(mellow guitar music) - [Becky] Sometimes life gives you an opportunity to reflect on what you would do with a "Clean Slate."

Our guest on this episode is Alice Randall, a Grammy nominated songwriter, author, producer, and professor.

♪ But I've thrown away my compass ♪ ♪ Done with the chart ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around ♪ ♪ Looking for direction, northern star ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around ♪ ♪ I'll just step out ♪ ♪ Throw my doubt into the sea ♪ ♪ For what's meant to be will be ♪ - [Becky] Alice Randall is a New York Times bestselling novelist, multi award-winning songwriter, educator, lecturer, and now memoirist with her latest book, "My Black Country."

Randall has a singular distinction in American music history as the first black woman to write a number one country hit, "Xs and Os" performed by Trisha Yearwood.

♪ She used to tie her hair up in ribbons and bows ♪ ♪ Sign her letters with X's and O's ♪ (air whooshes) - [Becky] And to have an Academy of Country Music Video of the Year award for "Is There Life Out There" starring Reba McEntyre.

♪ She doesn't want to leave ♪ ♪ She's just wonderin', is there life ♪ - Honey, we're home.

- A native of Detroit, she spent much of her youth in Washington DC and later made Nashville her home to pursue a career in country music.

A graduate of Harvard University, she holds an honorary doctorate from Fisk University and is on the faculty at Vanderbilt University.

(air whooshes) She is recognized as one of the most significant voices in 21st century African American fiction.

Alice is also a food activist and has received great recognition for a book she co-wrote in 2015 (air whooshes) with her daughter Caroline Randall Williams entitled "Soul Food Love, Healthy Recipes Inspired by 100 of Cooking in a Black Family."

She is currently working on a cookbook based on her most recent work, "My Black Country," and its companion album, "My Black Country, The Songs of Alice Randall."

She makes her home in Nashville.

(mellow music) Alice, I'm so excited that you're here with us in the studio and getting the the year kicked off right.

- I am so thrilled to make you my first interview of 2025.

- Me too, me too.

- This is exciting.

- It is.

Hey, you know.

I have so many things I wanna talk to you about because you are a New York Times bestselling author.

You're number one hit single country music songwriter.

You're a prolific songwriter, you're a professor in Vanderbilt for decades actually.

And you just have made such a difference in our community here in Nashville, but all across the country.

And so I just, I really- - And five novels.

You left out those five novels.

I love that one.

- Now listen now.

I don't mean to leave out the novels because literally you've had multitude of books.

Let's start with that first book, though.

The one that was the very first, right out the gate.

- My notorious book.

My notorious book.

- Your notorious book that out of the gate was a New York Times bestseller and it really was a parody of "Gone With the Wind."

- A parody and critique of "Gone With the Wind."

It was called "The Wind Done Gone."

And I love your show, "Clean Slate" and makes you reflect on your life and being in February, January, you reflect on your life.

- Yeah.

- And when I reflect on my life and I think about "The Wind Done Gone," one of the things I have loved most about my life are the friendships I made.

And some of those friendships were made in work world.

And one of the surprising friends that "The Wind Done Gone" made me was Harper Lee.

When I think back, I was thinking one day I was opening up the mail and I was really behind on the mail.

I was essentially, you know, I had been a single mom for a long time, right?

I was newly married, but I was raising a daughter, starting a new marriage, working, mail gets behind if you don't know who it's from, opening this letter and this yellow legal pad comes out, there's writing and it's just the sentences are so elegant and what person is talking about, "The Iliad," and saying you changed things.

And I thought, who is, this is just such amazing writing.

And I get to the last page and there it was, Harper Lee.

- Wow.

- I burst out crying.

She and I wrote letters back and forth for some time to come until her death.

And I eventually sold those letters to work on a cookbook project.

And I called her up and said, "Do you mind if I sell the letters?"

And you know what Harper Lee said to me?

"Do you need me to write you some more letters?"

(Becky laughing) And I said, no, I'll take the ones I have and did good with them.

