Charting country music paths
Women have always played a major part of country music, from the Carter Family to Dolly Parton, but in recent years you’d be hard pressed to hear that on country music radio. In “Her Country,” Marissa R. Moss chronicles how three singers — Kacey Musgraves, Maren Morris and Mickey Guyton — found ways to circumvent the traditional Nashville Music Row country music industry path and its “good ol’ boy” mentality to chart successful paths of their own.
In the 1990s, women country stars seemed to dominate the airwaves: Shania Twain, Faith Hill, the Chicks (formerly the Dixie Chicks) were mainstream stars. But after the Chicks were essentially blacklisted in 2003 for criticizing George W. Bush, a chill for women settled over the industry. Even today, women are rarely played back-to-back on country radio and make up less than 20% of airtime.
But as Morris shows, the women in “Her Country,” have managed to produce some of the most creative, inclusive and successful country music of the moment despite obstacles. Musgraves, Morris and Guyton all started out in Texas as talented singers from a young age, each making their way to Nashville, Tennessee, to try to make it in country music.
Musgraves strove for inclusiveness, both in her lyrics, and by making sure her co-writers Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally took the stage when she won the Country Music Award for Song of the Year in 2014 for “Follow Your Arrow.” It was the first time two openly gay people stood on the CMA stage for an award.
Morris found success by self-releasing her songs and then working with Spotify to launch them in 2015. Her songs were a hit on the platform and left labels scrambling to sign her. Next, she became a crossover success with the pop hit “The Middle,” with producer Zedd and musical duo Grey in 2018.
Guyton overcame years of discrimination as a Black woman singer in the country music business to receive a Grammy nomination in 2020 for her song “Black Like Me” — the first Black female solo artist to get a Grammy nomination in a country music category. — Mae Anderson, Associated Press
Like a lot of us, A.J.
Jacobs spent a chunk of the past two years doing puzzles, but at least he got a book out of it.
“The Puzzler,” begun before the pandemic, is the result. Like the selfdescribed human guinea pig’s other books — “The Know-It-All,” about reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and the selfexplanatory “The Year of Living Biblically” — it charts an experiment. But this experiment is easier to relate to and less rigid since the book loosely chronicles him taking a stab at more than a dozen kinds of brain-teasers.
Although Jacobs has been accused of smugness in previous books, he’s a self-deprecating guide to these puzzles (most of the 18 chapters come with several for us to solve, along with offering tips). He steps back to ponder why we love puzzles — even though he still stews over one from his youth and a more recent example convinced him that one of his books has the wrong title.
In a way, “The Puzzler” is a self-help book that assures us there’s good reason to spend an hour in the bathtub with a pencil and a Sudoku or months fiddling with the world’s largest Rubik’s Cube (a task he farms out to a college student).
Writes Jacobs of a logic problem, “It’s a crash course in perspective-taking, in seeing the world from someone else’s point of view. Which to me is an absolutely crucial skill, especially in these times of heightened tribalism.”
Sure, they can make us howl in frustration. But over the course of the book, Jacobs realizes that even vexing puzzles offer comfort. We may not know how to solve them, he writes, but at least we know those problems can be solved.