Review: Mickey Guyton’s Remember Her Name Defies the Norms of a Blinkered Genre

Mickey Guyton’s Remember Her Name satisfies pop-country standards even as it defies the genre's institutional roadblocks.

Mickey Guyton, Remember Her Name
Photo: Bonnie Nichoalds

Singer-songwriter Mickey Guyton’s debut album, Remember Her Name, satisfies pop-country standards even as it defies the institutional roadblocks for a black woman working in the genre. The album reflects on the hardships of being a minority in the South, recounting the discrimination and harassment that Guyton experienced as a child in Texas, and paralleling that with how she’s come to embrace her identity as a source of strength in the face of Nashville’s strict stylistic and thematic conservatism.

The perspectives that Guyton offers are desperately needed in country music, even if her approach can sometimes veer toward the didactic. “Black Like Me” is a direct, personal political statement, expressing frustration about how little race relations in the U.S. have changed since the 37-year-old’s youth. “If you think we live in the land of the free/You should try to be black like me,” she sings with guileless grace. On “Love My Hair,” something of a companion piece to Solange’s “Don’t Touch My Hair” in its focus on the fetishization of black hair, Guyton remembers “the things I used to do to fit in…I used to think what God gave me wasn’t fair,” before resolving that “I’ll never justify my skin again.”

YouTube video

Given these deeply intimate reflections, a song like “All American,” where Guyton lists off various American signifiers that are often coded as being associated with only a certain type of American and then reminds us that we’re all part of the same country, feels like lip service to inclusiveness. The song has a nationalist bombast to it, replete with wailing electric guitar and massive drums, that’s jarring alongside Guyton’s more personal stories.

Advertisement

The more conversational and specific Guyton gets, the more her stories register. She plays call and response with a slide guitar on “Do You Really Wanna Know?,” addressing an idle question about how she’s doing with the titular retort and wondering if the asker can handle her full truth. On the heartbreaking piano ballad “What Are You Gonna Tell Her?,” Guyton recalls moments from her youth when her innocence and naïve hopes for the world were dashed, such as sexual mistreatment from a friend’s brother and the realization that there’s a limit to what she can accomplish because of her gender, race, and economic status. There’s real pain in Guyton’s slightly wavering vocal as she wonders if her parent could have been more encouraging or frank about the challenges that lie ahead for her.

Guyton’s wide-ranging vocals have a way of investing even the weakest tracks on Remember Her Name with a freshness and power, sometimes belting an octave or two higher in a way that emphasizes the weight that her words carry. The accounts that she shares of “hard life on easy street,” and her family’s struggle for upward mobility, are piercing and generous. Along with Guyton’s gestures at self-love, these sentiments have too rarely been expressed in the context of country music, and Remember Her Name is, as a result, a welcome corrective.

Score: 
 Label: Capitol Nashville  Release Date: September 24, 2021  Buy: Amazon

Charles Lyons-Burt

Charles Lyons-Burt covers the government contracting industry by day and culture by night. His writing has also appeared in Spectrum Culture, In Review Online, and Battleship Pretension.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.