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By Emily Nussbaum
On March 20, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, a block from the Lower Broadway honky-tonks, Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the pop-punk band Paramore, played a country beat with her guitar. He takes the stage in a ketchup wig and gold lamé boots. Redone for the time being.
Singer-songwriter Allison Russell looked at them with a smile. In just 3 weeks, she and an organization of like-minded progressives had organized “Love Rising,” a benefit concert meant to show resistance to Tennessee’s law targeting L. G. B. T. Q. citizens – adding a law, recently signed by the state’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, that bans pickup trucks anywhere young people might see them. The stars had been texting to known friends; manufacturers had worked for free. The organizers had even booked Nashville’s biggest venue, the Bridgestone, only to have its board, fearful of breaking the law, cancel the deal. In the end, they had softened their promotional language by posting a banner that simply read, in lavender lettering, “a birthday party of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” with no “drag,” no “trans,” no mention of Politics. It’s a small compromise, Russell told me, because their purpose is broader and deeper than party politics: They needed their listeners to know they weren’t alone in damaging times. There’s a Nashville that many other people didn’t know existed, and it just might fill the city’s biggest corridor.
The doors were about to open. Behind the scenes, global stars like Sheryl Crow, Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes and Julien Baker, the Tennessee-born member of indie supergroup boygenius, were spotted alongside non-binary country singer Adeem the Artist, who wore a plum-colored lipstick stick and faded away. denim jacket. Singer-songwriters Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires walked by, swinging their seven-year-old daughter, Mercy, between them. There were more than thirty artists, many of whom, like Russell, referred to themselves as Americana, an umbrella. Term for country music outside the mainstream. In the American universe, Isbell and Shires were big stars, but not on Nashville’s Music Row, the corporate music engine of country radio. , the after-sober intimate love song “Cover Me Up”, was covered by country star Morgan Wallen, many Wallen enthusiasts assumed he had written it.
Shires, overcome by the crowds behind the stage, invited me to sit with her in her dressing room, where she served each of us a glass of red wine. A Texas-born violinist and member of the feminist supergroup Highwomen, there was forest green feathers clustered around her eyelids, like a bird, her own form of drag, Shires joked. Surrounded by makeup palettes, she opened up about her ties to the cause: her aunt is trans, anything her grandmother may have refused to acknowledge, even on her deathbed. The city followed by Shires is in danger, he told me, and he had begun to think that more provocative strategies might be necessary after the recent redistricting of the Tennessee legislature, which amounted to voter suppression. “Jason, can I Lent you a minute?” He called the antechamber, where Isbell hung out with Mercy. “Gerrymandering: How can we triumph over this?”
“Local elections,” Isbell said.
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“Don’t you think the answer is anarchy?” said Shires, waving one of his tied heels like a decoy.
“Well, you know, if you’re the dirtiest fighter in a fight, you’re going to win,” Isbell said, quietly, slumped against the door frame. they. And if there are no regulations, or if regulations replace depending on who won the last bout, you’re screwed. Do it where you can bite your ears!”
That night, the dominant emotion on “Love Rising” was not anarchy but comfort: a healing vibe, interrupted by calls to register to vote. Nashville Mayor John Cooper, a Democrat, spoke; the stars of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” made the impression via Zoom. American folk singer Joy Oladokun, who had a “keep hope alive” sticker on her guitar, spoke sweetly about growing up in a small town being black and “queer. “kind of woman, but not quite in the binary. “Jake Wesley Rogers, whose sequined suit and big yellow glasses channeled Elton John, sang a surprising edit of his positive queer pop anthem “Pluto”: “Hate me, hate me. “, hate me!/ I might also hate the sun / for shining a little too bright. »
Before Adeem, the artist directed “For Judas,” an ironic love song to a man, summed it up well, describing it as “a juxtaposition of joy and fear. “moving to Pittsburgh, “the Paris of Appalachia,” with his wife and young daughter. In Tennessee, hiring was too high and politics too cruel. While Adeem appreciated the solidarity of “Love Rising,” they saw its message as the best. Naïve friend: As Shires had suggested, the state was already so completely rigged, “forcefully sculpted,” that, even though every one of the best friends they knew voted, the solution lay in it.
Only one classic country star played that night: Maren Morris, a Grammy-winning artist whose 2016 hit “My Church” was an unresisting professional radio anthem that celebrated making a song in her car as a form of “sacred redemption. “Morris, who had good fortune in terrestrial radio—the normal, unbroadcast genre you pay attention to on a vacation on the road—was an exception to the rules of Music Row, where liberal singers, even supernovas like Dolly Parton, kept their politics codified, supportive but overly talkative pershapers, especially women, They tended to be kicked out of the Row and turned to the more indulgent pop world, as had happened with Taylor Swift, Kacey Musgraves, and Brandi Carlile (who, along with Amanda Shires, Natalie Hemby, and Morris, is a member of Highwomen). Decades later, everyone in Nashville was still talking quietly about what happened to the Dixie Chicks in 2003 when they were censored after speaking out against the war in Iraq.
Morris had recently had some online skirmishes with right-wing influencers, adding Brittany Aldean, the magician wife of singer Jason Aldean. Morris had called it the “Barbie uprising”; in response, Jason Aldean had encouraged a concert audience to boo Morris’s name. Both sides had sold shock products. The Villagers were selling Barbie tops that said “don’t step on our kids. ” Morris fans can buy a top that says “country music nutcase,” the nickname Tucker Carlson gave her, and another that says “you’ve been given a seat at this table. ” (She donated the proceeds to L. G. B. T. Q. charities. ) A few months before “Love Rising,” Morris interviewed one of the organizers of the event, Hunter Kelly, host of Proud Radio, a queer-themed channel on Apple Music. Array and told him that she was looking after being known for her songs, not by their applause on Twitter. But, he added to her, she wouldn’t apologize for holding political views: “I can’t just be this web store that sells you songs and tops. ” In the Nashville context, she explained, “I’m a lot louder than me, because everyone is so quiet. “
Toward the end of the concert, Morris, a little brunette in a long tuxedo coat and a small skirt, sang “Better Than We Found It,” a protest song, encouraged by her newborn son, which she had written after George’s death. During his opening joke, he had told a sweet, casual story about his son, now three, in awe as drag queens stood ready backstage, amid clouds of glitter and hairspray. “And, yes, I brought my son to drag queens today,” Morris added, impertinently. “So Tennessee, fuck, arrest me!” The next day, Fox News focused on the moment.
