This is an opinion column.

His cowboy boots were broken in, “but I wasn’t.” Dez Wilson was laughing as he spoke — and still recovering.

Still healing from just a few days earlier when he had helped curate a remarkably unique evening in Birmingham. When he capped a whirlwind 30 days with a collaboration with home-grown songwriter/artist Sabastian (Pynk Beard) Cole to produce a hella night of country music. In these parts, of course, a night of country music isn’t particularly remarkable nor unique. Not even a hella night of country music.

Yet this is: A hella night of Black country music.

A night when Birmingham-bred and nurtured Black country artists rocked a mostly-Black sold-out crowd dressed straight out of Yellowstone, including kids Cowboy-ed and Cowgirled-up in their boots and hats. Rocked a crowd that swayed, stomped and knew the dang words.

Wilson — himself a musician who once received the Stevie Wonder music scholarship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham — shot and dropped music videos that rippled through social media, created graphics, and helped design the Western-themed stage and lighting that transformed the Pearl Room at Regions Field last Friday night into a honky-tonk noir (phrasing totally intended).

Wilson’s body still ached but his spirit remained full.

“It was an amazing vibe,” he said, “especially seeing kids enjoying and resonating with the music, and having the lyrics memorized. This is a new wave of creative expression for Black folks, from kids to elders, where we see ourselves represented in a space we were taught was not for us.”

Call it: Lesson unlearned — and not just because of what’s percolating in unexpected creative spaces in Birmingham and around the region. The last 12 months have been a year — the year — for Black country artists.

Two days after the sold-out concert at Regions, the global musical force that is Beyonce put a shiny sepia bow on the first weekend of Black History Month, becoming the first Black artist to win the Grammy for Best Country Album. The ground-shaking “Cowboy Carter” also won Album of the Year.) The normally poised artist’s stunned reaction to the historic win was so good it would have been a meme had it not been real.

It came just months after Beyonce received nary a single 2024 Country Music Association Awards nomination for the album, which earned the highest debut of any album last year (407,000 units) and spawned a renaissance of Black country artists, highlighted nationally by the likes of Shaboozey and locally in the talents of artists like Birmingham-Southern grad Jada Cato (who also performed last Friday) and Gardendale singer-songwriter Tiera Kennedy.

Kennedy is featured on two “Cowboy Carter” tracks and was among an array of Black artists who performed with Beyonce on Christmas at halftime of the NFL game in Houston, her hometown. Streamed on Netflix, the halftime show drew 27 million views, more than four times the 2024 CMA viewership (6 million).

“You’re not the gatekeepers of a musical genre,” Willson said. “Your validation doesn’t make or break anybody.”

Certainly not anybody Black. We validate our own. And know all the words.

Thus, the hella Black country evening in Birmingham last week may not be unique for long. Frankly, it never should have been. Black country artists never should have been the forgotten thread, the whitewashed core of the genre’s deep mosaic history. Never should have been mostly overlooked and rarely invited into its stage.

And there’s this, too: Country music never should have been largely shunned by African Americans, though it’s easy to understand why. Easy to turn away while being turned away. Turned away from something we birthed.

“You think you don’t like country music, but you do — you just don’t like the country artists you’ve been presented,” Wilson said. “You don’t resonate with those country artists. Now, [Black] people are re-embracing themselves as being country, being able to own that and wear it with pride. I’ve traveled a lot of places, and being from the South, you get called ‘country’ and you consider it a slur, a stereotype.

“Us being able to own that and remind ourselves: Oh, we are country — Sabastian’s from Dolomite and in Greene County, Alabama. We are country. Whether I have on a pair of J’s or a pair of boots, I’m still country and that’s okay.”

The emergence now of Black country artists, strumming boldly into the genre, is a natural evolution of creative expression, Wilson told me. “We’ve had representation in country music over time,” he said, “but for whatever reason Black Country artists have not been given a mainstream spotlight, and no one grabbed it the way Beyonce did. She combined her traditional esthetic, formula and execution in a new space for her. So, it wasn’t a stretch to see Beyonce do this.”

“As a multi-hyphenate artist who plays piano, saxophone and drums, I’ve naturally bounced around from instruments to styles and mediums of music,” he added. “I get bored and I shift. As a creative scene, watching Beyonce do it resonated with me for that same reason: Okay, you got bored and wanted to shift creatively. If they don’t shift, a lot of artists give up because they’re not resonating with their traditional style of music anymore.”

The seminal moment last Friday evening, the moment when it crystallized that Birmingham was more country than you might think, came when Pynk Beard’s mic blew during “Mine Lord Willing.” The artist was flustered for a few until he realized the audience hadn’t stopped signing the lyrics.

Call her Monday she at work

Call her Sunday she may be at church.

Her baby daddy got the baby for the weekend

So on Friday she gonna twerk

She a demon in a dress and she pretty in a Fendi and she hell yeah independent

She’s mine Lord willing and the river don’t rise.

Wilson was on stage with his camera. “Capturing that moment, that was it,” he recalled. “It was just a powerful moment to know that we went from concept to execution in literally 30 days, and this was the result. To see and feel the amount of support and love in the room, in that moment, to see people knowing the words of songs that aren’t even available on streaming platforms, it was beautiful to know we were able to do this in our city. It meant a lot. And that was that moment, I felt something that the city really needed.”

Especially now as the city grapples to stem the scourge of gun violence and heal its wounds.

On a stage in Los Angeles two nights later, Beyonce said: “Sometimes, genre is a code word to keep us in our place as artists.”

Now, that place is hella country. Break in your boots.

Let’s be better tomorrow than we are today. My column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, Instagram @roysj and BlueSky.