On Thursday, Hillary Scott, Charles Kelley, and Dave Haywood took it to Twitter to announce changing the country group’s name to Lady A, previously Lady Antebellum, owing to its reference with the period 1830-1860 when Blacks were enslaved legally.
The group said they are embarrassed and sorry for choosing this name but they never realized the association of such a dark idea with it. The ‘Antebellum South’ is the period of pre-civil war in the Southern United States where different old beliefs were practiced such as White supremacy and slavery.
The reason this Grammy-winning band took this name, since 2006, was to pay its homage to the southern music that inspired the group like R&B and country and they also took their first pictures in the antebellum-style home.
The band members shared their sentiments on Twitter as they wrote they regret their choice for the band’s name and it was never their intention to hurt any individual or group but this does not change the fact that it did.point 304 |
So they apologized to their fans and disclosed they took this decision after many discussions and prayers with their black colleagues and friends.point 124 | point 126 | 1
The tweets also shed light on what took them so long for this realization and to further make actions accordingly. As per the group, they can’t make any excuse for being late but what they can do is to give up on the name and move on with what they have now understood.
It seems like the statement came in the context of George Floyd’s murder, a Black man who was murdered by a white cop as he knelt on his neck for 8-minutes straight suffocating him to death. Though the fans have always been calling them Lady A, it was never endorsed by the band until now.