Arlington-born singer Mickey Guyton has long stood out as the rare Black woman in the mostly alabaster world of country music. Now, the spotlight has grown even brighter with her emotional new ballad “Black Like Me.”
Released in June in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, “Black Like Me” starts out with Guyton singing about the racism she experienced growing up in Texas.
“Now I’m all grown up, and nothin’ has changed,” she sings. “If you think we live in the land of the free / You should try to be Black like me.”
Guyton titled the song after 1961′s Black Like Me, a book she read in college that was written by John Howard Griffin, a white journalist who darkened his skin to document racism in the segregated South. The song — co-written by Guyton and three others — was slated to come out later this year, but someone at Spotify heard the tune and asked Guyton’s record company, Universal Nashville, to release it sooner.
“It’s all so heavy,” she told Rolling Stone about the response to “Black Like Me” in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. “I’ve been talking to so many of my Black friends in the industry. We have to call each other and cry to each other. … People are not OK. Black people, especially, are not OK. Brown people, especially, are not OK.”
Guyton — whose father’s job took the family to Dallas, Fort Worth, Tyler and Waco — began singing at age 8 after seeing LeAnn Rimes perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a Texas Rangers game. She released her first major-label album in 2014 and an EP in 2015 but has yet to score a big hit.
Part of the problem, she told Rolling Stone, was she wasn’t writing songs from the heart — a fact she only realized after her husband told her so during marriage counseling.
“It was a gut punch,” she says. “I was writing other people’s songs. I wasn’t writing my songs. So I looked at myself, looked at what my stories are, what I have gone through, and I started writing about it. All of a sudden, people started listening to me.”
