you wanted in life. Instead, it was like,
I have no talent whatsoever. I'm going to go there
and show them.

Speaker 3 (28:35):
I was born in Detroit City the same year as
Motown Records, and at that time when by five years later,
Motown is the largest black company in America. So one
thing is I do understand. And I'm a child who
sat on the lap and realized how important music was
to me. So Wall Street, my best friend did go

(28:56):
to Wall Street. My friends were all going to investment
banks and to law firms, and I did consider that.
But I really love people and I love life, and
I knew how I wanted to impact world was through
songs because I had seen the power of Motown. It
wasn't the kind of music I wanted to do, but
it had created a new narrative of what black life was,

(29:17):
a sort of softer, sweet thing I wanted to take
use to preach to the unconverted part of it. Actually
no one asked these questions, but you did so. And
I wrote my thesis on mothers and Daughters in the
novels of Jane Austen, and I did ultimately do well
on that thesis. But I realized that there are probably
six people in the world who could understand it and
four people that could benefit from it. You had to

(29:38):
know so much about Jane Austen, so much about structuralist criticism,
and so much about feminist criticism to be able to
evaluate what I did. And I wanted to create and
write with words and affect lots of people. So country
was the place I felt, you know, it was a
Reagan era. I felt that I could enter in and

(30:00):
that artistic voices are all political voices. I didn't want
to write New York or poetry, and I didn't want
to do what's now called Americana. I wanted to go
on the charts in the radio and actually change what
might be called hardened hearts and minds. I wanted people
who were thinking about environmental justice to hear Glenn Campbell

(30:21):
saying who's minding the garden and maybe start wondering. Oh,
Bible told me I'm supposed to be concerned with Eden.
Maybe that means I should actually be supporting Earth Day
so one because I thought the work was urgent. I
actually think I was a person who knew I've left
out that hard part of my story. I told you
I had a mother who didn't love me. She wasn't

(30:42):
a good mother, and in high school I was raped,
you know, within the family circle. I had a very
hard experience and music helps sustain me from that. So
I also had human lived experience that music will crawl
in to people's pain, to isolation and sustain them. And
I wanted to be one of the people creating the

(31:05):
kind of music that could do that. Emily Dickinson did
that for me, John Prime did that for me. Was
that a tharp did that for me? And I wanted
to be a person who's done that. And one of
the most exciting things about this book tour is when
I was in Indianapolis, I went to the Madam C. J.
Walker Theater and gave a talk and Layla mccallall played.

(31:28):
But afterwards, a young woman came up to me, black
woman from Michigan, and she said, my brother was killed
in a shooting accident, and I was so unhappy. She
felt like the world has coming apart. And she said,
the first time I smiled again after that murder was
when I heard x's and o's on the radio, or

(31:50):
people who told me that their mother and they had
cleaned their houses to exes and o's. So many times
someone has told me how some one of these songs
sustained them. That's so it took me a long time
to find out it really happened. Then it really worked.
You send them out there, there's some things that you
hear early. I worked up Ariba video of the Year

(32:13):
is their Life out There, which I actually put on
a lot of my own trauma has an abusive mother.
I actually put Maya Angelo's I Know Why the Cage
Bird Sings is right in that you can see it.
Reba's reading it to her child. That's a book about
a child that God abused. So I'm signing it. I
walk through that video in case people don't believe it.
But we know that video it also starts off with

(32:34):
sexual harassment. That the waitress played by Riba is trying
to get her tip and the man tries to touch
or caress our hand when she does it. We know
that the Department of Education said that that video sent
thousands of women, mainly I think lower middle class white
women back to college or to college to get their education.

(32:55):
They saw Riba do it, they thought they could do it.
That's the kind of work I wanted to do. I
want to send women back to colleges with a country
music video. Becklas Night was my first song that got
recorded by the Forrester Sisters, who to be one of
the most successful female groups in country that sort of
get forgotten about. It's about a young unweb mother. It's

(33:16):
one of the songs I did bring with me from
Washington to Nashville. And I wrote it with that guy
who told me I had near tilant whatsoever. And it
was the B side of a number one single back
when there were still numbers one single.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
But X's and O's was your first number one, my first.

