Black Artists Are Reclaiming ‘Country’

From Beyoncé to Rissi Palmer to Ramell Ross, modern artists have long known — and celebrated — the Black history of rural culture in America

Natasha Trethewey is a true child of the rural South.

Born into a then-illegal biracial marriage, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet’s childhood, and now her poetry, recalls the country outskirts of Gulfport, Mississippi, where Blacks and whites lived tenuously together, making a way out of no way.

Trethewey is part of a growing cohort of modern authors, musicians and visual artists whose works intentionally center Black rural culture while also heralding and celebrating the modern growth and economics of the culture. Their efforts are reviving the histories, memories and modern-day trials of the Black towns, the Black farmers, the Black cowboys, and the Black artists who are part and parcel of rural culture and therefore should be considered part of the Americana narrative.

“There’s a real way that one is made to feel like a psychological exile in your own homeland,” says Trethewey, now a professor at Northwestern University. She links our conversation about historical memory to her book Monument, which poetically examines the markers of her childhood, alongside the names…