After the concert, Adeem’s Realpolitik echoed in my head. For all its heat and energy, “Love Rising” hadn’t sold out of the Bridgestone Arena. And Adeem isn’t the only one leaving Tennessee: Hunter Kelly moves to Chicago with her husband. , frustrated that artists whose paintings he had celebrated for decades, such as Parton and Miranda Lambert, had not spoken out. That night, I saw the other aspect of Nashville, down the street, at the honky-tonk bar Legends Corner. he danced and drank, shouting the lyrics to Toby Keith’s old hit, “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” a jingoistic number that, twenty years ago, helped get the Chicks off the radio.
You realize certain things about a town when you’re an outsider. There, the way they all ended their description of Nashville the same way: “It’s a small town within a big city. Everyone knows everyone. There’s the fact that all the other Uber drivers were part of an organization. There were the pink shops, with names like Vow’d, promoting component materials for singles. Above a cafe with a #BlackLivesMatter sign, a smiling billboard flanks a proudly “troublesome” weekly. I had originally come to town to learn about an organization of local singer-songwriters whose presence challenged an industry long ruled by brother country: slick, hollow songs about trucks and beer, sung by interchangeable white dudes. This new guard, made up of black queer songwriters, musicians and artists, championed a new kind of outlaw, expanding a genre that many outsiders considered bland and narrow-minded, conservative in many ways. What I discovered in Nashville is a more confusing story: a city in the midst of a bloody metamorphosis, reflected in a struggle over who owned Music City.
Every town changes. But Nashville’s transformation, which began a decade ago and exponentially accelerated the pandemic, has surprised the other people who love the city most. “None of that existed,” music critic Ann Powers told me, pointing to swathes of new structure. There was a flash flood in 2010, and at the start of the pandemic, a tornado leveled many structures, adding music venues like the basement. But the structure went far beyond restructuring; it was a radical overhaul, meant to appeal to a new demographic. In trendy East Nashville, small houses were demolished to make way for “tall and skinny” structures, layered structures ideal for Airbnbs. The Gulch, a once-industrial domain where bluegrass fiddlers still gather at the humble Station Inn, was lined with luxury hotels. Broadway, once a rough community with a handful of honky-tonks, had become NashVegas, a strip filled with nightclubs named after country stars. Only tourists went there now. Mayor Cooper, meanwhile, was looking to host the Super Bowl, which meant building a domed football stadium big enough for another sixty thousand people, which meant the city needed more parking lots, more hotels, and more.
This physical renewal was accompanied by a political renewal. The city, a blue bubble in a red state, had long prided itself on its reputation for racial civility, for being a position where other people in a war of words can simply co-exist: the so-called Nashville Way. Then, in September 2020, right-wing troublemaker Ben Shapiro and his media empire, the Daily Wire, moved out of Los Angeles, following a giant organization that included online influencer Candace Owens, who left Washington, D. C. , for the prosperous Nashville suburb of Franklin. That team, along with other alt-right figures (commentator Tomi Lahren, social media executives Parler) joined forces with shop-friendly country stars like Kid Rock and Jason Aldean, club owners on Broadway. Under Gov. Lee, who took office in 2019, Tennessee politics glowed red: abortion was necessarily prohibited; gun laws were lax; Terraformed school boards of Moms for Freedom. Now the state has sought to ban flirting and health care for trans youth. When the liberal-leaning Nashville City Council refused to host the 2024 Republican National Convention, Lee swore revenge and attempted to cut the length of the council in half. A week after the “Love Rising” concert, a gunman, whose gender identity was ambiguous, murdered six other people, plus 3 children, at a local Christian school. The gun protests that flooded the Capitol sounded like a cathartic expression from a population already on the brink. At a rally, country singer Margo Price led Bob Dylan’s “Tears of Rage. “
Throughout the pandemic, newcomers continued to arrive: a thousand per month, by some estimates. Sometimes it was as if California had tilted, sending refugees rolling east like pinball machines, and while some of Nashville’s new inhabitants were wealthy Angelenos tired of living in a chimney area, there were more complex attractions. Tennessee had no state source of income taxes, and Nashville had abandoned its mask mandate. It was now imaginable to paint from home, so why not visit Music City?When Shapiro announced after his decision, he called himself a “spearhead” and, if his politics leaned to the right, Nashville was a magnetic force, with the whiteness of the musical component of that charm.
For Nashville musicians, 2020 holds a milestone. Big stars have died, adding John Prine, the spark songwriter, and Charley Pride, the genre’s first black star. With tours canceled and recording stalled, artists had time to reflect and reconsider. Some were sobered up, others were given a high, and many other people started projects that reflected the volatile national mood. After “Better Than We Found It” was written by Maren Morris, who uploaded lyrics like “When the wolf’s at the door all covered in blue / Shouldn’t we see something new?” – She posted a video with pictures of Black Lives Matter and Nashville Dreamers signs. Tyler Childers, a bluegrass-influenced singer-songwriter from rural Kentucky, made a video for his song “Long Violent History” in which he encouraged other poor white people in the South to see his fate tied to Breonna’s. . Taylor. Mickey Guyton, pretty much the only black woman on the radio, released a song called “Black Like Me. ” The Dixie Chicks released “Dixie”; Lady Antebellum replaced her call to Lady A. Everywhere the cracks gave the impression of Nashville Way.
