Photo courtesy of Julie Williams
For as long as I can remember, if someone asked me what kind of music I liked, I would always recite the same answer: “Everything but country.” I didn’t say that without putting at least a little bit of consideration toward what country music offered. Sure, I had bopped to a few Kacey Musgraves songs here and there and the amount of times that I streamed “Old Town Road” when it first came out is probably a contributing factor in why it was so popular. Despite those few discrepancies, I kept myself firmly on the side of “everything but country.” I’m a Black woman who was born and raised under the Mason-Dixon line, and witnessing firsthand the culture that crops up around country in my home state is the main thing that kept me from enjoying it. However, my perspectives were changed when I got to sit down and interview Julie Williams, a Black country artist who is using her music and influence to redefine the place of Black artists in country.
Julie spent her youth in Tampa, Florida singing at weddings and beach bars (she shared with me that looking back, she definitely was not old enough to be singing in those bars). Later moving northward for college, Julie attended Duke University, where she joined Small Town Records (Duke’s student owned and run record label). After college ended, it became clear that Julie needed to make the transition to Nashville so that her music career could really take off.
The vicissitude of her move to Nashville was emphasized by Julie experiencing (at least in my opinion) an incredibly traumatizing moment: Her hair started falling out. The cause of her hair trauma? Relaxers, which she used for most of her life. For those of you not up to date on Black hair care, a relaxer is a chemical mixture of hydrogen peroxide, hydroxyl compounds and phosphoric acid that many Black women use to straighten their hair. Julie is mixed race, and most of her classmates had straight hair, so she used the relaxers to straighten her naturally curly hair (which also makes it easier to take care of). Julie’s hair falling out was tangible evidence of what she quickly started to find out about living in Nashville: You can’t inhibit your true self in the hope of fitting in. “When I first moved to Nashville, I didn’t call myself a country artist. I called myself acoustic pop, Americana, folk or anything else under the sun. In my head, I knew that country music artists didn’t look like me, so I couldn’t be one.”
Julie’s fears about her place as a country musician weren’t unfounded. According to a study by Dr. Jada Watson, Black women account for only 0.1% of play on country radio stations. For Julie, the first step of actualizing herself as a Black woman in country music was coming to terms with the things that she would not be able to change. “I have had to accept that no matter how big I get, there will be certain radio stations that won’t play my music because of how this industry is and what the color of my skin is. I’ve had to accept that there will be some venues that I won’t be safe playing in. That’s just how it is.” I know from firsthand experience that as grim as her sentiment is, it’s true. Despite that, Julie hasn’t let that limit how she has let herself grow as an artist.
Julie was recently featured as a part of Rissi Palmer’s “Color Me Country: Class of 2021.” “Color Me Country” is a podcast that was started by Rissi Palmer to highlight and uplift Black talent in the country music industry and educate listeners on the role that Black people have played in creating the country music genre. Spoiler alert: Country music is rooted in the use of the banjo, fiddles and the harmonica, which were staple instruments of music played by Blacks in the antebellum south (I learned that from listening to the podcast, so you should definitely give it a listen). Julie cites the model set by other Black women in country, like Rissi Palmer, Mickey Guyton and Brittney Spencer for giving her the confidence to authentically pursue a career as a Black woman in country music. Their ability to transcend the limitations set by them by the industry inspired Julie to want to push her own boundaries on her music and how she thought about her identity.
As Julie began to rehab her curls, she started having to reckon with the way that her Blackness had impacted other aspects of her life as well. Thus, “Southern Curls” was born. Julie’s lyrics read like a love letter to all little Black southern girls who are faced with racism from their peers at a young age. “Not all Southern girls are met with open doors / Some of us are looked down on before we’re even born / Curls are too tight, skin is too dark / To feel beautiful just as we are / I’m a Southern girl / With the wrong kind of Southern curls.” For a while, Julie sat on the song, thinking that there would be no place for it in the current environment of the industry. However, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and Mickey Guyton’s release of “Black Like Me,” she knew that if she was going to release this song that it was now or never.
Before she fully released “Southern Curls,” she played it for (mostly white) test audiences who liked the song, but didn’t understand why she spent so much time talking about hair. What these audience members failed to grasp is that for a lot of Black women, their hair is their source for their strength (and can also sometimes be the source of their ire at the hands of themselves and others). Hair and hair care is important to the Black community, and it can often be a source of controversy to white people. Look no further than activists around the U.S. who are campaigning for the passage of the CROWN act, which would make it illegal for employers to discriminate based on hair styles. The fact that that even has to be put into law proves that Julie’s focus on hair in the song is incredibly important for using music to shed light on the struggles of Black women in America. Eventually, her collaborations with test audiences and other artists allowed her to reach a point where she felt comfortable releasing the song and its music video.
The music video for “Southern Curls” uses a young actress to illustrate the whiteness that Julie was surrounded by in her youth as she sings about the racial trauma she experienced at the hands of her childhood peers. “It took a while for me to talk about my experience as racial trauma. I had always lived with microaggressions to the point that they were just normal, I became so desensitized to them that they just became a part of life.” Up until she started writing songs like “Southern Curls” and “Mixed Feelings,” Julie didn’t even consider writing songs about her experience with race even though it impacted everything about how she saw herself: her beauty, her worth and her place in the world. Luckily, the visuals for the “Southern Curls” music video makes it clear that she has come to rightly see herself as a beautiful Black woman with a sweet as honey voice and a story to tell. The visuals for the video default to the typicalities of a country music video, there’s an incorporation of linens, bright colors and a connection with the natural world. The twist (ha-ha) of the video comes from the young actress, Julie, and Julie’s actual grandmother (who is rocking some pretty sick southern curls of her own in the video) celebrating one another’s hair and beauty (Julie made sure to let me know that all of the music video was styled by Curry, a Black queer womxn who specializes in hair and beauty).
Coming off the success of “Southern Curls,” Julie knows that things won’t always be smooth sailing, especially as she starts to lean more and more into her own voice and perspective. “I’m not going to think about what Nashville wants, I’m going to think about what I want to share with the world.” She hinted that she has an upcoming song with Brittney Spencer about being Black in America that might ruffle a few feathers in the community upon its release, but Julie doesn’t seem too perturbed. “The country that’s being blasted out of high school boys’ trucks that have confederate flags all over them is not the kind of country I play, and those aren’t the kind of people I’m trying to play for.” When Julie isn’t writing new lyrics or filming beautiful music videos, she can be found playing with the Song Suffragettes, a weekly showcase of up and coming young women in country music who are attempting to help along the evolution of country music. “Country has to evolve to survive, people know more and care more so they’re going to want to hear more.”
Julie represents a renaissance of country music that is more inclusive, and will no doubt include me as I finally let my walls down on the genre and start telling people, “I like all music, even country.”