I am country music’s most unexpected fan: a queer woman of Color who grew up in suburban Michigan. Since Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” rose to the top of the charts and country became cool again, I’m moved to reflect on why and how the genre resonated with me at a young age.
The history of country music as we now know it begins with the introduction of Anglo-Celtic immigrants and their musical traditions to North America. But the genre grew staying power as America institutionalized slavery. The music of enslaved Afro-American people fused with existing sounds, particularly in the American South. As historian Bill Malone explains in his book, “Country Music, U.S.A”: “Of all the southern ethnic groups, none has played a more important role in providing songs and styles for the white country musician than that forced migrant from Africa, the black.” Poor rural Black and white folk were both the practitioners and patrons of the genre.
In the 1950s, the genre started commercializing on a national level. Radio stations and record companies sought to capitalize on the nation’s growing interest in the “hillbilly” sound but diluted the music to appease the widest audience. These industry gatekeepers intensified racial divisions and often segregated Black country artists to their own category — “race music.” At the same time, TV and radio programs promoted country music, making it more accessible and appealing to the white conservative middle class. This demographic is most widely associated with country music today. [z: if this isn’t in the link on “history of country music” please cite these facts :)]
As a child growing up in the 2000s, it comes as no surprise that the entry point to my fixation on country music was Taylor Swift. When she debuted with her self-titled album in 2008, Swift promised family-friendly hits engineered to speak to the hearts and minds of young girls. Some classmates turned their noses up to the honky-tonk sound, but no one blamed me for loving Taylor Swift. The problem was I kept digging deeper. Swift was the gateway drug to the harder stuff: Carrie Underwood, David Nail, Zac Brown Band. I couldn’t get enough, and few of my peers understood why.
As I grew up in the early aughts, white men by the likes of Luke Bryan, Blake Shelton, and Keith Urban dominated country radio airplay. They sang about having beers after a long day at work and driving their trucks past cornfields. But they also sang about women — women from small towns, women on beaches, women in fields, etc. — in their bright tenor voices.
At eight years old, I sang along to the twangy guitar-driven Brooks & Dunn single “Ain’t Nothin’ ‘Bout You” in the car as my family listened. My energy inexplicably picked up during the first chorus: “Girl, you got everything / The way you look, the way you laugh / The way you love with all you have / There ain’t nothin’ ‘bout you that don’t do something for me.”
I wouldn’t have been able to articulate why I connected to that song then. But I see now that I was expressing a joyful, undercover queerness. My parents didn’t bat an eye at me singing a love song about a woman because the song was originally sung by a man. I could live between the lines. Enough ambiguity existed in who was doing the singing versus who was meaning the lyrics, and so I could connect with my love for women without drawing attention to it. This ambiguity isn’t unique to country music. Unlike in some other genres, the gender ratio of country radio singers skews heavily towards men. In the heteronormative paradigm of mainstream country, that means a unique proliferation of love songs meant for women.
Meanwhile, when Katy Perry’s techno dance hit “I Kissed a Girl” came on my childhood boom-box radio, I whispered the lyrics alone in my room. I had to make sure no one heard me acknowledging Perry’s explicit ode to bicuriosity. I felt drawn to the song because it brimmed with new possibilities, but I didn’t feel particularly represented by the drunken exploit it described. I furrowed my brow at the lines, “I kissed a girl just to try it / Hope my boyfriend don’t mind it.” Did girls only kiss other girls if they were beholden to boys? How depressing — for everyone involved.
So I tuned the radio to a different station. 99.5 WYCD! Detroit’s Country. Much better.
***
At the same time, my gender expression became implicated in my love for the country genre. See, I wanted to sing my favorite country songs in their original keys, but there was one major complication. Most of these songs were sung by cisgender men, so I had to train my voice to hit those tenor and baritone notes, essentially forcing it lower. But when I eventually could sing these parts, it felt exhilarating.
This was the first intentional way that I started experimenting with my gender performance. Country music is often a hypermasculinized genre, featuring men singing about being tough guys who like fishing and cars. When male country singers opined about what it meant to be a man, the results were mixed, often revealing undercurrents of homophobia and misogyny. In his 2007 song “I’m Still a Guy,” Brad Paisley had a take that didn’t sit well with me: “It’s hip now to be feminized / But I don’t highlight my hair, I’ve still got a pair / Yeah, honey, I’m still a guy.”
