Last Thursday, mere hours before his eighth solo album was released, Darius Rucker—once the front man for Hootie and the Blowfish, now a successful country singer—performed a solo show at the Apollo Theatre, in Harlem. If you never imagined you’d be part of a crowd of fifteen hundred mostly white people hollering along to “I Only Wanna Be with You” on 125th Street—well, me neither.
Rucker was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, a black polo shirt, and a baseball cap. He periodically did a hugely charming dance in which he raised his arms up from his sides and shuffled his feet back and forth. There were several public encomiums to the industry that nurtured him. First, Rucker thanked country radio, a mighty and dominant force, for “taking a chance on an aging pop star.” (In 2016, country was once again the most popular radio format in America, accounting for 13.6 per cent of all listening.) Later, he raised a shot of whiskey and said, “Since I’ve been in Nashville, my label has been so friggin’ good to me. To my label!” Rucker also attempted to disabuse his audience of any long-held presumptions about genre. “I think, when it comes to music and reality, we all just like great songs,” he announced, before covering Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places” and Blackstreet’s “No Diggity,” in glorious succession.
The best track on “When Was the Last Time,” Rucker’s new record, is a loose, clamorous cover of Drivin’ N’ Cryin’s “Straight to Hell.” It’s a song about getting into trouble, and sort of enjoying it. Rucker’s version features the country stars Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean, and Charles Kelley; they trade verses, alternately celebrating and mourning the recklessness of young manhood. At the Apollo, Rucker introduced the song by asking, “Did anybody here go to college in the South?”
Rucker, who is fifty-one, founded Hootie and the Blowfish when he was an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina, in 1986. The band self-released a few EPs before signing to Atlantic Records, in 1993. “Cracked Rear View,” its début long-player, sold sixteen million copies in the United States, and remains one of the best-selling records of all time, outpacing Eminem’s “The Marshall Mathers LP,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” and Prince’s “Purple Rain.” In retrospect, “Cracked Rear View” feels like both an unlikely success—its ambling, airy folk-rock was at odds, both musically and ideologically, with the dissonance of grunge, then the dominant mode for guitar bands—and an obvious one. It’s hard to think of a rock record more plainly congenial, or with sturdier hooks.
Of course, Hootie and the Blowfish was instantly uncool. The degree of mainstream ubiquity required to become the subject of a tense subplot on “Friends” (Ross, Monica, and Chandler go to see the band at Madison Square Garden, but Rachel, Phoebe, and Joey cannot afford tickets!) entails the prompt sacrificing of any countercultural cachet. But I don’t think that anyone in the band minded. Rucker was relatable and unpretentious—he liked golf, the Miami Dolphins, and Bob Dylan. While Kurt Cobain was messing around with tea dresses, red nail polish, and eyeliner, Hootie and the Blowfish wore shorts, boxy T-shirts, and baseball caps. The romantic tensions that animate a song such as “I Only Wanna Be with You”—Rucker’s girlfriend wants to get married, but he’s not ready; she gets angry when he spends too much time goofing around with his buddies—are so ordinary and clichéd as to feel bloodless. There are no edges. In the Times, the critic Neil Strauss called Hootie’s success “a slap in the face to alternative rock.”
Yet Rucker’s voice is extraordinary: rich, round, and full of nuance. Take “Let Her Cry,” a soft-rock ballad that’s melodically and structurally benign. (It is also tonally similar, in perfectly legal ways, to the Black Crowes’ “She Talks to Angels”; at the Apollo, Rucker explained its origins by sharing how he once heard “She Talks to Angels” in a bar, went home, “played some Madden,” and then tried to write a version of it that Bonnie Raitt could sing.) In the video, Rucker wears a faded Dartmouth sweatshirt. “So I sat back down and had a beer and felt sorry for myself,” he bellows. He is trying to make sense of a curdling relationship. Then, about three minutes in, at the very end of the bridge, his voice rises a bit, cracks: “Oh, mama, please help me,” he implores. It is a surprisingly dark and moving moment.