Speaker 3 (33:32):
It's about only in two weeks at number one, and
it wasn't my first top ten, which which I'm very
proud to say. You know, I got songs on the
charts in the eighties and nineties, the hots at tens
in the twenties.

Speaker 2 (33:44):
But I do want you there's a because you were
working on that song for a while it wasn't working.
You tell a great story about it.

Speaker 3 (33:51):
I would love to year the x'es and o's I had.
I realized a lot of my songs were weird and
that they need to be introduced to the world in
special ways. In one of the ways I thought we
could introduce them is by film or television. So actually
worked to write a series for CBS that we present
it as a movie of the week, blacktoor pilot, but

(34:12):
of the ex Wives of Country Stars and the George
Jones star renamed him George S. Randall, after my father.
But the show was focused on the women, the X
wives of their lives, And I got it in my
contract that I got to write the theme song because
I knew that theme songs were really those are very
profitable and that would be a great way to launch
a song. So when I got that opportunity, I knew

(34:34):
I want to share it with Mtresa Burg, who's one
of my favorite writers. When I was driving down to
Nashville in the eighties, I was listening to her first
number one. I think fake in love only temporary lovers.
So Matrasa and I get together to write and we
write a couple of songs and they're just not good.
And I remember calling my publisher it was a Sunday night,

(34:54):
I think, and saying I can't do it. We're going
to use ring a fire or something. I'm not going
to pretend something's good, that's not good. That theme song
is just going to have to be a country classic.
And I woke up the next morning. I was feeling
so depressed. You know, you got to picture your mama
and heals some prolls. You're trying to make it, and
your daddy's it's not working. And then my phone rings,

(35:16):
and it's my child's school that I had forgotten to
put something in her backpack she absolutely had to have
that morning, I'm thinking, you are get into the shower
and that line comes with you got to picture your
mama and heals some prolls, you're trying to make it,
and your daddy's world that in it. I thought, that's
my song. That is my song, and I raised to
my daughter's school. First, I raced over to Matreesa's house.

(35:37):
This is I don't think we had cell phones. We
certainly didn't use. I begged on her door, and when
she was opened it, I start telling her that first
lyric on the porch, and then she quickly is telling
me the second verse. But that first there phone rings,
baby cries, TV, die Guru lies, good morning, honey. It's

(35:59):
just what actually had happened, except for it wasn't a
baby crying, It was a baby's school calling. We had
to change it around a little bit. And Matrey said
was newly married to Jeff Hannah and they had to
this beautiful house I'd driven over to. He was with
the nitty gritty dirt band, and so they were more
in this beautiful house that they're renovating, and how do
you keep love and romance going into the deep of it?

(36:22):
So hers was fixed to sink mowed the law and
really isn't all that hard if you could pay. Mama
needs romance and a live in Maine. They were in
that couple thing, and so that's what the second verse
was about. I was in the single mom thing. That's
what the first verse was. It became this universal anthem
for all the women trying to keep the balance up
between love and money, which is pretty much all the

(36:44):
women living in any capitalist society anywhere. So I thirty
years later, it's still being played, and I now have
generations of students at Vanderbilt who are raised on it.
I'm probably about to have grandchildren. But we wrote that
song from our heart and experience instead of calculating anything,
and those exes and O's that was all about Carol

(37:04):
signs her letters with x'es and o's, she's got these
big ribbons in her hair. And we were thinking about
consciously about Aretha Franklin and Patsy Clin, who make an
appearance in the song, because we were thinking about our
life as women writers. And Aretha wrote only a little bit,
but her sister Carolyn was a great songwriter, and Patsy Klin,

(37:26):
people may or may not know it, was a great
letter writer. So we love connecting women's high culture to
low culture. That women can write songs and women can
write letters, and all of this informs the music we hear.
And so we love putting Aretha Franklin and Patsy Clin
in the same song. We love putting Aretha Franklin first.
Aretha Franklin loved that even more than we did, and

(37:47):
it was just something that was ripped literally from our
life experiences. And I think it didn't take us forty
some minutes after all those days of writing not writing it.
It took us forty minutes to write that song, and
it is endured.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
It's also one of those songs that if you hear
it on the radio, you're not paying attention. It just
sounds like a great boppy song about this little girl
growing up. But then when you when you listen, it's
about this almost fracture between this very feminine childhood and
now she has to succeed in this whole other difficult world.

