November 5, 2021
Maddie Oatman here, senior editor in charge of our print magazine's culture section. The pandemic has mostly been a drag, but one benefit has been all the uninterrupted hours I've spent nerding out about music and the stories behind some of my favorite albums.
In September, I transitioned from occasional Brandi Carlile listener to complete fangirl. Immersing myself in Carlile's 2021 memoir, Broken Horses, was one of the best audiobook experiences I've ever had: The Americana singer reads the story—a peek into her hardscrabble Washington childhood and scrappy rise to fame—herself, and plays and sings two or three acoustic songs after each chapter. At the end of the book, she references an album she started writing during the pandemic.
Well, that album dropped on October 1, and it's killer: full of poignant writing, folksy vibrato, and even some rockers like the song "Broken Horses," which she performed in a gold suit on the October 23 episode of Saturday Night Live. I'm a tried and weathered woman, she warns in the lyrics, but I won't be tried again. Brandi, I bow to you.
The same day Carlile's record dropped, another new gem appeared. Singer Miko Marks made waves in the early 2000s as one of the only Black country artists to hit Nashville. But she felt iced out of the mainstream country scene. "I heard, 'You won’t sell'…because I’m Black, without saying because I’m Black," she later told the New York Times. Discouraged, Marks ended up taking a 13-year hiatus.
This year, she returned with a splash, releasing a full-length record and an EP of cover songs. The second, Race Records, out October 1, functions as payback for all the years Marks was made to feel unworthy of singing country music. The original "race records" were a way for record labels to differentiate music by Black people in the early 1900s, essentially segregating these records and their profit potential. (I wrote more about this in a story about Black banjo player Jacob Blount.) They're one of the reasons mainstream country music became so lily-white during the second half of the century, even as the genre has always drawn heavily from the contributions of Black artists, pulling from blues, gospel, and bluegrass.
Marks subverts this history: Paying homage to country's many influences, she covers country classics, like "Long as I Can See the Light," made famous by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and "Whiskey River," which Willie Nelson liked to sing. Race Records has a layered story to tell, and it's delightful listening.
That's all for now—I hope your weekend is full of relaxation and good tunes.
—Maddie Oatman
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