I was like, “I don’t know if I could agree with that. It didn’t take someone outside of my ethnicity to tell me, “Hey, country music is this or that.” It was my closest friends, telling me, “This ain’t gonna work for you.” I was saying, “Look at Darius Rucker.” They said, “Well, Darius Rucker tricked everybody. Was that something that was on your mind when you decided to start making country music? There haven’t been many African-American country stars. But if I delete those drums, you can’t take back the fact that it’s traditional country that lies at the surface. It ain’t what you preserved, it’s what you are-it’s the essence of your spirit. Snatching the butt of lightning bugs, making earrings. Country is walking barefoot, eating pickled pig feet, pig ears. I’m not trying to be country, I am country. They weren’t trying to identify as country-they were just being themselves. I guess you’d kind of say it was a sound developing in Atlanta from the Dungeon Family all the way up. “Ah ha, hush that fuss”: they were genius. They had twang on it that was all from country banjo playing. You could say it’s rap, but it still had a country feeling. Nappy Roots had a country twang to them too.Īnd Outkast: you can’t really identify what Outkast was. What about your predecessors from the hip-hop side?īone Thugs-n-Harmony and E-40 made country songs. They actually built that bridge for me that I needed: that it’s one big world. Honeysuckles in the country, they bloomed just a little bit longer. Spending my summers in the country, then coming back to the projects in Atlanta, just bridged the gap. I could never get away from the storytelling. It changed my perspective and broadened my senses. The first song I heard and remember out there was Tim McGraw’s “Don’t Take the Girl.” When I heard it I was like, “Wow, this is a story-this is different from what I’m used to hearing.” Before that I was hearing Donny Hathaway, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye-I never heard that approach to music. I remember my aunty making her own seasoning, picking peaches off the trees, eating boiled peanuts.
I would go to Butler, Georgia, in the country, and spend my summers there with my great aunt and my mother. You knew they were hunting in the country. When I went to the country and I heard gunshots, no one ducked.
#THE GIT UP HOW TO#
The first thing I learned how to do was to duck. How did you develop an interest in both rap and country?īrown: Loving Johnny Cash and Outkast is just surface, but there’s so much more depth to it. TIME: In previous interviews you’ve talked about loving both Outkast and Johnny Cash as a child.
In a phone interview, Brown talked about the lineage of country rap, his initial reaction to Lil Nas X, African Americans in country music and more. A consummate insider, he’s perfectly equipped to capitalize on an unexpected cultural moment. Brown is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer and engineer who has been working in Atlanta for years, collaborating with artists like Fergie, Kane Brown and Pitbull. But for Brown, the synthesis of country and rap is nothing new: He’s been honing his particular hybrid strain, which he dubs “trailertrap,” for the better part of the decade. The success of “The Git Up” can be partially attributed to the success of “Old Town Road”-in fact, Brown decided to rush-release his song right after he heard Lil Nas’ anthem.
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