Rucker and his five siblings were raised by their single mother. When she died, suddenly, in 1992, of a heart attack, he was devastated. At early Hootie shows, he would sometimes sing a few unaccompanied bars of the blues spiritual “Motherless Child” before transitioning into “I’m Going Home,” a song about the deep grief that he felt following her death. “Motherless Child” was likely written sometime in the nineteenth century. (It was published in William Eleazar Barton’s “Old Plantation Hymns,” in 1899, though the earliest commercial recording I could find is from 1919, when it was sung by Edward H. S. Boatner, a black composer born in 1898; it was later included on “Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1891-1922,” an anthology released by Archeophone Records, in 2005.) Odetta performed it at Carnegie Hall, in 1960; in 1969, Ritchie Havens closed his set at Woodstock by repeatedly singing the word “freedom” to the melody of “Motherless Child,” which he’d learned as a kid in Brooklyn. Rucker sounds comfortable with the melody. His rendition is heavy, trenchant.
Rucker’s relationship to American blues and gospel is sometimes difficult to discern. So far, his most popular single as a solo artist is his cover of “Wagon Wheel,” a song about hitchhiking co-written by Bob Dylan (who recorded, but never released, the chorus and melody in 1973, while working on the soundtrack to “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”) and Ketch Secor (who filled in the verses and eventually put it out with his band, Old Crow Medicine Show, in 2004). In 2013, Rucker’s version made it to No. 1 on the country chart, and was certified platinum the following year. (The video somewhat inexplicably stars various cast members of “Duck Dynasty,” a reality series about an entrepreneurial duck-hunting family in Louisiana that became controversial after the family’s patriarch, Phil Robertson, made racist and homophobic comments to GQ.) Rucker’s take is buoyant, celebratory—when Secor sings it, there’s a sense of desperation in the vocal, as if he is not sure he’ll ever actually get off the road alive (“Pray to God I see headlights,” he sings on an early verse, his voice nervous). Rucker sounds like he’s out for a leisurely Sunday cruise.
In the wake of this month’s massacre in Las Vegas, many have wondered about country music’s relationship to both the National Rifle Association and to conservative politics more generally. Some country stars have pleaded a kind of aphoristic neutrality (“Spread love!”), while others have been quietly distancing themselves from the Trump Administration. Even Toby Keith, who performed at a “Make America Great Again” concert on the National Mall the night before Trump’s Inauguration, downplayed the affiliation in a recent interview: “The president of the frickin’ United States asks you to do something, and you can go, you should go instead of being a jack-off,” is how he explained his appearance. Historically, left-leaning groups such as the Dixie Chicks have inspired fury and recrimination, and been effectively banished from Nashville. Now the reigning ideology feels less clear. In a recent editorial for the Times, the country singer Roseanne Cash pleaded with her cohort to be more decisive in their repudiation of certain Republican ideals: “It is no longer enough to separate yourself quietly,” she wrote. “The laws the N.R.A. would pass are a threat to you, your fans, and to the concerts and festivals we enjoy.”
It’s possible that people continue to presume country is a right-wing genre simply because it is overwhelmingly, perplexingly white. There is certainly diversity among its fans—to flatly dismiss commercial country’s audience as uniform would be absurd—but there are only occasional exceptions to the homogeneity of its charts. One recent example is Kane Brown, a young singer from Chattanooga, whose “What Ifs,” a soaring pop ballad featuring Lauren Alaina, recently went platinum; Brown’s mother is white, and his father is half-black and half-Cherokee. Likewise, artists of color working primarily in other genres sometimes incorporate foundational elements of country into their music; this can feel significant, like an important opening up. Earlier this year, the rapper Young Thug, from Atlanta, released the mixtape “Beautiful Thugger Girls,” which contains a now infamous “yee-haw.” In 2016, Beyoncé performed her song “Daddy Lessons” with the Dixie Chicks (it samples the group’s single “Long Time Gone,” and features banjo and harmonica) at the Country Music Awards, though her very presence at the event deeply agitated some viewers.
Still, for many years, Rucker has been the most prominent—and, at times, the only—black country-music performer consistently releasing charting singles. He is just the third black recording artist to win a Grammy in a country-music category. He is just the third black recording artist ever invited to join the Grand Ole Opry.
Country music has not always been the exclusive terrain of white people. The other two black members of the Opry—Charley Pride, a singer from Sledge, Mississippi, and DeFord Bailey, a virtuosic harmonica player—were both hugely popular in their time. Between 1966 and 1987, Pride had twenty-nine songs make it to the top of the country chart. In the nineteen-thirties, Bailey was one of the Opry’s most beloved performers, and toured with Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, and Uncle Dave Macon.
