According to Tosches, one of the style’s few blues-based practitioners was Herschel Brown, who followed his own 1928 “New Talking Blues” (which, like Bouchillon’s, confusingly discussed not needing to work hard when one has “a gal in the white folks’ yard”) with two records that added an ugly n-word to the title. Countless “Talking Blues” imitators ensued: usually white ( Coley Jones and “Talking” Billy Anderson were rare black exceptions) and generally “not really blues at all, except in name,” Nick Tosches argues in Where Dead Voices Gather, his 2001 book about the hugely influential second-quarter-of-20th-Century blackface minstrel Emmett Miller (who we’ll return to). Ex-Dylan sideman Charlie Daniels made a career of out of them, though he never sounded rappier than in his first charting single, the uncharacteristically left-leaning “Uneasy Rider,” which went top 10 pop in 1973 then seemingly went on to inspire the cadence that Southern soul artist turned X-rated proto-rapper (and “Convoy” parodist) Blowfly flew with in his 1980 single “Blowfly’s Rapp.”ĭylan may have nicked his own rap flow from mid-’40s Woody Guthrie or early-’50s Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith, but talking blues officially dates back to 1927, when mandolin-wieding South Carolina car mechanic Chris Bouchillon was recording in Atlanta, and an A&R director found his singing skills lacking, so he suggested Bouchillon just talk the words instead. Blues,” etc.) Talking blues were all over country, and frequently crossed over to pop, in the ’60s and ’70s: “Hot Rod Lincoln” for Johnny Bond in 1960 and then for Commander Cody in 1972 “Big Bad John” for Jimmy Dean in 1961 “Ringo” for Bonanza actor Lorne Greene in 1964 “My Uncle Used to Love Me But She Died” - as absurdist as anything by Beck - for Roger Miler in 1966. McCall‘s pop-chart-topping 1975 CB-radio novelty “Convoy” (which itself inspired a long-forgotten wave of country Citizen’s Band raps, only a few years before “Rapper’s Delight”: advertising exec Cledus Maggard‘s “The White Knight,” Johnny Hemphill‘s “The Handles Hall of Fame,” Mac Wiseman‘s “Listenin’ C.B. To get there, though, you’ll need to start with the talking blues - a rhythmic, rhyming, humorously yarn-spinning spoken vocal style you’ve heard if you’ve heard much early Bob Dylan, or Johnny Cash‘s 1969 “A Boy Named Sue,” or C.W. If you really explore the pre-history of country rap, you’ll wind up wandering down some unsettling abandoned corridors, leading back to a time long before not only rap, but even country, existed - a time when the racism in American popular music was anything but accidental. In honor of the runaway success of “Old Town Road,” we have decided to republish the country-rap list in its original form, with some new additions to reflect recent history. The capstone, of course, is the remix to “Old Town Road,” in which two disparate artists from different generations come together to find a very happy place where rap and country can coexist (memes, mostly). The last five years have only further exposed “Accidental Racist” as a farce, with rap and country continuing to mingle in far more interesting ways. It was the time of “Accidental Racist,” when a country star (Brad Paisley) and old rapper (LL Cool J) coming together to talk about the state of prejudice in the American south was momentarily the hottest topic in pop culture-either because you found it productive, ridiculous, offensive, or some combination of the three. The premise of the song was based in part on the idea that there was something inherently novel about a collaboration between a white country singer and a black rapper, but this list showed that, in truth, it was the opposite. Back in 2013, SPIN published an exhaustive history of the relationship between rap and country music.
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