(38:26):
There's an amazing generational shift.

Speaker 3 (38:28):
Absolutely, and it's about and money, anxiety if you get
picked all of this anxiety. And it's twelve. Because the
song was savage, I will still call it. I'll call
Bob Orman. When it first came out in terms of reviews,
and you know this whole thing, you know that there's
just saying it's like a radio hit, that it's just
this superficial thing. Well, two weeks at number one. From

(38:51):
the very beginning, women listen to it and they heard
beneath the surface, and that was part of the black
part of it. It has code switching. It seems like
one thing on one level, like yeah, sing along and
sing along, that's how the Ballad of Aally Hand sounds
and image one. But this is a deep and I
like that because I like making things accessible. That's what
I like about Cowboy Carter. Actually, that song is to

(39:15):
me is really about life, is it a game. Texas
Hold Him is a card game. Texas Hold Him is
about life, is not a game. It's about redemption, It's
about real love. It's about a whole lot of things.
I always thought, I even made the case for Achy
Breaky Heart. It's about love and death. That's the American sublan.
All the great songs are about something deeply. We're used

(39:38):
to those songs that were their poetry and their complexity
on their surface. But I am the beneficiary of a
My daughter Caroline is an amazing poet, and she is
an amazing poet, and she sings the last cut on
our album, and she deconstructs and reconstructs this word poem
homage to X's and O's that is X's and O's,

(40:04):
like if Picasso got a hold of it and fragmented it,
but showing its greater unities and greater significance. She said
raised me and how she paid for it, and she
just excates it all out there. And so I feel
that she provided all the footnotes and structure for those
people who did not get what Matraca and I did.
That my daughter, Tracea's goddaughter, she got the last word

(40:28):
in a sung literary criticism. She also went to Harvard
and studied English. We got a song literary defense of her.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
And we should mention Trisha Yearwood because she sang was
that her first album.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
No, it was her second album, and it was funny.
She was almost in a little bit of a lull
when she came. So the rest of that story, which
I did not tell you, is everybody wanted to sing
that song because it was going to be the theme song,
and everyone could feel it felt like a hit. I
will not nickname to the people who didn't get to
do it, except the person who did get to get

(41:06):
to it. Originally was not Tricia. It was why Nona.
And so we go in the studio with Whyona. We
got all the A players. It is like Willie Weeks.
It is just fire. She does an extraordinary job. She
just has to come back up to the tiniest little
overdubs what the network needs. And we come back to
the studio and we wait for Wyona, and we wait
for Whyona and we wait for Winona, and why Noa

(41:29):
does not show up. It's down to about one hour
in the day. She's come and come and doesn't come.
That's another story. But I knew where Tricia was in
the studios recording her second album with Guardfunds A small town.
I barely drop. I literally run into the room where
they are recording, and they weren't physically recording, they were

(41:49):
talking at that moment, but into the actual room and
I just said, I remember I think the first words
I said to her. We know each other, back to
our first marriages. This is my last chance. Whyona is
not shown up? We've got those tracks. Everyone knew the
song was out there. All we have time to do
is pull why Nona's voice off and put your voice on?

(42:11):
Because it was so late in the day, Please come,
And she said yes. That generous, extraordinary woman left her
own stassion. It still makes me cry, left everything there
to come and sing on that record in not good circumstances.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
I was going to ask you what it was like
to be working as hard as you were in Nashville
and suddenly you have a number one. But it seems
that even before it was a number one, everybody wanted
a piece of that. Did everybody want your next song?

Speaker 3 (42:44):
Then you know I ended up quitting not long after
X's and O's.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
Now.