While it can be argued that a genre such as hip-hop was born specifically from an experience of blackness—and that it emerged, in part, to give voice to that experience—country music was not born from an experience of whiteness. Even decades before Bailey, so-called black hillbilly artists were ubiquitous around the South, performing string-band music at picnics, square dances, and parties. But, in the nineteen-twenties, with the advent of the commercial recording industry, nascent labels figured it made sense to segregate product—to sell “black music” (blues, gospel, jazz) to black people and “white music” (country, hillbilly) to white people. Musicians such as Lonnie Johnson and Brownie McGhee, who had grown up playing string-band music, quickly realized that if they wanted to make any money, they had better play blues. The idea that a person might shop outside of her race seemed ridiculous. Ergo, very few black string bands were commercially recorded, and country music was effectively reborn as a white genre.
It seems worth pointing out that the groups that did get recorded were tantalizingly great. In the late nineteen-twenties, the fiddle player Howard Armstrong had a trio called the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, which recorded three double-sided 78rpm records for Vocalion in 1930. Now only a handful of copies of each of its records remain; one of those sides, “Vine Street Drag,” is so rare and excellent that I once bribed a collector just to whisper the names of who else owned a copy in my ear. (In 1985, the director Terry Zwigoff made a terrific documentary, “Louie Bluie,” about Armstrong’s life and work.) Or consider the Booker Orchestra, a quartet led by a black fiddle player from Kentucky named Jim Booker; in 1927, Booker and his band travelled to Richmond, Indiana, to record a handful of sides for Gennett Records, including the exuberant and sublime “Camp Nelson Blues.” The Mississippi Sheiks, a family band from Bolton, Mississippi, is probably the most widely recorded black string band (the group issued over seventy sides, for Okeh, Paramount, and Bluebird Records, in the nineteen-thirties). The Sheiks’ “Sitting on Top of the World,” an unhurried country song about the kind of breakup that feels more liberating than calamitous—“But now she’s gone, I don’t worry / I’m sitting on top of the world”—was later covered by Ray Charles, among others.
In recent years, the mantle has been taken up by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a string band from Durham, North Carolina, featuring Rhiannon Giddens, Hubby Jenkins, Rowan Corbett, and Malcolm Parson (they formed in 2005, after meeting at the Black Banjo Gathering, in Boone), and others.
But Rucker remains the only black country singer working in an overtly commercial mode. He doesn’t subvert country stereotypes, but he often indulges them. In the video for “For the First Time,” his most recent single, he strums a guitar on a front porch while a good-looking blond couple holds hands, falls into a pool, gets married, buys a big house, and has a baby.
At the Apollo, Rucker mostly just seemed thrilled to be there, singing songs he loved in a temple of sorts. At one point, he invited the lap and pedal steel player Robert Randolph onto the stage, to duet on “Love Do What It Do,” a song from Randolph’s most recent album, “Got Soul.” I don’t know exactly how to parse what was happening—how to effectively break any of it down by genre. Randolph’s band plays funk and R. & B., but the lap steel was devised in Hawaii, toward the end of the nineteenth century, using a Spanish guitar; its high, yawning sound (later controlled by pedals) became synonymous with country music by the nineteen-fifties. Watching them play together, with Rucker’s band of Nashville-based country-rock musicians boogieing behind them (including Sasha Ostrovsky, a classically trained guitarist from Obninsk, Russia) was thrilling, if disorienting. What was this music?
Maybe even posing that question is foolish. Rucker, for his part, seems largely disinterested in reflecting on his legacy as a black pioneer. Music is music, he repeats; he doesn’t seem to believe in (or, at least, wish to dwell on) his own striking exceptionalism. He has expressed his feelings about racism before, in song: in 1994, Hootie and the Blowfish released “Drowning,” an indictment of American bigotry that specifically references the Confederate flag hanging above the South Carolina statehouse (“Why is there a rebel flag hanging from the statehouse walls?”).
Country, as a genre, is obsessed with notions of patriotism, of purity, of some nondescript American-ness. Rucker has faced vitriol for his views, and for his work. “Hate mail has been a part of my life. That’s just the way it is,” Rucker said, in a 2014 interview with the Wall Street Journal. “People don’t want me singing country music. But I’ve never wanted to let anybody tell me what I can do.” It is in this way that Rucker is most essentially American: he has insisted on a path of his own, on breaching a frontier.
