African-American woman aims for the country music charts

Growing up in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side, Liz Toussaint straddled a musical divide.

“In front of my friends, we listened to Biggie Smalls and Tupac,” she recently recalled, sliding into a stage whisper. “I never told anybody that at home I was listening to the Dixie Chicks.”

Toussaint’s crush on country began on her family’s summer road trips — when that high lonesome sound was all their station wagon’s radio could dial in. Once back home, the teenager kept quiet about the passion she felt would ostracize her, and country music was a cultural curse made worse by the fact that Toussaint was a promising pop singer, performing alongside a young Jennifer Hudson.

“You’re supposed to be Mary J. Blige — a hip-hop queen!” her brother Mustafa Abdullah remembers telling Toussaint when she first informed him that her heart ached not for Nas, but Nashville.

“No,” Abdullah pleaded with her, pointing out that the family had a musical pedigree to maintain — he works as a popular Chicago hip-hop DJ and uncle Allen Toussaint is a well-known R&B pianist.

“You cannot do country music!”

But Toussaint couldn’t help it.

“I was dead set: I’m not singing unless I’m singing country,” the now-30-year-old Toussaint said last week, wearing a cowboy hat, boots and a pearly grin.

Still, “it took a while before I could actually sing my original material in front of people without (wetting) myself.”

This summer, Toussaint plans to release an album titled, “My Name is Liz,” where she sings of being a “City Girl with a Country Soul.”

Like other country records, the album is full of songs about tough times, lost love and gunfighting — although this single mother of two ain’t just whistling Dixie.

“Someone was shot down on my corner just last week,” said Toussaint, who now lives in the city’s West Pullman neighborhood. “It’s real out here!”

If Toussaint’s forthcoming album manages to succeed, it’ll put her in rarefied company as a black country singer: Only two of the Country Music Hall of Fame’s 105 members are black, and the last time an African-American artist had a hit on the country charts — before Darius Rucker this year — was Charley Pride in 1983.

“And let’s be honest, Darius Rucker wouldn’t be there if he wasn’t in Hootie & the Blowfish,” said Frankie Staton, who runs the Black Country Music Association out of her Nashville home.

“I’ve seen (black performers) come and go, I’ve been at the bedside of those who died trying to make it happen and didn’t, but that shouldn’t dissuade Liz from trying.”

Toussaint said she’s no stranger to discrimination: When she first sent her demos and head shot to country-friendly clubs, no one responded.