Speaker 3 (42:50):
Part of it was I wanted to get to the
number one spot, and once I achieved it, I was
looking on for a new challenge, and part of it was,
you know, they call it the music business for a reason.
I was never just in it for the business. You
make money when you connect to audiences, and I always
wanted to to larger audiences. I was trying to do

(43:11):
something esoteric for me, but I was very committed to
the art, and so it did feel, like I've said,
having a number one song sort of puts a target
on your back. Everybody wants a piece of you, but
not for the good reasons. Before this, people wanted to
write with me because they knew my ideas were so
original and my work ethic was so strong, and that

(43:34):
I had really great chaste in music that I knew
so many songs all along the way because I knew
so much, I knew the country canon of recorded country music,
and I had what other people recognize, this good taste
about songs, what song is really amazing. There was a
decent amount of respect and engagement. My big breakthy was

(43:56):
actually getting those songs and that the title song and
the thing call Love. Because all the big songwriters that
competed for that and I just went out and got it.
I didn't know the man who was doing it. But
it's also interesting how much wasn't noticed until this album
and Fiona Prine until a few years ago. People I
got these songs recorded, but people never noticed that I

(44:19):
had had multiple chart hits. People would assume that someone
like you know, Steve Girl has more cuts than me. Well,
I have more cuts in terms of if you look
at things he didn't record himself in country. I actually
have had quite a significant career in country. I don't
think anyone noticed until a few years ago, because I

(44:40):
think they insisted on looking at each individual song. Many
people as a one off, just anomaly, but in fact
it was a big pattern, and it was with known
artists and non non artists. Some of these things girls
ride Horses too made Judy Robin. It wasn't the other
way around. A lot of times. The one these really

(45:00):
one weird songs was elevating the artists. Then you get
someone like a Glen Campbell, who's heard hundreds of songs.
One of the greatest thousands of songs. One of the
greatest compliments I've ever had is it in the studio
he kneeled down to my little Girl and said that
this one is Galveston Strong, that this song Galveston was
such an important anti war song, and at this time

(45:21):
in his life he was interested in Christianity is a
positive social influence, and he understood that singing about environmental justice.
He came in the studio and there was no entourage,
just musicians and him and me and my little girl,
and he sang that song so beautifully, the vocal on it.

Speaker 1 (45:44):
After one last break, we'll be back with the rest
of Bruce Hedlm's conversation with Alice Randall.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
I'm going to ask you for a little Nashville gossip.
Who were the writers you worked with, because you worked
with so many that really knocked you out when you
sat down to.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
Work with them.

Speaker 3 (46:05):
Well, one would be steebral I love Steve is an
amazing songwriter, a syllable and sound, so that was very important.
Another would be Bobby Braddock. I'm very thrilled that you
know he wrote the IVO RC and he stopped loving
Her Today.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
And which was one of your favorites, he stopped loving
It's one of my favorites.

Speaker 3 (46:23):
He stopped loving her day. Maybe my arguably my all
time favorite country song, So Bobby pat Alger, who's very
subtle melody person. You know, listening to the sweetness of
his guitar when you sit down to write with Pat
Alger was a wonderful thing. Obviously, matreesa some people that
people don't think about anymore that much. Kevin Welch. I

(46:47):
did some really art songs with Kevin. They're on a
project called Mother Dixie. Mark Sanders I wrote most of
my biggest songs with. We were almost like siblings.

Speaker 2 (46:57):
And what was writing like with? Would you throw lines
back and forth? How did it work?