Though this bigotry unsettled me, the genre helped me to recognize that I didn’t always feel feminine or want to. At times, I related to what these country singers deemed masculine. Toby Keith describes loquaciousness as a female trait in “I Wanna Talk About Me,” but I identified more with his frustration at feeling silenced by bigger personalities. At the time, I detected some of the misogyny but tried to rationalize it. Maybe Keith was discussing one particular woman’s extreme case of happiness. Plus, was it untrue that women didn’t talk, on average, more than men? Depending on the context, that trait could be an asset or an annoyance. But it’s clear now that Keith was making a generalization about women. In the music video, women follow him from one location to the next and flap their lips in exaggerated movements.
At other times, I wanted to align myself with what mainstream country singers deemed feminine. Shania Twain proclaims in the pop-crossover single “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” that “The best thing about being a woman / is the prerogative to have a little fun,” and that idea is irresistible.
The popular country music of my youth often engaged directly with what it means to be a man or a woman. Artists posed questions and made claims about gender identity, and these singles made radio airwaves. Listening to the genre at a young age, I was able to parse through what felt meaningful or superfluous about these gender distinctions to me. Keith’s claim contradicted my experience and lost its importance, but I strived to be a Shania Twain type of woman. Just as Twain wore both men’s shirts and short skirts I could sing both the “boy” and “girl” parts in duets and still know I was a woman.
It is true that much of the messaging about gender in mainstream country music is rooted in misogyny and the constructed gender binary. I certainly internalized some of those ideas, and they can have real harm. Still, I allow for some nuance. My early education didn’t encourage reflection about gender, but these songs did. They seemed to insist that gender, as an idea, was something to consider and discuss.
***
Even though I had never worked on a farm or attended Sunday mass, I found it easy to relate to country music. My life was different, but the genre was as preoccupied with home, belonging and community as I was. Now, I recognize that these concerns and priorities loom large for both queer and rural communities.
Like queerness, “country” is often described as a state of being. In 1974, John Denver proclaimed, “Thank God I’m A Country Boy.” In the next decade, Hank Williams Jr. promised that “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Come 2004, Gretchen Wilson followed suit by declaring herself a “Redneck Woman.” These examples have a striking implication. You aren’t just from the country. You are country.
But outsiders’ misconceptions make being country a dilemma. You feel devalued and out of place with your larger surroundings. You become frustrated with a popular culture that confounds urbanity with intelligence, sophistication and morality. Meanwhile, hegemonic narratives consider your people crass, dirty and backward. It becomes an act of resistance to feel proud in your community and way of life.
If you switch out the concept of urbanization with cisheteronormativity here, a meaningful, if imperfect, parallel emerges. As much as popular imagination wouldn’t let you believe it, country music can affirm queer identities, even when it isn’t explicitly made for and by queer people.
Thankfully, though, country music made by queer artists is receiving more airplay and recognition. Orville Peck is one rising gay country star who debuted in 2019. His most recent release is a duet version of “Cowboys are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other” with Willie Nelson. Peck and Nelson join in crooning, “There’s many a cowboy who don’t understand the way he feels for his brother / And inside every cowboy there’s a lady that’d love to slip out.” This particular song has a long history in country music. Originally written by Ned Sublette in 1981, the song took on a new life when Willie Nelson released a cover in 2006. That cover debuted at No. 52 on the Billboard Charts at the time. Peck’s recent collaboration with Nelson is emblematic of a larger movement to unearth and reclaim the queer history and subtext in country music.
The future of queer country looks bright, too. Adeem the Artist, a nonbinary singer with Appalachian influences, recently released their third album, Anniversary, which comes a year after a career-making Grand Ole Opry performance. Brandy Clark, a lesbian country songwriting mogul, won her first Grammy in February for the song “Dear Insecurity” after a decade in the industry. In upcoming news, the bluegrass-inspired queer musician Allison Russell is set to perform her first headlining tour later this year.
Country music can and does reflect queer experiences and inspire queer artistry. Nothing inherent to the genre condemns or refuses queerness. How else could I and other queer people see ourselves reflected in it? How else could I find comfort in the sound of a fiddle and feel like it’s taking me somewhere, maybe not home, but nearby?
MiC Contributor Roshni Veeramachaneni can be reached at rove@umich.edu.
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