“It's where I fell in love with country music. After moving to Fishing Creek Island, Maryland as a young girl, she took a particular liking to The Johnny Cash Show. The Black artists Randall saw performing on the Welk show and others were hugely influential on her trajectory as a future songwriter. He treats them as artists, worthy of respect.” And he gives them a space to tell their entire family autobiographical music story on his show" she recalled. When the Mills Brothers guested on a 1964 episode, the “extreme respect” that Lawrence Welk treated them with left an impression on young Randall. While Lawrence Welk’s show was a Saturday night tradition in the Randall household, Georgia favored the music of Black artists like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and the Mills Brothers. “When my grandmother sat down to watch Lawrence Welk in Detroit with her grandchild in a house owned by her daughter, she is disrupting all of this. “She was born in a place, in a time, in Alabama where Black people served and white people were served where Black people performed and white people were entertained and where it was considered that all white performance was better than Black performance,” Randall explained. But it wasn’t exactly Welk’s music that Georgia tuned in for. But she vividly recalled the way her grandma would put on a silk dress, perfume, and jewelry when she sat down in front of the television with a young Alice. Randall said that, as a child, she found the show boring. The essay, titled “Music from the Magic Box,” recounts ceremonial nights spent with her grandmother, Georgia Minnie Randall, watching the classic television variety show The Lawrence Welk Show. “If you asked me where I was from, and if I really knew you well, I said Detroit, Alabama,” she told Stateside. In a recent essay for the Oxford American, multidisciplinary writer Alice Randall traced the lines between her Southern heritage and Detroit upbringing.