MARGO PRICE

Midwest country rocker brings back the realness, with help from Jack White.

f country music is all about hard luck, Margo Price has earned her place in its pantheon with stripes. Leaving her hometown of Buffalo Prairie, Illinois aged 19 after her father lost the family farm and took up a job as a prison guard, this 32-year-old with a voice like a 21st century Loretta Lynn travelled to Nashville with dreams of making it in the city. That’s where her problems started. “I moved into my cousin’s apartment in a satellite town called Antioch,” says Price, down the line from Nashville, where Jack White’s Third Man Records have just released her devastatingly honest debut Midwest Farmer’s Daughter. “When I got there my cousin took off with a guy she was dating. Then I totalled my car. I ended up in a truly terrible apartment complex on my own, no money and no car, trying to figure out what I was doing.” Things went from bad to worse. Price spent much of her twenties playing open-mike nights, to general disinterest from the Nashville country establishment. As her song This Town Gets Around documents, she did get attention from industry figures; just not the kind of attention she wanted. “That’s about a guy who told me he had worked with the Dixie Chicks and all these big names from the noughties,” she explains. “He said he wanted me to write songs for other people, but when he invited me to his house and there was another guy there, both of them smiling at me,

II realised what he really wanted. ‘Sleazy’ is the word I’d use.” With painful irony, the breaks came after tragedy struck. In 2010 Price and her musician husband,

Jeremy Ivey, lost their 10-day-old son Ezra, who was born with a heart condition. Drinking heavily to cope with the grief, she ended up with a drink-driving conviction and a spell in Davidson County jail, sharing her cell with a crack addict who had beaten up her husband. “It was the tragedy of these women collecting their medication in little paper cups that got to me,” says Price, who writes about it in Weekender. Feeling they had nothing to lose, the couple sold their possessions and drove to Memphis to record what became Midwest Farmer’s Daughter at Sun Studios. Finally, after a “painful amount of rejection letters”, Third Man’s Ben Swank heard the album. Now, backed by a live band that rocks like Creedence at their finest, Price is on her way. “I’m hoping that, by including the most painful moments of my life, the album will help other people deal with similar situations,” says Price. “I’ve struggled with depression, and it has always helped to hear music that comes from the heart. I don’t aspire for millions. I don’t want to be famous. I just want to make a decent living for my family and get my music out to people who might need it. Actually, I don’t have much of a choice. Singing is the only thing I know how to do.” Will Hodgkinson