That hick-hop style
Cowboy Troy gets that look a lot.
He’ll be hanging around an arena before a show and see a black person who works there.
“You can feel the look they give you – ‘So that’s the one guy in country music.’ You can feel it, that there’s this sense of hope sometimes,” says the former shoe salesman from Dallas.
Born Troy Coleman, the 34-year-old is a double anomaly in country music: Not only is he black (try naming another black country artist besides Charley Pride), he’s also a rapper.
His major-label debut, “Loco Motive,” features fiddle and banjo, but it fits more comfortably with Nelly and the Black Eyed Peas than with Toby Keith or Alan Jackson.
The first single, “I Play Chicken With The Train,” uses machine-gun beats and rhymes to defend what he calls “hick-hop”:
“People said it’s impossible, not probable, too radical / But I already been on the CMA’s / hell, Tim McGraw said he like the change / Said he likes the way my hick-hop sounds / and the way the crowd screams when I stomp the ground / I’m big and black, clickety-clack …”
Coleman says the marriage of country and rap isn’t as far out as it might seem.
The talking-blues style of records like Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and Jerry Reed’s “Amos Moses” laid the groundwork. A few rappers have spun their lyrics over the twang of country guitars.
And last year, Big & Rich – “Big” Kenny Alphin and John Rich, who co-produced “Loco Motive” – showed the possibilities of hick-hop by selling more than 2 million copies of their debut album, “Horse of a Different Color.”
“A lot of times the only difference is in the vernacular used to convey your thoughts and, of course, the instrumentation,” Coleman says.
If the similarities seem obvious to him, it’s because the two genres coexisted in his childhood. His parents played country music around the house when he was a kid. As he grew older he became interested in rock and rap. It all came together for him at the University of Texas, where he began performing at frat parties and clubs.
“I had my cowboy hat on and would rap over techno,” he says. “People started remembering who I was I guess because I had the cowboy hat on everywhere I went.”
It doesn’t hurt that he’s 6-foot-5, 250 pounds. But in person, he’s nothing like the party animal persona he exudes on “Loco Motive.” He has a degree in psychology, is nine credit hours short of a master’s in marketing and can speak snippets of six different languages, including Mandarin Chinese.
His musical career began to spark in 1993, when he met Rich, who was with the country group Lonestar. He started coming to Nashville to hang out with Rich and Alphin, who was in a rock group at the time. He was an early member of the MuzikMafia, the loose-knit group of artists whose weekly performances led to major label record deals for Gretchen Wilson and Big & Rich.
Coleman lent his rhymes to the Big & Rich song “Rollin’ (The Ballad of Big & Rich),” and when the duo’s album took off, he left his job as a salesman at a Foot Locker store to join them on tour with Tim McGraw.
McGraw sings on the new record, as do Big & Rich and other MuzikMafia members.
“I Play Chicken With the Train” has been doing better in some markets than others. At contemporary country station WBVR-FM in Bowling Green, Ky., program director Myla Thomas says it isn’t getting any spins.
“We don’t think it fits our format. We don’t consider it country,” Thomas says.
But at WKTYS-FM in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, it’s aired every few hours.
“The response was mixed at first. People didn’t know what to think of it,” says operations manager Lorrin Palagi.
“For some listeners who were more purists, well, they weren’t quite sure how to take the song. But as they spent a little more time with it they’ve become comfortable with it and have seemed to embrace it.”