Celebrated local country star Rissi Palmer stopped by Live & Local last week, following the release of her new EP “Perspectives.”
Rissi Palmer has been blazing trails in country music for nearly two decades – beginning in 2007, when her debut single “Country Girl” made her the first Black woman to make the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart in 19 years. (To this day, she’s still one of only nine to do so.) She roared back in 2019 with another highly acclaimed album, “Revival” – and she’s back again with “Perspectives,” a tight collection of four songs (two originals, two covers) whose meanings all hinge on how you view them.
“’Perspectives’ is something that I’ve been working on for about nine months,” Palmer says. “I had dinner with Alice Randall, the professor, writer, songwriter, amazing human being, and she brought me (Chris Stapleton’s) ‘Can You Run,’ and I just thought it was one of the coolest songs. I thought it was a really interesting thing that Chris Stapleton did, writing from the perspective of an enslaved man…and I started thinking about how it would change meanings if I sang it, as opposed to him singing it. This was around the same time that Audra McDonald was doing Gypsy on Broadway: it was the first all-Black cast of Gypsy, and none of the songs changed, none of the dialogue changed, but suddenly you have all this new context and meaning because of who is singing the songs. Thus the name ‘Perspectives.’”
Listen to the EP and purchase it on Bandcamp.
And “Perspectives” is only one of many things on Rissi Palmer’s extremely busy plate. Friday, April 10, she’ll be in Raleigh performing alongside Dawn Landes, Mike Wiley, Django Haskins and Mipso’s Jacob Sharp in response to a public reading of the Declaration of Independence to commemorate its 250th anniversary. She’s also working on a new full-length album, due out later this year; it’ll be her fourth, counting a children’s album she released in 2013. And speaking of works for children, she’s also about to release a children’s book called “Color Me Country,” which she wrote in collaboration with another highly decorated area musician, Rhiannon Giddens – with whom she’ll be performing on the DPAC stage on April 27. (That show, “Beloved Community,” will serve as this year’s installment of Giddens’ “Biscuits and Banjos” series, which launched last year as a way to celebrate Black musicians in folk, bluegrass, and Americana.)
“Rhiannon Giddens is one of my heroes and I get to call her ‘friend,’ Palmer says. “It’s myself, Mavis Staples, Toshi Reagon, and The Blind Boys of Alabama – and my parents are coming up for that, so I’m really excited.”
Follow Rissi Palmer on Instagram.
That children’s book is also connected to another major project of Palmer’s: a podcast called “Color Me Country,” which spotlights the work of Black musicians in country music today – and traces the history of country music back to its Black roots in American history.
“That was actually my COVID project, in 2020,” Palmer says. “That was also the same time we were dealing with George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and all that, (and) Lil Nas X was being kicked off the country charts for Old Town Road. And there was an abundance of thinkpieces, (but) I was like, ‘everybody’s getting this wrong. There’s a fuller picture that’s not being told here, about Black artists and country music…’
“And so ‘Color Me Country’ (became) my little project: I would record conversations with all the Black and Hispanic and Indigenous country artists that I knew. And a very good friend of mine, Kelly McCartney, had a relationship with Apple, told them about the show, and Apple reached out to me … and something that I started in March of 2020, ended up making its debut in August of 2020.”
It was partly her work on “Color Me Country” that earned Rissi Palmer a major honor last year: the Lift Every Voice Award from the Academy of Country Music, for her efforts to elevate underrepresented voices, to promote inclusion, and to spotlight a long-forgotten legacy.
Indeed, honoring legacies is at the heart of much of Palmer’s work, whether it’s about the legacy of a genre – or, as in her new EP’s lead single “Old Black Southern Woman,” the legacy of those who made her the powerful artist she is today.
“My biological mother passed away when I was seven, and she was only 38 years old,” Palmer says. “And I just think a lot about how lucky I am to have seen my daughters grow up – and God willing, I’ll get to see them have babies and all that – and my mother wasn’t afforded that luxury. So I’m just grateful for the opportunity to grow old. And that’s part of what the song was about. And it’s also about paying homage to (all) the incredible women that helped to raise me and are the type of women that I want to be someday.”
Rissi Palmer stopped by Live & Local to discuss “Perspectives” and play three songs: “Old Black Southern Woman” and “Can You Run” (both from the EP) and a live in-studio performance of “Good To Me.” Listen:
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