Speaker 3 (47:02):
So we're very titled driven typically and subject driven, like
if you'd think girls ride horses too or reckless night
but young unweed mothers and religious hypocrisy. Small towns are
smaller for girls. So one we would identify a subject
we wanted to write about, or often I would bring

(47:23):
in subjects and titles, and then we would Sometimes the
other person would have another piece of a lun or
something from that very beginning, but usually with subjects and titles,
and then they would suggest some different a groove for it,
a melody for it. We would start that way. Sometimes
when we got the music all straightened out Mark would

(47:44):
be able to write I have my own weird way
I wanted it was unstressed, stressed. I needed to know
what kinds of words I needed, and so he would
write scan it out for me sometimes, or I could
just do it sitting with the person and they sing
when I suggest a song and we can see whether
it works. But Mark is also a great lyricist, so
he was definitely adding lots of words. I developed a

(48:08):
very collaborative way of writing songs. I think the exception
of one song that's not on the album, a song
called My Hometown Boy, which was Marie Osmond, I don't
feel that's the only song that my name is. I
don't feel that I contributed a lot to And as
you can even just see across who I've written with,
there are themes like this girl thing is a big theme,

(48:31):
certain kinds of gothic situations, death, murder, certain kinds of injustices.
I have a whole I call a cowboy suite. My
cowboy songs sound a lot whether I'm writing with Rodney
Foster or Kevin because they are my cowboy songs. So
I think that one of the things that is interesting
about this project and this album is because I co

(48:54):
write a lot and I do co write, and because
I don't perform, it's been harder for some times for
people to see or question are you an artist? Are
you a songwriter? Ar you as opposed to some kind
of artisan a lot of times as opposed to thinking
of it as being art and is self expressive? They
think if you're co writing, it's craft, it's not about

(49:16):
self expression. But in fact, all of my work has
been very much I would I've never said this before
out loud, but it's a kin to cycle analysis. It's
my story that their biss is very much facilitating it,
and maybe they are un being the there bis for
them so to some degree, and they're also telling their story.
That's what the greatest thing. But it was wonderful about

(49:38):
this album that I don't even think is so much
a tribute album as my Grandma Moses Immersion as an
artist album that you can see what the art, the
themes of Alice Randall's songwriting body is.

Speaker 2 (49:53):
We should talk a bit about the album. There's other
things I want to get to. But the sort of
marquee names here are like Rhanne Giddens, who does an
amazing job on the Ballot of Sally Anne. You mentioned
I think in your biography that you were really influenced
by Joe as his ballad book, and that just this
song takes me sort of back to that.

Speaker 3 (50:14):
I listen to that album over, and I mean hundreds
of talks. I mean I used to know every song
on it. So I think when I internalize that it's
part of my artistic DNA. But it even the Ballad
of Sallyent references that directly. Sallyanne is also an old
folk and black fiddle tune. But the Ballad of sally Ane,

(50:34):
as far as we know, was never put together that
phrase and that and as I've noticed that those songs
are a lot about death, A mother dear I cannot tell,
but go dig my grave, both long and wide and deep,
and marvel head, you know what my head had and feet,
and tell the world I died of love. They found
her hanging on vi a rope like it has. Death

(50:56):
has all kinds of young women's trauma in it, a
lot of around love and domestic violences of different kinds, betrayals,
intimate betrayals of different kinds. So I think those songs
really went into my artistic DNA, and really they prepared
me to be a country songwriter because I had also

(51:18):
all this black music wealth in me and I had
my Detroit Lutheran and Baptist Sunday School, so I had
the Celtic ballad forms, I had the African influences, and
I had the evangelical Christianity, So I was set up
to be a country sunger.

Speaker 2 (51:38):
Another song, another version I thought was so impressive was
I'll Cry for Yours.

Speaker 3 (51:42):
I love the Miko Marx that we did a video
of that one. I think that's just heartbreakingly beautiful, and
so I hope that one still becomes a theme song
for this time.

Speaker 2 (51:54):
A beautiful brass arrangement. And it's really unexpected that.

Speaker 3 (51:58):
Ebany Smith, she's brilliant. No one expected those horns on
the ballat of Sally Ann either and they're married or no.
To me, they've reminded us that lynching happened into the
age of as and those horns. That's also our homage
to Louis Armstrong playing on Blue Yodel number nine. Their
horns on Blue Yoda number nine.

Speaker 2 (52:18):
You know, we've avoided talking about it, so we have
to talk about it. Most people don't know that Jimmy Rodgers,
who's supposed to be the father of country music, played
a version of Blue Yodel Number nine with Lil Hard
and Louis Armstrong.