That same year, Morgan Wallen, a Sneedville, Tennessee local who signed to sister-country establishment Big Loud Records in 2016 when he was twenty-three, briefly called off. In October, Wallen was scheduled to perform on “Saturday Night Live,” but after a video showed him partying in violation of covid restrictions, the invitation was revoked. Then, after he apologized and gave the impression on the show, a video of the moment gave the impression, in which he used the N-word. Country radio dropped it; Big Loud suspended his contract; Jason Isbell donated the proceeds from “Cover Me Up,” the song Wallen had recorded, to the N. A. A. C. P. And then, in the complete opposite of what had happened to the Chicks, Wallen’s “Dangerous” album shot up the charts. When I asked an Uber driver, a woman in her 60s with a slicked-back ponytail, what music she liked, she said: “Morgan Wallen, of course. When asked what idea she had of the scandal, she gasped, “He came back here real quick. They didn’t have it very long. He’s number 1 again. ” As she left me, she sweetly added, “Have a blessed day, Emily.
Leslie Fram, a senior vice president at Country Music Television and a former rock programmer who moved to Nashville in 2011, told me bluntly: Wallen had divided the city. To some, he is a symbol of Music Row fandom; to others, of resistance to an awakened world. He had apologized, more or less, but he hadn’t replaced, not converted, a large component of his attractiveness. However, there is no denying the success of him or the skill of his handlers. His songs, which began with the 2018 hit “Whiskey Glasses,” which began with the line “Poor me, pour me another glass!”, were about longing to drink back the past. His most recent album, “One Thing at a Time,” thirty-six song deep, with lyrics by forty-nine writers, which followed an independent single titled “Broadway Girls,” a collaboration with trap artist Lil Durk. , which includes repeated mentions of Aldean. bar topped the charts. In March, a few weeks before the “Love Rising” concert, Wallen announced a temporary concert at Bridgestone; set an attendance record for the arena. In January, Wallen headlined Governor Lee’s inaugural banquet.
When Holly G. , a flight attendant, was grounded during the pandemic, she sank into a depression. For nine months, he hid in his mother’s house in Virginia, absorbing bad news. In December 2020, he discovered himself watching a YouTube video. of a soft-haired, soft-faced Morgan Wallen, sitting on a country porch and humming the song “Talkin’ Tennessee” on an acoustic guitar: “What do you say, we’re taking Hayon under the stars / Catch some fireflies in the moonlight jar. Holly played the video in a loop, calmed through its sweetness. “That’s what they gave me from that funk, listening to music,” he told me. “And then, in February, he kept saying the N-word. “
Before 2020, Holly never had a deep idea of what it meant to be a fan of black country music — it was just a quirky flavor she learned as a child, watching videos on CMT. Now the national racial calculation has made her question everything. Wallen’s habit felt like a private betrayal; I had started reading a lot, learning more about the history of country music. The genre had begun, in the early twentieth century, as a multi-ethnic product of the rural South, fusing the sounds of Irish violin, Mexican guitar and African banjo. Then, in the early 1920s, Nashville radio manufacturers divided this music into dual brands: racing records, advertised to black listeners (which became rhythm and blues and, later, rock and roll), and “hillbilly music,” which became country. and -Western. By the time Holly began listening, the genre had long been coded as the voice of the rural white Southerner, with some black stars, such as Pride or Darius Rucker or Kane Brown, as exceptions to the rule.
In the spring of 2021, Holly started a Black Country fan website, Black Opry, hoping to find like-minded listeners. Unexpectedly, he met another group: the black country artists, a global he knew less about. Among them was Jett Holden, whose song “Taxidermy” was a scathing reaction to hollow online activism, sung in the voice of a murdered black man: “I’ll talk to you about issues in my life / When that taxidermy is over for your Facebook. “Holly became an activist and then, to her surprise, a promoter, compiling a list of many artists and signing them across the country, as a collective, under the Black Opry logo. On Twitter, she adopted her role as a malefactor, and when she moved to Nashville in 2022, she replaced her Twitter bio with “Nash Villain. “At the 2016 C. M. A. de Awards, a week before the election, Beyoncé and the Chicks performed their red-hot country collaboration, “Daddy Lessons,” Alan Jackson, the grumpy traditionalist who popularized the ’90s anti-pop anthem “Murder on Music Row,” “It’s Out. “
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In January, I visited Holly’s home in East Nashville, where Black Opry members would gather before the game before heading to Dee’s, a local concert venue. We sat on a padded couch and Holly showed me videos on her TV. One was a song called “Ghetto Country Streets,” through Roberta Lea, a warm, nasal portrait of a Southern childhood (“I hear my mom say, get out your yett and play / And don’t come back until the lights are on”) — number of the Kentucky Knights, fashionable gay twins who walked around dressed in leather pants and leopard-print shirts. The twins had the advertising bop of country radio, Holly said, but they were in a defining bind. White stars incorporate trap beats or rapping into their songs, however, as researcher Tressie McMillan Cottom pointed out, music still counts as country: it’s “hick-hop. “When black men sing this way, their music is characterized as R.
After completing some videos, a singer named Leon Timbo picked up his guitar. A tall, bearded guy with a smile paired up with Houston-raised singer Denitia on a slow edit of an R song.
Holly said: “For me, a blanket like this fills the precise hole we need. Because other black people love some of Luther’s prostitutes, and taking him and making him an American, brings him into a position they would have no idea of. And, again, it is also an example for white people, who wonder what our position is in gender.
