Bartees Strange Makes Experimental Music that Speaks to the Black Experience

Bartees Strange is busy. He’s busy waiting for fans (both old and new) to listen to his sophomore album, Farm to Table, set to release on June 17.

He’s busy creating unique music that meshes indie, alternative, rap, R&B and jazz music together to create something that you’ve never heard before.

Bartees Strange is also busy finding his full self. When The Root asked him to describe his music to someone who has never heard it before, Bartees said, “It’s Americana, it’s Black Americana. My favorite thing about music is history, my whole life I’ve been so fascinated with music and where things come from. As a guitarist and songwriter, I always start with hearing something and wondering where it came from.”

More times than not, Bartees landed on the Black experience.

Born Bartees Leon Cox Jr., Bartees hails from Mustang, Oklahoma, where he was raised in a Christian household singing in a church choir on Sundays. While he doesn’t make gospel music now, those experiences in the pew inform how he performs and makes music currently.

“An important thing about church music and gospel specifically is making sure you bring your full self,” said Bartees. “Recognizing that your spirit won’t move unless you’re open. I feel like when I’m playing music live, me and my band’s approach to the show is to bring our full selves.”

He did not always have the full confidence to be himself while performing his music. As a Black man who plays guitar and makes music in a genre that rarely sees Black people recognized, he admits there was some insecurity. For Bartees, that’s exactly what made him who he is.

“Everything I had run from made me who I am,” said Bartees. “When I was in high school I wanted to leave Oklahoma so bad. I remember in every walk of my life in the northeast the thing that kinda made me who I was that I was the only Black dude around and I was also from the south and I was also from Oklahoma.”

If you listen to Live Forever, Bartees’ 2020 album, and wonder to yourself “Damn, I’ve never heard anything like this” (my first reaction). Then hold on for his 2022 album Farm to Table, because he doubles down on his uniqueness.

Farm to Table is a laboratory, Bartees is the scientist and his music is the subject.

“I’ve always been curious about all these different sounds and wondering how they work together,” said Bartees. “Live Forever was an experiment for me in being my full self and for this album, I wanted to go even harder to show people more about who I am and why I’m doing this.”

The process for creating Farm to Table began the day Live Forever came out, on October 2, 2020. He was worried about how people were going to receive the album, so he made more music.

Unlike Live Forever, this new album doesn’t blatantly make his Black influences known. But it does speak to his Black experience growing up with a family on a farm in a rural, small city in Oklahoma that is 85 percent white.

Songs like “Black Gold” and “Hennessey” speak to specific feelings Bartees has had growing up around Black people.

But, one song in particular, “Hold the Line,” speaks to the more devastating parts of growing up with brown skin in the United States.

In a statement, Bartees said, “I remember watching George Floyd’s daughter talk about the death of her father and thinking wow—what a sad introduction to Black American life for this young person. It was painful to watch her grow up in that moment like all Black kids eventually do.”

He continued, “Through this song, I was trying to make sense of what was happening in the U.S., my neighborhood and my community at that moment. During the marches people were trying to stop the bleeding, locked arm in arm, doing everything they could to hold the line.

While every sound Bartees uses may not resonate or make sense for every Black person, each line he uses rings true to someone’s Black experience in America.

Bartees may just be an artist that wants to experiment with sounds and grow with his music. But he is also a voice for the Black kid who feels like they don’t fit in anywhere, no matter where they go.

And as a kid who was called a “weirdo” throughout his life, I can speak to the importance of having a musical voice like Bartees in the industry more than ever.