Honky-tonk angels sing the truth
SING THE TRUTH The power of women in country music
The power of women in country music
“WE tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote, and women in country music have long borne out the transgressive power of bearing witness. In 1952, Kitty Wells’ song “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” was a direct clapback to Hank Thompson’s hit “The Wild Side of Life,” a tune that dissed a woman who found nightlife more interesting than her husband. “Honky Tonk Angels” — which put the onus for faithless women back onto unfaithful men — became the first number-one Billboard country hit for a solo female artist, despite the fact that Wells was prohibited from performing it on the Grand Ole Opry. In 1980, Dolly Parton’s working-class anthem “9 to 5” galvanized generations of timecard-punching women, who in 1992 also swelled to the truths contained in Mary Chapin Carpenter’s rallying cry for loveless (soon to be ex-) wives, “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her.”
In a recent conversation, Nashville-based music critic Holly Gleason singled out “The Pill” — Loretta Lynn’s 1975 ode to birth control, which was banned by many radio stations upon its release — as an emancipation song. “It was giving women essential freedom — take that. And now it’s kind of a battle cry for family planning.” Gleason’s faith in the gospel of female country artists led her to edit and commission the absorbing new anthology Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives, published by University of Texas Press last fall. In the book, a range of writers — activists, journalists, and musicians — pen essays on 27 groundbreaking artists. From Wanda Jackson to Emmylou Harris to k.d. lang to Patty Griffin, each contributor tells the deeply personal story of how one woman’s songs impacted the course of her life. In her introduction, Gleason defines country music as women’s music in many ways: “Smart, cool, brash, tough, mysterious, sassy, sexual, earthy, young, maternal, it’s all here — in a way you won’t find in any other genre.”
The breadth and diversity of the book’s contributors point to an under-the-radar intersectional feminism in women’s country music. In addition to Rosanne Cash’s moving eulogy for her stepmother June Carter Cash and a seventeen-year-old Taylor Swift’s heartfelt tribute to her idol, Brenda Lee, singersongwriter Kandia Crazy Horse writes a piece called “Rita Coolidge: A Dark-Eyed Cherokee Country Gal.” In it, Crazy Horse extols the hybrid nature of “hillbilly music,” which she says “arose from southeastern America out of a confluence of African and Native American roots and songs from the British Isles, hybridized in the southern Appalachian Mountains and their environs.” Alice Randall, whom Gleason named as “the first black lady to have a number-one country record” — Randall wrote Trisha Yearwood’s 1994 single “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl)” — contributes an essay on singer Lil Hardin, Louis Armstrong’s second wife, who composed many iconic songs in her own right. Of the adversity Randall experienced as a black Harvard-educated country songwriter, she writes, “I didn’t bat an eyelash. I thought of all that Lil Hardin had endured on the Chitlin Circuit.”
For Gleason, much of the female bonding with these artists stems from their frank exploration of class issues. “Women get empowered by women,” she said. “When you’re a working-class woman, you’re a little less invested in being polite, and you’re a lot more invested in the truth and taking care of yourself, because there’s not a lot of extra money at the end of the week. I think women who work really hard also tend to put up with a lot less crap.” She mentioned Kacey Musgraves’ song “Blowin’ Smoke,” written from the perspective of a group of hardened diner waitresses, along with Lucinda Williams’ sly ownership of her sexual agency in “Come On,” in which Williams rasps, “Dude I’m so over you/You don’t even have a clue/All you did was make me blue/You didn’t even make me, come on!”
Gleason said, “These are women who understand that to get theirs, they’re probably going to have to go out and get it. They don’t need permission.” In Ronni Lundy’s essay on bluegrass singer Hazel Dickens, Lundy explores the kinship she felt with the lyrics Dickens sang with Alice Gerrard in “Hello Stranger.” “‘Get up rounder, let a working girl lay down,’ they sang, and I got that chill of recognition, and pride
… from the delicious possibility the song laid out,” Lundy writes. “A life, perhaps lost, definitely hard, but surely independent and maybe as exciting as any offered to a man — but this time, the story belonged to a woman, sung in a woman’s voice.” The feminist themes in country music can also transcend class and other boundaries. Mary Chapin Carpenter, who attended prep school and graduated from Brown University in 1981, is a non-blue-collar artist whose 1990s hits nonetheless celebrate the universally appealing themes of sex-positivity (“I Feel Lucky,” the Williams-written “Passionate Kisses”) and selfempowerment (“The Hard Way”). Even Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” infamously put down by Hillary Clinton in 1992 as the sappy anthem of spineless, unwoke women everywhere, contains a double-edged narrative that speaks directly to female listeners who know their gender is the more resilient one. “’Cause after all, he’s just a man,” Wynette sings ruefully, and we begin to pity her hapless counterpart.
