Kacey Musgrave & sisters in country take on male-dominated industry
Judging by the schedule at the inaugural Big Barrel Country Music Festival - which has been going in Dover, Del., since Friday and wraps up Sunday, with Carrie Underwood headlining - you would think it's a boom time for women in country music.
Judging by the schedule at the inaugural Big Barrel Country Music Festival - which has been going in Dover, Del., since Friday and wraps up Sunday, with Carrie Underwood headlining - you would think it's a boom time for women in country music.
Miranda Lambert is scheduled to top the bill Saturday at the Woodlands at Dover International Speedway - the same site that hosted the pop Firefly Music Festival last weekend - making two out of the three headliners female. The odd man out is Lambert's not-better half, The Voice star Blake Shelton.
That's to say nothing of the undercard, which included the legendary Loretta Lynn on Saturday and was to be highlighted Sunday evening by Kacey Musgraves, the Grammy-winning media darling from Golden, Texas, who last week released her highly anticipated second album, Pageant Material (Mercury Nashville ***1/2). Pageant is the follow-up to 2013's Same Trailer, Different Park, which won the Grammy for country album of the year.
Along with those female country traditionalists three generations apart - Lynn is 83, Musgraves 26 - Big Barrel also is hosting alt-country acts like Nikki Lane, Caitlin Rose, and the Stray Birds, the Lancaster folk band fronted by Maya de Vitry (scheduled to kick off the fest Sunday) - who are actually more "country" in sound than many allergic-to-twang mainstream acts.
So, to judge from Big Barrel - or from the lineup of July Fourth's Wawa Welcome America! concert on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, where the featured guests of Philadelphia hip-hop band the Roots are Los Angeles polyglot R&B singer Miguel and big-voiced country-pop vocalist Jennifer Nettles - female country would appear to be big business.
If you listen to tightly programmed mainstream country radio stations throughout the United States, however, you get a vastly different impression. That reality was invoked last month, when industry publication Country Aircheck interviewed radio consultant Keith Hill - and the interview went viral.
Hill advised struggling stations that "if you want to make ratings in country music, take females out." Though women make up more than 70 percent of the country audience, he said, successful ones play men more than four times as often.
"Women like male artists," he said. "Trust me, I play great female records, and we've got some right now. They're just not the lettuce in our salad. The lettuce is Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, Keith Urban, and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are the females."
The culinary metaphor did not go down easy with women who did not appreciate being compared to either a fruit or a vegetable.
Lambert, whose Platinum was the hands-down best country album of 2014, cut to the chase on Twitter, calling Hill's comment "the biggest bunch of [expletive] I have ever heard." Nettles joined in with: "Don't worry babe. I see an opportunity here. A big ole vagina-shaped opportunity #yesisaidvagina." Musgraves reacted whimsically: "That's a new one. Never been called a tomato before. Good thing I love tomatoes."
As much outrage as Hill's comments inspired, his numbers are borne out at Philadelphia-area country station WXTU-FM (92.5). On Thursday morning between 8 and 10 a.m., the station played 22 songs, starting with Zac Brown and Jimmy Buffett's "Knee Deep" and closing with Eric Church's "Talladega."
Bro-country acts like Thomas Rhett, Brantley Gilbert, and Cole Swindell all got spins, but only three and a half women were in the mix: "Two Black Cadillacs" by Underwood, "Compass" by Lady Antebellum, "Diamond Rings and Old Barstools" by Tim McGraw featuring Catherine Dunn, and "Love Me Like You Mean It" by newcomer Catherine Ballerini.
Musgrave's Pageant Material steps into that bro-dominated pickup-truck-and-baseball-cap "country" world mocked by Maddie and Tae's 2014 hit, "Girl in a Country Song."
The media attention devoted to Pageant Material would make you think an immediately appealing lead single like Musgrave's new "Biscuits" would be all over the radio.
The song's light-stepping charm expands on "Follow Your Arrow," Musgrave's 2014 gay-friendly hit, with a similar live-and-let-live attitude: "Just hoe your own row, and raise your own babies / Smoke your own smoke, and grow your own daisies . . . Mind your own biscuits, and life will be gravy." Who could resist such charms?
Country radio, that's who. The song is not to be found in the Top 30 of the Billboard airplay chart, now topped by Ballerini's more banal "Love Me."
Banging your head against the wall of the country establishment can be a frustrating experience. While Hank Williams' and Johnny Cash's names are dropped, their music is rarely played. A few mainstream rebels are tolerated for a time, then sent out into the Americana world to find an audience.
The good news in the digital-media age is that radio does not have the stranglehold it once did. Artists like Musgraves (in "Good Old Boys Club," she sings: "Never too good at just going along / I always kind of sided with the underdog") or tough guy Sturgill Simpson (who played Firefly last weekend, Big Barrel this weekend, and is back at the TLA on Sept. 18) can get the word out by playing live, making TV appearances, and being active on social media.
Along with her cute-as-Katy-Perry poofy skirts and a duet with Willie Nelson on a tender "Are You Sure?", what's so appealing about Musgraves - who brings her Country & Western Rhinestone Revue to the Trocadero on Oct. 3 - is that she comes across as such an eminently reasonable, normal person. To use a word that's way overused in 2015 and that I'm hoping never to use again, she's relatable.
That quality is apparent in the steel-guitar-kissed title track, in which she announces, "I ain't exactly Miss Congenial" and concludes, "I'd rather lose for what I am, than win for what I ain't."
And it's there in her June 9 Rolling Stone interview, in which Musgraves said her label wanted to water down the "Biscuits" lyric "pissing in my yard ain't gonna make yours any greener." "Come to a show, and that's the line everyone loves," she said. "Don't take that away from me."
In 2013, I interviewed Musgraves when Same Trailer first came out, and she was making waves with her "Merry Go Round" single, about the claustrophobia of small-town life. (R&B-rap-pop changeling Shamir recently recorded a cover version. Seek it out.)
She talked about admiring songwriters like John Prine and Patty Griffin, "anybody who has something to say, and their own way of saying it." Asked why she was determined to at least cowrite the songs she records - which she does, except for the Willie Nelson cover on Pageant - she gave an answer that was obvious to her, even if not to everybody in the country music business: "I wanted to use my brain a little."
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