Alice Randall

The only African-American woman ever to write a number one country song, Alice Randall has had more than twenty songs recorded, including two Top 10 records and a Top 40.

Her work includes the only known recorded country songs to explore the subject of lynching in The Ballad of Sally Ann; mention Aretha Franklin in the same line as Patsy Cline in XXX's and OOO's: An American Girl; and give tribute to both the slave dead and the Confederate dead in I'll Cry for Yours, Will You Cry for Mine? 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 author of The Wind Done Gone, an unauthorized parody of the American classic Gone With The Wind, Randall was awarded the Free Spirit Award in 2001, the Literature Award of Excellence by the Memphis Black Writers Conference in 2002, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in 2002. Randall also wrote Pushkin and the Queen of Spades chronicling the tribulations of an African American professor of Russian literature whose pro football player son plans to marry a Russian lap dancer. Her latest book, Rebel Yell, explores racial irony through a young black couple struggling with their identity.

Originally from Detroit, Michigan, Randall grew up in an enclave of Motown populated almost exclusively with refugees from Alabama and then in Washington, DC. She 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 mother of Caroline Randall Williams, 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, Randall lives deeply down south.

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.