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Author, songwriter Alice Randall to give Randolph’s annual Thayer Lecture

A portrait photograph of author and songwriter Alice Randall

Alice Randall

Alice Randall has spent her career rewriting the narrative—both on the page and in song. 

She is the only Black woman to co-write a No. 1 country hit and is also a celebrated novelist who explores the intersections of race, music, and history through both fiction and nonfiction. 

Her latest project, My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future, is a memoir and companion album that Kirkus reviews called “a delightful, inspirational story of persistence, resistance, and sheer love.” 

“I knew it was now or never to have my say about what it was like to be a Black woman working on and around Music Row for 41 years,” Randall says on her website, calling My Black Country a love letter to Black country music. 

In March during the College’s annual Philip Thayer Memorial Lecture, “Black Country: An Erased History Made Visible and Audible,” she’ll tell her story and discuss the often-erased Black history of the genre. 

A graduate of Harvard University, Randall 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 moved to Nashville in 1983 and got her first break when she met Steve Earle, with whom she wrote several songs, at the famed Bluebird Cafe. Her first major song, which hit No. 1, was XXXs and OOOs, recorded by Trisha Yearwood in 1994. 

Randall is also widely recognized as being one of the most significant voices in 21st century African-American fiction. Her novels include Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, Rebel Yell, Ada’s Rules, and the New York Times Bestseller The Wind Done Gone, an unauthorized parody of Gone with the Wind

She has co-written two books with her daughter, Caroline Randall Williams: the cookbook Soul Food Love and the young adult novel The Diary of B.B. Bright, Possible Princess, winner of the Phillis Wheatley Award, which recognizes the best African-American books and writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s literature.

Randall has presented across the nation, weaving history, literature, practical wisdom, and political passion into powerful exchanges with large and small audiences. 

Randall will give the Philip Thayer Memorial Lecture on Tuesday, March 18, at 6 p.m., followed by a book signing at 7:15 p.m., in Wimberly Recital Hall.

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