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The annual roller coaster that is South by Southwest hit its first peak Wednesday night with the 10th annual Austin Music Awards show, and then plummeted downward Thursday morning with the event’s official opening ceremonies. Instead of the traditional keynote speech, SXSW had scheduled opening remarks by Michelle Shocked followed by welcoming comments from Willie Nelson (who didn’t want his name associated with anything as formal as a keynote speech).

Shocked’s well-meaning but muddled analysis of racism in America met with a tepidly polite response from the audience, which was anticipating Nelson. It was then announced by SXSW managing director Roland Swenson that Nelson was a no-show, delayed on the road again in Laredo, though Nelson promised that he would arrive in time to play during Poi Dog Pondering’s free show at Auditorium Shores Thursday evening.

“The speech part of it was something that he wasn’t too anxious to do,” admitted Swenson, who had invited Nelson to speak at most of the previous conferences and had annually been turned down. This year, however, Nelson had been expected to use the platform to promote Farm Aid V, scheduled Saturday in Irving.

Shouldering alone the agenda-setting responsibility, Shocked offered an anecdotal analysis of current racial relations as an outgrowth of blackface minstrelsy. It was a provocative topic, particularly pertinent at a conference offering music heavily steeped in black influence, but which remains overwhelmingly white in both the registrants it attracts and the artists it presents.

The singer-songwriter’s central example of a Fishbone concert – a black band that draws a predominantly white audience – as modern minstrelsy made no distinction between reinforcing racial stereotypes and subverting them (which that band in particular consciously attempts). Her tentative stab at dealing with rap seemed confused, as even she acknowledged that she wasn’t quite making her points for her audience. She repeatedly advised the crowd to purchase a pamphlet written by her fiancé and journalist Bart Bull who had inspired her interest in the topic.

Ultimately, Shocked’s contention that truth can get crushed within “the weight of history, and the way that history gets told and who that history gets told by” is an important issue, one that is central to the American character. As a speechmaker, however, she communicates more lucidly with her mandolin.