Before Nashville, There Was Congo Square | RHOC Emily Simpson Analysis | Somebody said the quiet part out loud about Beyoncé and country music, and this episode is what happens when you actually go look it up.
We open with what was recounted on Bravo's Most Wanted, attributed exactly as it was told, and then Elle and Ric react to it as producers before the tone shifts. Because the reaction is the easy part. The interesting part is that the premise underneath the comment is wrong, and there is a dated eyewitness account that proves it.
That account comes from a square in New Orleans. Under French and later Spanish colonial practice, enslaved people in the city had Sundays off, and by 1817 the city had designated Congo Square as the only legal place for Black people to gather. Historian Dena Epstein's conclusion is the line that matters here. This was the only place in America where the African musical tradition was able to continue in the open. Everywhere else it was suppressed or driven underground.
In February 1819, an architect named Benjamin Latrobe walked up on those Sunday gatherings and wrote the most detailed account we have. He sketched the instruments. One of them was a banza, a gourd bodied stringed instrument that came before the banjo, and he noted it had been brought from Africa and was being played by a man in his eighties or nineties. Fifteen years later, another observer listed banjos, violins, tom toms, jawbones and triangles in the same square. Banjos and fiddles together, in a Black gathering, decades before anybody recorded a country record.
Elle walks through why the city mattered structurally. New Orleans was the largest slave market in the antebellum South and it sat at the mouth of the Mississippi, which means whatever happened musically there traveled upriver into Tennessee, Kentucky and the Ohio Valley. Then come the receipts. The 1920s split of one shared Southern catalog into hillbilly records and race records. Jimmie Rodgers recording with Louis Armstrong in 1930. Aaron Neville charting country and winning a country Grammy.
Beyoncé topping the country chart and getting shut out of the CMA ballot.
And then the part this show always comes back to. Format gatekeeping in country radio and production editing in unscripted television are the same instrument pointed at different rooms. Both decide what a person is before the tape rolls, then select the material that proves it. Both call the result neutral. Both blame the audience.
Host Elle Schwartz is a behavioral analyst. The Good Edit Unfiltered brings context to reality television and challenges audiences to understand the nuances of the housewife experience, including how that experience is sometimes shifted unfairly through production edits. The podcast continues to rise in rank.
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