If gender distinctions weren’t so stark, Timbo said, other people might see Tracy Chapman, who was encouraged to play guitar while watching “Hee Haw” as a kid, and Bill Withers as country legends. They would meet Linda Martell, the first black woman to play at the Grand Ole Opry. A purist nostalgia for country music was ultimately indistinguishable from a racist nostalgia: either it focused on policing a narrow definition of who qualified as genuine.
After the showing at Dee’s, the organization, many of whom were gay, hung out at the Lipstick Lounge, a gay bar with karaoke and drag shows. The queens gave a loud call and reaction with the crowd: “Lesbians in the room, raise your hands!” In the upstairs hallway of a cigar bar, I spoke with Aaron Vance, the son of a preacher with a radio ministry. A lanky guy in his forties with a slurred voice, Vance was one of the oldest members of the Black Opry. A singer influenced by Merle Haggard, he had written humorous tracks like “Five Bucks Says,” in which he imagined himself drinking with Abe Lincoln in a dive, discussing the racial divide. When Vance moved to Nashville in 2014, he was treated like an oddity, but in the agricultural network he came from in Amory, Mississippi, he was not a black man enjoying the countryside. His grandfather, a trucker, had taken him to Haggard. Vance saw his music as his ministry, he said, and the Black Opry collective freed him to pursue his project on his own terms. “You can’t tell a wolf he’s too wolf,” he laughed at himself; in other words, you can’t tell Vance that he’s too redneck. When I asked him what his karaoke song was, he smiled: It was “If Heaven Ain’t a Lot Like Dixie” by Hank Williams, Jr.
On a beautiful spring morning, Jay Knowles picked me up in his red van and drove us to Fenwick’s 300, a place to eat where Music Row executives hold pancake meetings. his blood. His father, John Knowles, played guitar with the legendary Chet Atkins, who helped launch the Nashville Sound, the soft, radio rival to Willie Nelson’s “outlaw” movement. In the early ’90s, when Jay went to Wesleyan University, he was encouraged by the rise of “alternative country” stars, such as Steve Earle and Mary Chapin Carpenter, who had witty lyrics and unique voices full of feeling. It felt like a golden age for cultural indie musicians, as every aspect wrestled over who is an insurgent and who is a sellout, a local culture as old as the metal guitar.
Knowles returned home and went to work on Music Row, fitting in with a professional craftsman who joked, in his Twitter bio, that he was “Nashville’s most productive songwriter in his range of value. “Alan Jackson in 2012’s “So You Don’t Have to Love Me Anymore,” which was nominated for a Grammy. Bro Country took hold a decade later. The deepening gender divide had been negative for both sides, he said: Americana wasn’t driven through the market to speak more broadly, and Music Row wasn’t driven to be smarter. A split that reproduced national politics badly.
Knowles’ paintings were, for the most part, enjoyable: He met friends both one day, writing in a paperback while young collaborators typed words into the Notes app. Star. But no publisher has gotten rich from Spotify royalties. Knowles had observed, with frustration, how the tonal diversity of the lyrics of the countries was reduced, adapting to more young people a year: for a time, a single success was a festive anthem, with no dark songs or stories allowed. Recently, a small opportunity had opened up for songs about pain, her favorite subject. But after years in the industry, he was wary of false hopes: When his friend Chris Stapleton came to notice in 2015, Knowles thought the genre was entering a less synthetic phase. But on radio, the similarity was rewarded.
One of the worst adjustments followed the Dixie Chicks scandal in 2003. At the time, the band was a leading band, a beloved Texas trio that fused the strong verve of violin bluegrass with trendy storytelling. Then, at a concert in London, as Iraq War was brewing, lead singer Natalie Maines told the crowd that she was ashamed to come from the same state as President George W. The reaction was instantaneous: the radio dropped the band, enthusiasts burned their albums, Tothrough Keith led in front of a manipulated symbol appearing on Maines. along with Saddam Hussein, and death threats came. Concerned about the McCarthyite atmosphere, Knowles and other industry professionals gathered in an independent film space for an underground meeting of an organization called Music Row Democrats. Knowles told me, “It’s a bit like an A. A. meeting: ‘Oh, are you all drunk too?’
But an assembly was not a movement. Over the next two decades, the total perception of a female country star faded. There would be one or two exceptions: a Carrie Underwood or a Miranda Lambert, or, lately, the fierce Lainey Wilson, whose recent album “Bell Bottom Country” has become a hit, just as there would be one or two black stars, usually men. But Knowles, now fifty-three, knew many talented women her age who had discovered Nashville’s doors closed. songs,” he said. Some sing in support. None have become stars.
Knowles was encouraged through the new wave of Nashville, which had followed another strategy. Instead of competing, those artists collaborated. They propelled each other on the ladder that they fought to be “the only one. “”This young generation, everyone helps each other,” he said. “Doesn’t sound familiar. “
Every time I talked to other people in Nashville, I was left with the same questions. How can female singers be ‘uncommercial’ when the Musgraves filled stadiums?Was it less difficult to be blatantly gay now that big names like Brandi Carlile were out?What makes a song with violins “American” and not “country”?And why do so many grandiose snippets — brilliant portrayals of characters like Josh Ritter’s “Getting Ready to Get Down,” mind-blowing reports like Margo Price’s “Been to the Mountain,” sharp commentary like Brandy Clark’s “Pray to Jesus” — rarely appear on country radio?I first fell in love with the genre in the ’90s, in Atlanta, where I was driving all the time, doing a song along with radio hits through Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire, Randy Travis and Trisha Yearwood, the music my friends at Gen Los Xers del Sur think is cheesy. Array associates her with the worst other people in her best schools. Decades later, quality and popularity seemed to be out of sync; Music Row and Americana felt indistinguishable, comfortably adjacent and also at war.