But it was so wonderful, women coming into relationship with other women like having this conversation with you.

- Oh, it's so great.

What a really, what an honor.

This is so great.

I'm a huge fan of Harper Lee, huge fan of yours.

You call it a notorious book and it's because the estate of Margaret Mitchell sued you, right?

- And it's also a deeply beloved book.

I say it was notorious in certain circumstances, but I'm very, very proud of that book.

One of my fans said it was the literary equivalent of Prissy slapping Scarlet back.

And it was a very much an important retelling of what the South and what reading "Gone With the Wind" was like for a Black family, for my great grandmother and grand, for my grandmother, yeah.

For my grandmother.

My daughter's great-grandmother.

- Because it tells the story from a perspective of an enslaved woman who's the really the same age as Scarlett or close.

- Close to the same age as Scarlett and is Mammy's daughter and Scarlett's half sister.

- Right.

- As I said, when my grandmother read "Gone With The Wind" and she was from Alabama, she certainly asked herself the questions where all the Mulattos and Tara?

- Right.

- But that was one of the things I would do again is write "The Wind Done Gone" despite the fact of all the hardship because that book has done so much good for healing and I love that.

- Absolutely, and such an important perspective.

We always should look at both perspectives for any story.

And that's what I love about your work and your career is you are telling these untold stories.

You have a new book, brand new book, "My Black Country."

This is a memoir, right?

- Absolutely.

- And you have a companion album with your songs.

- And we are nominated for a Grammy this year.

And- - I know.

- It's been big, it's a memoir of my 40 year history as a Black person in country music.

I arrived in Nashville in 1983 to write country songs and publish country songs.

I've been fortunate enough that that dream came true.

But it is also the history of 400 years of Black people in country music.

And I've just been so honored to be entrusted to tell the stories of DeFord Bailey and Lil Hardin Armstrong and Herb Jeffries as the bronze buckaroo, the singing Black cowboy.

A lot of people know Charlie Pride's story, but they don't know all of it.

And so many people forget that Ray Charles is a very, is a cornerstone of the history of country music.

And I get to reclaim all those people as a sort of first family of Black country tell the story of how they sustained me.

And I hope it's gonna be sustaining this new generation with Shaboozey and all these- - Beyonce is- - Beyonce.

She doesn't need to be sustained.

She is sustaining us all, thriving.

But the Tara Kennedy, there's so many amazing new artists.

Rhiannon Giddens, Allison Russell, - I'm just so fascinated by your story of being in Nashville in the 80s, coming here to be a country music songwriter, performer.

You of course, cities were not unusual to you.

I mean, you were born in Detroit, you were raised in DC, you were a Harvard graduate, so you lived in Boston.

You've spoken all over the country.

Why Nashville?

- Well I said I was born in one riverside music municipality, Motown.

And I am likely gonna die in another.

I certainly love riverside music towns and Detroit was one, Nashville is one, but actually Cambridge on the Charles and the whole folk music scene was another.

And Washington DC with Potomac and Roberta Flack is yet another, so I love a riverside music town.

But when I was thinking about, you know, I came here pretty much straight out of Harvard.

I was just a year, year and a half out of Harvard when I came to Nashville, When I came to Nashville, her mother was a managing director of ASCAP.

So she was probably arguably the most powerful woman in the music world business at the time.

And so when I told her I wanted to be a country songwriter and move to Nashville, she had some ideas about how I might do that and ideas that that might be crazy but might be profitable and helped me.

But I have been thinking, I love that you wave my book, "My Black Country," because I love that book.

But thinking meeting with you today and with the title of your show "Clean Slate," which I love, and it being this January, February period, I was thinking my happiest times at Harvard included studying for credit with Julia Child.

I loved Julia Child.

I had, you know, read and studied and cooked from her cookbooks from the time I was a teen, you know, middle school girl.

And by the time I was in high school, I was obsessed with her.

And so I cold called her, I looked up her phone number in the Cambridge, Massachusetts telephone book.

