Lil Nas X and the racial politics of country music

As of this writing, the biggest song in America is “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X. It might also be the most interesting pop song of the 21st century so far.

“Old Town Road” defies genre categorization. Like Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” it sits entangled in a vast musical rhizome. Lil Nas X calls it country-trap. It’s definitely not a rap song–Lil Nas X sings throughout, with a clear country twang. The beat sounds like hip-hop, but then, the beat of almost every slow or medium-tempo pop song sounds like hip-hop right now. The banjo suggests country, but as we’ll discuss below, that suggestion was unintended by the track’s producer. There’s a lot going on here! Before we take a look at its broader cultural significance, then, let’s take a close look at the musical details of “Old Town Road.”

A Dutch beatmaker named YoungKio produced the instrumental–you can hear his producer tag in the intro. Lil Nas X bought the beat for $30 from Kio’s BeatStars shop. The melancholy guitar and banjo are sampled from Nine Inch Nails, which is not the most obvious source for a country vibe.

YoungKio said in an interview that he heard this as a “rock-type” sample, not a country one. He sped the loop up a bit, thereby changing its key from G to G-sharp. As is customary in trap, he used a tuned 808 kick drum sample to play the bassline. He also added multiple layers of intricate hi-hat patterns pitching up and down against a straightforward clap backbeat. It’s an elegantly simple instrumental, and an attractive one.

One thing you notice immediately about the original version of “Old Town Road” is how short it is, just one minute and fifty-three seconds. Wikipedia informs me that it’s the fifth shortest number-one single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, and the shortest since 1965. The structure is minimalist to the extreme: four bar intro, chorus, verse, prechorus (“Can’t nobody tell me nothin'”), another verse, another prechorus, one last time through the chorus, and that’s it. A more conventional songwriter might have followed all that with a breakdown, followed by a few more choruses to stretch the track out to three minutes. My guess is that YoungKio’s original track was less than two minutes long, and Lil Nas X simply followed its structure without altering it–my students do the same thing with type beats they find on YouTube and SoundCloud.

The remix with Billy Ray Cyrus is a little longer, because Billy Ray does an additional verse after the second chorus. Then he and Lil Nas X duet on another chorus at the end, and someone adds a whistling melody on the outtro. This is a slightly more conventional song structure, but it’s still minimal, even by mainstream pop standards.

Like most current top forty songs, “Old Town Road” is based on a four-chord loop that repeats identically throughout. Wikipedia cites a transcription that gives the chords as G♯7, B(add9), F♯sus4, E6. Even though it’s a simple loop, this progression has caused some music-theoretic controversy. For one thing, it’s not obvious what key it’s in. Wikipedia says it’s in B major, which makes no sense to me at all. I analyze loop progressions like this one in terms of Philip Tagg’s theory of groove-based harmony, which says that G♯ is the tonic because it’s in the metrically strongest position. The other three chords are characteristic of G♯ minor, but the tonic chord is major. In classical music, you’d call this a Picardy third. It’s a mildly exotic sound in country, but pop songwriters are known to use it for a sense of moody grandeur.

The real music-theoretical interest of “Old Town Road” comes in the first measure of the chorus (measure nine in the transcription below.) Listen to the word “horse.” That’s a B natural, which is the minor third in G♯. But didn’t I just say the chord was G♯ major? What is going on here? Listen for yourself:

This chord has been the subject of intense debate on the Facebook Music Teachers Group. Some of the commenters there go through contortions to try to explain it in terms of the Western tonal system. To me, there’s nothing mysterious going on. Minor-key melodies over major chords is one of the characteristic sounds of the blues. The B natural in the melody tells me that this song is in blues tonality, rather than major or minor. “Old Town Road” is not a blues song per se, but in the African-American tradition Lil Nas X comes from, blues tonality is part of the standard harmonic toolkit.

Just considering the song as an isolated musical work, there’s already a lot of complex racial politics: a moody ambient electronic track featuring a banjo made by a white American producer, heard as rock by a Black Dutch producer, who sampled it and turned it into a trap beat by adding 808s, which was then heard as country-trap by a Black American artist, whose vocal melody turned a Picardy third into the blues. By the way, the banjo originated in West Africa, but it became known as a “white” instrument over the course of the 19th century because it was frequently featured in minstrel shows. It’s no wonder that “Old Town Road” has stirred up some racial controversy in its travels through popular culture.

Lil Nas X made it to the Billboard Hot 100, Hot Country Songs, and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts in March 2019, a feat previously only attained by such carpet-bombing hits as “We Are The World.” But Billboard quietly removed “Old Town Road” from the country chart. Once people noticed and started asking questions, Billboard explained the move in a statement to Rolling Stone:

[U]pon further review, it was determined that ‘Old Town Road’ by Lil Nas X does not currently merit inclusion on Billboard‘s country charts. When determining genres, a few factors are examined, but first and foremost is musical composition. While ‘Old Town Road’ incorporates references to country and cowboy imagery, it does not embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.

