Back in March 2020, Country Soul Songbook, the media and production company from Durham’s Kamara Thomas and Kym Register, was just getting its bearings.
Thomas and Register, both musicians, had a vision of amplifying the voices of historically marginalized artists and expanding the conversation around Americana music—a mission with a sturdy foundation, given the Triangle’s reputation as a creative hotbed for roots music.
But the Songbook’s second-ever performance was ill-fated, Thomas tells the INDY, with a NorthStar Church of the Arts concert scheduled “on the eve of the pandemic.” The organization pivoted from stages to streaming, with a successful sequence of virtual summits and online archival work, though the pair missed the in-person component of curating live music.
This summer, the Songbook returns to the stage. Thomas and Register are partnering with Duke Arts to curate the organization’s annual five-concert showcase, bringing in a mix of national and local musicians for tribute performances to under-recognized artists. A collaboration between the Gardens concert series—a local summer-evening staple, with its picnicking sprawl of friends, families, and first dates—and the Songbook feels like a match made in heaven.
“We started with a basic mission to integrate and intersectionalize country and Americana music stages. It’s been a great ride and a great expansion into understanding like, ‘Oh, there’s lots of ways that we can do this mission,’” Thomas says of the organization’s online work, over the past few years. “But it’s really nice to just come back to to the home base of our mission, literally and figuratively.”
In addition to the Wednesday evening performances, Thomas says, touring and local artists will rehearse the week ahead of the event, with collaborations going toward a compilation album. The full lineup announcement will be announced in May.
“These are precisely the voices and music that Duke Arts seeks to amplify through our presenting series, and Country Soul Songbook has been an ideal partner for this work,” Aaron Shackelford, Duke Arts director of programming, shared in the Duke Arts announcement. “Our vision is to invite more of the community not just to sit on the grass with us, but to have greater participation on stage and, perhaps more importantly, have a voice in who gets invited to that stage and why.”
In recent years, there has been an overdue surge of momentum to diversify—and recognize the whitewashed roots of—country music. Nashville may serve up plenty of sweet tea, but its reputation with anyone who doesn’t fit the genre mold (dominantly white, male, and heterosexual) is far from hospitable.
In 2019, when Lil Nas X released the impossibly catchy “Old Town Road,” Billboard removed it from the country charts, prompting controversy. A 2022 report by the Black Music Coalition found that, over 19 years and 11,484 songs played by country stations, only 13 Black artists saw airtime (and only 3 of those 13 artists were Black women).
“The long-standing industry lines that there isn’t enough Black talent, that there isn’t a Black country audience, and that the existing country core won’t embrace Black acts, endured so long because Music Row and the Country Music Association specifically, repeatedly ignored or suppressed indicators to the contrary,” the report read.
Despite little help from the industry, successful country artists like Mickey Guyton and Darius Rucker have made cultural inroads in recent years; the announcement of a forthcoming Beyoncé country album, Cowboy Carter, has also renewed talks of change.
All along, local artists have been instrumental in challenging conventions and shifting the conversation. Rissi Palmer, the artist behind 2007’s chart-making single “Country Girl,” lives in Durham and is the host of Apple Music radio show Color Me Country, which explores country music’s Black, Indigenous, and Latinx roots.
Local duo Larry Bellorín and Joe Troop have trailblazed with a singular, cerebral blend of bluegrass and Venezuelan folk music. Greensboro’s Rhiannon Giddens, who has no shortage of accolades (in addition to her Grammy’s with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Omar, the opera that Giddens co-wrote with Michael Abels, won a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2023) plays banjo on Beyonce’s “Texas Hold ‘Em.”
And then, of course, there’s Thomas and Register, who both write and perform music: Thomas is a solo singer-songwriter of “cosmic country soul,” while Register has performed as Loamlands, the past few years, recently reworking the band as Meltdown Rodeo. (Register also owns the Pinhook, the queer, dusky downtown dive where you step off Main Street, pop open a Miller Lite can, and watch a drag show.)
Both are excited about an opportunity to share the work of Country Soul Songbook on stage.
“I’ve always seen Music in the Gardens as an anchor of Durham’s cultural scene,” Thomas said in the Duke Arts announcement, “We are excited to bring our intersectional community of local and visiting artists to kick off the local summer concert season. There is a limitless pool of artists that we want to continue spotlighting.”
Admission to the annual series is free, though due to limited capacity, Duke Arts requires a digital reservation ahead of performances (registration opens Tuesdays at 11 a.m. one week before each event). For those unable to make the event, Duke University radio station 88.7 FM WXDU will broadcast the concerts live.
“We’re interested in really making Durham a hub of the movement to diversify country and Americana,” Thomas says. “It’s a huge opportunity for us to see what we’re capable of.”
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