This is the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Michael Lohanger.

Some of you already know this, but Beyonce's new country influenced album,

Cowboy Carter, drops this Friday. And because most of our producers

are huge Beyoncé fans,

we spent our Monday editorial meeting,

brainstorming and debating how

and if we could find a way to talk about the release on the show.

And then we learned that our friends at Today explained the Daily News Podcast from Vox Media

beat us to it. They just released an excellent overview of the history of black musicians making country

music and it was so good we thought we'll just share it with you as our podcast this week.

So here's co-host Noel King. So last week I went to the

Nashville home of songwriter Alice Randall to talk about cowboy Carter.

Alice has been writing and teaching for a long time about country music's very black roots.

If her life was a country song, it would go something like this.

A sensitive black girl with a bar fly dad and a distant mom finds solace in Ray Charles and Charlie

Pride, writes her first country song before she's even old enough to read.

And at 24 hits the road to Nashville with a folder full of handwritten songs, one of which will

go to number one on the country charts.

Phone rings, baby cries, TV, Diet, Goul Lines, Good morning honey. Go to work, makeup, try to keep the balance up between

love and money. Exes and owes sung by Tricia Yearwood.

Alice then spends 40 years in Nashville waiting for another black woman to make it in country,

an art form that she defines this way.

...