Rhythm & Western Vol.1 - When Two Worlds Collide

THE "MOJO" MAN SEZ: Friends I'm proud to present to you a new Boss series focused on black artists doing "Country & Western" music, before Civil Rights and before artists like Charlie Pride and Linda Martell made it acceptable to the vast majority of white folks for an African American to do this type of music in the late 1960s. Before that it was not really in the book and to this day black artists in C&W are still considered pretty much a "novelty" or an exception. The term "Country Music" was coined in the 1940s because the earlier term "Hillbilly Music" was deemed to be degrading. Around the same time the term "Rhythm and Blues" replaced the term "Race Music" or "Sepia" for the same reason. The funny thing is... Black artists actually pioneered this genre but when record companies in the 1920s created musical "Genres" to better market the records they were releasing, African Americans had to more or less leave it alone. The same thing happened to white artists doing Blues. The ones that continued to record it like Jimmy Rodgers (nowadays regarded as the "Father of Country Music"), Gene Autry, Sam McGee (and many others) suddenly started to get labelled otherwise. The term "Blues" suddenly was used only for black performers. On "Rhythm & Western" I tried to cover African Americans doing C&W and its early incarnations at 360 degrees. Many tracks here are "classic" C&W songs, a lot are numbers that were released as "R&B" only because they were not sung by a white artist and others are "novelty" songs with a strong Country flavour or just a C&W twist to it. DIG IT!