When we still had telephone books.

- Wow.

- And asked her if I could work with her and she actually said yes.

And I would walk over to her house and we would work.

And then I was in the Harvard Archives, actually the Schlesinger Archives, which is their big cookbook archive.

And the course I'm currently teaching at Vanderbilt right now is Soul Food In Text to Aztecs.

That was a course born in my experience with Julia Child in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 'cause she taught me the importance of writing.

And it's a writing course.

- Right.

- She taught me the importance of doing original work in the archives.

And I send my kids out to do original work in the archives and she taught me how a teacher can change someone's life, 'cause she changed my life forever.

- Wow.

What a powerful story.

- She changed my life forever.

She prepared me to be a state department wife when I was one.

And she had prepared me to surprise you right now.

- Yes, because do you have a clean slate?

- I have, if with my clean slate, you know what I wanna do with it that I didn't do?

- No.

- I should have pursued having a cooking television show walking in Julia Child's path a little more directly, 'cause I did not fall in love with the books first.

I fell in love as a little black girl in Detroit, Michigan watching Julia Child on the PBS in Detroit.

And she was my first window into a giant world.

I think the Black Country Cookbook TV show is a thing I should have done.

And that's the thing I wanna do now with my clean slate.

'Cause food is, food and music are two of the most elemental art forms.

- Absolutely, and you know, I think we can help you with that.

- I know, and it came from a PBS and I thought you and me, this is, Julia would be so proud.

- She would be so proud.

- She would be so proud.

And John Seigenthaler would be too.

- Yes.

- So I actually, because largely, I truly have loved my life.

It hasn't been an easy life.

I was born in Detroit in 1959.

The city I love so much, essentially exploded in 1960s during what something was called then the Detroit Riots that we now called, and it was the Motown Rebellion.

But that city that I loved caught on fire and never completely returned to what it had been.

My own mother was a very difficult mother.

I fell in love with country music because it's music for people, hard people going through hard times.

And I found a mother in Lil Hardin I didn't have in my own mother.

My own mother did not love me.

She was a complicated, beautiful woman, but she was not a good mama.

But I've had a wonderful life.

I am a mother myself.

I love being a mother.

I mentor.

I have loved being mentored.

I've been mentored by some great women, including Julia Child, including Joan Bok, who was the first woman president of utility in the world and in America in the United States.

And Joan, I dated her son in college and she took me on to this day, my last speech in Boston just earlier, you know, in end of 2024, Joan Bok, almost 90 years older in the front row.

- Wow.

- At the Boston Atheneum.

So she has been mentoring me for now 40 some years.

- Wow.

- So there are very few things I would do differently, I love the friendships.

I'm still friends with my kindergarten best friend.

I talked to her this morning.

She called me this morning.

She lives in Detroit, Michigan.

- Wow.

- That I picked the right girl in kindergarten.

- Yeah.

- My seventh grade best friend and I are still close, and I saved my best friend for my life, Mimi, I met my first week of college and she and I are closer than most sisters.

- Wow.

- Most sisters.

I love these books.

I love the teaching.

I love the students.

I've been married twice, but I got something out of each marriage.

But I do think I literally have that one thing, I wish I had done a food television show because food changes people's lives.

- Yeah.

- My daughter and I, it's the 10th anniversary of "Soul Food Love."

- Yeah.

You wrote a cookbook.

- Yeah, award-winning cookbook.

It won the Pat Conroy Award and it also won the NAACP Image award.

And I think there's no other book in history that won those two awards because they're very different awards.

- Very, awards.

- And that book is a labor of love.

It's 100 years of cooking and eating in one Black family.

This new book.

- Wow.

- "The Black Country Cooking Book" is a love story between a mother and a daughter.

- Oh, yeah.

- I love that my daughter and I, we have a true love story that's against all odds.

I say the greatest act of creation in my whole life was inventing motherhood.

- Tell me about that.

Because I think it would be so wonderful to be able to create with your child.