The other people I spoke to in Nashville tended to describe America as a “root” country, as a “progressive-liberal” country or, more recently, as a “diverse” country. Fit instead of plaid shirts. For others, it was about celebrating the singular singer-songwriter. The label has been a handbag, incorporating everything from honky-tonk to bluegrass, gospel and blues, southern rock, western swing and folk. Calling himself alluded to a provocative notion: that it was genuine, 3-chord, and truly ancient American music.
The starkest difference is that, like independent films, the American paid less. (Singer-songwriter Todd Snider joked that American is “what they call ‘unsuccessful country music. ‘”)Not everyone has embraced the label, even some of its biggest stars: five years ago A few years ago, when Tyler Childers named an emerging artist of the year at the American Awards, he rose to the level dressed in a red beard in the war and growled: “As a guy who identifies as a country music singer, I think Americana is not a component. “you’re welcome,” a reference to bluegrass legend Bill Monroe’s brusque rejection of the trendy artists he disdained.
Perhaps, as Childers later argued, Americana functioned as a ghetto for “good country music,” letting “bad” country get away with it. Or maybe it was an escape valve, a platform for musicians who otherwise had no infrastructure. Marcus K. Dowling, a black music journalist who writes for Tennessee, told me that some time after George Floyd’s death, he wrote a review of black female country artists, highlighting talents like Brittney Spencer, a former backup singer for Carrie Underwood, hoping that at least one of them would break into mainstream radio. “Almost everyone ended up in Americana,” he said with a sigh.
Signing with Music Row required another calculation: you’ve become a brand, with millions of dollars invested in your career. This component of what made the bro-country phenomenon so infuriating to its detractors: white millionaire men dressed as blue-collar rebels while the real rebels starved. Comedian Bo Burnham rose to the challenge in a scathing parody, “Country Song,” which drew laughter for both the stereotypical lyrics of bro country (“a rural noun, an undeniable adjective”) and its false authenticity: “I walk and communicate like a cashier//But the boots I wear cost $3,000//I write songs about driving tractors/From the comfort of a personal jet.
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When Leslie Fram first moved to Nashville ten years ago to run Country Music Television, the equivalent of the MTV genre, she studied Music Row as a new language. “I understand why other people there don’t get it,” she told me, over a fancy omelette in the Gulch. “I did not perceive!” Fram, who has dark hair and a frank, friendly manner, was born in Alabama but spent years on rock radio in Atlanta and New York; he came to Tennessee meeting Johnny Cash and various American guys, like Lyle Lovett, and a few others. It took him a while to master some structural issues, such as some songs not even being tested for release if the men at Rate didn’t approve. Unlike a rock star, a country star needed a radio hit to break into the touring circuit, so it didn’t matter if CMT continually aired videos of Brandy Clark or African-American trio Chapel Hart. The most irritating thing is that if the women of the country wanted to be on the air, they had to be big and look at the male guards of the local radio stations. According to “Her Country,” an e-book by Marissa R. Moss, Musgraves, who made her impressive major-label debut in 2013 with her album “Same Trailer Different Park,” saw her country career derail when she he went away. she confronts a creepy DJ named Broadway ogling his thighs during an interview. Then the biggest country DJ in the country, Bobthrough Bones, called her “rude” and a “shit head. ” After that, her trail branched off elsewhere.
In 2015, a radio representative named Keith Hill gave an interview to an industry publication, Country Aircheck Weekly, in which he made explicit the implicit: “If you need to do Country Radio audiences, women. “For a station to succeed, no more He warned that more than fifteen percent of his mailing list may include women, and never two songs in a row. He described women as “tomatoes in salad,” to use in moderation. Fury erupted on social media; Advocacy organizations have formed, such as Change the Conversation. In 2019, Highwomen released “Crowded Table,” a song that imagined a warmer, more open Nashville: “a space with a table full of people/and a position across the fire position for everyone. “
Fram, who had recently hosted Next Women of Country, a program to advertise young female artists, was excited first and foremost about what is known as Tomatogate. The controversy has at least clarified the issues. Over the next decade, he met with other members of sensible senior management, racing to solve the gender puzzle. Did the proportions change when Taylor Swift left the format?Nothing Fram or others did made a difference, and radio displays for women continued to decline. Finally, a senior radio official told Fram, “Leslie, A, the program administrators are tired of hearing about this. Truth? B: They don’t care.
Hill, who began working in country radio in 1974, moved to Idaho, where he plans to retire. During a recent phone call, he introduced himself, as he had in the past, as the id joculaire of country radio: a guy right in a global “woke jive. “The demographics of the country’s stations were limited, he told me: white, rural, major, partial woguy. He led concentrated teams where he knew other people with express zip codes who listened in at least two hours to a given radio station during the day. Based on her feedback, her recommendation to programmers is firm: no more than fifteen percent women, never two in a row. Country music is a meritocracy, Hill insisted.
Hill enjoyed a new hip-hop-influenced artist, she told me: Jelly Roll, a heavily tattooed white singer from Nashville who told a touching story about getting out of jail, quitting hard drugs, and finding God. “authentic artist” of the country, in Hill’s view, with an outlaw history that rivals that of Merle Haggard. Could women be outlaws, another for ruining their chances of success. The chicks had “opened their mouths. ” The Musgraves had “self-inflicted wounds. “Morris had “hurt himself considerably” — he would transfer to pop, he predicted. She saw a caveat in the divergent careers of two black entertainers, Kane Brown and Mickey Guyton: Brown, a shrewd country star, knew how to play the game, but Guyton had “hurt herself by complaining. “
The more we talked, the more elusive Hill’s perception of merit became. When he praised someone’s authenticity, he didn’t mean it: everyone was pretending, he said, laughing. Nor was it a question of quality. Even if an artist was generic and sounded like “seven Luke Bryans boiled in a blender,” his songs could be successful, if he knew how to act. “Repeat with me, ‘I’m wrapping myself in the flag,'” Hill said. Or no, when it’s September 11 or when the wagons capsize, you’d better be part of the damn prayer. “He may have only saved the Chicks’ runs, he boasted: They deserve to have talked about getting the troops home safely. Those restrictions only applied to liberals, he acknowledged. If you had “Sur in your mouth,” as Aldean did, your path had more lanes.
