Mickey Guyton Performs Historic Single ‘Black Like Me’ on ‘Colbert’

Country star Mickey Guyton performed her historic, Grammy-nominated single, “Black Like Me,” on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Monday, February 1st.

The performance found Guyton stripping back some of the elements of the song and presenting it with just piano and guitar accompaniment. With a wash of candles flickering in the background, Guyton belted the frank and devastating chorus, “It’s a hard life on easy street/Just white painted picket fences far as you can see/If you think we live in the land of the free/You should try to be black like me.”

Guyton wrote “Black Like Me” in the summer of 2019 but didn’t release it until last June, amid the uprisings against police brutality following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The track later appeared on her Bridges EP, which was released in September.

In November, “Black Like Me” was nominated for Best Country Solo Performance, making Guyton the first black female solo artist to earn a Grammy nod in a country category. The last black female artists nominated in a country category were the Pointer Sisters, who won Best Country Performance by a Duo/Group for “Fairytale” in 1975.