- It is so wonderful.

Our first thing we did was B.

B.

Bright, "The diary B.

B.

Bright, Possible Princess."

But Caroline was just three or four years old.

We start making up B.

B.

Bright stories, about a Black fairytale princess at the doctor's office, anywhere we were, and we added to those stories and then we finally started writing them actually.

And that is an award-winning children's book, which I'm so thrilled has gone out in the world and done so much for kids.

We also wrote "Soul Food Love" together.

But Caroline is a poet and she's mathematical.

I say she's brighter than I am.

I'm a novelist and I love spending time in the archives.

I'm more the actual researcher.

She is an extraordinary cook and she's an extraordinary collector of cookbooks.

Her cookbook collection is now up to about 10,000 cookbooks.

- Oh, my goodness.

- So we both have a palate.

We both have a love of food and we both love to work.

I once cooked on a local TV show at lunchtime, Caroline, and they said, why are you making berries and some kind of berry salad and baked fish?

I said, if you were an enslaved African on the Hermitage Plantation and you were trying to celebrate something like your child's birthday, you would forage some berries and you would take a fish that you could get from the river that no one could count the number of fish they have.

They know how many chickens they have.

- Right.

- You could catch a fish and you could bake that in leaves in your little cabin and baked fish and a foraged berry salad.

That is soul food.

- Yeah.

- But people don't know that.

- No, they don't know it.

They don't think about it.

A lot of the stories that you share with us are things that people just don't know or don't think about.

- And they're joyful.

- Yes.

- I like telling, I think one of my things of my life, and I wish I'd just known this a little earlier, joy is radical.

Working on my book, "Black Bottom Saints," I came to claim that out loud.

I have lived that in beats all of my life, but I hadn't known it so clearly.

It's been easier to hold to it knowing it clearly.

- How do you deal with loss?

I mean, when you talked about you've experienced loss in your life, how do you deal with that?

- We had a terrible odd loss just on New Year's Eve this year.

Delilah, our dog that we loved so much.

Delilah Apple Randall was killed, bolted with the fireworks and was hit by a car in the street.

That is a loss of a dog.

I know Delilah's a, they're the big loss, like the loss of the one parent that loved me.

There was the loss of mother love that I never had.

What I've always found is to focus on what you do have.

There is so much love and so much beauty in the world that everyone's free to give you or not give you love.

And what I did find, I thought I said about Delilah, what I felt about my father.

When my father died, I literally wondered for a moment, could I wake up and deal with all the things I had done, dealt with, a mother so abusive she put me in the hospital at least on one occasion, without that good parent in the world.

And the answer was yes, because I vividly knew all the love, that he was still alive in me and I had the chance to be- - Yeah.

- Him now, that he was always with me.

- Oh.

- That's how I feel about Delilah now.

Now it's not I that go visit Delilah.

Delilah, some in spirit is always with me now.

- Sure.

- My father, George Stanley Randall.

I don't have to worry if I, is always with me now.

So loss is, and realize that change is a part of life but you can't lose yourself.

The only really important thing to avoid losing is your courage.

- Yeah.

- I sometimes, rarely, lose.

But I sometimes lose my courage for a moment.

I sometimes get anxious.

What I don't lose is my willingness to love and lose.

When you love passionately, you know loss, you know it's not just loss, it's pain and hurt will come when you care.

There's a lot of, in that vulnerability is pain.

But pain is always eclipsed for me by love and beauty.

Or my grandmother, when I was little, she would, there was no air conditioning in our house and there were mosquitoes aplenty in Detroit City.

She would put perfume on the mosquito bites and then wave over them.

And so you'd have that wonderful smell and the alcohol in the perfume would make the itch stop for a moment.

You almost wanted to get bitten by a mosquito.

People who create these rituals of joy, they can be so small and they can be free.

- Yeah.

- When you are full of love and joy and that radical joy, there's all possibility that the next moment will actually be wonderful.

- Yeah, absolutely.

