[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [S]uch fiddling and dancing nobody ever before saw in this world. thought they were true 'heaven-borns.' Black and white, white and black, all hugemsnug together; happy as lords and ladies, sitting sometimes round in a ring, with a jug of liquor between them ... --Davy Crockett (1834) ain't nothing like a good, solid ride. don't care where you are or who you are. It 's just like music--smooth and perfect if you do it right. --bull rider Alonzo Pettie (1910-2003), America's oldest black at time of his death My belt buckle is my bling-bling. It's just going to keep getting bigger. --Cowboy (2005)' BLACK HILLBILLIES AND BLACKNECKS There was no necessary reason why Cowboy Troy's country-rap single, I Play Chicken With Train, should have caused such an uproar among country music fans when it was released in spring of 2005. The song itself is a sonic Rorschach test: not so singular a curiosity as many might think, but still a challenge to what passes for common knowledge in music business. It is animated by a sound and a lyric stance that might strike us, in a receptive mood, as uncanny--at once unfamiliar, a half-and-half blend of two musical idioms that rarely find themselves so jarringly conflated, and strangely familiar, as though song has distilled sound of ten-year-old boys filled with limitless bravado, jumping up and down and hollering into summer afternoon. Compared with other country-rap hybrids, I Play Chicken With Train contains surprisingly few sonic signifiers of hip-hop: no breakbeats, no samples, no drum machines, no scratching. The full burden of audible blackness is carried by Cowboy Troy's decidedly old-school rap, with its square phrasing, tame syncopations, and echoes of Run-DMC. One hears white voices framing, doubling, responding to, supporting, that black voice; simultaneously, one senses that somebody has torn down wall that is supposed to demarcate firmly boundary between twanging redneck euphoria--the lynch-mob's fiddle-driven rebel yell--and rap's exaggerated self-projections of urban black masculinity? The song scans, to receptive ears, as a particularly boisterous example of male-bonded American pastoral articulated by Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in American Novel, a transracial masculine idyll stretching its unencumbered limbs across some country & western frontier, civilized men throwing off their generic shackles and reinventing themselves as a fraternity of fearless young warriors out to revitalize world. Or else--to unreceptive--it is monstrous, and must be treated as monsters are treated. In The Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll defines monsters as entities that are un-natural relative to a culture's conceptual scheme of nature. They do not fit scheme; they violate it. Thus, monsters are not only physically threatening; they are cognitively threatening. They are threats to common knowledge. The email blast that alerted potential purchasers to recording's release fused a kind of King-Kong sensationalism with an assertion of scandalous, unprecedented hybridity: Cowboy Troy, we were informed, is the world's only six-foot, five-inch, 250-pound black cowboy rapper. Was that a threat, a brag, or a promise? (3) In his follow-up album of 2007, Black in Saddle, Cowboy referenced antipathy with which some whites and blacks greeted song and, by extension, his highly conspicuous presence in country music world. People I've never met wanna take me body surfing behind a pickup, he sang in How Can You Hate Me, referencing infamous dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas, at hands of two white men. As for black response to his hick-hop persona: silence from hip-hop precincts, at least publicly, has been deafening, although Vibe magazine did take note of Black in Saddle long enough to sneer at Coleman's presumptive audience: Troy and his twang trust are keen to serve two masters: game exurban blacks steeped in country grammar and white fans of post-redneck rock. …