The Battle of Troy

By Josh Tyrangiel

As a singer and songwriter, John Rich is a unique talent. But as a rogue, huckster and progressive, he is extraordinary. It was Rich who helped create the Muzik Mafia, a loose collective of musical outcasts deemed too rock, too rough or just too weird by the famously conservative executives on Nashville's Music Row. It was Rich, along with partner Big Kenny Alphin, who came up with the Mafia acronym (Musically Artistic Friends in Alliance) and slogan ("Music without prejudice") and showed the group members how to turn their individuality into hits, co-writing Gretchen Wilson's underclass anthem Redneck Woman and the winningly lewd Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy) for his own duo, Big & Rich. Now Rich is putting his skills behind an act that tweaks Nashville's two greatest taboos--race and musical tradition--and he can barely contain himself. "Cowboy Troy is the only 6-ft. 5-in. black rapping cowboy I've ever met!" says Rich. "We think he's going to be a groundbreaking, multiplatinum artist!"

Cowboy Troy is indeed black (he prefers the term to African American), and, particularly with his ten-gallon hat on, he is enormous. He is also a phlegmatic and thoughtful antidote to Rich's hype. "I get looks from just about everybody," says Troy Coleman, 34, as he squeezes into a booth at a Nashville steak house. "I'm pretty used to the fact that there aren't a lot of people who look and dress like me." There aren't a lot of people like him, period. Coleman grew up in Dallas and Forth Worth, Texas, loving Guns N' Roses, Charlie Daniels and Run D.M.C. He majored in psychology at the University of Texas, speaks six languages (including Russian and Mandarin), is a few hours short of a master's degree in economics and spent nine years as a human-resources consultant. "I think of myself as a pretty unique dude," says Coleman. "But if you've been to a country bar recently and seen people dance to a George Strait song followed by a Ludacris song, you know I'm hardly the only person that likes rap and country mixed together."

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 for Loretta Lynn, and the best song currently making its way around the Internet is Sweet Home Country Grammar, a mash-up of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama and Nelly's Country Grammar.

Still, country is a universe in which even the tiniest deviation from tradition is chewed over obsessively and often spit out. Unlike rock fans, most of whom are attracted to the music's fusion of styles, a large number of country fans take it upon themselves to enforce a vague (and deluded) notion of genre purity. Acts that other listeners take for granted as part of the twangy firmament, from Willie Nelson to Shania Twain, are often disparaged for their perceived experimental perversions--not enough fiddle, too much navel--with a prim cruelty that would not be out of place in an Edith Wharton novel. "One of the subjects of debate on our message boards is always, 'Is it country?'" says Calvin Gilbert, managing editor of cmt.com the online extension of Country Music Television (CMT). "With Troy, it seems like it's the only subject of debate."

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. "Can't spell rap without crap" and "NOT COUNTRY ... A SICK DISGRACE" are common threads, with even moderate dissenters saying that while they may like country and rap separately, they would prefer they stay that way. Some call on CMT to stop playing the video. "Rapboy Troy is not CMT. He's MTV and BET. Plain and simple."

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't send out publicity photos or put him on album covers, and while many black artists have since given country a shot (see box), the absence of another significant black face between Pride's retirement and Cowboy Troy's start suggests that some listeners, at least, care as much about who they see as what they hear. "There are outrageous Aryan attitudes in a healthy minority of listeners," says John Rich. "It's K.K.K. b_______, and at some point, you just can't believe it's still out there. But you've got to confront it."

For 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. But he would rather not make it an issue. On tour with Big & Rich last summer, Coleman signed autographs on Confederate flags when they were proffered. "On some level, it's a neat feeling that you can connect with people musically regardless of what your politics are. On another level, a choice between signing flags and selling shoes is not a choice."

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 efforts. "'But no way is my boss going to let me play it.'" With his consultant job filled, Coleman started working at Foot Locker. He was a few months away from getting a store of his own to manage when Rich and new partner Big Kenny Alphin offered him a guest spot on their tour and then a record deal.

At 34, Coleman found the lure of sudden stardom thrilling and discomfiting. "My wife was managing an MRI facility and making good money in Dallas," he says. "We're not kids. Moving to Nashville, making a record--there's a lot of uncertainty. I was excited but cautious." Whether some of that caution crept into Loco Motive is hard to know, but anyone expecting controversy will be surprised. Troy calls himself "the last of the Brohicans" on the Kid Rock-ish Beast on the Mic and asks the ladies to "get low" and "make it clap" on the willfully stupid (and thoroughly enjoyable) My Last Yee Haw, but the album is hardly a paragon of genre-bending ambition. Most of it falls squarely, if not unpleasantly, within the accepted boundaries of modern country. Mixed in with the inoffensive party tracks (including one that makes a commendable use of Spanglish) are songs about debt and God, and a duet with Sarah Buxton that sounds more like Music Row than the Muzik Mafia. The absence of a single social or political lyric leaves the impression that Cowboy Troy may be the obverse of a certain white rapper whose skin is outwardly a comfort to his audience but whose substantive goal is to make that audience uncomfortable. Troy's skin and delivery may jar country traditionalists, but his material will set them at ease. "That's intentional," says Coleman. "I love rap, but my target audience is country. That's where my heart is." Hopefully, country will have space in its heart for him too. o