Boy, what an inspiration you are.

And we're gonna run out of time before I get to talk to you about everything I want to.

But let me just say one thing about, there's, you, I believe are the only Black woman to have had a number one hit song, you had "X's and O's" that Tricia Yearwood had a hit with.

But you also, at the same time about at some point with Reba McEntyre had that- - ACM Video of the Year.

- ACM Video of the Year.

- I am the only Black woman in history I am the only black woman in history and an ACM Video of the Year.

And I'm so proud that "X's and O's" was actually two weeks at number one.

But I love that, I love working with Tricia Yearwood and Reba McEntyre, adored working with Reba.

and Reba McIntyre adored working with Reba.

and Moe Bandy, Rodney Foster.

and Mo Bandy Rodney Foster.

Rissi Palmer, Miko Marks, Rhiannon Giddens, who's won a Pulitzer Prize, Allison Russell, SistaStrings, all of these extraordinary women alive and working in East Nashville.

So it has been, I have been so lucky as a little girl, you know, in Detroit City, I heard Marvin Gaye sing live.

One of my first concerts I ever went to at my, the first concert in a formal concert space was seeing The Supremes at the Copacabana in New York City.

And they sang a country song "Queen of the House."

- Oh wow.

- This was the world's fair.

I was five years old.

It was, you know, or approximately five years old.

It was such a wonderful experience.

But I've been listening to great music all my life and great music and great food are the two things that I love to make and the two things that sustain me.

I love to make it for others, I like to experience what's made for me.

- And it is the common denominator that can really unite us, isn't it?

- It is.

- Both music and food.

- Absolutely.

- Both music and - Food.

Absolutely.

And that's why when I say the Pat Conroy Award, and that award tends to go to things that relate to that world, and the NAACP Award is a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

That's a very Black award, that tells you how uniting soul food is and "Soul Food Love" won both of those awards.

- Any last comments you wanna share with us that really will get us inspired to lean into a new world and just a new way of living together?

- This is February, it's Black History month.

And Black History month is another way of saying American History month because Black Americans have been part of the American story from the very beginning and a good part of it.

So I want us to celebrate the common things that we have created together that work.

I want us to lead from the things that we know as true, which is treating our neighbor as we wish to be treated by ourselves.

- [Becky] Yeah.

- These are fundamental country truths.

They're very fundamental southern truths.

They're fundamental truths to me that I was raised on from a Black Baptist Sunday school in Detroit City.

Treating my neighbor as I want to be treated.

We come very far away from that.

- Yeah.

- I think the future is going back to the basics of truth and caring and not just taking, remembering that an eye for an eye does not mean an eye for an eye.

It means the most you can take for an eye is an eye.

And the whole press is on the empathy, the grace and the mercy you can show to take less.

We need to spot to the love, the truth, the beauty, the empathy, the fairness that we know is right.

And we need to call out all the things that are pure exploitation.

- Yeah.

- That are not what we are at our best.

There's an old fashioned thing that mamas used to say, you're better than that.

- Yep.

- Good mamas say that.

- That's right.

- We as a community need to know, recognize when we're better than that.

And try to be our best selves.

And that always involves giving our best to others.

It is not, I'm exhausted with narcissism.

I'm exhausted with the people who do not understand what Bob Dylan tried to teach us so well, you gotta serve somebody.

- [Becky] That's right.

That's right.

- And so in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, we gotta serve somebody.

- Alright.

- And that's a Black Country truth too.

- I love it.

I love it.

- Love it.

(mellow guitar music) ♪ I've thrown away my compass ♪ ♪ Done with the chart ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around ♪ ♪ In one direction ♪ - Alice, what was a true Nashville moment for you?

What is like something that just pops out and says, oh, that could only happen in Nashville.

- I got to dance with Merle Haggard in the Sony parking lot after an award show.

Like.

(Alice laughing) - Doesn't get better than that.

- It does not get more Nashville than dancing with Merle Haggard in a Sony parking lot.

(uplifting music)