Fox, Tucson Meet Yourself co-presenting free country concert Friday

Palmer will have a lot more time when she comes back this week to play a free concert at Fox Tucson Theatre on Friday, Aug. 28.

“I'm coming in on the 27th and I'm not leaving until Sunday,” Palmer said. “I'm excited because there's a community component to this. I'll be speaking with school children earlier in the day before the actual show … and then they have some other things planned for me the day after the show.”

Palmer’s Tucson concert is part of “Of the People: The Smithsonian Festival of Festivals” nationwide tour of 40 folklife festivals and events around the country through November, including Tucson Meet Yourself Oct. 16-18. Fox Tucson and the Southwest Folklife Alliance, which puts on Meet Yourself, are co-presenting Palmer’s concert with the Smithsonian.

Palmer will share the stage with her longtime guitarist Charles Newkirk and a backup vocalist. She’ll sing songs from her four career studio albums going back to her eponymous 2007 debut and her most recent, “Perspectives,” released in February — seven years after 2019’s “Revival.”

She also plans to mix in some of the singles she has recorded over the years and a song or two from her forthcoming album “Survivor’s Joy,” due out next year.

“Lord, I feel like I've been talking about ‘Survivor's Joy’ for like five years, but it didn't feel complete until this summer,” she said. “It's the first album that I've done with my touring band. … We wrote together on this project, and this is the first project they've ever written on so it's special for a lot of reasons.”

The album delves into the changes in Palmer’s life over the past several years, including a divorce and “kind of dealing with the new normal of that and some of the insights and self-awareness from that.”

Her concert at the Fox might remind some people in the audience of “MTV Unplugged,” a series that ran from 1989-2009 that featured artists playing acoustic versions of their songs and telling stories about the music or themselves.

“You know, I'm an '80s kid, born in the '80s, and so I love the whole format,” said the 45-year-old mother of two. “That's kind of what the show is like; I'll tell the stories behind the songs and that sort of thing, like we're having a conversation. It's not just you sit down and you get a concert and you're going to be sung at. I'd like to think that I'm singing with you.”

The conversation will include the story of Black country music, whose history has been lost to “a really amazing marketing job done in country music to make it appear as thought it is a white genre," she said

“I don't think it was through the fault of artists necessarily. I think it's more of a marketing thing,” Palmer said. “In the early days, artists would record exactly the same songs, and one would be sold as a race record, and the other would be sold as ‘hillbilly’ records. So I think all of this is just like extremely effective marketing.”

Country music was born from the blues traditions of African-Americans combined with folk influences from Western European immigrants, who introduced fiddles, banjos and guitars early in the 20th century. In the 1920s, DeFord Bailey became America’s first Black country music star, checking the boxes as the first to record in Nashville and the first to play on the Grand Ole Opry stage.

Black artists continued to inch toward acceptance in the country music space, but it wasn’t until the early 1960s that America had its first Black country music superstar in Charlie Pride. Over a 40-plus-year career, Pride sold more than 70 million albums worldwide and had 30 No. 1 hits.

Palmer was among a small handful of Black female country artists signed to Nashville labels in the early 2000s. And while she scored a historic coup in 2007 when her single “Country Girl” made the Billboard charts, history credits Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish fame for opening the door for Black country artists after his 2008 debut album “Learn to Live” spun off three No. 1 singles and sold platinum (more than a million copies).

In recent years, Black country artists including Mickey Guyton, Shaboozey, Kane Brown, Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, the GRAMMY-nominated duo The War and Treaty, and boundary-pushing voices like Reyna Roberts and RVSHVD have found a home in country music.

“I'm really excited about the fact that in the mainstream there are so many examples of people of color doing country music,” Palmer said. “It's a really great time in the culture at large to set the record straight. It's not that we're trying to tell anyone that what you know is wrong. There's just more for you to know, I think.”

In addition to her concert at the Fox, Palmer is scheduled on Saturday, Aug. 29, to tour The Dunbar Pavilion and KXCI studios in Armory Park, where she will appear on host Tyina Steptoe’s “Soul Stories” program from 2-5 p.m.

The Smithsonian’s “Of the People” tour replaces the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival that has taken place on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., every July since 1959. It was canceled this year to accommodate President Trump’s “Great American State Fair” as part of his Freedom 250 events marking the country’s 250th anniversary.

In addition to several folklife festivals around the country, “Of the People” is sponsoring a number of music festivals including Farm Aid in September, Georgia’s Talbotton Blues Festival in October and Jackson, Mississippi’s 83rd annual National Folk Festival in November.

“Of the People” is designed to amplify “festivals as spaces for civic engagement” and “to uphold equality and describe the United States as shaped by the knowledge, needs, and most importantly participation of its people.”

“Black musicians in the country music scene perfectly align with that,” said Maribel Alvarez, co-director and senior curator of Tucson Meet Yourself. “It’s an opportunity to shine the light on things that we either take for granted or we have not seen.”

TMY has been collaborating with the Smithsonian since earlier this year, when the Washington, D.C.-based organization announced plans for “Of the People.” Among Meet Yourself’s Smithsonian-inspired initiatives is a traveling kiosk where residents can record their interpretation of “We Hold These Truths.”

Friday’s concert at Fox Tucson Theatre, 17 W. Congress St., starts at 7 p.m. Register for free tickets at foxtucson.com.