The real y’alternative

Cowboy Troy, the long, tall Texas country-rapper, is the nation’s leading proponent of hick-hop — or rather the most prominent one. His heavily rotated CMT clip for the infectious, fiddle-and-banjo-fueled single “I Play Chicken with the Train” features a curiously integrated audience “raising the roof” to lyrics like “I’m big and black, clickety-clack/And I made the train jump the track like that.” A tepid rap boast, indeed.

How much cooler would Cowboy Troy’s challenge to Music Row be if he had enlisted New York’s Ebony Hillbillies, three urban hipsters who play the subway stations and city streets as the self-proclaimed “last black string band in America”? Head Hillbilly Enrique Prince certainly has the chops to back anyone. Hailing from a family of musicians from St. Thomas, Prince grew up around all kinds of music, from instrumental dance to traditional Caribbean, Hawaiian and country styles. In his preteens, he taught himself to shuffle on violin, his favorite instrument.

“The desire to play with a banjo player and bass stems from an intuitive understanding of how these instruments fit together musically,” Prince told us via e-mail from his New York home. As for why the Ebony Hillbillies took it to the streets, Prince said, “I had a street-corner band when I was ten. Basically, it’s economics. The subways afford you an instant stage and a perpetual audience…”

Despite the surprised and delighted Gotham audiences, the Ebony Hillbillies — Prince, multi-instrumentalist Norris Bennett and bassist Dave Colding — probably won’t be featured on CMT. One, they’re based in New York, far from country music’s Southeastern centers; two, they play a prewar form of hillbilly music championed by institutions like Charlotte’s Folk Society rather than shiny Nashvegas; and three, of course, they’re of African descent.

The 19th-century string band sound produced by a core of fiddle, banjo and guitar was popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and was a key element in the genesis of jazz and virtually everything after (blues, bluegrass, rockabilly, rock & roll). But big country labels today aren’t interested in history, they’re interested in money, and that means repressing country music’s inner hillbilly.

To make things even more difficult, the Ebony Hillbillies are not likely to get much support from blacks, beyond the boho types that frequent NYC’s Astor Place in the East Village and other hip precincts. They say twang is not a color, but the reality is that the Ebony Hillbillies can still encounter black audiences imprisoned by stereotypes of cowboys and Lou Gossett Jr.’s “Fiddler” from Roots. Since the Civil Rights era made rural history unfashionable and blackness bona fides paramount, most “Bucks” (per Don Cheadle’s C&W-loving character in Boogie Nights) keep their country jones in the closet. So don’t expect an Ebony Hillbillies/Big & Rich version of “Dueling Banjos (Black to the Future mix)” anytime soon.

The Ebony Hillbillies’ own extant CDs will have to tide y’all over until the eventual sepia twang revolution (don’t tell Diddy!). Sabrina’s Holiday and I Thought You Knew (forthcoming on Lincolnton-based Gaff Records) provide a great introduction to a largely forgotten African American cultural legacy. The trio’s take on classic black string-band repertoire includes “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” “Sugar in the Gourd,” “Hell Among the Yearlings” and “Yellow Rose of Texas,” a tune originating from a black minstrel show which is actually an ode to the singer’s “sweetest girl of color a fella ever knew.”

So, with these standards along with dulcimer and autoharp in the mix, the Ebony Hillbillies cannot be dismissed as inauthentic. And the brothers and sisters in general need to recognize that their claim to the twang is as legitimate as that of the Scots-Irish mafia. Peep Prince’s useful illumination of the African roots of old-time music: “Africans, particularly West Africans, have had string bands for centuries…The ekonting is the banjo’s ancestor. The ekonting players were said to have been captured and made to perform on the decks of slave ships to allow the (enslaved Africans) to get enough exercise to survive the Middle Passage. Left off in America, these players became the first black fiddlers and made the earliest gourd banjos. Somewhere up in the mountains of Appalachia, knowledge of the banjo got transferred to other groups.”

Is that black enough for ya?

The Ebony Hillbillies will be performing at Festival in the Park at the Folk Society Stage at Freedom Park. There are two chances to catch ’em: Saturday, September 24, at 8pm, and Sunday, September 25, at 2pm. This event is free.

This article appears in Sep 21-27, 2005.