Words by Javacia Harris Bowser
Photos By Lynsey Weatherspoon
When listening to the songs of the country music artist known as Pynk Beard, you may feel as if you’ve taken a road trip to Birmingham, Alabama. And if you’re from the area, Pynk Beard’s music might feel like home.
“Country music is just about telling where you’re from, and where I’m from just happens to be Birmingham, Alabama,” says the artist. “I believe that country music is just music that comes from the soul of country folk.”
In his EP “Red Dirt Diaries,” released in October 2025, Pynk Beard sings of being from “the edge of town,” a small community called Dolomite on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, and shows the diversity of both country music and the South.
“Whenever you try to distill a culture into one thing, you ruin it,” he says. “There are some parts of the country that are a little rougher than they are rural. There are some parts that are a little bit more dirt road than avenue.”
Pynk Beard first made a name for himself as Sebastian Kole, a Grammy Award-winning songwriter who has penned hits for major artists such as John Legend, Brandy, Alicia Keys, and Jennifer Lopez. As recently as 2025, his contributions to the Alicia Keys project “Hell’s Kitchen” earned him a third Grammy Award, this time for Best Musical Theater Album, for his writing on the song “Perfect Way To Die.”
But his recent work in country music isn’t new.
“I used to be signed to Motown as an artist, and my first album was supposed to be a country album,” he says. “But it was 2012, and nobody really understood a Black man from Alabama doing country music.”
Today, things have changed—sort of.
The same night that Sebastian Kole won his third Grammy Award, Beyoncé became the first Black artist to win the Grammy Award for Best Country Album. Her 2024 country music album, “Cowboy Carter,” won Album of the Year and set the stage for Shaboozey’s country/hip-hop interpolation “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” to top charts worldwide.
None of this surprises Pynk Beard.
He knew Shaboozey’s single would be a hit, and he says the first time he heard Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, he knew it would be one of the biggest songs in the world.
Nonetheless, detractors continue to question the presence of some Black artists, including megastars like Beyoncé, in country music. But Pynk Beard believes this hurts country music more than it hurts him.
“You develop a picture from the negatives,” he says. “Those people that think that I don’t belong help me stand out. You get to see the measure of man that I really am, based on how I handle those people.”
Pynk Beard hopes his music speaks to people who have felt ignored by country music in the past. And while he appreciates the increased visibility of Black country music artists, he feels the genre still has a long way to go. He wants people to know the names of more than just a handful of Black country singers.
“My biggest hurdle to jump is figuring out where I fit in the country music space,” he says.
Telling His Story
The life of a songwriter is more grind than glamour. Pynk Beard shares that, as Sebastian Kole, he wrote about 700 songs a year for 15 years.
“Of course, that doesn’t mean I had 700 songs a year come out,” he says. “I might get 10 songs a year that come out.”
He adds that he loved songwriting for the same reason that he loves country music: the storytelling.
“I’ve helped a lot of people tell their stories,” he says.
Now he wants to tell his story.
His is the story of a Black man from Dolomite, a small, unincorporated community west of downtown Birmingham.
“It was a great place to incubate your own thoughts,” he says of the area. “It’s not a lot that gets in or out of there. So whatever you come up with, you’re responsible for growing it up yourself.”
He grew up in church, which is where he was first exposed to singing and songwriting.
“We couldn’t listen to songs that were on the radio, so all the songs that we sang at church, somebody at my church wrote them,” he says. “So, everybody was a songwriter when I was coming up. And I got a chance to participate in the church services because I would write a song.”
Then, in the sixth grade, his girlfriend gave him the soundtrack to the 1994 film “Forrest Gump” for Valentine’s Day. It was the first piece of secular music he’d owned. “It changed my life,” he says.
He was captivated by the sounds of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Simon & Garfunkel, and many more.
“This felt like church to me,” he says of the instrumentation of the songs.
Becoming Pynk Beard
The Pynk Beard persona is no act. It’s a revival.
He was no longer happy simply working behind the scenes.
“I was getting really sad,” he says. “And this brought me back to life because this is so very me.”
The pink beard is his way of standing out.
“I tell any new artist that I talk to: Learn all the rules, and then find one rule and break it,” he says. “And that’s how you stick out. This is the rule I broke. Men don’t wear pink, and they definitely don’t put it on their face.”
He likes that the pink beard makes people smile. But most of all, he says, it’s encouragement to keep going.
“It’s like a kick in the butt every morning,” he says. “I look at myself in the mirror, and I go, ‘If you don’t do something productive today, you look ridiculous. You’ve got to do something to earn this.’”
Though Pynk Beard proudly calls his sound country music, he doesn’t get too caught up in genres.
“Most music is country music, when you really think about it,” he says, adding that jazz, blues, folk, Southern soul, R&B, bluegrass, gospel, and hip-hop all have something in common with country music.
“The first thing you learn about a person that does that kind of music is where they’re from, and where they’re from is more important than really even who they are,” he says.
And where a person is from often colors the person that they become.
“Birmingham shaped me,” he says. “It encouraged me to do me and allowed me to do me. Keep in mind I’m walking around with a cotton-candy-pink beard, and ain’t nobody fought me yet.”
Catch Pynk Beard on tour this summer as he travels across the South. For updates and music, visit pynkbeard.com.