Tyler Mahan Coe, whose podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones details the history of 20th-century country music, is the self-identified feminist son of outlaw country artist David Allan Coe. Both the younger Coe’s podcast and Woman Walk the Line delve into the story of singer-songwriter Bobbie Gentry, whose Southern Gothic tale of suicide “Ode to Billie Joe” spent four weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967, crossing over into bona-fide pop hit status. In his episode on Gentry, Coe says, “The reason ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ is respected as literature is because it tells a story as good as any short story by any other author you’d like to name. The music writer Greil Marcus was driving somewhere the first time he heard the song on the radio and he became so focused on it that he crashed into the car ahead of him in traffic.”
“Ode to Billie Joe,” which Gentry originally did write as a short story, sparked two universal questions among listeners, who examined and debated the song’s intricate mysteries as if it were a Hitchcock film: What did Billie Joe and his girlfriend toss off the Tallahatchie Bridge, and why did Billie Joe commit suicide? Gleason remarked of the song, “It’s a horrible story, right? Everybody has this big debate, what were they throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge? But I wanted to know whether the mother was poking the daughter because she figured the daughter knew more than anybody was letting on. It’s just such
economy [in the songwriting], and yet what kind of vistas it paints.”
Gentry, who disappeared from public life in the early 1980s, has refused to answer those questions, instead pointing to her intention to weave a multilayered family tapestry: “Those questions are of secondary importance in my mind,” she once said. “The story of Billie Joe has two more interesting underlying themes. First, the illustration of a group of people’s reactions to the life and death of Billie Joe, and its subsequent effect on their lives, is made. Second, the obvious gap between the girl and her mother is shown when both women experience a common loss … and yet Mama and the girl are unable to recognize their mutual loss or share their grief.” On his podcast, Coe sums up his own view on “Billie Joe”: “It’s about how nobody can ever truly feel anyone else’s pain and most of the time they can’t even be bothered to try.” In her essay on Gentry in Woman Walk the Line, Meredith Ochs writes, “The eternal mystery of Gentry and her songs is something that makes mystery itself acceptable to me.”
Gentry also penned the rags-to-riches sex-worker melodrama of a lady named “Fancy,” a 1990 hit for Reba McEntire and a song that Ochs positions as “a commentary on the way the music industry prostitutes its artists, specifically women.” In January, Rolling Stone reported on the widespread culture of the sexual harassment of female artists during country radio-station visits and music conventions, though many sources in the report chose to remain anonymous, fearing professional repercussions. Several news outlets have noted the lesser impact of the #MeToo movement on country music, indicating the reluctance of women artists to come forward with allegations in an increasingly male-dominated country landscape. Coe said, “If you want to get into the real difference between country music and other genres of music pertaining to this issue, I would say that Nashville has a lot of practice in burying this stuff.”
Gleason lamented corporate changes in the industry that have led to lower visibility and lesser airplay for female artists — unlike in the ’90s, when recording artists like Mary Chapin Carpenter, Patty Loveless, Tanya Tucker, Shania Twain, Faith Hill, and Trisha Yearwood ruled the country airwaves. Now, she said, “You’ve got huge chains with a guy telling you what you’re gonna play. … And there’s an unspoken rule that’s been around forever that you don’t play two women back to back. Whatever. But you know, just because that was a rule, there was a time in the ’80s and ’90s when they did. The rule didn’t change; they just did it.” With regard to radio programming these days, she said, “It’s middle-aged men who think they know what women want.”
But Gleason’s book shows that the potent stories contained in country songs sung by women are handed down through generations. There’s a sisterhood — even a whisper network — in the genre that predates #MeToo by decades. “The book is about the power of female narrative, woman to woman,” she said.
In the Alice Randall-penned empowerment anthem “XXX’s and OOO’s,” Yearwood sings of a young heroine, “She’s gonna make it in her daddy’s world.” How will she survive? “Well, she’s got her God/And she’s got good wine/Aretha Franklin and Patsy Cline.”
“Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives,” edited by Holly Gleason, is published by University of Texas Press. The “Cocaine & Rhinestones” podcast can be heard at cocaineandrhinestones.com.