Eventually, Hill stopped speaking in code: “You have bullies in the neighborhood for blacks, and you have pallet records for whites. “It’s natural, a matter of water flowing down, why is combat opposed to gravity?”the radio dial, from 88 to 108. There’s your fucking diversity. “
Jada Watson, an assistant professor of music at the University of Ottawa, began reading country radio after Tomatogate. What Hill called the knowledge Watson regarded as a musical red line. The original sin of country music – the split between “career records” and “hillbilly” – had led to the splitting of radio formats, which then led to the splitting of the charts. Never reproduce women consecutively, an official tip that dates back to the 80s, formalized in an educational document called “Manual of programming operations”. The scenario worsened after 1996, when the Telecommunications Law allowed corporations to acquire an unlimited number of radio stations; the dial is now governed by the giant iHeartRadio, which has encoded old biases into algorithms.
Since 2000, the proportion of women in country radio has increased from thirty-three to 11 percent. Black women lately account for only 0. 03%. (Ironically, Tracy Chapman recently became the first black songwriter to have a country hit No. 1, when Luke Combs threw a canopy of his classic “Fast Car. “) Country is popular around the world, consistent with musicians from Africa to Australia, Watson told me. It’s the voice of other rural people everywhere, but you’d never recognize it on the radio.
All parties agreed on one thing: you can’t forget about country radio even if you wanted to; she was the one who motivated each and every one of the resolutions on Music Row. As Gary Overton, former CEO of Sony Nashville, said in 2015, “If you’re not in country radio, you don’t exist. “Little had since replaced, even with the rise of online platforms, such as TikTok, which have helped independent artists go viral. Transmission is not the solution: like terrestrial radio, it may only be playable. When I created a Spotify playlist called “Country Music,” the service most commonly suggesting footprints through white male stars.
One day I went down to Music Row, a beautiful, wide street of big houses with cozy porches. On every block there were symptoms of prosperity: a wealth control company, a massage studio. I passed past Big Loud, that there was a sign outside promoting Wallen’s hit “You Proof,” one of the many billboards on the street of amateur types with No. singles. 1. Nearby, I walked into a club called Bobby’s Idle Hour Tavern, which looked strangely run-down, as if it had been there forever. In fact, he had moved around the neighborhood; It was demolished to make way for new construction, then rebuilt to retain its original appearance, with lists of splintered games nailed to seedy walls. It sounded like a decent metaphor for Nashville itself.
Inside, I ran into Music Row composer Jay Knowles. (It was a small town within a big town. )We talked about Nashville’s recent reputation as a “City of Bachelorettes,” so he presented a theory: Although more than a quarter of Nashville is black, the town was widely regarded as “a white town. “-Coded village. ” I’m not saying it’s a smart thing to do,” she said, but tourists saw Nashville as a safe space, a city where teams of young white women can enter public freely, unlike, say, Memphis, New Orleans or Atlanta.
At the bar, I also met two low-level Music Row employees, who worked in radio and helped companies manage VIPs. Fortunately, they spoke, off the record, about the clashes on The Row, but added that there was no point in introducing their own politics into their work. It’s like running for Walmart, you had to remain neutral. The challenge with country radio isn’t complicated, says one: The older generation still handled everything and would never replace their minds. When I explained that I was going to Broadway to find myself single, they rolled their eyes. Evita Aldean’s, they said.
They weren’t alone: every locals I met suggested I only move into old neighborhoods like Robert’s Western World, where I spent a glorious night with the rampant son Tyler Mahan Coe. through outlaw artist David Allan. Coe, who hosts a podcast about the country’s history called “Cocaine”
Still, I loved Broadway, for a practical reason: there were no velvet strings. Each nightclub had at least 3 plots. On the ground floor, there was a bar and a level where a live professional musician covered hits. At ground time, there was some other bar, some other musician (and, in one case, a women’s organization toasting with me with grape vodka). On top of that, things got crazier, with a noisy dance floor and often a rooftop bar. There was a cheesy series in the scene that echoed the Lipstick Lounge: when the d. j. played Shania Twain’s classic “Man!he screamed. ” Do any of the women feel like a woman?”Live greetings. ” Do any of the men feel like a woman?”Deeper applause. Call me basic, but I had a blast: In Manhattan, a scruffy middle-aged woman in jeans can’t walk into a nightclub, order a Diet Coke, and dance for free.
Everywhere, there were brides in cowgirl hats or heart-shaped glasses, and in one case a majestic rhinestone suit worthy of Dolly. At a club named after the Florida Georgia Line band, a screaming woman threw silver glitter in my hair. All the locals I spoke to hated those intruders, who filled the streets with their party buses. With satisfied women celebrating their friends, it’s hard to see the problem.
The bar in the middle of Jason Aldean’s space built around a large green tractor. The doors of the bathrooms read “good south” and “country girls”. singer at the handsome and funny level, extremely happy to get a request for “Travelin’ Soldier” through the Chicks. When someone asked for “Wagon Wheel,” a 2004 vintage co-written by Bob Dylan and covered a decade later by Darius Rucker, the singer spoke entirely of passersby asking about the song when it went to Broadway years ago, before the streets were packed with tourists. You can get to about a hundred feet from your starting point!” he said. “So, here is a little ‘wagon wheel’ for you!”Feeling affectionate, I searched for the singer online. His Twitter page is filled with like posts protecting anti-vaxxers and Jan. 6 rioters.
