Massachusetts Daily Collegian

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A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

Rapper wants to be country’s first black star since Charley Pride

DALLAS – Cowboy Troy can’t walk into a concert venue without turning heads. He knows there’s no way a 6-foot-5-inch black country rapper can escape the curious stares. Especially when he’s wearing a Superman T-shirt. The spotlight, he admits, can be intimidating.

“There are times where if you let it wear you down, you can feel the pressure,” says the 34-year-old Dallas-raised artist. “There are times when I find myself walking through venues and I can kind of feel the looks from people. `Oh, so he’s the one.’ I walk through places and I can hear the whispers. When the lights come on and the music starts and you’re out there on stage and you hear the people cheering, clapping, it’s pretty cool.”

It’s also historic. Cowboy Troy Coleman is country music’s first rapper, a purveyor of what he calls “hick-hop,” a mixture of authentic country instrumentation, hip-hop rhythms and flowing, rhyming words.

And if he’s successful, he will become the first black country artist to break out since Charley Pride almost 40 years ago.

Cowboy Troy first attracted the attention of country fans in 2004 during Big ‘ Rich’s tour. He rapped on “Rollin’ (The Ballad of Big ‘ Rich),” a cut from the pair’s 2-million-selling debut album, “Horse of a Different Color.”

When he performed that rap at last year’s Country Music Association Awards in Nashville, he was the first black artist since Pride to take the stage at the awards show.

“That’s pretty interesting to me on a historical basis and pretty humbling at the same time because they didn’t have to let me do it,” he says. “They could have said, `No, no, that’s not where we want to go.’ But the CMA board was very gracious and very kind to me in allowing me to participate.”

The buzz on him grew louder after five months on the road with Big ‘ Rich opening for country superstar Tim McGraw. McGraw was so impressed with Cowboy Troy’s rapping abilities that he asked Coleman to write a rap to perform during “She’s My Kind of Rain,” one of McGraw’s hit country ballads.

“You already had this rap on a major-label release and then you’ve got one of the biggest names in country music saying, `Hey man, we want you to do something like that on my set,'” says Coleman. He rapped during “She’s My Kind of Rain” every night until the end of the trek.

He also wore a Superman T-shirt every night of the tour. It was supposed to be a onetime goofy sight gag, but the crowd and the other musicians on the tour loved it, so it became his uniform.

“I ended up having to buy five or six of them,” he says. “You wash one five times in one week and eventually it starts fading. … I retired it at the end of the tour.”

Now Coleman’s on his own. “Loco Motive,” which arrives in stores May 17, is the first release on Big ‘ Rich’s label, Raybaw, which stands for “red and yellow black and white.” He hopes to capitalize on the success of Big ‘ Rich’s album and the media attention showered on the Muzik Mafia, the no-boundaries artist collective formed by Big Kenny and John Rich. That collective includes sizzling newcomer Gretchen Wilson (“Redneck Woman”), Cowboy Troy and a cast of quirky musicians and offbeat characters.

“It’s important that Cowboy Troy is the first one because it kind of goes along with the whole Mafia theme of music without prejudice,” says Cory Gierman, general manager of Raybaw Records and one of the founders of the Muzik Mafia. Coleman’s time on the Big ‘ Rich tour helped, too.

“He was the first one to get the exposure. So we decided to kick it off with him and get the train rolling.”

Every track on “Loco Motive” showcases Cowboy Troy’s way with rhymes. His robust voice glides smoothly over country-rocking instrumentation. Big ‘ Rich sing on three cuts, and McGraw and Muzik Mafia members James Otto and Jon Nicholson each sing on one track.

The lead cut on “Loco Motive” is the rock-and-hip-hop-influenced “I Play Chicken With the Train,” a loose metaphor for his battle to stare down the country music world:

“People said it’s impossible … not probable … too radical/But I already been on the CMA’s …,” he raps.

“I’m big and black, clickety-clack/And I make the train jump the track like that!”

For Troy Coleman, that country, rock and hip-hop combo was the soundtrack of his high school days.

He was enthralled with music, all kinds of it. He moved from the country sounds of Charlie Daniels, the Oak Ridge Boys and Jerry Reed to rockers Kiss, Kansas, Eagles, ZZ Top and Foreigner. But he had a penchant for rappers LL Cool J, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Run DMC, Ice-T and Ice Cube. Rapping was a fun pastime that got him noticed.

“I was kind of messing around with it, listening to the cassettes back then at the house and I had my headphones on hitting the rewind button over and over. I kept hitting that rewind button so I could deliver it just like the guys did on the tape. It became kind of a party trick. I messed around with that from time to time. I remember one time doing that in front of a group of students and they would say, ‘Didn’t know you could do that.'”

Coleman decided to give it a shot. He kept in contact with John Rich, whom he met in Dallas in 1993 when Rich was a member of Texassee, which later became Lonestar. By 1999, Cowboy Troy was making trips to Nashville, unsuccessfully trying to stir up interest in his unique style. That’s when Rich introduced him to Big Kenny. Four years later, when Big ‘ Rich were recording their debut CD, Rich called Cowboy Troy with the proposition of a lifetime.

” ‘Rollin’ didn’t originally have a rap part in it,” he says. “And they asked me to write a rap part for it. They said they had gotten the go-ahead from the label to put the rap in there. They wanted me to be on the record. That was just nuts for me. I was like, `Sure!’ It began to sink in that I was going to make an appearance on a major-label release for mass consumption. I was trying to wrap my mind around it at the time.”

Today, Cowboy Troy’s life is on a roller coaster. He and his wife, Laura, relocated to Nashville. He’s promoting the upcoming “Loco Motive” with the usual media interviews and personal appearances. But he knows the album might face an uphill battle.

In a genre guilty of supporting the conventional and ignoring the experimental, his one shot is make-or-break. Unconventional artists such as Cowboy Troy either explode instantly or fizzle quickly. But like Big ‘ Rich, a top-selling act not often played on the radio, Cowboy Troy has honky-tonks on his side.

Big ‘ Rich’s mix of traditional country, rock, hip-hop and some Southern gospel appeals to the young fans who crowd the clubs every weekend. Walk into any honky-tonk and before long you’ll hear the DJ play a rock tune or a hip-hop track. And when that happens, everybody flocks to the dance floor.

“I’m one of those people at the bar jumping out on the floor dancing around when those songs came on,” says Coleman. “I knew there were other people out there like myself that enjoyed those combinations of music: rock, rap and country, all in one song.”

The first sign country music could be hip enough to accept Cowboy Troy came when rap rocker Kid Rock morphed into Southern rock before completely embracing his inner hillbilly on 2003’s “Kid Rock.” Then Big ‘ Rich sold 2 million albums.

And country rap may not be the big stretch it appears. In the original square dancing, the announcer was essentially rapping to an Appalachian beat.

“Cowboy Troy is what he says he is,” says Paul Worley, head of the artist and repertoire department for Warner Bros. Nashville and a co-producer of “Loco Motive.” “We did not make him up. He’s a 6-foot-5 black rapping cowboy that grew up in Dallas loving all kinds of music, and yet his first love is country music. … So when I started hearing some of these songs, I thought, ‘We gotta do this `cause it’s great.'”

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