'70S-ERA LAVENDER COUNTRY ENJOYS UNLIKELY REVIVAL
Unabashedly `queer' band plays Icehouse Saturday
By his own account, Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country has had a wonderful life as a “screaming Marxist bitch” railing against both the country music establishment and the prevailing political system.
His words, not mine. Also, there's another word we've left out that the 77-year-old singer-songwriter uses as a descriptor in that incendiary quote, a slur that he's happily taking back from the homophobes. Daily newspapers tend to be more circumspect about printing that word; let's use “queer” instead, shall we?
“My dad, who was a dairy farmer, knew that I was queer when I was a kid,” says Haggerty, who is bringing Lavender Country to Edmonton on Saturday for the recent re-release of its 2019 “comeback” album, Blackberry Rose and other Songs of Sorrow. “He supported me, and most importantly, he told me to never sneak around.”
It took a little while before the country singer-songwriter fully understood his dad's advice. Haggerty's predilection for glitter and girl's clothing might not have gone over in his hometown of Dry Creek, Wash. in the '40s, but by the time he fully came out in his mid-20s, post- Stonewall, he knew who he was. From the early '70s on, Haggerty was definitely not going to sneak around.
He moved to Seattle for graduate studies where the first iteration of the unabashedly gay Lavender Country was formed in 1972. The group's self-titled 1973 debut, which features songs like Back in the Closet Again and Straight White Patterns, shook up listeners but despite its astonishingly revolutionary lyrical tone never got any real traction. Haggerty kept it going for a few years more, but when the band folded in 1976 he shifted his focus to politics. By the '90s he was collaborating with the Nation of Islam in a bid for office; all the while he kept writing lyrics.
“I was never interested in the crap that they were calling country music then,” he says. “They don't want you to talk about real struggle. Don't talk about Karl Marx. Don't talk about organizing. Don't talk about the real nitty gritty. The music industry is an empty, vapid world. If you're gorgeous they'll take you on, and maybe you'll be a star. I'm not talking about musicians who have made sacrifices in order to make art, I'm talking about the corporate structure.”
Through the years the legend of Lavender Country refused to fade. There was a 1999 article on gay country musicians in the Journal of Country Music, followed by a CD re-release of the album and a five song EP, Lavender Country Revisited. By the time Haggerty and his husband J.B. retired outside of Seattle in the early 2000s, he was back at it, playing country covers in retirement homes as part of a duo with blues harmonica player Robert Taylor.
All the while the outside world was starting to talk about this revolutionary, queer country band that had recorded an album full of gay themes in 1973.
“I think it was 2016 when the documentary about me, These C--cksucking Tears, won first place at SXSW,” he says. “That's when it went to another level. After that there was an opera by an avant-garde company about Lavender Country, and then all of a sudden people wanted to talk to me again.”
The new wave of queer country musicians, including Canada's Orville Peck, quickly embraced his return. On Blackberry Rose and Other Songs and Sorrows, Haggerty widened his lyrical palette from beyond LGBTQ+ themes to compassionate and clear-eyed songs about a beaten down housewife (Lament of a Wyoming Housewife) and the horrifying consequences of an interracial love affair (Blackberry Rose). Philadelphia label Don Giovanni Records picked up the record for this year's reissue, adding a new version of I Can't Shake the Stranger Out of You. It's taken a long time, but the world is definitely not ignoring Lavender Country anymore.
“I'm having fun,” Haggerty says with a certain amount of glee. “I came from a dairy farm with 10 brothers and sisters, cardboard in our shoes and no money, and I'm hearing these singers go on about poverty. They're so sanctimonious. But what I'm finding with the whole gay country thing is that these really good musicians are approaching me all over the country, and they're not rednecks. They're actually pretty progressive. They just have to work with corporate Nashville for their money and, trust me, it was a difficult choice for me back in 1973 to not do that with Lavender Country as well. I may not have the fame, but they're sick in the heart because they don't get to say what they really want. In Lavender Country I get to say exactly what I want.”