Speaker 3 (52:33):
The one that was the million seller. The right, yes, yes,
and they only say on the label and orchestra, but
the orchestra.

Speaker 1 (52:39):
Was that right?

Speaker 2 (52:40):
They didn't list. But this is nineteen and.

Speaker 3 (52:42):
In fact it was fought until recently, as late as
when I worked on the ken Burns documentary Country Music,
and ken Burns has been supportive of my book, but
other scholars they just debated and fought with me. It
took so much work to get Louis Armstrong mentioned as
part of the jew and Me Rogers story. Ultimately, even
though I was able to prove it and prove it

(53:04):
to everyone's satisfaction, sheet I didn't find it. But the
sheet music has been found and it's been authenticated by
Jimmy Rogers scholars that then Jimmy Rogers' own hand that
he wrote after the session, and Louie's wife lil played piano.
But up until the time it was that Literally, it's
only been the twenty first century we've been able to
prove that, and people denied it. But what's wild is

(53:28):
Lil Harden was alive when I was alive. She knew
whether or not she played on Blue YOLDA number nine,
and so it required not believing her. But what's wild
is Roy Acuff knew it too. Everybody knew it because
it wasn't a secret at the time. That's why they
had to go out. They recorded in LA. Did you
think Jimmy Rogers didn't say, I just put on this

(53:48):
big session with Louis Armstrong and Lil Harden Armstrong. These
are two of the top jazz players of that day.
But it was hidden. So that's a little bit sad.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
Louis Armstrong is one of those characters who is so accessible,
including to white Americans, Like why with the fact that
he performed with Louis Armstrong be an issue because then
it then became less authentic. What was the what was
the thinking? I'm asking you to think about the other
side here. I realized, that's unfair.

Speaker 3 (54:21):
Well, we don't first, I never think I know what
other people are thinking. And to wonder what Jimmy Rogers
was thinking in nineteen thirty one, and couldn't it could
have been not his idea. He could have just wanted
to play with Louis a Lil and it had to
do with the people who are marketing the record. That part.
There have been arguments made that part of the way
that country music was marketed was that part of the

(54:42):
value you got, like when you buy armez scarf, you're
buying into an image of yourself of luxury or this
or that. Does this not just the silk scarf from
the pattern, that part of what was being marketed with
country music was quote unquote white identity, and that that's
part of what people were buying when they got it,

(55:03):
and so that's what they wanted to see. So you
see in the early thirties they are examples of that
were actually integrated bands, but when they made pictures of them,
they would take out the black member and put in
a white person, sometimes a manager or some other person
as if that was the band. And we know for
sure because he talked about it. When Charlie Pridde was

(55:25):
originally being broken in the industry, they did not send
out any pictures of him or indicate to radio when
they were getting him established that he was black. They
hid that because they thought it would make it more
difficult to sell. And we know that that had happened
with earlier artists that people have thought were white that

(55:47):
we now know for sure were black, and that their
images were replaced at an earlier time.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
That was not always the case with country music. You
talk a lot about DeFord Bailey, who was the most
popular star on the on the Grand Old Operay when
it started. Was there a particular moment when it went
from being this art form that had a lot of
different contributors to being this representative of white culture.

Speaker 3 (56:16):
I think the same way that African influences have been
in country music since its birth, the erasure of Black
contributions to country music have been there since the beginning
of it. It's the same. I think it comes out
of the idea of you owning people's bodies, and you're
owning their labor, and you're owning their creation. So I

(56:38):
think that there's a very complicated history that it's only
right now that we're seeing open collaboration and accrediting of
what black contributions a country have been. Because even it's
recently as the Lil nas X thing, one of the
quote unquote controversies with this first song Old Town wrote

(56:59):
with people you would see all over the internet versions
of this. Our culture isn't your costume. But what they
didn't know is that at least twenty percent of cowboys
were black and brown. Some people estimate as highest thirty percent.
These people actually don't know this because it's a raised
history that when we look at another long term contribution

(57:21):
to country music is cowboy songs and the whole wealth
of them. And we know that Thorpe I write about this,
the guy first in the teens who collected the first
cowboy songs and put them in a book. Well, people
don't realize that the first cowboy camp he went to,
because it's been a race from the story, was a
black cowboy camp. That a lot of songs come from

(57:41):
black cowboys. I don't even think people are lying or
repressing that. I think most people just don't even know
that any and so it's a distorted story of the
past that distorts our potential for the future.