Taylor Swift was discovered at the Bluebird Café. Like Garth Brooks. A ninety-seat venue with a single-scene postage stamp, it’s nestled between a barbershop and a dry cleaner, yet it’s a center of strength in Nashville, a position run by authors, songwriters, and performers. In January, artist Adeem wore a floral top over a T-shirt that read “It’s a wonderful day to kill God. ” They were gambling on their first Bluebird showcase, performing songs from their album of the moment, “White Trash Revelry. ” Some were stomping, like the hilarious “Going to Hell,” in which Adeem compares the lyrics of Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” to satan himself: “He seemed taken aback, so I told him the story, and he He said, “None of that shit is genuine / It’s true I knew Robert Johnson, he showed me how the blues can be just paint / But white men would rather praise Satan than acknowledge a black man’s price” were musings on growing up amid “meth and non-secular madness. ” It was folk tunes played on acoustic guitar, with witty, sharp lyrics. People in the crowd seemed interested, even as Adeem took punches from them.
Adeem grew up in a circle of poor evangelical relatives in Locust, North Carolina, doing a song with Tothrough Keith, the self-proclaimed “Angry American,” on the car radio, after 9/11. They dreamed of fitting in as a country star, but as their politics drifted, they felt at odds with the genre. Then, in 2017, they won an award ticket to the Americana Awards, and were shocked to see Hurray for the Riff Raff singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra sporting a hand-painted T-shirt reading “Jail Arpaio. ” hand, and through Nashville bluegrass artist Jim Lauderdale, she shoots Trump. “I was like, ‘Man, maybe this is it. Maybe this is where I belong,'” Adeem told me. Americana had another source of calls for Adeem, a D. I. Y. artist with a punk mindset – you might get it on a shoestring budget. Adeem, who barely managed to paint houses in sunny Tennessee, had spent years building a following by uploading songs to Bandcamp. They budgeted what it would take to make a splash with an album: $5,000 for production, $10,000 for PR. They held an online “redneck fundraiser”, asking each donor for a dollar, then recorded “White Trash Revelry” independently. (The album was distributed through Thirty Tigers, a Nashville-based company that left them the rights. ) Adeem’s strategy worked strangely well: In December, Rolling Stone hailed “White Trash Revelry” as “the most empathetic country album of the year. ” Rating it #7 on their year-end list of the twenty-five most sensible albums in the genre. This year, Adeem was nominated for Emerging Act of the Year at the Americana Awards and made her Grand Ole Opry debut.
After the Bluebird concert, I met Adeem at a nearby Airbnb, where they were experiencing “visual distortions” due to microdosing mushrooms. who believed in QAnon conspiracy theories. Adeem’s Angelestive relos were defeated through their choices, but not without support: when his uncle insisted that Adeem’s gender identity was a rock-and-roll functionality à Los Angeles Ziggy Stardust, Adeem’s father defended his son’s authenticity, in his own way. “He said, ‘No, no, I think he believes it!'” Adeem told me with a laugh.
There have been other queer people in country music. In 1973, a band called Lavender Country released an album with lyrics like “My abdomen becomes jelly / like a naïve nelly”. But there were many more ugly stories of singers forced into the closet. — and even now, after the release of many wonderful talents, adding songwriters like Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, old taboos persisted. You may just be a composer, not a singer; You can just sing love songs, but not say who you loved; You may simply pass out, but lose your position on the radio. When T. J. Osbourne of the popular duo Brothers Osbourne came out he was gay, in 2021, his control company arranged a painstaking campaign: a profile, written by a sympathetic journalist, and an applicable single, the unhappy but confusing “Younger Me,” that seemed designed not to offend anyone.
Adeem, which is based on both the absurdity of Andy Kaufman and the intelligence of John Prine, a component of another race. Queer Americana featured many outspoken artists, from River Shook, whose title track is “Fuck Up,” to bluegrass artist Justin Hiltner, who wrote about AIDS in his beautiful bachelorette “1992. “These artists, all left-wing, come from backgrounds like Adeem: small towns, evangelical families, drug abuse and addiction. This biggest complaint from Adeem: Music Row announced a condescending parody of his “white trash” educating the poor. Adeem’s own policy is not simple. When they opposed Tennessee legislation opposing trans youth, it was not as a liberal but as a Southern parent and farmer who was suspicious of government control: “This is, like, staying away from my kids!Stay out of my garden, you know?
On Airbnb, Adeem’s transmasculine partner, Ellen Angelico, known as Uncle Ellen, released a card game: a beta edition of Bro Country, a Cards Against Humanity-style game based on genuine country radio lyrics. The organization went crazy and laughed dumbly, shouting clichés. — “tin roof”, “red truck” — to form silly combinations. In a way, the game made country radio laugh; In another, he paid homage to him: you couldn’t touch it without reading it. Like hip-hop, country has been an aggressively meta-referential art form; Even the sister country had become more and more self-aware.
On bad days, Adeem told me, both sides of Nashville seemed locked in a “W. W. E. fight match,” betting cartoon versions of themselves. I’ve been a cowboy,” who criticized Toby Keith for dressing in “my life like a dress on TV. “However, Adeem fantasized about what it would be like to meet Keith. They didn’t need a match but a genuine verbal exchange: a chance to tell Keith how much his music meant to them and ask him if he regretted anything.
