“Mom, is that country music?”

Eight-year-old Austin is curious. During car rides, including to and from South Shades Crest Elementary in Hoover where Austin’s a second-grader, his mom typically plays what her precocious son calls “old people’s music.”

Soul Town on Sirius XM is Austin’s favorite channel and he’s been known to dance on the couch wearing Pikachu pajamas while beltin’ Johnny Taylor’s classic 1997 soul vibe Last Two Dollars and sippin’ apple juice.

A lady at the casino

She lost all of her money

She said don’t feel sorry for me no

Don’t feel sorry honey

But if you want to do a lady a favor

Here’s what I want you to do

Just loan me two dollars

Until the next time I see you

Austin’s an old soul, as the elders say.

But on this day early last month, his mom, Kennedi Stone, a communications executive and consultant, is on a country vibe. She’s playing a recent release from long-time acquaintance and Birmingham native Coleridge Tillman, an award-winning national songwriter who sang around the city as Sebastian Kole before re-rebranding as the explosively popular country singer Pynk Beard.

“It is,” Stone responds to her son’s query.

“But I don’t like country music,” Austin says.

Now, mom is curious. “How do you know you don’t like it?” she asks. “Have you heard it before?”

“I’ve heard some,” Austin said. “Well, let me listen to a little bit more.”

It’s not at all shocking that Austin, a young Black boy, might feel some kinda way about country music. That maybe subconsciously, he might have a notion of the genre’s tenuous two-step with Black music fans — even though Black artists were among the creators of the genre.

For generations, the industry was largely unwelcoming to all but a scant few Black artists, which certainly dampened its popularity among African Americans.

That’s shifted seismically over the last year or so, ever since Beyonce rocked the country during Super Bowl LVIII in February 2024 with a commercial that teased her entree onto its stage – welcome or now. A month later she dropped Cowboy Carter, the album that garnered historic success and spurred a renaissance of Black country music artists.

The buzz, alas, had not yet penetrated the second-grade conversation circles. At least not Austin’s. “He’s very astute to a lot of things happening in the world,” Stone told me.

Recently, he came home from school and mentioned a conversation he’d had with one of his best friends.

“What was your conversation about?” mom asked.

“What’s wrong with our generation?”

“You’re 8, baby,” she said. “What is your generation?”

Austin didn’t flinch: “Why is our generation so crazy? People are killing each other. Everything’s happening in the world. It’s just so mean.”

Stone didn’t have an immediate answer. She shared that Austin’s “village” includes his father, her parents and others.

“We all love on him and give him the support he needs because we recognize how he is,” she said. “He’s 8, but he’s definitely 45. That’s what happens when you’re ‘besties’ include 60- and 70-year-olds.”

Stone has known Tillman since he performed on stages across the city, like the now-gone Amani Raha Martini Lounge in Pepper Place and karaoke bars. Last year, as he released new music and videos on social media, Pynk Beard began to dominate their in-car playlist.

And Austin became a fan – though he did not know a pertinent fact about the artist.

“He wanted to see a picture of Sebastian and know why his name was Pynk Beard,” Stone said. She showed him a photo of the performer.

“Wait, he’s got a pink beard?” Austin said. “He’s got gold chains? He’s got gold teeth? Mom, he’s Black. This is cool. This is really cool, Mom.”

When Stone learned Pynk Beard was performing locally in January she reached out to him to see if the show would be kid-friendly. “I can make it kid-friendly,” he told her.

“When I told Austin we were going, he was super excited,” Stone said. “He wanted to make sure he had his best country western gear. He wanted a cowboy hat, and we had to get boots so he could be in a total character. This was the first time he was able to actually relate to an artist. That’s why representation matters so much.”

Out of the mouths of babes, the scriptures say.

As Austin, dressed fully cowboy’d up, prepped and preened in front of a mirror not long before the show, he paused and grabbed his mother’s hand.

“Mom, this is a country concert, right?” he asked. Stone said, yes. Austin paused again.

“What if there’s a little white girl there that I want to dance with?”

Stone was shaken by the question but quickly said, “That would be fine, Austin.”

He paused again. “Well, would that be ok? Because I’m colored.”

Stone grabbed both of her son’s hands.

“It, it, it shocked me,” she later told me, pausing to catch herself between words, pausing to corral a mother’s emotions. “It just floored me because I wasn’t expecting it to come from my 8-year-old.”

She asked why he’d said that. Austin saw her emotion and began to cry.

“Mommy, I’m sorry for saying it,” he said. “I knew I wasn’t supposed to say it.”

It wasn’t that at all. Austin’s school is diverse and, as any parent would, she wondered if he’d heard the term at school, whether anyone had called him colored.

“No,” he said. “We’ve watched videos and talked about racism and Black history. This is why I’ve had all these questions. Why is it that Black people were treated differently? I didn’t know if I would be treated differently because it’s a country concert.”

Out of the mouths.

“He related country music to a white audience,” Stone said later. “How would he be looked at? He has friends of different races; his best friends are of different races. So, he doesn’t see racism at eight, but he does see it. This is a child who watches CNN and Fox News. He watches documentaries. He sees the information, takes it in, and then asks questions about it. I try to guide him through it the best I can and let him know that everyone is not like that in the world. Some of the things we’ve faced, we’ve overcome. But we still do have some challenges.

“I have to be honest with him because he is a little Black boy. But I’m what I call selectively transparent so to still protect his innocence as much as I can. That turned into a teaching moment. Standing there by that mirror, I turned him around and told him to look at himself. I asked, ‘What do you see? Do you see the beautiful boy looking back at you? Here you are: Stand in your greatness.’”

“He shouldn’t have to be afraid to ask someone if they want to dance. I told him, ‘Even if you do ask someone and they say, No, that’s okay. You still go into that room. You let your little light shine and dance and sing like nobody’s watching. That’s exactly what he did.”

Yes, he did. I was there and wondered just who was this adorable Black boy in the Black cowboy hat and boots, dancing in the aisle and singing Pynk Beard lyrics on a night when Black country came out to play in Birmingham.

Before the show, Austin got to meet Tillman. “Sebastian was so gentle with him and so welcoming and warm,” Stone recalled.

“Mom, he’s really, really nice,” Austin later said. “He’s really cool.”

Once Pynk Beard appeared on stage, Austin embodied all that had looked back at him in the mirror.

“When it comes to anything else, I’m tough as nails. But when it comes to my baby, I lose it,” Stone said. “To see him just throw his head back, close his eyes and sing ‘On My Hood’ at the top of his lungs, it did something to me as well.”

She called it “Black boy joy.”

Not long after the show, Stone told Kole that her son had asked about dancing with a white girl. He took to social media with a tearful response.

“That don’t make no sense,” he said in a video, while drying his eyes and gathering his words. “That baby … I don’t want my young man to live in a world like that and you shouldn’t either…. Oh my God, that just killed me … Man, we got a lot of work to do. Maybe music heals. We got a lot of work to do.”

My sweat and my blood.

I did it all for love

I did it all for love.

I did it all … put that on my hood

We can learn from our children. We must teach them — and learn from them, too. Learn that not everyone in the world is like them.

So don’t let them steal your joy.

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.