Speaker 2 (57:54):
Or the other you know, the other great source of
country music, Appalachia. People don't And I think you might
mention this in your book, just huge number of African
American foundations in coal miners.

Speaker 3 (58:07):
Yeah, yes, A large, A large amount of co owners
are black. Bill Withers, who I love, who I think
of as a country artist. Grandma's hands, wonderful country songs.
He kissed. His grandfather was a coal miner. They're black,
So Appalachian music is influenced by the presence of black people.

(58:27):
M H.

Speaker 2 (58:28):
And you'd always have some performers would release. The Pointer
Sisters released a country album. I think one a.

Speaker 3 (58:36):
Great a huge single fairy Tale that Elvis Presley would
cover and they that was a big single and that
family winning duel. We've always said Ray Charles, the Pointer Sisters.

Speaker 2 (58:51):
Tina Turner did one.

Speaker 3 (58:52):
Jana Turner had amazing Tina Turns a country on. But
one of my other memories is my nineteen sixty four
five with the Supremes played the Copa Cabana for the
first time and I was there and they sang a
country song. They sang Queen of the House and that
song became country song of the Year, and they were
part of putting that song in that place.

Speaker 2 (59:14):
And Al Green did did great versions of He did
blunsome I could cry, He did.

Speaker 1 (59:21):
A bunch of way.

Speaker 3 (59:22):
He had a whole country album about that. I love.
I love the Grand Tour by George Jones. That it
equally interesting is aaron Nevills.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
I have to confess I like Grand Tour a little
bit better than he stopped loving Her today.

Speaker 3 (59:38):
Well waite until you hear this other one. Grand touris
are just a sad song about the divorce and that.
But he' stop living today. To me, in terms of criticism,
is about what I call dynamic stasis, stasis frozenness. In
Western literature and Western art, one of the things we
look for is the hero evolving, changing, becoming more. But

(01:00:02):
in real life we know most people don't change. People
get very set. What I love in country there is
a dynamic that I have labeled dynamic stasis. We're a
frozen character. The narrator moves around them like that line
he stopped loving her today. Soon they'll they'll hang a
reef upon his door. He stop loving her day. The

(01:00:22):
change is death. When you see the price of dynamic
stasis for being frozen, that you may die, you may
have a life that mounts to nothing. It actually can
provoke you to change. That's why I love he stopped
loving her Today, because it's about what the penalty of
not moving on is and that could be from a

(01:00:43):
success or a failure in work life, Like we all
need to be reminded that we do not want to
be the person who's going back and saying he had
underlined and read every single I love you like all
these people's death, scrolling and commenting on other people's lives
instead of doing something that's the equivalent of he had
underlined and read every single I love you.

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
Okay, I love that. I love that theory. I think
we're going to end on that because that is so.

Speaker 3 (01:01:08):
Great dynamic stasis. I'm a stritter, but I'm a critic
of the form, and I love this form when it's
at its best, and it's an Afro Celtic form. I
love great journalists like you that give us a chance
to put the footouts on and complete the story.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
Well, we're going to talk the next time you do
something then, because this has been just fabulous.

Speaker 3 (01:01:30):
Thank you so much. I appreciate you.

Speaker 1 (01:01:35):
Thanks to Alice Randall for walking us through her professional
history and her many projects around black country music. You
can hear her new album My Black Country The Songs
of Alice Randall, as well as other songs she's written
on a playlist at broken record podcast dot com. You
can subscribe to our YouTube page at YouTube dot com
slash broken Record Podcast to watch all of our video interviews,

(01:01:56):
and be sure to follow us on Instagram at the
Broken Record Pod. You can follow us on Twitter at
broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose,
with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our
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Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin,

(01:02:16):
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Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.