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BIO
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.
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