In late May, the debates about “Old Town Road” stretched beyond the music when Wrangler announced it was launching a Lil Nas X collection. The news prompted some consumers to accuse the jeans company of “taking the cowboy outta country” and threaten a boycott.
The fans who were angry that the company would team up with a rapper essentially characterized the pairing as “cultural appropriation,” a charge that has generated outcry from African Americans who balk at the idea that cowboys or country music should be considered the sole provenance of white people.
“The idea that Lil Nas X is perpetuating some form of cultural appropriation by recording and having success in the country genre is simply absurd,” pop culture commentator Jawn Murray told me. “How can you appropriate something you played a significant part in shaping?”
Josh Garrett-Davis, the Autry Museum of the West’s Gamble associate curator of Western history, popular culture, and firearms, said the efforts to whitewash the country-and-western tradition go back years.
“There’s a lot of media, whether the classic cowboy paintings or the Wild West shows, that were all sort of reinforcing this idea that the cowboy hero is white,” he told me.
The racial segregation of musical genres would also perpetuate the idea that African Americans played no role in country-and-western customs. Still, the black influence on these practices lives on through the black rodeo, the black musicians recording country music today, and the millions of African Americans who remain connected to their country roots.
“One of the missions of the Autry Museum is to expand that often narrow or mythic perception people have of the American West,” Carolyn Brucken, the Autry’s chief curator and director of research, told me. “You can’t talk about the beginning of the American West without talking about African Americans and Native Americans.”
In Texas, many black men became skilled cowhands when white ranchers left their land and cattle behind to fight in the Civil War. When enslaved black people won their freedom, the ranchers hired them to be ranch hands and cowhands, or “cowboys.” Brucken estimates that at least one out of four cowboys was a black man.