Which elements of “today’s country music” are missing, exactly? To my ears, the most obvious departure from typical country is the trap beat. But country-trap was a well established subgenre long before Lil Nas X showed up. More to the point, drum machines are ubiquitous in mainstream country, though not every country fan is overjoyed about it.

Are the Billboard people objecting to Lil Nas X’s conspicuously use of Auto-Tune? That’s not exactly a new thing in country either. Are they upset that he’s singing over a banjo sample rather than a live performance by a Nashville session player? If that’s the case, then they are really splitting hairs. It’s awfully difficult to avoid the conclusion that the distinguishing factor in Lil Nas X’s case is the color of his skin.

There is nothing new about a Black artist’s straddling the boundaries of country and more typically “Black” music. It wasn’t that long ago that conservative country fans got mad when Beyoncé performed with the Dixie Chicks at the 2016 CMA Awards. This country fan named Trigger wants you to know that neither the fuss over Beyoncé nor the one over Lil Nas X had anything to do with race. At all! But he repeatedly calls “Old Town Road” a rap song. There isn’t one syllable of rapping in it, so why would Trigger be calling it rap, if not Lil Nas X’s blackness?

The racial politics of country music have been fraught for the entire hundred years that the genre has existed as a named entity (though it was called “folk” or “hillbilly” for its first few decades.) We customarily think of country as being “white” music, but that’s the result of a conscious marketing decision, not a musicological description. When you listen to the vernacular music of the rural South from the early twentieth century, you discover that what we now call “blues” and “country” are two different names for the same hybrid mass of sounds. The distinction between blues and country was the invention of record company executives, and their racial motivation wasn’t exactly a sneaky subterfuge. During the era when country music was called “hillbilly,” blues and jazz were sold as “race music,” a term coined by Okeh Records.

After World War II, hillbilly was renamed “country and western,” and race music became “rhythm and blues.” However, while the labels may have changed, the identity politics remain the same. In her must-read essay “Another Country,” Karen Pittelman explains how the marketing categories of “hillbilly” and “race” took on lives of their own as musical genres. She also points out that African-Americans and European-Americans weren’t the only cultural sources for what we now call country music. Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Mexican musics are cornerstones too, though these roots are largely forgotten unless you’re a musicologist. I always forget that pedal steel originated among Native Hawaiians.

Even after the “country” and “R&B” or “jazz” categories became self-perpetuating, actual music didn’t always respect their boundaries. Listen to “Blue Yodel No. 9” by Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong. Is this country, or jazz, or blues, or what? I have no idea, I just know that it sounds great.

There have been prominent Black country musicians throughout the music’s history. I’ve been a fan of DeFord Bailey ever since a country-playing friend introduced me to his harmonica playing. Bailey played beautiful guitar, too. He was fired abruptly from the Grand Ole Opry in 1941, and quit music at the height of his fame, supposedly due to a licensing dispute. He spent the next thirty years shining shoes. I find it hard to believe that racism didn’t play a role in his story.

I was surprised to learn that the first million-selling country album was by Ray Charles.

Once you start looking for the close entanglement of “Black” and “white” American roots music, you see it everywhere. Chuck Berry’s first single on Chess Records, “Maybelline,” is sometimes considered the first rock and roll record. It sounds more like uptempo country to me.

Berry said that “Maybelline” is based on a folk song, “Ida Red,” which he learned from Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.

Bob Wills developed his sound after a close study of the blues. That’s not too surprising, given his jazzy sound. But you may be surprised to learn, as I was, that bluegrass is based on the blues too. We conventionally think of bluegrass as being the whitest music in the world, but there’s a lot of blues and jazz in there. For example, Earl Scruggs’ hemiola-filled rhythms on the banjo are informed by Count Basie and Duke Ellington as much as anything, and he uses tons of blue notes.

The interplay between “white” and “Black” music isn’t just in the roots. In 1970s country, there was a vogue for funky backbeats. You hear them most frequently in Waylon Jennings, but the most famous example is Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.”

The Black rhythm connection also runs through Linda Martell’s 1969 country chart hit, “Color Him Father,” a cover of an R&B song song by The Winstons. The B-side of the Winstons’ song, “Amen Brother,” is a foundational breakbeat in hip-hop and every subgenre of electronic dance music. And rap itself has an unexpectedly long presence in country, too. Hank Williams raps straight through his 1954 album, Luke The Drifter.

Shuja Haider’s essay, “A World That Draws a Line: Interracial Love Songs in American Country Music,” explains how the deepest impact that country music had on America’s racial politics may be judicial, not musical. In the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision, the US Supreme Court finally struck down laws against interracial marriage. The plaintiffs in the case were a white man, Richard Loving, and a Black woman, Mildred Jeter. They met as teenagers when Loving came to hear Jeter’s brothers play “hillbilly music.” Lil Nas X may be pop’s flavor of the month, but he is also part of a long and noble history.