Word: cowboy
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cmt.com closely monitors postings about Cowboy Troy, and the few so far that have used racial epithets have been swiftly removed. Even so, antebellum echoes are not uncommon: "He is just polluting this awesome genre. This is such an abomination"; "A discrace [sic] to humanity [is] Troy on stage and the white girls down front dancing for him." Those who say the debate about segregation vs. integration is strictly musical usually point to Charley Pride, a genuine black superstar who had 29 No. 1 country hits from 1966 to 1989. But when Pride made his debut, his label didn...
...Cowboy Troy's debut album, Loco Motive, was just released on the Muzik Mafia's Warner Bros. imprint, Raybaw (red and yellow, black and white) Records. Says Troy: "I'm rapping over pedal-steel guitar, lap steel, Dobro, fiddle and other country instruments. In the Muzik Mafia we call it hick-hop, and we think its time has come. Country is ready to expand its boundaries." There are signs he may be right. Nelly and Tim McGraw recently had a hit with the style-mixing duet Over and Over, Jack White of the White Stripes produced a Grammy-winning album...
...Cowboy Troy's first single, I Play Chicken with the Train, which features Big & Rich, was not designed to put traditionalists at ease. On first listen, it's almost comically dissonant; a grimy lead guitar fights for control with a banjo as Troy's deep, rat-a-tat-tat delivery flies by. But it does grow on you and soon finds a stomping middle ground between the Sugarhill Gang and Charlie Daniels. In the online-opinion maelstrom, about 50% of people seem to enjoy their first exposure to hick-hop; the rest can safely be described as horrified...
...Rich, the confrontation lies somewhere between a responsibility and a pleasure. (He seems to enjoy a vision of himself and Coleman as righteous cowboys staring down a populace of exuberantly prejudiced morons--like Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles.) Coleman, typically, is more subdued. "I have to be laid back," he says. "What good would it do me to get upset about it?" In the video age, Cowboy Troy can't hide his race, nor does he want to. "I'm big and black, clickety-clack," he announces in the first verse of I Play Chicken...
Coleman and Rich first met in 1992 when Rich, then with the blandly successful Lonestar, looked into a crowd and spotted "a 6-ft. 5-in. black guy in a cowboy hat, starched Wranglers and a giant belt buckle two-stepping his ass off." The pair shared broad musical tastes, became friends and kept in touch, but Coleman rapped mostly at local bars as "a party trick" until 2001, when he quit his job and made two independent albums that left him $25,000 in debt. "DJs would say, 'This is pretty novel, really cool,'" says Coleman of his early...