Join Cary Library and the Association of Black Citizens of Lexington (ABCL) for an evening with Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author of My Black Country, A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future. Randall will share her writing journey, tell stories of her career in music and discuss her newest book, My Black Country.

Regie Gibson will be the host of this program.  He is a poet, educator, and literary performer. He lives in Lexington.

Registration is required.

About the book:

"Country music had brought Randall and her activist mother together and even gave Randall a singular distinction in American music history: she is the first Black woman to cowrite a number one country hit, Trisha Yearwood’s “XXX’s and OOO’s”. Randall found inspiration and comfort in the sounds and history of the first family of Black country music: DeFord Bailey, Lil Hardin, Ray Charles, Charley Pride, and Herb Jeffries who, together, made up a community of Black Americans rising through hard times to create simple beauty, true joy, and sometimes profound eccentricity.

What emerges in My Black Country is a celebration of the most American of music genres and the radical joy in realizing the power of Black influence on American culture." (Simon & Schuster)

About Alice Randall:

Alice Randall is a New York Times best-selling novelist, award-winning songwriter, educator, food activist, and now memoirist. A graduate of Harvard University, she holds an honorary doctorate from Fisk University, is on the faculty at Vanderbilt University, and credits Detroit’s Ziggy Johnson School of the Theater with being the most influential educational institution in her life. She is widely recognized as being one of the most significant voices in 21st century African-American fiction, the only Black woman in history to write both a number one Country song (XXX’s and OOO’s) and an ACM video of the year (Is There Life Out There? starring Reba McEntire).

Randall has presented across the nation: In auditoriums, libraries, museums, and ballrooms; in fields, in graveyards, and harborside. She once did a talk for a group of students as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, In all those spaces she weaves history, literature, practical wisdom, and political passion into powerful exchanges with large and small audiences. She covers expected territory in unexpected ways and makes unexpected territory accessible. My Black Country, memoir and album, is a summit of storied career. Randall’s work has been or is currently being taught at a wide range of universities, including Fisk, Harvard, Iowa State, Penn State, Philander Smith, Princeton, Tuskegee, The University of Texas Austin, The University of Virginia, and Wesleyan.

Copies of the author's book are available for purchase through Book Ends in Winchester, MA.

Presented in partnership with the Association of Black Citizens of Lexington (ABCL) and in collaboration with several libraries in Massachusetts.

This program is made possible by the generous donors to the Cary Library Foundation.