In mid-May at the Academy of Country Music Awards, Music Row in effect. Bobby Bones, the DJ who had insulted Musgraves, backstage, interviewing stars. Wallen won Male Artist of the Year. Aldean sang “Tough Crowd,” committed to “hell’s pass. “he launched the repellent “Try That in a Small Town,” an ode to vigilantism. ) Artist and album of the year Wilson, the daughter of a Louisiana farmer, Music Row’s newest female supernova, follower of Dolly Parton (one of her early ” WWDD “) hits who moved to Nashville after high school. A decade of turmoil paid off: In 2023, he had a role in “Yellowstone” and a partnership with Wrangler jeans. Maren Morris is not there: this week there she is in New York, accepting an award at the Glaad Awards. On Instagram, she had posted a video of herself in a recording studio with indie-pop guru Jack Antonoff. A few weeks later, at a concert, she sang a duet with Taylor Swift.
The A. C. M. The latest number of awards was the live premiere of Parton’s new single, “World on Fire,” from an upcoming rock album. map of the world; then, when she tore apart, she was dressed in a black leather suit, singing a song angrily as rescue dancers strutted in the Janet Jackson-style formation. For a moment, it felt like a shocking departure: a politician from a woman who has never been in politics. Then that impression evaporated. Politicians were liars, Parton sang; People deserve to be nicer, less ugly. What happened to “In God We Trust”? Four days later, on the “Today” show, Jacob Soboroff asked Parton which politicians she was talking about, and she casually replied, “All of them, any of them,” adding that if those anonymous personalities tried “hard enough” and worked “from the heart,” things would actually get better.
The feature reminded me of Keith Hill’s recommendation to the Chicks: they deserve sugar sprinkled. Parton had been the greatest sadness for Allison Russell and the organizers of the “Love Rising” performance, who told me they had “begged and pleaded” for her. to sing in Bridgestone, or connect the event, or zoom in. I played with drag queens several times; he wrote an Oscar-nominated song, “Travelin’ Thru”, for the 2005 film “Transamerica”. The ultimate star of hard country wasn’t talking, it was hard to believe others would take a chance.
Another song performed that night had another feel: “Bonfire at Tina’s,” an ensemble number from Ashley McBryde’s pandemic project, an ambitious concept album called “Lindeville,” which featured guest artists. The record had won critical acclaim but little radio audience. During “Bonfire at Tina’s”, a female choir sang: “Small town, women ain’t built to get along / But you burn one, boy, you burn us all. ” In its salty solidarity, the song evoked emerging collectives in Nashville, from “Love Rising” to the Black Opry, bands that embodied the Highwomen’s notion of “packed table. ” You can also see this ideal reflected in “My Kind of Country,” a truth show on Apple TV+, produced by Musgraves and Reese Witherspoon, that focused on acts from global countries and included gay South African musician Orville. Peck as a judge, and in “Shucked,” a new Broadway outing with music by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, which presented a sweet vision of a multiracial small town learning to open its doors. Mainstream country radio hadn’t changed, but all around it, other people were actively imagining what would happen if it did.
McBryde, who grew up in a small Arkansas town, had spent years running in honky-tonks and country fairs, a vacation he sang on the anthem “Girl Goin’ Nowhere. “She was a unique figure in classic country, a brunette in a sea of blondes, her arms covered in tattoos. When we met backstage one night at the Grand Ole Opry, she was performing at a memorial concert for character actor and southern rainy hen Leslie Jordan, who had created a virtual pandemic table fill, through lush Instagram videos, and then recorded a gospel album with country stars like Parton.
Unlike Jordan’s contented quarantine, McBryde’s pandemic had been “destructive,” he told me: unable to work, drinking too much, feeling like a “sheepdog who couldn’t hunt sheep. ” “Lindeville” had been the solution. For a week-long Airbnb retreat in Tennessee, he had been writing up to 18 hours a day with old friends, adding Brandy Clark and Florida-born artist Pillbox Patti. The result was a set of songs about different characters, songs that were grittier and less sentimental than the top music heard on country radio. The album, which bears the name of Dennis Linde, the composer of the Chicks’ feminist revenge song “Goodbye Earl,” had a non-secular edge, McBryde said. She had grown up in a “strange, strict, rigid position” in which she had been taught that “everything drove Jesus crazy,” and she felt smart to imagine another kind of small town. “The fact that God loves the wayward, other people like me, is so obvious,” she said. “There are things I survived, especially when alcohol was involved, that I shouldn’t have. ”
McBryde, who called himself “country like a space sock,” didn’t have the goal of switching to pop, as his peers had done. But he had a pragmatic view of the industry to which he had devoted his life. Making music in Nashville, she joked, she may feel like adopting a stray cat, only to bite you when it turned out to be an opossum. “It’s a cat, radio country, but it’s a smart opossum,” he said. She had to keep a sense of humor: “I probably wouldn’t call her, but there’s another female artist who has a very vertical spine, like me. And we joke with each other and say, ‘What are you going to do?– Don’t play our songs?” »
He had attended a staging of “Lindeville” at the Ryman Auditorium a few weeks earlier, some time after Tennessee’s first anti-drag ordinance passed the state Senate. The occasion was advertised as an outdated radio show, with a whimsical announcer and advertising jingles. TJ Osbourne and Lainey Wilson were among the guest stars, creating a sense of camaraderie on Music Row. Do you hear that? There were the smart dishes / I hope they probably don’t drop the cord” – the enthusiasts threw bras onto the stage.
At one point, McBryde serenaded a small boy, who sat at his feet. The center of attention of the exhibition “Gospel Night at the Strip Club”. Sung on acoustic guitar by Louisiana musician Benjy Davis, the song spoke of living a non-secular party in an unforeseen place. As Davis sang the key phrase, “Jesus loves drunks, prostitutes and faggots,” spotlights lit up part of the audience. The congregation of the Church of Country Music searched for what had been revealed and then gasped: five drag queens, scattered among Ryman’s crowd, stood up, their dresses shining like sunlight. ♦
An earlier edit of this article distorted the date of Governor Lee’s inaugural banquet and the name of an Adeem the Artist song.
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