About Black Like Me

When Mickey Guyton signed a Nashville record deal nearly a decade ago, after growing up in Texas on Dolly Parton and Whitney Houston and doing a bit of work in the LA entertainment industry, she approached the country music scene with tremendous respect. Cognizant of her newbie status, she showed how serious she was about becoming a part of that professional community by learning its culture and customs and taking its conventional wisdom to heart. Soon, she came to see what she was actually up against. She was a stirring, sumptuous singer, the sort of pop-embellished voice that was celebrated in a slightly earlier era, but undistinguished male vocalists with swaggering affect were now having their day, and women had little hope of radio airplay at all. What's more, Guyton was a black woman in a format whose association with whiteness, though a distortion of the historical narrative, remained entrenched in the popular imagination and reinforced by market biases.

But, after many demoralizing years, Guyton started to create a role for herself where none had existed; within and beyond her music, she would accentuate the differences she embodied in identity, experience and perspective, while persisting in her warmhearted drive and artistic inclination to please a popular audience. Committing to that course, she's emerging as a poised and galvanizing country-pop conscience, at once consummate pro, steadfast optimist and truth-teller. On Tuesday, while much of the music industry paused in recognition of unjust threats to black survival, Guyton's song "Black Like Me" appeared, without promotional fanfare, on her Instagram account and Spotify's marquee Hot Country playlist. The track encapsulates her vision on many levels. It builds like a pop anthem, piano chords supplying a pensive pulse until the hook lifts above handclap backbeats, shadings of subterranean bass and ribbons of steel guitar. Vocally, she moves through country, pop and gospel modes: intimate narration, commanding plea and, at the song's emotional climax, imperial belting, agile, octave leaps and flaring, improvisational runs. In the lyrics, she applies familiar tools of country storytelling — a small-town backdrop; poignantly down-to-earth scenes of class disparity; admiration for a parent's hard work — to aim her anguish at dehumanizing encounters with racism toward sparking broad empathy.