Alice Randall was
born in Detroit, Michigan, in an enclave of Motown populated almost
exclusively with refugees from Alabama. She grew up in Washington,
D.C., and then attended Harvard University, from which she
graduated in 1981 with an honors degree in English and American
literature. In 1983 she moved to Nashville to become a country
songwriter. The only African-American woman in history to write a
number-one country song, she has had over twenty songs recorded,
including two top ten records and a top forty. Her work includes
the only known recorded country songs to explore the subject of
lynching ("The Ballad of Sally Ann"), mention Aretha Franklin in
the same line as Patsy Cline ("XXX's and OOO's: An American Girl"),
and give tribute to both the slave dead and the Confederate dead
("I'll Cry for Yours, Will You Cry for Mine?"). Ms. Randall is also
a produced screenwriter (a movie of the week for CBS) and has
worked on adaptations of Their Eyes Were Watching God,
Parting the Waters, and Brer Rabbit.


The mother of Caroline Randall Williams (who is the
great-granddaughter of the Harlem Renaissance poet Arna Bontemps)
and the wife of attorney David Ewing (a ninth-generation resident
of Nashville and a great-great-grandson of Prince Albert Ewing, the
first African American to practice law in Tennessee), Alice Randall
Ewing lives deeply down south. Early in their courtship, Alice and
David took Caroline on her first trip to Atlanta, a city that has
long been important in Alice’s family because it is where her
father, George, was briefly enrolled at Morris Brown, one of the
nation's oldest black colleges.


The entire family is involved in documenting and preserving the
history of people of color in the American South, with particular
interest in the history of enslaved women and enslaved children and
in the formerly enslaved who went on to striking academic
achievement or whose children did. They have lectured, researched,
consulted, and written about these topics, and have served on the
boards of a variety of museums, historic houses, and institutions
concerned with preserving and documenting the lives of enslaved
people and their descendants, including Belle Meade Plantation,
Carnton, the Hermitage (Andrew Jackson's home), Traveler's Rest,
the Metro Historic Commission (of Nashville), the African-American
Historical and Genealogical Association, the Family Cemetery
Project, the Andrew Jackson's Slave Descendent Project, and Fisk
University.

Books by Alice Randall

The Wind Done Gone

by Alice Randall - Fiction